You need to be of a certain age to recall the sheer ubiquity of Studio 54. For a few years in the late 1970s, even the sterner British newspapers were routinely stuffed with stories of who was there and what went on within the hallowed citadel (if not who went down, and on whom).
Lee Alexander McQueen said that he pulled the horrors out of his soul and put them on the catwalk. Eight years after his death, and three years after the record-breaking Savage Beauty retrospectives at the Metropolitan Museum and the V&A, his extraordinary story remains as powerful as ever. This moving documentary by Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui (son of late designer Joseph Ettedgui) provides a glimpse into that soul.
BBC Four is the TV music equivalent of those oldsters music mags like Q and Mojo. Have there been five, or is it six, documentaries about Queen on the channel?
Comprehensively charting hip hop’s rise from the underground to the mainstream is no mean feat, but that’s exactly what Canadian MC Shad aims to do over four hour-long episodes. Originally shown in the US in 2016, and available in full on Netflix, Hip Hop Evolution has finally reached the British box via Sky Arts.
“I thought she maybe had superpowers to go that high.” Emilia Senior, 12, watched her sister Eve, 15, thrown into the air by the force of the explosion. When Eve came to earth her own perception had tilted on its axis: “I saw my legs on fire,” she remembered, “and then I was unconscious.” Short of targeting a kindergarten, a terrorist could not have chosen to decimate a more blameless demographic than teen fans of Ariana Grande.
What would have happened to Leon Vitali if as a schoolboy he had gone to see that other 1968 hit sci-fi movie, Barbarella rather than Kubrick’s 2001? It’s impossible to imagine that a life devoted to the oeuvre of Roger Vadim would have merited a documentary. Luckily it was Stanley Kubrick who inspired total dedication.
Director James Erskine found a fascinating subject in the life of ice-skating legend John Curry and has fashioned it into an absolutely compelling 90-minute documentary. Curry was only 45 when he died of AIDS in 1994, but his professional career, in which he moved from ice-skating as competitive sport to performing and choreographing it as dance, was intense: Erskine describes him, in the short Q&A that appears as an extra on this DVD release, as “an artist more than an athlete,” and you end up agreeing resoundingly.
The Ice King makes clear the struggles that Curry went through to reach his success. The film starts with his early triumphs in the competition world, from the Prague 1966 championships, through Davos 1970, to reach an early career culmination with his gold medal victory at the 1976 Innsbruck Winter Olympics. That triumph allowed him to launch his John Curry Theatre of Skating, as he put competition speed and flourish behind to mesmerise with a solo performance of “L'après-midi d'un faune” on the London stage, that still captivates today with all the expressive power of the greatest dancers, Nijinsky coming inevitably to mind.
There were demons, of course. Curry’s private life was complex, his childhood dominated by a father who had strict ideas about his son’s future: skating was acceptable because it was sport, the idea that John might become a dancer unthinkable. It was a distinction that continued even into his professional career, with one trainer instructing him “not to be so graceful”. Though he didn't exacty come out, his homosexuality became public at the time of his Olympic victory, setting precedent for competitive sport at the time.
Erskine makes good visual use of the letters that Curry wrote throughout his life, with the actor Freddie Fox providing voice-over: Fox brings just the right fey delight to the character. It’s accompanied by the testament of friends, from the Swiss skater Heinz Wirz, who met Curry at Prague 1966 and became one of his first lovers, through those with whom he became close as his sporting career developed (as New York became increasingly the place where he felt most at home), and on to the collaborators with whom he worked on his ever-more demanding shows.
Highlights, of course, include the 1984 Symphony on Ice at London’s Royal Albert Hall, followed by the John Curry Skating Company’s triumph at New York’s Metropolitan Opera with its collaborations with prominent contemporary choreographers. The shows may have won the highest critical plaudits, but we learnt how the technical demands of staging them in such venues made for a lot of anxiety. “Can I stop now?” Curry apparently asked after the Met premiere, but the international tours that followed demanded his presence, and proved punishing, not least when Curry raised artistic objections at their commercial trappings (intrusive signage was a particular hate). There were contradictions aplenty, no doubt caprice too, but the reverence accorded him by collaborators spoke for itself, even while the personal demons never left him, a sense of melancholy somehow deepening towards the end.
Some of the landmark performances survive only in amateur video recordings, which makes watching them a particularly moving experience. Live orchestra accompaniment was crucial for the shows’ impact, but the musical recordings were in even worse state, which sent Erksine and his musical director Stuart Hancock off to record a whole new soundtrack with the Bratislava Symphony Orchestra (an eight-minute extra covers the experience). That location was fitting, given that Curry’s 1993 “On the Beautiful Blue Danube” was one of his final pieces, its male quartet a glorious reminder of how he broke new artistic ground, a creative pioneer in a medium virtually of his own creation.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Ice King
This was not a film that left you with much respect for the wisdom of politicians, but perhaps its truest line came from John Kerry, when he called the ongoing – seven years, and counting – Syrian conflict “an insult to the humanity of this planet”.
If only there were more: that's a first response to Nothing Like a Dame, Roger Michell's affectionate yet clear-eyed portrait of four of Britain's finest actresses, all now in their 80s. As the camera circles around Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Joan Plowright, and Eileen Atkins in conversation, it's impossible not to be swept up in a collective portrait of these remarkable careers alongside their shared awareness of the advancing years. Small wonder the one classic role they pause to debate at length is Cleopatra. Age really cannot wither this quartet's infinite variety.
Due to be aired on the BBC following a limited cinema release, the film consists of chat caught, as it were, on the lam. Michell provides the occasional offscreen prod to get a topic going, and once in a while the film crew appears in a shot, more often than not to be shooed away by Smith. But with ladies like this, intrusions would be unnecessary as well as impolite. Who wouldn't want to hear as much as Smith has to say about pinching her comic technique from Kenneth Williams? Or from Dench, bronzed following a Cornish holiday, putting a patronising young paramedic in his place by announcing that she recently appeared on the West End in The Winter's Tale? (Pictured below: Judi Dench as Paulina, photograph by Johan Persson.)
The points of convergence between the women make for a veritable thespian cat's cradle. All except Atkins appeared in the Franco Zeffirelli film Tea with Mussolini, while I have seen Smith over the years onstage with each of the others in turn. Away from stage and screen, the ladies can all speak on what it was like having been married to an actor, Smith movingly insisting on remembering the good times she had with Robert Stephens and letting whatever else their marriage consisted of go unsaid. (She and Atkins remarried, Plowright and Dench have not.)
Filmed inside and on the Sussex grounds of the home that Plowright shared with her late husband, Laurence Olivier, this portrait of the artist as a reflective dame essentially takes the form of a round-table discussion spliced with pairings of Dench and Smith, say, on the sofa, chortling about memories and fretting about what happens with time to the memory.
The chosen clips – Dench as Sally Bowles in Cabaret, Smith and Stephens in Private Lives, among others – won't generally surprise any British theatre buff who hasn't had the odd amble round YouTube, but one can surely infer from her remarks that this is yet another celluloid venture Smith most likely will not see. (She confirms once more that she has yet to watch Downton Abbey, pictured below.) Less expected, and utterly delightful, are remarks in passing about Atkins's unexpected acquaintanceship with the initials KY – cue much hilarity – and a sightless Plowright advocating yoga and mindfulness and the need always to exercise the brain.
Agelessly witty and effortlessly stylish as they are (all four have remarkable skin), the women make no attempt to conceal the toll exacted by time. Dench stops the heart, as she has made a career of doing, pausing before she talks of her beloved Michael Williams: a lifetime of feeling contained in a fleeting silence. Smith later admits to loneliness but not before informing us that Edith Evans had two sets of teeth: the gossipy and the self-aware ever-intertwined. We get talk about sharing hearing aids alongside lines from bygone plays remembered as if the years had somehow fallen away. And in one startling moment, all eyes turn in mock-fury on Dench for scooping up the best parts. (Theatre buffs will note the arrival of this film in the same week that Glenda Jackson and Diana Rigg, contemporaries all, got Tony nominations for their current Broadway parts: this generation of women, Vanessa Redgrave included, marches ever onward.)
Career highlights? Roles that got away? Changing tastes and preferences for work? Those are among the topics one could imagine explored in further depth had Michell's camera rolled ad infinitum. Let's just say that I laughed plentifully and was greatly touched and doubt I'm alone in wishing for a director's cut packed with outtakes. And when Nothing Like a Dame draws to a close with audio of Dench reciting "our revels now are ended", the only possible response is to insist that they are not.
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.