24FPS @ LFF 2017: Suspiria

Dir: Dario Argento
While he continues to dilute his legacy with garbage like Giallo and Dracula 3D (and the rest of the last two decades), it’s a fine time to be reminded that, at one time, Dario Argento made some of the most visually stunning horror cinema ever seen. Suspiria, recoloured to its intended luridness and remastered in 4K for its 40th anniversary, is a brutal, beautiful, masterpiece.

The paper thin story of Suzy (Jessica Harper), an American ballet dancer, going to a famous dance academy where people begin to disappear and be killed, couldn’t be any less important. This isn’t one of Argento’s many whodunnits, instead he simply wants a framework on which to hang the film’s stunning set design, lighting and its graphic gore.

Suspiria’s tagline famously told us that the only thing more terrifying than its last 12 minutes were the first 92. I agree in part. The film’s first 15 minutes or so, up until the first two deaths have been shown, are a self-contained masterwork. The vivid lighting, drenching what should be a drab rainy night in unnatural colour, the striking set design - all sharp lines and symmetry - and the Goblin score; ethereal at first, building to something sinister, all these things combine with the shock of sudden violence in a sequence that envelops us completely in the world of the film.

The scenes in the dance school, with their obvious dubbing and over the top line reads, aren’t the film’s strongest suit, but the disconnection from reality that dubbing often lends is, intentionally or otherwise, effective in further dislocating us from reality, just as the film does to Suzy. This isn’t to say that the performances don’t work for the film though, the delicately pretty Jessica Harper isn’t one of horror cinema’s tougher final girls, but our journey through the world of the film is much like hers - slightly surreal, sometimes unnerving, sometimes confusing - and Harper takes us along on that journey effectively. Most memorable among the cast is Alida Valli, (over)playing strict ballet teacher Miss Tanner to often very funny effect.

Argento sprinkles scares, surrealism and beautifully designed slayings throughout the film, but the tagline undersells the film’s last 12 minutes. Suzy’s surreal journey through the ballet school to find the secret at its heart contains some of Argento’s most incredible and iconic visuals, bringing the film to a crescendo. On this viewing, with the picture so vividly remastered and the sound pounding into my ears, I saw Suspiria on a non-narrative level. That’s probably how it works best, as a purely sensory experience; shape, colour and noise colliding into the most beautiful of nightmares. 
★★★★★ 

My Top 10 Directors: Part 1

Last night I was having a conversation on Twitter with my friends Michael Ewins and Laurent De Alberti about the idea of making a list of our Top 10 directors, and so we decided that we would each try to make our own lists as a sort of mini blogathon (you’ll find Mike and Laurent’s lists linked under their names).

My list doesn’t, I suspect, look like the lists that most critics would draw up. It’s more contemporary; with 6 of the 10 still making new films today, and doesn’t draw heavily on Hollywood’s classic or Movie Brat periods. There are several reasons for this, but they all essentially come down to personal taste; these are the directors whose work I love most, and whose work I love the most of. This isn’t to say that, for instance, Scorsese, Spielberg and Coppola haven’t done surpassingly brilliant work, but for me it’s been a while since they’ve been at their best.

There are also filmmakers who might have made the list, but whose work I just haven’t seen enough of to consider seriously. Some of those will be listed in a special number 11 spot after the list, but many classic era directors, working in English and foreign languages, fall into this category. Shohei Imamura is one that comes to mind, as do filmmakers as varied as Stanley Kubrick and Preston Sturges.

All this said, I make no excuses for this list (which is unranked and alphabetical by surname). These are 10 filmmakers whose work I love, whose work I look forward to (well, in six cases) and while some of these choices may be scoffed at by cinephiles I feel that they represent much (though not quite all) that I love in cinema. As a guide, for each of my Top 10 picks, I’ve suggested a film you should start with, and what I think is their best film.


The Top 10
Frank Capra

I suspect that this will be the choice that really takes people by surprise. Capra is often seen as a corny, sentimental, filmmaker, but I don’t really feel that his films entirely bear this perception out. It’s true that his films always end on an upbeat note, but that never precluded him from looking at darker things.

Perhaps the two films that are generally seen as Capra’s most sugary; Mr Smith Goes To Washington and It’s A Wonderful Life are the ones that best show how I think he’s somewhat mis-represented. Mr Smith is broad, and has a very heroic and uplifting ending but the journey to that ending is incredibly cynical about American politics, with James Stewart’s senator reacting against his disillusionment when his idealism doesn’t fit with the way Washington is run. It’s A Wonderful Life is an even darker film; yes, it has THAT ending, but again, think about how we get there; it’s a film about a man in the grip of suicidal depression. There are also films that are darker as a whole, notably the Barbara Stanwyck starring The Miracle Woman (about a fake faith healer)

This said, I love Capra’s lightness. It Happened One Night is featherweight, but it’s also entirely engaging, charming and funny romantic comedy, and the same goes for his wonderful screwball You Can’t Take It With You. Always a master with actors, Capra got brilliant work from some of the best actors of the studio era; Stanwyck, Stewart, Jean Arthur, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert all did some of their best and most iconic work for Capra.

To dismiss a long career as ‘Capracorn’ strikes me as shortsighted, and undersells a great and interesting filmmaker. I have much more to see from Capra, having only seen seven of his films to date, but what I have seen is more than enough to earn him a place on this list.
Start With: It Happened One Night
Best Film: Mr Smith Goes To Washington


Claude Chabrol

Though he is generally seen as initiating the French New Wave with his first film, Le Beau Serge, my interest in Claude Chabrol begins a little later in his career, when he began making the thrillers that would define his filmography and occupy him for the bulk of the next sixty years, in which he would make at least a film a year (he was prepping another with frequent collaborator Isabelle Huppert when he died, aged 80).

Again, Chabrol is a filmmaker from whom I still have much to see, but whose body of work on average impresses me more than enough to place on this list. Chabrol’s great run of form begins, for me, in the late 60′s with La Femme Infidele, the first of the Helene cycle, in which Chabrol’s muse and then wife Stephane Audran played a series of women, always named Helene, caught up in relationships (often with men named Charles) that tended to lead to violence and murder. Que La Bete Muere, Le Boucher, Juste Avant La Nuit and more continued this very successful cycle, always twisting the plot enough that Chabrol never seemed to be repeating his stories, just establishing ongoing themes.

The thrillers, great as they are, can tend to lead to Chabrol being dismissed as a one trick pony, but he departed from them frequently, and in interesting ways. He was a brilliant observer of character, especially when paired with Isabelle Huppert, who starred in one of his best dramas, the affecting true story A Story of Women, about a woman making ends meet by providing back street abortions during World War Two. There is great diversity in Chabrol’s long career; the terrorist thriller Nada; Caustic divorce drama Un Partie de Plaisir; character study Betty and L’Enfer, a version of a film that Clouzot began making but never finished all help to show a much more rounded filmmaker than Chabrol is sometimes seen as.

He continued making brilliant films into his old age, only hitting the very peak of his form, for me, in 1995 with the shocking, brilliantly acted La Ceremonie. There’s much to see with Claude Chabrol, I suggest you dig in.
Start With: Le Boucher
Best Film: La Ceremonie


David Cronenberg

I’ve largely parted company with the academic idea of film studies, having done it at A Level I found a lot of it to be reaching desperately for meaning that wasn’t there, but there are still a few filmmakers whose work fascinates me enough to really want to analyse it at a level much deeper than the largely qualitative coverage I write here. David Cronenberg is one of that handful of filmmakers.

I’ve long found Cronenberg’s body horror themes to be fascinating, they give what could just be, at least in the first part of his now distinctly two act career, nasty horror films an added dimension. Neither does Cronenberg just use his favoured themes: disease, metamporphosis, sex, split personalities and manifestation among others, to try to appear clever, rather they inform and alter the characters in his films. The Fly is a perfect distillation of character and commentary, as Jeff Goldblum is consumed by a disease like metamorphosis into a fly, which at once makes him more powerful and destroys him. It’s a thoughtful progression of character, far from the mad science cliches, and Cronenberg and Goldblum make it intensely moving.

Beyond this, Cronenberg is a fantastic visual filmmaker. His films are always impeccably designed, even, perhaps especially, when it comes to their most disturbing images. Think of the medical instruments in Dead Ringers, the vampiric barb in Marilyn Chambers’ armpit in Rabid, the gristle gun in eXistenZ; all images that could only come from Cronenberg.

Take a step back and there’s an evolution in Cronenberg’s work. He’s always been cerebral: The Brood – with its literally manifesting rage – is brilliant on psychology, but recently he has moved more and more to the interior of his characters, messing with the mind rather than the body, while still indulging all his obsessions. This is one of the reasons eXistenZ is my favourite of his works; it’s the bridge between the two kinds of Cronenberg film, and it explores both his body horror and cerebral horror ideas with great assurance (and a brilliant performance from Jennifer Jason Leigh, which helps). Latterly he’s explored the psychological more and more, most successfully with A History of Violence and Eastern Promises.

I could talk about the ideas in David Cronenberg’s films all day, and that’s largely why he’s here. Despite the odd mis-step (the shockingly dull A Dangerous Method), Cronenberg is the one filmmaker I always feel that I can rely on to provoke me as much as he entertains me. It’s a rare and special mix.
Start With: The Fly
Best Film: eXistenZ


Joe Dante

This may be one of my more left field choices, but if there is one director whose sensibilities just line up with mine, it’s Joe Dante.

Most great filmmakers are, to begin with, great film lovers, and Dante is a fine example of this. What’s most interesting about the way the love of cinema shows in Dante’s work is the kind of films he refers back to; B-Movies, 50′s sci-fi both good and bad, and he approaches his own work with the same sense of fun and excitement that those films – even the most intelligent of them – usually reflected. This is best seen in the delightful Matinee, which pays affectionate tribute to nuclear paranoia monster movies by setting a coming of age movie around the premiere of a film called Mant in Florida during the Cuban missile crisis. It’s a wonderful film, shot through with a regard for the magic of both cinema and a first crush, but also with Dante’s typically lunatic sense of humour.

While he has made straight horror in The Howling the real reason I’m such a fan is that few directors combine the horror and sci-fi genres with comedy as deftly as Dante, be it in cheapo Jaws spoof Piranha, blackly comic neighbour from hell tale The Burbs or Fantastic Voyage remake/riff Innerspace. However, most would agree that he does it best with the two Gremlins films. The first film is something of a spoof of It’s a Wonderful Life, as the picture perfect town of Bedford Falls is torn apart by the things that mutate from Billy Peltzer’s new pet Mogwai, but it’s the sequel that, for me, sees Dante at his best. The film, it seems to me, is a merciless mickey take of the very idea of making a Gremlins 2. Dante just lets himself totally off the leash here, and offers the same consideration to his cast, especially a riotous Tony Randall as the voice of Brain gremlin and Christopher Lee as the hilariously sinister Dr. Catheter. He rips on corporate America, especially Donald Trump and large media conglomorates not entirely unlike the one that released Gremlins 2.

Sadly, since 1999′s much underrated Small Soldiers, Dante hasn’t made as many films as he used to, and they haven’t quite connected with me in the same way when he has, but even his lesser works have great moments; the creepy clown doll in The Hole, for instance, or the hilarious Louvre sequence in Looney Tunes: Back In Action.

Sometimes critics get so bound up in what a film is saying that I think they forget that first and foremost film is about being entertained. For me, Joe Dante is a great entertainer.
Start With: Gremlins
Best Film: Gremlins 2: The New Batch


Guillermo Del Toro

When I think of cinema as a series of pieces of art, Guillermo Del Toro is one of the first people who springs to mind. He can make that art populist or personal, sometimes both, but his great strength as a filmmaker has always been the consistency of the world he creates not just within a single film but throughout his work in terms of both themes and design.

Del Toro has been fascinated by monsters since he was a child, and much of his work seems devoted to humanising them, whether it’s the dark world of the Faun drawing Ofelia to it in Pan’s Labyrinth or the Hellboy films and their depiction of monsters both as superheroes and blue collar government workers. This gives his work a very individual viewpoint, as he takes the side of the things that, in most films, we should be running from.

I’ve always loved the design of Del Toro’s work. Right from his 1993 debut Cronos it was obvious that his was a striking visual sensibility. There are the obvious things, like the design of the Cronos device itself; intricate, beautiful and threatening, but everyday things are also visually striking, such as the way an all white bathroom provides a vivid backdrop for a character licking up a drop of blood. I love Del Toro’s dedication to making his fantastic worlds feel real, both by combining them with a realistic human world, as he does so brilliantly in Pan’s Labyrinth; as much a film about the Spanish civil war and a dysfunctional family as it is fairies and monsters and by realising as many of his monsters as possible practically, as in the Troll Market scene in Hellboy II.

For a while it seemed Del Toro had two careers going; the Hollywood career where he did his best to put a personal stamp on films like Mimic and Blade II and the Spanish language career, where he indulged his passions in his themes and his visuals. For me, he really brought them together in Hellboy II; one of the most underrated blockbusters of recent years, which has all the emotion of Del Toro’s Spanish language work, but wraps it in a populist superhero movie. I’m nervous of his latest, Pacific Rim, which looks like little more than a CG heavy Transformers riff with some monsters in place of the Decepticons, but I’m trying to have faith, after all, Del Toro hasn’t let me down yet.
Start With: Pan’s Labyrinth
Best Film: Pan’s Labyrinth

Blu Ray Review: Double Indemnity / The Lost Weekend

Masters of Cinema are releasing two Billy Wilder films on June 25th. I'll be tackling both in one review because otherwise I might end up repeating myself rather a lot.

The Films

Double Indemnity was only Billy Wilder's third film as a director, but you'd never know. It not only defined the film noir style for all time (its influence on both classic and neo-noir is inescapable), but it also remains probably the best film made in either era of noir.

Based on a novella by James M. Cain, and with a perfectly hard-boiled screenplay by Wilder and Raymond Chandler, Double Indemnity is narrated, in the form of a confession, by insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), who relates how he fell under the spell of Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) and was seduced into a plot to kill her husband and claim the insurance on his life. His summation: "Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money - and a woman - and I didn't get the money and I didn't get the woman. Pretty, isn't it?" could easily double as a summation of noir itself.

Double Indemnity is one of those rare films that functions like a perfect machine; every cog working in unison to make something that does its job flawlessly. There are so many elements here that come together perfectly. In many ways, as director and co-writer, Billy Wilder is the star. The screenplay that he and Chandler penned is exceptional, shot through with dark, dry wit, and dancing around the sex and murder implicit in the film with linguistic creativity and glee the likes of which we seldom see. Wilder also had a great collaborator in the visual aspects of the film; cinematographer John F Seitz (who had a track record stretching back to the silent era). Seitz' lighting here is a masterpiece in and of itself, with bars of shadow frequently entrapping MacMurray, and pitch blacks contributing to an increasingly foreboding atmosphere. For his part, Wilder's camerawork is clever and compelling in its patience. Frequently he lets a simple shot hold, and uses that to make the audience tense in their seats. For instance there's the brilliant scene of Stanwyck hiding behind a door, desperate that Edward G. Robinson (who plays MacMurray's suspicious boss) not see her, or the simplicity with which Wilder handles the murder; holding on Stanwyck's face as it happens just next to her, out of shot.

But the praise that has to be accorded to Wilder shouldn't detract from his three leading players. Barbara Stanwyck was one of the best actresses cinema ever had, effortlessly compelling whether she was in a drama like The Bitter Tea of General Yen, a romantic comedy like The Lady Eve or a screwball farce like Ball of Fire (also co-written by Wilder), but Phyllis Dietrichson may be her greatest role and her best performance. Stanwyck was already in her mid thirties by the time of Double Indemnity and she was never Hollywood's most obvious beauty (a cheap blonde wig certainly didn't help), but she's still devastatingly sexy. The minute she appears at the top of a flight of stairs, wrapped in a towel and wearing "a honey of an anklet" you understand how MacMurray has ended up where we find him at the start of the film. Stanwyck also has the Fatale part of the Femme Fatale equation down perfectly; there's an edge to everything she says, and an ever present glint in her eye that should set alarm bells ringing with DO NOT TRUST.

The chemistry between MacMurray and Stanwyck is fantastic, and the two bounce off each other in some of the most memorable dialogue scenes in 40's cinema. Wilder was best known as a comic wirter, but here his dialogue with Chandler is a perfect mix of the poetic "How could I have known that murder could sometimes smell like honeysuckle?", the suggestive "There's a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff. Forty-five miles an hour..." and the darkly funny "...Guess I was wrong. You're not smarter, Walter... you're just a little taller." MacMurray, best known at this time, and subsequently, as a star of family films, is perfect as Neff, that outward assurance and bravado to Phyllis is all the more effective for he way he allows us to see the nerves simmering just below it. The third spoke in the wheel is Edward G. Robinson, whose delivery of the many speeches about the 'little man' telling him that there's something wrong with the Dietrichson claim ratchet up the tension, while he also emphasises the closeness between Neff and his boss to strong effect.

Double Indemnity is as tense, as smart, as thrilling and as beautiful now as it ever was, if you haven't seen it there really is no excuse.

The Lost Weekend was the film that Billy Wilder made immediately following Double Indemnity, and while it's adapted from a novel it may also have been inspired by Wilder's difficult and fractious relationship with Raymond Chandler, who was, like this film's main character, an alcoholic writer.

Ray Milland plays author Don Birnam, he's supposed to be going away for the weekend with his brother Wick (Philip Terry), so that he can make sure Don doesn't go back to drinking (it's been 10 days since his latest 'cure'). Instead Don sends his girlfriend (Jane Wyman) and Wick to the theatre, while he goes off to his favourite bar. Wick leaves without him, and over the weekend Don spirals ever further into alcoholism.

The Lost Weekend is one of, if not the first Hollywood film to really tackle the subject of alcoholism in a serious manner, and that's where it really excels. The scenes themselves have become somewhat cliché as every other film about addiction has worked through the same beats over the last 67 years, but Wilder and especially Ray Milland bring them vividly to life. Milland is outstanding as Birnam, making the vicious circle of his drinking - he drinks because he can't write, and can't write because he drinks - relateable as well as devastating. We see just enough of the charming guy Don might be that we can root for him to recover, and empathise as he becomes ever more pathetic and helpless (even begging money from fellow barfly Doris Dowling). While the acting style of the time was broader than it is now, Milland doesn't overplay the drunkenness (compare this performance to Tom Cruise's hilariously dreadful drunk scene in Jerry Maguire, for example), giving us a picture of a man who doesn't drink for fun or even for the effect, but just because he needs to.

Wilder brings DP John F Seitz and all the visual style he learnt on Double Indemnity back here. Indeed, thanks to the design of the shots and the the lighting, you could say that The Lost Weekend is a film noir in which Whisky is the femme fatale (look at the shot when Milland finally sees a shadow, and remembers he hid a bottle in the light hanging from his ceiling, or the increasing use of shadow as he becomes more and more enclosed in his apartment and his addiction). Seitz and Wilder paint with shadow to wonderful effect, emphasising the dark influence of the bottle on Milland's life.

There are things that don't work though, chiefly the flashbacks, and particularly Jane Wyman's part as Milland's girlfriend. Ultimately, Helen is just a misconcieved character, there are few scenes where you really feel that she needs to be there, and even in the flashback scenes the relationship carries very little weight. Wick is a better character, and Pilip Terry has a good scene when he pretends to Helen that it's he who is the drinker in the family, but he's off screen too much for there to be much weight to the relationship with Milland, and Terry's hardly the most charismatic of actors, especially next to Milland.

There are outstanding sequences here; Milland's desperate trawl through the city trying to pawn his typewriter comes to mind, as does the DTs sequence, which brings a B Horror edge to the film for a few minute. On the whole though the film is a little inconsistent; a minor Wilder, but still, calling something a minor Wilder is hardly an indictment, and The Lost Weekend is often compelling, with Milland's performance alone making it a must see.

The Discs

Masters of Cinema have a well earned reputation for discs with beautiful transfers, and these are no exception. The Lost Weekend looks great, with deep blacks and subtle shades of grey in the black and white photography. The grain is pretty heavy, but very natural, and helps bring out a lot of detail in the picture while giving it a film like look. The print isn't quite perfect, but you'll barely notice.

The print for Double Indemnity, however, is perfect. The Blu Ray is stunningly beautiful, and unless you saw it on its original release (perhaps even then), it should make the experience like seeing the film for the first time again. The blacks are pitch dark, the (few) whites spotless and everything in between is beautifully and subtly scaled. The transfer is awash with fine detail, and does wonders for Seitz' photography.

The soundtracks are pretty simple, both largely dialogue driven, and the stereo tracks do a fine job; they're well balanced and loud enough to be an easy listen.

The Extras

The Double Indemnity disc has a featurette on the making and the legacy of the film. It runs for almost 40 minutes and is entertaining, though the lack of any comment from anyone who was there (even in archive footage) is a shame, though the assembled critics, writers and filmmakers do a nice job telling the story. There is also an audio bonus; the full radio broadcast version of Double Indemnity, with MacMurray and Stanwyck reprising their roles. I love these things, they're fascinating alternate versions of films we know and love, and something that just doesn't exist today. It's a great listen. Wrapping up the on disc supplements is a commentary with screenwriter Lem Dobbs and film historian Nick Redmond. It's a very good track, avoiding much of the dry film theory that can afflict tracks like this and Dobbs and Redmond make a good team.

The Lost Weekend has a six minute introduction from Alex Cox, which is a sincere appreciation, and Cox is a good host, but the real gold here (and of all the extras on these releases) is a three part, three hour, conversation between Billy Wilder and fellow German filmmaker Volker Schlondorff called Billy, How Did You Do It? It's an utter joy to see the 85 year old Wilder still so animated and enthused talking about his and other people's movies, and probably worth buying the disc for all by itself. There is also a radio production starring Milland, which is very similar in style to that for Double Indemnity, and is also well worth a listen.

Both discs also feature the original trailers for the film, and, like all MOC releases, a booklet packed with fascinating articles on the films. The Double Indemnity booklet includes a short answer from James M. Cain, relating how Billy Wilder did things with the film that he wished he had thought of for the book, while the Lost Weekend booklet has a comparison of the DTs scene in book, scrrenplay and film forms, and each boasts much more intensely interesting material besides, along with some well chosen and reproduced pictures.

Overall

These are essential discs for any serious fan of classic cinema. The films are of varying stature, but each is packed with brilliant extras that both intrigue and entertain, and the films themselves look incredible, even if you've seen each of them over and over it will be like watching them for the first time again.

If you'd like to buy these discs please use the links below, it won't cost you anything extra, but you'll be helping out 24FPS. Thanks.

An Education: A Canterbury Tale

An Education is a new series for 24FPS. Across the course of 2012 I'm going to be filling some holes in the list of accepted 'classics' that I realise I should have seen, but for one reason or another I have thus far not got around to. I'll be watching and reviewing 104 films across the course of the year (and another 52 horror films in a sister feature for www.horrormovies.ca) I'm really looking forward to it, and I hope you'll join me in what I hope is going to be something of a voyage of cinematic discovery.

If you've any thoughts on the articles, or the films I'm going to be watching (full list HERE) then please share them in the comments, via email to sam@24fps.org.uk or tweet me @24FPSUK

First up...

A CANTERBURY TALE
Dir: Michael Powell

Why is this on the syllabus?
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's films are some of the most significant in British cinema, and I've seen some (though not enough) of their later, more iconic, work, and loved it. The Red Shoes is among my favourite films of all time. I chose A Canterbury Tale because it's a slightly unexpected pick from their filmography as compared to the likes of Colonel Blimp or I Know Where I'm Going, and I'd been meaning to watch it for some time now.


What did I learn?
That I don't unconditionally love Powell and Pressburger. Now, put the torches down, stop the screams of 'burn the witch', A Canterbury Tale is a very, very good film, and I enjoyed watching it, but I really can't pretend that it had me at the same level, either of spectacle or emotion, as A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus or The Red Shoes. This may, admittedly, be partly my fault. One of the problems of spending 21 years watching movies on a more or less non-stop loop is that it leaves little time for reading, and I've never got around to reading any of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which screenwriter Pressburger is apparently echoing here, I imagine that if you've got a working knowledge of Chaucer the whole film will play much better, and likely feel more meaningful than it did for me.

The story here is slightly strange. Getting off the train in a village outside Canterbury, Alison, a young Land Girl, (Sheila Sim) meets two soldiers; Peter, an Englishman (Dennis Price) and Bob, an American (John Sweet, a non-professional who was a Sergeant in the US Army, and never acted in another film), as they walk to find somewhere to stay Alison is attacked by 'The Glue Man', who has been regularly pouring glue over the hair of girls who are going around with soldiers. Over the weekend the three stay in the village, and Alison decides that they should discover who the Glue Man is, before heading on to Canterbury on Monday.

The film's mystery storyline doesn't work terribly well, not that it's poorly told, but it's so lightweight (and the solution so stark staring obvious from the off), that it just isn't all that engaging, but I suspect that that's not really the point, and certainly Powell and Pressburger seem more interested in village life, the way people pull together in a time of war and the relationships between Alison, Peter, Bob, and Thomas Colpeper (Eric Portman), who seems to be something equivalent to head of the village council. This is where the film excels, as Pressburger's script draws each of them with some depth and complexity, and makes each relationship feel a little bit different. Particularly well written and played is the relationship between Bob and Alison, who bond over lost love in one of the film's standout scenes.

All of the performances are strong. Portman's role could quite easily have invited a hammy performance, but while he's appropriately stuck up at times (one scene takes place as he's giving a lecture to the assembled soldiers on the history of the local area), he also evolves as a character, being drawn in by the three main characters after being dismissive of them to begin with. It's left up to us to decide how much of this change of attitude is a ploy. Sheila Sim makes for an appealing lead, and a surprisingly modern one for 1944, as she takes the lead in investigating the Glue Man, drawing the men in after the fact. As Peter and Bob Price and Sweet both do solid work, with Sweet giving a relaxed and natural performance.

A Canterbury Tale is interesting in a lot of ways. At times it feel like it is pining for a dying (and now dead) way of life (look at the scenes with the wheelwright, a job that has likely completely died out now). It's also something of a tourist film, showing us glimpses of the quaint folk who live in the English countryside, and the way a GI reacts to them, but perhaps first and foremost it is propaganda, with the accent heavily on co-operation and friendship between British and American forces and civilians during the war effort. This seems especially hammered home in a storyline involving local village boys first playing at being armies and then helping to uncover the Glue Man.

Erwin Hillier's black and white cinematography is beautiful and crisp, he uses shadow beautifully, especially in the handful of night time scenes, and the vistas looking over the hills to Canterbury are expansive and stunning (a view I'm very familiar with, having ridden the bus into Canterbury most days for five years). between them, Powell and Hillier have created a striking looking film, even though, for my money, Powell's best work is in colour.

Ultimately, though I liked the characters, and was appropriately charmed by the film's ending, A Canterbury Tale seems a bit muddled, and a bit lightwieght compared to what I've previously seen from Powell and Pressburger, but it's still an engaging and enjoyable work, and one I suspect I'll grow to like more on rewatches. Now, where's the Chaucer?


Educate Yourself
If you buy A Canterbury Tale though these links you'll be getting the movie and helping out 24FPS at no extra cost. Awesome!



Next Lesson: The Taking of Pelham 123 ['74]