Guillermo del Toro has laid down markers as a wizard of the fantastical with such previous works as Pan’s Labyrinth and Crimson Peak (though we’ll skate nimbly around Pacific Rim), and now he has brought it all back home with The Shape of Water, as its 13 Academy Award nominations might suggest.
Watching what remains of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (L’Enfer) serves to remind us just how good his earlier work was. Inferno marked the beginning of the end, its shambolic production beginning Clouzot’s descent into obscurity.
The “insider’s guide to the music business” tag attached to Hits, Hype and Hustle: An Insider's Guide to the Music Business (BBC Four) dangles the carrot of all kinds of clandestine scams being exposed, such as extortionate recording contracts, systematic chart-rigging or Mafia rackets involving cut-out records. Instead, this episode was merely a meander through the history of live performances in rock music.
The official reissue of The Beatles’ Christmas records is a major event. Since Live at the BBC was issued in 1994, archive Beatles’ releases have fallen into two categories.
The Monterey Pop Festival in California in mid-June 1967 was a key event in the history of festival culture. There had been music festivals before in the US – Newport Folk springs to mind – but Monterey marked the point where the whimsical trend for “renaissance fairs” combined with the rising first blaze of rock music, born of psychedelia, all marinated thoroughly in LSD-flavoured happenings and love-ins. And, of course, it was filmed by DA Pennebaker, making it a visual blueprint, ripe for imitation, influencing countless generations into the idea of festivals as miniature countercultural utopias.
The film, only 79 minutes long, remains fantastic. This writer was blown away by it in his teens and 20s but, decades later, it’s lost none of its potency, perhaps even gained some as its defiantly non-cynical attitude seems so refreshing in these meta times. The first thing that strikes is how fantastically everyone is dressed, how sharp, how individual, making me want to weep at the rise of sportswear which has destroyed sartorial suss the planet round. But mainly, despite a bit of crowd action, it doesn't have Woodstock's propensity for tangential asides. It’s a lean musical entity.
And what music! Grace Slick out-singing all the men in Jefferson Airplane; Simon & Garfunkel silhouetted beautifully against a red backdrop; Janis Joplin channelling Etta James to invent Robert Plant and every heavy metal vocalist of the Seventies and Eighties; Otis Redding backed by Booker T & the MGs, just so tight, so sexy, the ultimate soul man; The Who going bonkers (“This is where it all ends!”); Hendrix setting his guitar and his career alight; and finally Ravi Shankar in a long, wonderful, frenetic back’n’forth with his tabla-player Alla Rakha, just mesmerising.
However, what most will be buying this three-disc set for is the extras. As well as a 16-bit 4K digital restoration of the original film, there are the complete filmed sets of Hendrix and Redding, and two hours of performance footage that wasn’t used in the film, running the gamut from the sharply choreographed, suited pop of The Association to falsetto oddball Tiny Tim, to The Byrds, frostily falling out with David Crosby onstage, their music suffering as a consequence.
There are also various interviews, old and new (Pennebaker, impresario Lou Adler, the Mamas and the Papas’ John Phillips, Sixties PR legend Derek Taylor, David Crosby, Mama Cass), as well as audio commentaries (Pennebaker, Adler, writers Charles Shaar Murray and Peter Guralnick), photos and Richard Leacock’s subversive short film about the police, Chiefs, which was the support feature when Monterey Pop was originally released to cinema. There’s also a booklet of essays featuring Barney Hoskyns, Michael Chaiken and others.
Much of this material has been available in the States since 2004, but this set really is the complete deal, a plethora of treats for fans of the original film and, for anyone else, an untainted window into Californian music culture, just as the Summer of Love was starting to bubble. It’s one of the all-time great music films, simple as that.
Overleaf: watch Ravi Shanker and table-player Alla Rakha play an astounding, nigh-on-20 minute version of "Dhun" at the Monterey Pop Festival
The title Northern Soul's Classiest Rarities Volume 6 suggests this 24-track compilation might be a rag-bag; a collection of random musical floor-sweepings which couldn’t be collected under any other heading. Not a bit of it. Instead, every contribution is a gem. Anyone into soul – Northern, or any of its forms – will get a buzz from this collection.
Director Richard Jones watched all 156 episodes of The Twilight Zone as research for this Almeida production.
A nineteen-minute adaptation of “Jack Orion” took up the whole of Side Two of Cruel Sister, Pentangle’s fourth album. It's the highlight of the smart but blandly titled 115-track box set The Albums 1968–1972. Up to this point in 1970, British folk rock had not spawned anything comparable to the epic “Jack Orion”.
Beneath the creamy overlay of gowns, crystal chandeliers, palaces, uniformed flunkies and a sumptuous (albeit CGI-enhanced) Royal Yacht, a steely pulse of realpolitik fuels The Crown, returning to Netflix for its much-anticipated second series.
Cinematographer Douglas Slocombe is a true prince of darkness here, picking out Leslie Caron’s beautiful eyes and gleaming mouth despite the gloom of a seedy Notting Hill boarding house. Taking a break from her usual roles as a happy hoofer, Caron plays Jane, a serious young French woman adrift in London with an unplanned pregnancy who finds herself renting an attic bedsit.
Adapted from Lynne Reid Banks’s best-selling novel, The L-Shaped Room was very daring in 1962 and the film faced several battles with the censors. Not only does Jane visit a Harley Street abortionist (a creepy Emlyn Williams) but her fellow lodgers include a gay black musician (Brock Peters, fresh from To Kill a Mocking Bird), a couple of prostitutes in the basement (Pat Phoenix on fine form), and an elderly lesbian missing her theatrical days (Cicely Courtneidge). All of them are sympathetic, rounded characters who take Jane (Leslie Caron, pictured below) under their wing.
But it’s another tenant, Toby (Tom Bell), an aspiring writer, who provides the love interest. The most radical departure in the transfer from book to film is the cultural background of the two central characters; Jane is not the failed English actress of the novel but an au-pair escaping from French provincial life and rigid, wealthy Catholic parents. In the novel Toby is a Jewish Londoner (perhaps based on Wesker or Pinter), but here he's played by Tom Bell, a Liverpudlian in his first leading role. It's possible that the producers in casting him were influenced by the success of those other angry young provincials, Albert Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Richard Burton in Look Back in Anger, or perhaps dealing with anti-Semitism along with antagonism to foreigners and homosexuality was just one step too far in a film that isn't otherwise afraid to challenge the status quo.
Fascinating as social history, The L-Shaped Room is a downbeat slice of post-war realism, tackling taboos around unmarried mothers, racism and sexuality in its own discreet way. It can't exactly be hailed as a lost feminist work, but Jane does refuse to take easy options, asserts her own independence and is impressively honest about the value of love. While this is very much a studio film with claustrophobic interiors, the location shots of Notting Hill have a documentary realism. This is the era of Colin McInnes's Absolute Beginners and brutal landlord Rachman's grip on the bomb-damaged rental market. In the opening sequence, Jane is accosted by a sleazy teddy boy played by Anthony Booth on a street corner, while Caribbean men are turned away from lodging houses. Later in the film, Smiths fans will recognise the Christmas sing-song with Cicely Courtneidge leading the chorus, which was sampled in The Queen Is Dead.
This restoration showcases Slocombe’s excellent framing – this film is all about close-ups and intimate conversations, dynamic encounters on stairs and dark corners. Bryan Forbes stepped up from his role as scriptwriter to direct when Jack Clayton dropped out – consequently he’s not afraid of letting the dialogue run on a bit, which can make it feel like you're watching an adapted play rather than a novel.
Sadly there’s no commentary as the key film-makers have died, and the supplementary material with this new edition is a little underwhelming. Extras include a drab analysis by two low-key film academics who don't inspire with their insights. Filmed in the same dull cinema setting are two separate interviews with Leslie Caron and Lynne Reid Banks, who is amusing on how much she hated the adaptation but changed her position over the years. Caron,still stunningly beautiful, describes asking Forbes to make Jane less passive and acknowledges that the role was a breakthrough after years of playing smiling ingénues. She was Oscar nominated for her performance as Jane, and well deserved the British Academy award that she did win.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The L-Shaped Room