Counter Culture

‘You will own nothing and you will be happy…’

I think most of us are now familiar with this sinister foretaste of the future as predicted/demanded by the Danish politician Ida Auken in an infamous essay for the World Economic Forum.

All I can say, for the purposes of this piece, is that despite my longstanding socialist commitment, when it comes to entertainment media, I would not be at all happy to own nothing.

And I don’t count downloads as ‘owning.’

I am a lover, and inveterate collector, and suspect always will be, of books, of DVD’s, and CD’s. Just knowing that they are there, around me, in most cases clearly visible, engenders feelings of familiarity, safety, and happiness. Everything there, within relatively easy reach, ready to be taken down from the shelf as and when the desire arises.

Nevertheless, in a family of four, including with two growing boys, living in a two-bedroom house with little chance of a move to bigger premises any time soon, space is at a premium. Thus, every now and then, to enable us to ‘breathe’, to quote my wife, who herself was quoting some Japanese anti-clutter guru, and to make room for new stuff, a cull needs to take place.

Fortunately, we have a Bernaldo’s charity shop collection point within easy walking distance of our house, and it is to there that a proportion of my stuff semi-regularly disappears.

It’s always a wrench, but I’m always glad when it’s done, and only when I’ve later found out I’ve purged something that is now selling for hundreds of pounds online, as has happened with more than one book I’ve given away, do I have any real regrets.

So, several bin liners full of books have recently made the short journey to the charity shop, and hopefully from there into the hands of those who will cherish them as much as I have, and several more bags of DVD’s.

It’s this latter aspect of my latest purge that prompted this article. You see, going through my substantial collection of DVD’s and Blu Rays, started me thinking about, amongst those I own, which are my absolute favourites, the ones that I will certainly NOT be getting rid of, not in any circumstance I can envisage?

For this enterprise, I established a little scenario: For some reason, perhaps my political views are no longer acceptable in the Brave New social-liberal-political-economic-totalitarian World of Tomorrow, I am informed that I am to spend the rest of my days in solitary confinement. I’ll be humanely fed and watered, in comfortable surroundings, but all I shall have for entertainment are forty discs, DVD or Blu Ray of my choosing, and these must be chosen from discs that are already in my possession. Nothing new is to be permitted.

It should be noted that, in this scenario, I must choose these discs quickly, in say fifteen minutes, just grab them off the shelves, box them up, and away I go. So, inevitably, mistakes will be made, regrets quickly manifesting themselves along the lines of ‘Oh no, I haven’t got any Woody Allen! What about Jaws! I’ve forgotten The Godfather! No Scorsese! There’s not enough comedy!’ No Westerns! Etc etc.

Such is life. My decision shall be irrevocable.

So then, this is the forty movies I’ve chosen to while away the long hours until death finally releases me into the great unknown.

It should also be noted that this is not quite my top forty favourite films of all-time as, in some cases surprisingly, I don’t, yet, own a physical copy of every film I would regard as amongst my favourites; and OK, I must admit to a bit of cheating, in betraying my own scenario, by quickly scanning eBay for an easily affordable version of something I decided I definitely wished to consider for inclusion at the last minute.

I also decided that I would not include more than two movies by any single filmmaker, which made for some tough decision making, as we shall see. 

I have not included documentaries, though I have some that I really value highly, especially my recently acquired television boxsets The World at War (1974) and The Great War (1964) as well as many music-themed documentaries, on favourite artists like The Beatles, Dylan and Elvis. Maybe ‘Greatest Ever Music Documentaries’ could form the basis of a future article.

I have also omitted any television series’, despite my cherished collection of vintage Science Fiction, mostly Doctor Who with representations of every Doctor, not counting Jodie Whittaker, obviously, as well as such greats as the Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Battlestar Galactica, and a bootleg of the never yet physically released Journey into the Unknown. That’s as well assuch great modern(ish), binge-series’ as The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones.

I should also stress that whilst most of these films are here on what I perceive to be pure artistic merit, some make the list based on other, more sentimental, purely subjective factors linked to my own biography. This is covered in the article.

With this lengthy preamble completed, we shall proceed with the list. The movies are in no particular order.

Tokyo Story (1953)

This beautiful movie by master Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu is a regular critics’ choice for the greatest film of all time, rated No.3 on the 2012 Sight and Sound film director’s choice. I first saw it through my membership of the postal DVD subscription service Love Film (remember them?) about a decade ago.

I watched it for the fourth time recently, and it’s still as mesmerising as that first time I watched it on my laptop at work’ (the cushiest job I’ve had).

If you’re expecting an all-action blockbuster full of car chases and explosions, you’re going to very, very disappointed. Not much happens as far as plot goes, but the realistic acting and dialogue in this family drama are amongst the greatest ever committed to celluloid, and that comes across even with subtitles. It’s a real story about the real lives of real people, which could be set anywhere, though the film will also teach you much about Japan in the post-war period of transition from traditionalist feudal empire to modern, economically advanced liberal democracy.

Most of all, it’s Ozu’s visual composition that makes Tokyo Story a masterpiece. He was noted for his long, lingering shots where the camera remained move for a whole scene, and often filmed from unusual, particularly low angles. I’m no expert, and those who are aficionados of the more technical aspects of filmmaking can research the technique of Ozu’s filmmaking for themselves. All I need to say here, is that every frame is a composition, a work of art in and of itself. If this list was in order of merit, then there is no doubt that this film would be at or near the top.

I was going to say that a free version with English subtitles is available on You Tube. Sadly, no longer.

It Happened Here (1964)

A film that started out as an amateur project that budding filmmaker Kevin Brownlow hoped to hawk around studios as an example of what he could do if given the chance to make a real movie. Based on the popular Alt’-Hist’ premise that Britain was conquered by Nazi Germany in 1940, the project took on a life of its own once military history buff and collector Adrew Mollo came on board with Brownlow. Taking ten years to complete before getting an initially limited cinematic release in 1964, it’s the incredible realism of the movie, much of it down to Mollo’s obsessive attention to detail, that puts this film above all other examples of its genre.

Every actor in It Happened Here was an amateur, with the superb Pauline Murray as the central character Pauline, making the step from amateur dramatics to the big screen for one film only, before returning whence she had come.

Best of all, real, active, 1960’s British Nazis, drawn from Colin Jordan’s National Socialist Movement, got the opportunity to dress up in SS uniforms and put forward their views on euthanasia and such on camera, something unthinkable today. A real highlight for me is the fiery oratory at the National Socialist Pagan funeral, where the real-life British Nazis seemed to be, and surely were, having the time of their lives…

Some of these more edgy scenes were cut from the original theatrical release, though they have been restored in all recent physical releases.

The film has long obsessed me, and my full review can be read here

 It Happened Here (1964) | Counter Culture (countercultureuk.com) –

They Live (1988)

Our all-American, working class drifter hero Nada, played by Roddy Piper, puts on a pair of special glasses offered to him by his new work colleague/friend Frank Armitage (Keith David), and Hey Presto! he sees reality as it really is, that is a world controlled by a tiny, alien elite which keeps us compliant through subliminal messages encoded within the fabric of everyday life: ‘Obey’, ‘Consume‘, ‘Marry and Reproduce,’ ‘No independent thought’, ‘Everything is under control,’ ‘Do not question authority,’ and many others.

In other words, he sees reality as it really is, not only how it really is in this movie…Except the ‘Marry and Reproduce’ thing seems to have gone a bit out of fashion since John Carpenter made this long underrated, low-budget masterpiece.

Carpenter has said that, to him, the film, based on a 1963 (very) short story called Eight O’ Clock by Ray Nelson, was a contemporary critique of Reaganomics and the Yuppies. But interpretations are legion, and I think today, many more people see it as a prescient parable about modern social control of the masses than would have done so when it was first made, and not an inconsiderable number see it as something more than a mere parable.

In They Live the glasses fulfil a similar role to the Red Pill in The Matrix, though they are less subtle and more fun, and I suppose it’s simpler to say someone who has awoken to How Things Really Are has been ‘Red Pilled’ than to say they have ‘Put on the Special Glasses,’ and of course more people have seen The Matrix and its unnecessary sequels.

If you’re not a ‘conspiracy’ buff, you can watch the film as a fun, straight-ahead, all-action Science Fiction movie, and especially enjoy the ridiculously and deliberately elongated fight scene, though I think to do so is to miss out on something deeper and more profound.

This is another one I’ve reviewed at greater length Film review: They Live (1988) | Counter Culture (countercultureuk.com)

The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

One of the coolest things about growing up in the 1970’s was that mainstream television, and don’t forget there was only mainstream television back then, introduced you to lots of great old stuff. The youth of today seem to live in an eternal now, where only the latest, brightest, most modern thing matters. Imagine an eleven-year-old-kid, sitting down, and by choice, watching a black and white film from the 1930’s, that is without being forced to by their dad, in the manner that my two sons regularly experienced, until they got too old for easy compliance.

When I was eleven, I think, and was in the final year of Primary school, one of the major television channels, probably the BBC, but I always think old stuff was on the BBC, had a late Friday night season of horror films, beginning with the earliest Universal movies, showing all of them in chronological order, and then, as far as I can remember, moving onto the British Hammer House of Horror movies from the fifties and sixties, though I can’t recall at what point they stopped. What I do remember is that amongst a certain sub-section of relatively intelligent but not very cool kids at Yarborough school, the strata to which I rightfully belonged, these films would be the talk of the playground come the following Monday morning.

I could well have gone for the original Frankenstein, directed of course by the great James Whale (not that one), who would later have a decent T.V biopic made about him called Of Men and Monsters. Everything about the film is iconic, the electrical storm which the brilliant Doctor Henry Frankenstein channels to bring life from death, marked by his exultant cry of ‘It’s Alive! It’s Alive! It’s Ali’ive!’ His assistant Fritz (not Egor/Igor, as is generally supposed) and his difficult choice between a ‘normal’ and an ‘abnormal’ brain, the little girl and the single flower floating macabrely on the river, the villagers with flaming torches (a modern, technological version of which was recently employed to fabulous effect by French protesters), and most of all, of course, Boris Karloff’s Monster itself, with a look so right that all subsequent attempts to modify to bring the creation more in line with Mary Shelley’s vision in the original novel, have seemed wrong.

But in the end, as much as I love it, I didn’t go for the first Frankenstein movie (or more accurately the first ‘Talky’ Frankenstein movie), I went for its sequel, four years later, ‘The Bride of…’, also directed by Whale, and with most of the same cast returning, including Karloff as the Monster and the tortured, alcoholic Colin Clive as the not-so-good doctor…

Ultimately, I feel that the second in the series has everything that the first does, plus that little bit extra, little arty touches like each major character having their own musical theme.

The story is about something more than the age-old trope of the dangers of ‘Playing God.’ At its heart, TBOF is a film about the all too human need for companionship, for love, notwithstanding that those in search of it have been cobbled together from the spare parts of the deceased.

We also get to hear the monster talk, something Karloff initially opposed as damaging to the mystery of the creature, but which I think works well, especially in the moving scene with the blind violist.  Of course, we only see the creature’s newly created, longed for companion for a few minutes near the end, but what an unforgettable few minutes they are; and what sadness we feel when his ‘Bride’ rejects him, condemning him to continued ‘life’ as a despised outcast.

Pathos is one of the outstanding features of these early horror movies, and this movie has it in spades, though without ever being maudlin. It is this which earns it a place, against stiff competition (I love the first Dracula, with Bela Lugosi, and The Wolfman, with Lon Chaney Jr movies too), particularly from its predecessor.

There would be several more Universal Frankenstein pictures for my young self to enjoy in 1973, and since, too, but these descended more and more into self-parody, until the very credible 1957 Hammer Curse of Frankenstein reboot.

Whale sensibly made his two Monster-masterpieces and left it at that.

Now Voyager (1942)

This is another one I’m pretty sure I first discovered as part of a late-night television ‘season’. I certainly remember discussing a current run of Bette Davis films with my dad, and my favourite aunty, aunty Gwen, an irregular but always very welcome visitor to our house. That would be when I was fifteen, when I would often go to see her bass playing son Derek, play with his rock ‘n’ roll revivalist band upstairs in the Pestle and Mortar, the ‘P ‘n’ M’ pub on a Friday night, from the age of fifteen onwards, the bar staff turning a blind eye to my youth, as long as I sat in a corner and didn’t approach the bar myself, leaving the beer buying to Dereck during his set breaks. I’ll always associate Bette Davis with Aunty Gwen and Cousin Dereck, though my dad was a big fan too. 

I’m not sure Bette was ever better than here, as dowdy Aunt Charlotte, who re-invents herself as a sexy older woman vamp and finds love on a cruise ship. Who can ever forget those closing lines, uttered by Claude Reins as the suave Jeremiah Duvaux Durrance (‘Jerry’), as he casually lights two cigarettes at once, before handing one to Charlotte: ‘Why ask for the moon, when we have the stars?’

Once her Hollywood starlet days were behind her, though she was never quite the ravishing starlet type anyway, Davis would re-invent herself, from the late 1950’s on, as a sinister and sometimes psychopathic middle-aged woman in psychological, some of them Hammer, horror movies, and the like, of which more below.

Secretary (2002)

But first we move on to a little more up to date, a mere twenty-one years ago, with this little known and neglected spank-fest, which I believe I first saw at Liverpool’s art-house FACT cinema, not long before my move to the city the following year. I was with my then girlfriend, ‘H’, who held an annual FACT membership, and she was amused at how fixated our fellow cinema goers were by the sexier scenes: ‘You could have heard a pin drop,’ she later said, with her usual flair for linguistic originality. Of course, I was pretty fixated myself…

It’s a slightly odd choice, I admit, a great success neither critically nor commercially. But actress Maggie Gyllenhaal as Lee Holloway is just about the sexiest woman I have ever seen on screen, and if I am to be solitarily confined for the rest of my days, I’m sure her big screen presence, and I’ve now decided I will be permitted a very big screen, would help to pass the time and satisfy certain needs very nicely.

Her performance alongside James Spader as her boss/lover and later husband, Attorney E. Edward Grey, a close cousin to the character he played in 1989’s Sex, Lies and Videotape, in what is essentially a two-hander, is superb.

Essentially, the film is about escape from mental despair and self-loathing through discovering, acknowledging, and embracing your true self, and how true love can find many physical expressions, all of which are OK, as long as they are consensual and nobody gets hurt, too much. The sadomasochistic themes have been cited as a possible source of inspiration for the author E.L James’ hugely successful 50 Shades of Grey (was the use of the surname Grey for the male-lead character coincidental?) book and later film series, and although I didn’t think of this at the time, it may also have had some influence on my own 2013 novel, The Angela Suite.

Pulp Fiction (1994)

1994 is a funny year in my personal biography. It’s the year when, for want of anything better to do an aimless year on from completing my degree as a mature student, I began my new career as a support worker, primarily with adults with learning disabilities, a job I’m still doing nearly three decades later.

One of the very first ‘gigs’ I had with the agency I began working for, Apex, was to support a gentleman with Downes Syndrome six-five-hour evenings a week. His routine was, that every Friday night he would go to the cinema. I worked with Philip for about six months, and even now I can trot out a sizable list of films that I know with certainty were released in 1994, because I remember seeing them first with Philip.

Pulp Fiction may seem an odd choice to take a person with a learning disability to see, but Philip was an adult, so there was no reason that his viewing need necessarily be confined to children’s films such as The Lion King, though that was another one we saw that year. Philip enjoyed pretty much whatever we went to see, to be honest, and sometimes, if there wasn’t anything he explicitly asked for, I would simply pick at random anything that sounded interesting.

That, I believe, was how we came to be viewing Pulp Fiction. At this time, I wasn’t particularly in touch with what was going on in the world of cinema, or in popular culture in general, so I wouldn’t have been aware of the work of Quentin Tarantino, had yet to see his first feature, Reservoir Dogs, though ultimately, I would become familiar with, and a fan and collector all of his work. Athis point, I believe he has more than earned his place amongst the all-time greats.

So, I wouldn’t really have known what to expect I sat down in the darkened theatre with Philip, as usual hoping that he didn’t inappropriately shout out his appreciation at a section of the movie that particularly pleased him, especially if this scene involved the cite of naked breasts. I can’t remember if Philip held himself in check or not during the sexier bits of this movie, though there were quite a few, mostly involving the gorgeous Uma Thurman, but by the time it was over, I believed I had just seen one of the best movies I’ve ever seen in my life.

I still think that, and the none-linear narrative structure is one the major aspects that make it great. Who didn’t conclude watching the film for the first time, or even the second, third or fourth time, by mentally re-arranging the scenes into the correct chronological narrative order.

Pulp Fiction was the movie that marked John Travolta’s return to the Hollywood ‘A’ list after a long period languishing in ‘B’ movie hell
(in a role originally earmarked for Mickey Rourke), and he’s great, as is Bruce Wilis, Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson, and all the supporting players.

Still probably my favourite Tarantino movie.

Angels With Dirty Faces (1938)

Back to the oldies for my next choice. My dad was a huge Jimmy Cagney film, and it used to be said by some that he resembled Cagney physically. I would probably have seen this with him for the first time somewhere around the mid-seventies.

In my opinion, this is Cagney’s best-ever performance, though White Heat comes a close second, with great support from Pat O’ Brien and the young ruffians known as The Dead End Kids. It’s a film about the power of the male role model, for good or ill, the important role that Christian faith then played in guiding moral values in western society, and of how courage can manifest itself in many different forms.

The climatic scene where Cagney’s ‘Rocky’ changes in an instant from mocking defiance in the face of death to screaming fake-cowardice as he is led to the electric chair, will always make the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end, no matter how many times I see it.

The Great Dictator (1940)

I’ve been going through a big Chaplin period of late, and it was a tossup between this and Modern Times from four years earlier as to which of his movies would make my list, with also a strong possibility that it could have been both.

The earlier film is perhaps the more perfect a movie. The flaws of ‘Dictator’ are well examined in the Extras section of my excellent Blu Ray edition, for instance the rather misplaced, Keystone Cops type slapstick of the SS type figures in their encounters with Chaplin’s Little Jewish Barber. It’s understandable if that seemed a better idea at the time than it does in retrospect. Indeed, Chaplin himself later said that if he had known the true horrors of Nazism, with the worst it, of course, the industrialisation of mass murder through the Death Camps in the Final Solution, being yet to come when he made the movie, he wouldn’t have made it at all.

It is also true that the barber’s impassioned anti-Fascist speech at the conclusion of the movie, when he has changed places with the dictator Hinkle, also of course played by Chaplin, perhaps the greatest fictional political speech ever made, was clearly the words of Chaplin himself, with no sense previously established through the film’s narrative that his character, who was essentially a version of the Little Tramp Chaplin had already been playing for close to a quarter of a century, was capable of such impassioned erudition.

But despite these weaknesses, the cultural importance of The Great Dictator overrides its flaws. It is still, more than eight decades on, perhaps the greatest statement of anti-totalitarianism ever captured on celluloid.

Chaplin was notorious as something of a benign dictator himself when it came to moviemaking, taking on the production, directing, writing, and even composition of the score in his films, as well as taking the starring role personally, from the time of becoming the biggest star in the world during the First World War, onwards. Thus a ‘Chaplin film’ is a statement of one person’s individual vision to an extent that has never since been equalled.

Here, we get to see all of the silent, balletic comedy tropes that had already become long established and associated with Chaplin, but with an added, overt political dimension, and we get the chance to hear the Little Tramp speak for the first time (Modern Times has some dialogue, but not from Chaplin); and how fitting that the very first words of this iconic character should have been words of such importance, uttered at a time when the country of his birth, in which he had spent his early years in such grinding poverty, and learned his trade on the stages of the Music Hall, stood alone in defiance of the Nazi war machine?

Indeed, it has even been argued that that climatic speech had some bearing in rallying American opinion in favour of the war, once Pearl Harbour and Hitler’s declaration of hostilities brough an end to isolationism. Certainly, President Roosevelt, always privately if not publicly in favour of America’s entry into the war, was a huge fan of the movie.

Come the 1950’s, and the age of McCarthyism, Chaplin would be driven from the land that had given him the opportunity to achieve unprecedented fame and fortune, Modern Times, The Great Dictator, and his personal statement about being ‘A Citizen of the World’ being cited as evidence of his ‘premature anti-fascism’ and sympathy for communism, though he was, happily, given a heroes’ welcome upon his return home, to England, to the land of his birth.

Hitler apparently saw The Great Dictator, having a private print of the film brought to him, which he is said to have watched alone two nights in succession. There is no hard evidence of his opinion of it, though one former loyal assistant did insist that Der Fuhrer wasn’t entirely humourless, and would have seen the funny side, as unlikely as this seems. It goes without saying that the rest of the German people were denied the opportunity to assess Chaplin’s flawed masterpiece for themselves.

Pleasantville (1998)

Like Secretary, one of my more obscure, twenty first century choices. I don’t remember how or why I first came to see this, but I do remember enjoying it again when I watched it with my eldest son a few years ago, and again more recently. It’s a deceptively light film with hidden depths that reveal themselves with each new viewing.

Brother and sister David and Jennifer settle down for ‘Pleasantville Night’, an apparently annual American national television event where a major (unnamed) network shows nothing but re-runs of a fictional, I Love Lucy style 1950’s Sitcom for an evening. When their T.V breaks down, they send for the T.V repair man (remember them?), who after fixing their device, hands them a special remote control which, for reasons that are never explained, transports the brother and sister into the world depicted in the show, with seemingly no means of escape.

Pleasantville, the fictional town that gives the film its name, is a black and white world in every aspect but the skin colour of the inhabitants, who are uniformly white. Nothing much ever happens there, everybody is permanently happy and content, teenagers are innocent with the idea of sex before marriage being unthinkable, all families are stable, teenagers dress like younger versions of their parents, and no outside world exists, with even maps showing all roads leading out of the town circling back towards it. ‘There is no outside of Pleasantville’ explains one character, incredulous, in answer to the newcomers’ queries.

As the brother and sister bring modern attitudes, fashions, sensibilities and previously unknown artefacts called ‘books’ to this insular world, dabs of colour start to appear, and then to grow, effecting more and more of the visual landscape and its inhabitants. At first, this leads to resentment and even hatred from the locals, who represent small-town resistance to change. Ultimately though, led inevitably by the youth, they come to accept this brand new, multi-coloured world.

It is of course a satire on racism, and undoubtedly an artistic expression of the liberal, multi-cultural worldview that has come to dominate the West. Whatever you think about this development politically, it’s very effectively done in terms of the movie. The scenes were young people become ‘colourised’ as they read in the park, suggesting education as the means to end prejudice and open they eyes of the young to the wonders of the outside world, are particularly striking.

Pleasantville looks great visually, and has some great performances, especially from the twin leads, a young, future Spiderman Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon.

A very original movie, co-produced and directed by Gary Ross.

The Battle of Algiers (1966)

Gilo Pontecorvo’s late-Italian Neo-Realist masterpiece, based on an account of a participant in the Algerian War of Independence from France between 1954 and 1957.

When I first stumbled upon this on You Tube a few years back, in the original French and Arabic, with no subtitles or dubbing, I assumed the black and white footage to be actual newsreel film of the struggle of the Algerian people. This of course was the intention of the filmmaker, standing in the tradition that properly begins with Rossellini’s brilliant 1946 movie Rome, Open City. 

The scene where an attractive, but ordinary looking woman surreptitiously pushes a bag containing a timer and explosives under a table in a crowded café, leading to a huge explosion minutes after she has casually left the premises, is one I could well imagine being played out in Northern Ireland within my own living history.

Indeed, it’s been suggested that the movie may have been influential on actual terrorist (or ‘Freedom Fighter’) groups, with some of the tactics portrayed apparently copied by PLO and the Black Panthers, as well as the IRA. Andreas Baader of the Baader-Meinhof group is said to have claimed it as his favourite film.

The decision to use primarily amateur actors, many whom, as in Rome, had recently lived through the events depicted, only adds to the authenticity of the movie.

The score by Pontecorvo and Ennio Morricone, using found sound/Musich concrete combined with indigenous Algerian music is an impressive feature.

Amongst the all-time great war films.

Che (2008)

Steven Soderbergh’s two-part film biography of Argentinian/Cuban revolutionary leader Ernesto ‘Che’ Gue Guevara has obvious similarities with The Battle of Algiers, and may even have been influenced by it, though the movie is in colour and has a much glossier look about it.

At its heart though, like the movie I’ve just covered, even if you strip away the political content (which admittedly you can’t really do), you have a bloody great, all-action war movie. The scenes where Fidel’s victorious guerrilla army, after six years of struggle, beginning with just a handful of revolutionaries, take Havana, entering the city on New Year’s Day 1959, are some of the best battle scenes I’ve ever seen.

Part One, ‘The Argentinian’, which concentrates on Che’s role in the Cuban revolution, is in my opinion much better than the second part, ‘Guerilla’, which details his doomed attempt to spread the revolution to the Congo and Bolivia, up to and including his CIA sponsored execution.

But taken together, the two add up to a mighty, political-military epic, and they really bring the iconic Christ-like figure on a million T-shirts to vivid, full colour life, and that includes showing Che for what he was, not some passive, peaceful, dope smoking hippy, but a man of action and a man of violence who wielded a gun in what he believed to be a noble cause, the cause of world socialist revolution; and it was a gun he was prepared to use, and did use personally, including for the execution of those who had betrayed the cause.

None of this is intended as a criticism of Guevara. But I believe that, as is also the case with Mandela, we need to reclaim Che for the revolution he fought for, and not be misled by the passage of time and the misuse of his image, into seeing him as a Gandi-like advocate of none-violent resistance, a political stance which, rightly or wrongly, he distained.

Che achieves all of that and much more besides. Great performances from Benicio Del Toro as the titular hero, Damian Bichir as Fidel Castro, and Rodrigo Santoro as his brother, fellow guerrilla fighter and fellow future Cuban President Raul.

The Passion of the Christ (2004)

The last twelve hours in the life of Jesus, as told by staunch Roman Catholic Mel Gibson. The dialogue in the movie was entirely in Latin and ‘reconstructed’ Aramaic, the language of Jesus himself. Gibson initially opposed even the use of subtitles, believing that the story at the centre of Christianity was so well known that he could rely completely on ‘filmic’ storytelling.

Fortunately, he relented on this issue, though the film is still very much a visual experience, and a powerful, emotional one at that. The Passion (Gibson’s original choice of title, the ‘…of the Christ was only added later when he found that his first choice had already been copyrighted), divided opinion, and continues to do so. Believing Christians, especially Evangelicals, tend to love it, critics not so much.

Many of the latter group saw the film as overly gory, and antisemitic. All I can say about these criticisms, is that the Crucifixion of Christ would have been a very gory affair, as are all crucifixions (and yes, they still happen), and the film is so faithful to its Biblical sources, mostly the synoptic Gospels of Mark, Mathew and Luke, with a smattering of Old Testament quotations and a hint of Revelations, that if the film is antisemitic, then so is the Bible.

Interestingly, the then vicar of my local church, at a time when I was a regular attendee, though I’ve never really got further than being able to describe myself as a ‘Cultural Christian,’ was with the critics on the shortcomings of the movie, but that probably says more about the state of the modern C of E than anything else.

It’s my favourite Jesus film anyway, despite strong competition from Scorsese’s equally controversial The Last Temptation of Christ, and one I now make a point of watching every Easter, with the 1976 television series Jesus of Nazareth starring Robert Powellbeing its Christmas equivalent.

Here, Jim Caviezel, himself a man of Christian faith, is simply amazing in the lead role.

A sequel, focussing on the Resurrection, is apparently in development. No doubt, critics will describe the plot as overly fanciful.

The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)

I loved this as a kid, and a few watches later, I have enjoyed it just as much with my own two children. The movie is based on the excellent Richard Matheson’s novel from a year earlier, with Matheson himself taking the lead in penning the screenplay. Matheson had already written I am Legend, which would become a blockbuster hit movie more than five decades later and would go on to write some of the best episodes of The Twilight Zone.

Grant Williams is superb as Scott, the shrinking man of the title, in what is essentially a great adventure film, as our ever-more diminutive hero struggles to survive against ever-widening odds. The special effects still stand up today, and his battle against the, to him, giant spider, in the basement that has become his over-sized world, and which he wins by means of a pin fashioned into a makeshift sword, is one of the most memorable fight scenes in cinematic history.

There is a Cold War/ fear of nuclear energy backdrop to the story, and some critics have also seen it as a metaphor for male concern at the loss of their privileged position in society as women increasingly entered the workplace and gained positions of influence from the Second World War onwards.

 A terrible, comedic The Incredible Shrinking Woman was apparently made in 1981, though I’ve never seen it, and a 2007 version with Eddie Murphy was apparently planned, but perhaps fortunately, never made.

The film has a great philosophical ending as Scott utters the words ‘I still exist’ as he shrinks to nothingness, posing the question of whether there can be such a thing as ‘nothingness.’

A fine old movie. 

Kes (1969)

I first saw this on an afternoon school trip from my school to another Grimsby school, which had its own cinema. How many schools now have their own cinema? Few now can even manage a playing field, or kitchens. I can’t remember how old I was at the time, late primary school I think, certainly still of an age when hearing the word ‘bastard’ spoken on screen was both shocking and hilarious.

Kes is the story is of a barely literate, teenage working class kid from a dysfunctional family finding meaning in life through caring for and training an injured kestrel hawk he happens to come across. But it’s those features that are incidental to the main plot which make it sucha memorable film. Anyone who grew up in a working class communityin the 1970’s, would recognise the sadistic, wannabe-professional footballer games master, played by the great Brian Glover (who was incidentally a university contemporary of an old philosophy lecturer of mine), or the forcing of children with no aptitude or interest in sports to run around a frozen field in shorts on a freezing cold, English January day?

Ken Loach has amassed a large body of work as a filmmaker and has rightly won many plaudits. Personally, I think, in his more overtly political films, he tends to over-sentimentalise the working class, and his slavish following of the Trotsky-Orwell line in his Spanish civil war movie Cry Freedom, frankly annoyed me. But when he gets it right, he gets it very right, and he has never bettered this movie, based on the great novel A Kestral for a Knave by Barry Hines (who would later write the screenplay for Threads, the 1980’s nuclear war themed drama which is still perhaps the most harrowing production ever shown on British television).

Great performance by Davis Bradley in his first ever acting role, and sadly the only one that ever mattered, as the film’s young hero Billy Casper, and Colin Walland as the antithesis of Glover’s character, another archetype some of us will remember, a teacher who cares about and is genuinely interested in the lives of his pupils.

Unbreakable (2000)

I first read about this in comic-book writer’ Grant Morrison’s book Supergods, a history of the superhero genre, which I came across via a review on Jonathan Ross Saturday morning radio show, then a favourite of mine, sometime in the early 2000’s.

It is a sort of Superhero film, but one that digs below the surface gloss of the Marvel/DC Universe’ to the essence of the genre as a struggle between good and evil, which exist in symbiotic relationship to one another.            Bruce Willis plays everyman and security guard David Dunn, who slowly comes to the realisation, after being the sole survivor of a massive train wreck, that he has never in his life been ill or seriously injured.

He resists the knowledge that he possesses this superpower, until he is manipulated into a meeting with Elijah Price, AKA Mr. Glass, superbly played by the great Samuel L Jackson, an obsessive comic book collector and seller who has suffered from a rare muscle-wasting illness since childhood. This illness precluded him from being allowed to play outside with other children, pushing him towards an obsessive immersion in the world of comics and Superheroes. Through his meeting with Elijah, Dunn the reluctant Superhero, discovers his antithesis, the Supervillain, who it turns out has spent his whole life searching for his very own antithesis. That is the core of the film, that the hero and the villain need each other to complete themselves. It’s the classic, if unspoken, comic book trope, and Unbreakable plays with it and lovingly subverts it.

I loved this film as a little-known standalone classic for years, before producer/director/writer M. Night Shyamalan took the belated decision to make the movie part of a trilogy, with Split appearing in 2016, and Glass in 2019.

Willis appears only briefly as Dunn at the end of Split, and Jackson’s character is only briefly mentioned, never appearing. This film is really the vehicle through which a third major character, Kevin Wedell Crumb is introduced into this cinematic universe, before he, Dunn and Glass come together for the gripping, exciting climax of the trilogy in the final movie of the series.

Each of these films can be enjoyed in and of themselves, but it’s as a trilogy that they work best.

Brilliant, and all the better if you have some knowledge/interest in the history and form of the comic book Superhero genre.

This is another movie that I’ve reviewed at greater length.

Review: Unbreakable | Counter Culture (countercultureuk.com)

The Rebel (1962)

Written by the great Galton and Simpson and starring that tortured genius of British comedy, Tony Hancock. It’s one of those films that I first enjoyed as a wet, Sunday afternoon movie, at least in my memory, and it is still my favourite, and most watched, British comedy of all-time, my long-standing love of the Carry On movies notwithstanding.

Critically, the film has, for reasons I’ve never understood, not been well-regarded in comparison’ to Hancock’s classic BBC television series, Hancock’s Half Hour, or even of the radio series of the same name that proceeded it. But, for me, it’s his greatest work, a very funny, intelligent and accurate satire on the pretensions of Modern Art, superbly written and superbly acted, with great supporting roles from the likes of Irene Handl, John Le Mesurier, and George Sanders. After the movie, Hancock dispensed with the writing services of Galton and Simpson, but here they’re still on board and at the peak of their game.

(After Hancock’s suicide at the tragically young age of forty-four in 1968, the great Spike Milligan quipped ‘First he got rid of Kenneth (Williams), then he got rid of Sid (James), then he got rid of Galton and Simpson. Now, he’s got rid of himself.) 

Favourite line: ‘How do you mix your paint?’ – ‘In a bucket with a big stick.’

The Life of Brian (1979)

Alexei Sayle remarked that not only is this one of the finest film comedies ever made, it’s one of the greatest films ever made.’ I concur, which is why it’s only one of two outright comedies to make my list.

Maybe, it suffers a little from over-familiarity, which is even more true of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, though I love that too, and the television series, but it has, and I think will continue to, stand the test of time, despite changes in comedic taste, and in the cultural and political landscape.

When it was first released, with the aid of funding from ex-Beatle and Python friend and fan George Harrison, simply on the grounds that he wanted to see it (‘the most expensive cinema ticket in history’, as Eric Idle put it), it was a huge event, surrounded by massive controversy over accusations of blasphemy. It’s difficult to imagine that now, at least from a Christian standpoint…

But though it is a satire on the conformity of religious belief, the institutionalisation of belief, and the tendency, almost from the beginning, of religious organisations towards schism, it was made clear from the outset that this was not a film about Jesus, who is characterised, respectfully, early in the movie delivering the Sermon on the Mount.

It is also of course a satire on the fractious nature of the political left (‘People’s Front of Judea,’ ‘Judean People’s Front’ etc etc), and becomes more and more prescient by the day. At the time the film was made, members of a political organisation arguing over the right, in the abstract, of a man’s right to be a woman was clearly comedy: it couldn’t possibly happen in real life, could it? Now, at the time of writing, we have a teacher calling two of her pupils ‘despicable’ for doubting a class-mates right to be identified as a cat…

Pythonesque doesn’t cover it.

My personal best bit is when Brian, played by Graham Chapman, in the role which, temporarily overcoming his personal demons, he totally nailed, tells the crowd outside his house that they don’t need to follow him, they don’t need to follow anybody, they are all individuals. ‘Yes, we are all individuals,’ chant back the crowd, missing his point. Only one person, played by Eric Idle, usually my least favourite Python, puts his hand up and exclaims ‘I’m not!’ That joke works on so many levels, and along with Kenneth Williams ‘Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me’ from Carry On Cleo is a strong contender for the title of the funniest line in any film ever. 

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)

Adapted from the 1962 play by Edward Albee. I first saw this in the 1980’s and loved it immediately.

Independently, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were both towering screen presences, but together they sizzled, the tempestuous nature of their personal relationship, well depicted in the 2013 BBC Four film Burton and Taylor starring Dominic West and Helena Bonham Carter, adding an extra, fiery dimension to their collaborations. This was first seen in the epic, four-hour Cleopatra from 1963, on the set of which they first met and fell in love, but which reached its zenith here, in the best of the eleven movies they were to make to make together, the dysfunctional nature of their own relationship mirrored brilliantly in their depiction of the characters they portrayed, that of college professor George and his heavy-drinking wife Martha.

Although they have great support from George Segal and Sandy Dennis, as late-night house guests Nick and Honey, the only other characters in the film (leaving aside a few Extras dancing at a ‘Roadhouse’ that the four decide to visit), this is virtually a Burton-Taylor two-hander, and knowledge of the roller-coaster nature of their personal life together can so easily lead the viewer, despite the virtual incidentals of the plot, to surmise that the two, almost the first in a long-line of celebrity couples (OK, we’d had Bogart and Bacall, but they didn’t live out their marriage quite so publicly), that the pair are essentially playing themselves.

The film is stagy, and I’ve always felt the visit to the Roadhouse was an unnecessary departure from the original play’s setting, which was entirely within the home of George and Martha. But that is its strength, great actors speaking fabulous, sparkling dialogue, adapted by Ernest Lehman’s from Albee’s (for the time) shocking stage production from three years earlier.

The punchline of George and Martha’s drunken, verbal sparring, if we can call it that, is not particularly a surprise, but who cares? This is one of those films where it’s the journey that matters, not the destination.

James Mason and Bette Davis were the original choice to play the dual lead. That would have been a whole other film, probably brilliant, but lacking that vital rea-life dynamic. The decision to cast Taylor was a surprise, and the wisdom of that choice was apparently doubted by Albee. At the time, she was rightly considered one of the most beautiful women in the world, as seen in Cleopatra (which OK, was not exactly a work a forensic work of history, but was almost certainly more accurate than Netflix’ recently risible effort), and the fact that she was prepared to partially fore-go her beauty by gaining more than two-stone in weight for her role as Martha, showed that she was more than simply a pretty face and a beautiful body, she was also a serious actress who was prepared to sacrifice (though perhaps ‘sacrifice’ is the wrong word for a willingness to increase her intake of booze and junk food) for her craft. She never quite recovered her youthful beauty, and nor did she again reach the heights of acting ability she revealed here.

Needless to say, Burton is also tremendous, and would go on to play many other great roles, right up to in his very last appearance as the sadistic O’Brien in 1984’s Nineteen Eighty Four, though intermingled with a fair few turkey’s (for instance The dreadful Assaination of Trotsky.)

A brilliantly written, brilliantly acted movie, about two people who, unlike the couple who portray them, have found a way of staying together, through a mutually created delusion which sustains and glues together their relationship. This is a delusion that must not be challenged. That is the rule, and the drama in Who’s Afraid... comes from George’s decision to, temporarily at least, challenge that rule, to say what must not be said.  

A Hard Day’s Night (1964)

Well, I had to have something by the Beatles, and there wasn’t much to choose from fiction-wise. What can you say? Fabulous songs, and essentially a fictionalised version of the high point of Beatle mania. The first of only two attempts at acting by the Fabs, at least as a collective. John did How I Won the War and Ringo had a film career of sorts post-Beatles, with That’ll Be the Day being the clear highlight; and by the second film together, Help, a year after AHDN they’d discovered Marijuana curtesy of Mr. Zimmerman, and half-sleepwalked through the movie, feeling like, in Lennon’s words, ‘Extras in their own movie.’ It’s still an enjoyable romp, but lacks the originality and cultural importance of its predecessor. 

(I don’t count Magical Mystery Tour from 1967 for the purpose of this list, as, enjoyable as it still is, and almost, in its own way, as significant as their big screen debut, it was made for T.V, and was essentially a series of surreal music videos and comedy skits.)

With A Hard Day’s Night they got it right, at exactly the right time, largely by hiring the right people, and knowing precisely, even at this early stage in their career, what they didn’t want.

That was of course the standard ‘Hey, let’s do the show right here!’ pop exploitation-musical movie as had become standard, and was epitomised by the output of the likes the likes of Cliff and Tommy Steele (in America, they got it just about right once, with The Girl Can’t Help It, which still stands as an important documentation of the early days of rock ‘n’ roll, and which, significantly, the Beatles took a break from the Get Back sessions to watch on television in January 1969).

In insisting on Alun Owen as the writer, who was known to them through his gritty BBC radio-play work, and Dick Lester whose ‘Running, Jumping, Standing Still’ movie, featuring members of the Goons, they’d loved, as director, they ensured they succeeded in getting something very, very different to the British early-sixties pop-musical norm.

I’ve long said that we are fortunate that everything was put in place for the film at exactly the right time, in December 1963, when they had become massive in Britain, but had yet to crack America. Had Brian Epstein waited a few months, which in retrospect would probably have made sense from a business point of view, then the explosion of Beatlemania across the pond would have determined a pandering to the American market, and thus likely have meant no Owen, no Lester, and no Wilfred Bramble as the ‘very clean’ old man. In short, we would have got something far less British, and probably far worse.

As usual in the Beatles’ story, everything happened in the right way precisely when it needed to happen.

King Creole (1958)

Having chosen something by the Beatles, I also had to choose something by Elvis.

Unlike the Beatles, with a solid thirty-one acting roles behind him in thirteen years, between 1956 and 1969, there was much to choose from. Unfortunately, such was the miss-management of his acting career by ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker despite its early promise, and perhaps his own laziness despite his professed wish to become an actor in the mould of James Dean or Marlon Brando, most of these movies can be discounted. Post-army, Flaming Star and Wild in the Country were decent, especially the latter, but didn’t cut it at the box office due to a lack of songs. After that, we got essentially a long series of musical travelogues, with beautiful girls in beautiful locations, unchallenging songs, and unchallenging scripts, with only his very last dramatic role, in 1969’s Change of Habit, an interesting but slightly bonkers movie that is now virtually forgotten, being worthy of mention.

Wild in the Country was certainly a contender here, one of my top five Elvis films, but the lack of songs, barring the title track and I believe one other, was a drawback. After all, if I can only have one Elvis film, I do want to hear him sing, and to sing some of his stronger material.

So, we are left only with his pre-army film career, and for me, there were only two in strong contention, Jailhouse Rock and this one.

King Creole just shades it, great songs, such as the title track, Treat Me Nice, Hard Headed Woman, and my favourite, the bluesy, slightly atypical, Swordfish.

It was also a genuinely great dramatic role for Elvis, as Danny Fisher, an up-and-coming singer who falls in with the wrong crowd and betrays his mild mannered but hardworking drug store assistant father, before finding redemption, and, inevitably, love.

It was based on the novel A Stone For Danny Fisher, though in the novel Dany was a boxer rather than a singer (Elvis would eventually play a boxer in Kid Galahad four years’ later, with less impressive results). This was the movie that Elvis himself was most proud of, and rightly so.

Superb support from Walter Matt Matthau, Caroline Jones, and Dolores Hart.

Rope (1948)

Hitchcock is the filmmaker who most taxed my self-imposed ‘two-film-maximum rule. When it came to Hitch’, there was this one and my next choice, plus, at the very least, Vertigo (voted the all-time No. 1 movie in the 2022 Sight and Sound list), Psycho, Rear Window, Frenzy., and Spellbound The man was a genius, and his body of work unsurpassed in consistency of quality to this day.

So, why Rope, a relatively early film, and the great man’s first in colour? Firstly, I love the theme, that of two young men, deciding to commit murder, not for any personal gain, or as an act of revenge, or any of the other primary motives we associate with the ultimate crime, but as an intellectual challenge, because of the danger of getting caught, and the sheer thrill of getting away with it. The movie, based on the 1929 play by Patrick Hamilton, which was itself based (loosely) on a real-life case, the murder of the fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb five years before that, an event that also inspired, more directly, the very good 1956 film Compulsion.

Rope, retaining the spirit of the play, takes place in real time on a single set, and is also unusual for a film on the theme of murder in that it begins with the killing, with no attempt to mask who commits it. It is thus not so much a ‘Who-dunnit?’ as a ‘Why-dunnit?’ with the bastardised Nietzschean reasoning of the two killers, Brandon Shaw, played by John Dall, and Philip Morgan
(Farley Granger) being revealed to us through dialogue, principally between themselves, the victim David’s father and fiancé, and eventually their brilliant former prep-school housemaster and philosopher Rupert, played with his usual skill and finesse by James Stewart.

The post-murder ‘action’, if such it can be called, occurs at a get together where the killers’ housekeeper, Mrs Wilson (Joan Chandler), unwittingly serves buffet food and drinks from atop a large chest containing David’s corpse. It is through Rupert’s acute reasoning abilities that the crime is, eventually, shown not to be so perfect at all.

If I have a criticism of Rope, it is that the relationship between our two murderers is somewhat unequal, with Brandon appearing cocky, confident and self-assured, whilst Philip comes across as weak, and far from an example of the amoral Nietzschean Superman ideal that Brandon imagines the pair to be. This is apparently faithful to the dynamic between the two real-life killers that inspired the play/film, though the ease with which Philip cracks does slightly weaken the drama.

There is a definite homosexual sub-text in this unusual and powerful film, which again apparently has its roots in the original case, though it is, rightfully kept beneath the surface.

Maybe Rope doesn’t reach the levels of cinematic perfection that Hitchcock would later reach, but it’s a fantastic example of the maestro’s earlier work, and one I would never tire of watching.

The Birds (1963)

I love everything about this movie, and have from the first time I saw it as a child.

You couldn’t get two more different movies than this and Rope. Whereas the former is dialogue heavy, with the real ‘action’ confined to the very opening scene, The Birds is Hitchcock’s most overt attempt at ‘pure cinema,’ heavy on the visuals, which is emphasised by the incredible score supervised by the great Bernard Hermann, who of course worked on several Hitchcock movies (as well as another movie on this list), most famously providing the discordant, strident minor-thirds that accompany the shower scene in Psycho. Here, Hermann is relegated (or promoted?) to the role of ‘sound consultant’, with a soundtrack that is essentially found-sound/music-concrete mixed with sparse, synthesised electronics interspersed with silence, with the composition credits being assigned to Salam and Remi Gassman.

We know, if the film Hitch is to be believed that Tippi Hedren, though she herself said different things at different times, starring alongside Rod Taylor, went through hell as Hitchcock did his best to make the bird attacks look as realistic as possible, as well as having to fend off the director’s sexual advances. But for anyone who isn’t Tippi, the process was well worthwhile.

It’s creepy, it’s sinister, it’s scary, and I love the fact that nothing is ever explained nor resolved, making the movie the closest we can get to experimental cinema which remaining accessible and palatable to the mainstream.

Fabulous.

Sunset Boulevard (1950)

A Billy Wilder, one of my favourite filmmakers, movie in which washed-up ex silent screen legend Gloria Swanson plays washed-up former silent-screen legend Norma Desmond.

I’ve no idea what life must have been like for actors like Swanson after the glory days of silent film were over if, like the majority, they failed to make the transition to the ‘Talkies’, but her performance here is good enough to convince you that it might have been something like this.

As well as the strong, dripping with cinematic pathos story-line, extra realism is added through great cameo roles from the likes of Buster Keaton, Cecil B DeMille (as himself), and the brilliant silent film director Erich Von Stroheim, the man responsible for the seven-hour epic Napoleon (which incidentally was lovingly restored by Kevin Brownlow, the chief driving force behind It Happened Here) as Norma’s devoted butler, and with a fabulous co-lead by William Holden a struggling screenwriter who gets drawn into Norma’s fantasy of a big screen comeback.

A film I’ve seen countless times and can never tire of.

Most memorable line: ‘I am big! It’s the pictures that got small,’ delivered by Norma to De Mille.

Downfall (2004)

If I’m going to include some Beatles and Elvis, then I must also include a bit of Hitler…Only joking, but the history of the Third Reich and the figure of Adolf Hitler, that ‘terrible titan’ as Alan Clark called him in Barbarossa, his excellent history of the German – Russian conflict, 1941-45, has long fascinated me.

Nobody, to my knowledge, has yet made a great film about Hitler’s early days, pre-1914, a period that particularly interests me, but several; attempts have been made to recreate those final, delusional, and in their own way, tragic last days in the bunker beneath the German chancellery. The best, before this choice, was probably 1972’s The Last Days of Hitler, with Alec Guinness making a fair fist of playing the Fuhrer, though it made crap use of artistic license at the end.

But nothing comes close to Downfall. The fact that it is a German film undoubtedly helps, thus enabling the speech inflections of Hitler and his ever-loyal coterie to be properly captured, with an especially peerless performance by Bruno Ganz as the man himself, and Alendra Maria Lara as Traudi Junge, as his private secretary from 1942 to 1945, upon whose memoirs the film is based.

Director Oliver Hirschbiegel brilliantly captures the claustrophobia of life in the bunker, mostly through the use of hand-held cameras in a small, three-wall set, which give viewers the impression of being almost inside the action. The occasions when the movie ventures outside, into the Battle for Berlin raging ever closer, or into the courtyard as birthday boy Adolf presents medals to the Hitler Youth, only serve to further the enhance the stifling atmosphere of life below, to which we always quickly return. In that way, the movie has much in common, stylistically, with another great German film, Das Boot (The Boat), itself a strong contender for this list.

Inevitably, Downfall was criticised for ‘humanising’ Hitler, a criticism I’ve never understood. Surely, the point is that Hitler was indeed a human being, not an alien from another world, nor a supernatural demon? The need, for artists and academics alike, is to examine how he became what he became, and how he was able to capture near-absolute power in a major, supposedly civilised industrial nation, and to examine the how and why of his continued hold over the German people until the very end.

Downfall, of course, concentrates on the last of these themes, and one of the strongest moments comes at the end, when the leader’s hold on his people is finally broken by the single gun-shot that ends his life by his own hand, signified by the immediate lighting of cigarettes by several of those who had chosen to stay with their Fuhrer to the very end. Hitler, as we know, hated smoking and expressly forbade it in his presence.

Juliane Kohler is also great, and rather gorgeous, as Hitler’s long-time mistress and finally wife, Eva.

The only thing that could possibly spoil this film for me is the proliferation of those terrible online parodies of Hitler’s rages. I refuse to watch them.       

Battleship Potemkin (1925)

The earliest film on the list, in which Sergei Eisenstein invents the montage, and introduces the world to Soviet cinema. The movie was named as their all-time favourite by both Charlie Chaplin and Billy Wilder. 1929’s film Man with a Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov from the ultra-realist Kinok school of Soviet film was another contender here.

The 1917 revolution issued in a period of experimentation in all art forms, including film, although this settled down into the more predictable pastures of Socialist Realism by the 1930’s, although good work was still produced, including by Eisenstein himself. But it’s generally accepted that Potemkin was his greatest work, followed by his account of the October revolution called, appropriately enough, October, in 1927, scenes from which are often passed off as footage of the actual revolution.

Potemkin, about the sailor’s rebellion on the ship of the same name that led to the ultimately defeated revolution of 1905, has regularly figured on critical lists of the greatest movies of all time, ranking 54^th on the 2022 Sight and Sound list, though that was considerably lower than it had been in the magazines’ earlier polls. The high regard it is held in has much more to do with the, then, truly revolutionary advances in cinematic style and editing. With this movie, Eisenstein had his first opportunity to make practical use of theories that had previously been abstractions about which he’d often lectured and wrote. The technical aspects are too big a subject for me to go into here, and nor am I qualified to do so. But to watch the movie is to engage in a truly immersive activity.

Stand out moment: the scene that has been praised, parodied, and paid homage to for now close to a century, the scene on the Odessa steps as a baby in a pram journey’s slowly downwards, one step at a time, the baby’s mother lying dying on the ground, as carnage surrounds them with Tsarist troops and mounted, sword-wielding Cossacks attacking a peaceful crowd with sabres and bullets.

The fact that this attack on the Odessa steps never really happened, does nothing to diminish the symbolic power, nor the essential truth of the scene. 

Agitprop? Certainly. But agitprop as High Art.

Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)

One of those I probably first saw late on a Friday night in my early teens. It’s genuinely creepy and weird, as is Davis’s follow up Hush, Hush Sweet Charrlotte which also should have co-starred Joan Crawford, until she decided, after a few weeks’ filming, that she’d had quite enough of working with Ms Davis for one lifetime.

The real-life tension between the two stars no doubt added to the realism of the dysfunctional nature of the two protagonists, Baby Jane Hudson, the child-star who never progressed to adult stardom, and her sister Blanche, who did become a Hollywood star, but has long been confined to a wheelchair, abused physically and financially by ‘Baby’, who has always believed she was responsible for the accident that left her sister paralysed from the waist down.

This was essentially the film that kicked off Davis’s second career, as a sinister middle-aged woman in psychological horror movies, in films such Charlotte, and British Hammer horror movies like The Nanny and The Anniversary.

Baby Jane is about two people forced to live in stifling proximity to one another by the bonds of family, guilt, and mutually dependence. It wasn’t a great critical success at its time of release, but it was a hit at the box office, and remains hugely popular to this day, including, apparently, with ‘the Queer community.’ 

‘I’m writing a letter/For daddy…’

The Curse of the Werewolf (1961)

I had to include at least one Hammer Film, and, although I love their Frankenstein and Dracula reboots, and the more psychological based horror I’ve mentioned examples of above, in the end I went for this one, their re-telling of the classic Wolfman story, partly because I have such happy memories of watching it for the first time, I think, back in the eighties, and partly because it still stands up as a great movie to this very day.

Interestingly, on watching the Extras for the original 1942 Universal Wolfman film starring Lon Chaney Jr, I discovered that much of what we take to be ancient Werewolf lore, such as the transformation triggered by a full moon and the killing by a silver bullet (though actually the latter couldn’t really be that ancient, when you think about it), were really inventions of the scriptwriter for that movie, Curt Siodmark.

Curse of… of follows the tropes created by Siodmark , whilst having the benefits of, then, much better special effects, and a superb performance by Oliver Reed, probably his best, who stays close to Chaney’s brilliant, original depiction, whilst putting his own, quintessentially English (despite the none-English setting), spin on proceedings.

Going back to my first watch, or at least the first I remember, back in the eighties, me and my best friend now and then, found much hilarity in imagining the long opening sequence, where a beggar in eighteenth century Spain is taunted and ridiculed before being thrown into a dungeon and forgotten after stumbling into a rich people’s wedding feast, was an eccentric Militant friend/comrade/drinking acquaintance of ours accidentally wandering into Grimsby Conservative club. You probably had to be there, but the film will always remain memorable to me for that evening of no doubt drunken amusement alone, aside from its great merits as a movie.

This lengthy opening scene has actually very little to do with the main werewolf plotline and given that the film was substantially cut and censored upon release, I’m surprised it was retained. But it does work, and it sets up the world where the story unfolds very nicely, with the period setting giving Wolf Man story an added Gothic twist. 

Double Indemnity (1944)

Black and white American Film Noir will always be associated with post-pub Friday night drinking in my mind, and you don’t get more noir-ish than this. Directed by Billy Wilder, and co-written by Wilder and Crime Fiction legend Raymond Chandler, adapted from a novel from the previous year by James M. Cain (though it had started life as a novella eight years prior to that), it features super-fast, super-sharp dialogue delivered, in the main, by stars Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, and Edward G. Robinson.

It has a believable plot, a powerful sub-text concerning how sexual desire can lead men into dark places they could never have imagined visiting, and looks beautiful in a way that only lovingly restored black and white can.

Interestingly, it was working with Chandler that led Wilder to choose The Lost Weekend, a definite contender for this list, as his next project. Chandler was a recovering alcoholic who went back on the booze whilst working, in a fruitful but tense fashion on Double Indemnity with Wilder. Wilder said later he made The Lost Weekend, a story about an alcoholic writer, in order ‘to show Chandler to himself.’

Fame is the Spur (1947)

From drunken Friday night’s, back to wet Sunday afternoons. As a young Militant in the eighties, I was well-aware of the tendency of Labour politicians who began life on the Left to slowly, or sometimes not so slowly, shed their principles, seduced by the trappings of power and the clubhouse atmosphere of the House of Commons bars and tearooms. In fact, we were seeing this process personified in real time in the career of Neil Kinnock, the then Labour-leader. To watch the whole scenario so brilliantly dramatised on film, as it was here, and in a movie made as far back as 1947, at the height of the 1945-51 Attlee government, the most economically radical socialist, or at least social democratic, government in our history was something of a revelation.

To summarise, Michael Redgrave is brilliant as Hamer Radshaw, who begins the movie as a late-nineteenth century radical trade unionist and illegal strike leader, before entering parliament in the early days of the Labour Party at the close of the Victorian era.

Step-by-step, he makes the journey ever rightwards, abandoning his anti-war principles, like so many throughout Europe, by supporting the First World War, refusing to support women’s suffrage, opposing the 1926 General Strike, and eventually supporting the savage benefit cuts that led to the formation of a ‘national’ government modelled on that of Ramsey McDonald from 1929-31. Inevitably, he ends his days as a doddering representative of the Establishment in the House of Lords.

Throughout his life, he carries with him a sword, gifted to him by his grandfather, that had been used against demonstrators calling for working class people to be given the vote at ‘Peterloo’, the demonstration at St. Peter’s Field in Manchester in 1819 (where the Central Reference Library stands today), when the crowd were attacked, resulting in eight deaths, by members of the local Yeomanry. The sword stands, throughout the movie, as a symbol of the continuation of working class struggle against political and economic injustice throughout our history.

The film Peterloo, released in 2019 to coincide with the two-hundredth anniversary of the ‘massacre’ (tragic and historic though that event was, I’ve always found the use of the word ‘massacre’ to describe the killing of eight people to be a tad melodramatic), starring the ever excellent Maxine Peake, was an outside contender here, as was the underrated 1986 movie ‘Comrades’, which tells the story of the Tolpuddle Martyrs.

One of the great strengths of Fame is the Spur is that it is never overly didactic, and there is always an internal logic to Radshaw’s actions, so that the character’s transformation is gradual, happening almost without him being aware of it.

Based on the 1940 novel of the same name by Howard Spring, which I’ve long had on my Kindle but never got around to reading.

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

From a film based around the history of the Labour movement, to one on the glories of the British Empire, though covering the period, during the First World War, where it began its long death throes.

I was a late comer to this. If I saw it in my youth, I have no recollection of doing so. Only this year, after listening to a long podcast discussion concerning the movie, did I get around to it, first on Netflix, followed swiftly by purchasing my own copy, on Blu Ray, with all the bells and whistles

This is the epic to end all epics, at almost four-hours’ long, a movie worthy of its subject, the truly heroic T.E Lawrence, based upon his own 1926 memoir The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Lawrence has been accused of being something of an Unreliable Narrator in his book, but somehow his fundamental untrustworthiness fits a central character, superbly portrayed by Peter ‘O Toole, who is as much at war with the stuffy British political and military establishment as he is with the Ottoman Empire.

There are criticisms of the movie, aside from its alleged glorification of Empire. Apparently, the timeline and general historical detail are often out of sync with the real-life order of events, and the lack of physical similarities between the five-foot-five Lawrence and the six-foot-two-inch O’ Toole has been noted.

But the movie does at the very least depict the Arab and Beduin people as conscious agents in their own history, not just as extras in Our Island Story. And whether an actor resembles an historical character they’re playing becomes less and less important with time. What matters, is that the essential ‘derring-do’ essence of the central protagonist was brilliantly captured.

Director David Lean was apparently much influenced by the epic American Westerns of John Ford, especially by The Searchers from 1956, in developing the look of Lawrence, and few would argue that the movie, with the vastness of the desert and the horror of battle brought to vivid, forbidding, bloody life, looks stunning.

This film regularly attains a high spot in critical ‘Best Ever…’ lists. A 2004 Sunday Telegraph poll of filmmakers voted it the greatest British film of all-time. 

Lolita (1962)

Ah, Lolita, my all-time favourite novel, even if I did once get dirty looks and a frosty response from a colleague when reading it at work. To be fair, the edition I had at that time, mid-90’s, did have a cover that made it look dodgy, and not at all representative of the great literature contained within. I now have a less salacious, more none-committal looking copy, as well as versions on Kindle and audiobook.

This film adaptation, directed by Stanly Kubrick, and starring James Mason as the seedy, undoubtedly unreliable narrator Humbert Humbert, Sue Lyon as the titular character, and great supporting roles from Peter Sellers (playing several different parts, and stealing the show, as some claim) and Shelley Winters, just about nailed the essence of Nabokov’s novel, though some details were changed. For instance, the setting became the, then, present day, rather than the 1940’s, and Lolita’s age is left deliberately vague. In the book, it is made explicitly clear that she is twelve years old when the story begins.

The sex is considerably toned down, which is only to be expected given the time it was made, the theme of sex between an adult and a minor, and the fact that Lyons was herself only fourteen when she played the role.

I’m more of an admirer than a huge fan of Kubrick’s work, and aside from Lolita, only The Shining and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest made my original long list. As for 2001: a Space Odyssey, well, let’s just say it’s a film I more admire than like.

Lolita is, in my opinion, his best work, a film that deals sensitively and intelligently with a very difficult topic. Kubrick himself later said that he wouldn’t have taken on the project had he known the problems he would have from the British censors. The film did ultimately go out uncut, but that was more through a process of ongoing negotiation during the filmmaking process itself than a case of artistic license being granted to the director.

The 1997 remake starring Jeremy Irons was fine, and in that film Lolita’s age was unambiguously given as fourteen, but it is the earlier version which better captures the essence of the novel, beautifully telling the story, as is the case with the original source material, with great subtlety, neither condemning nor condoning, but taking us inside the mind of what, after all, despite his self-denial, is a paedophile and sexual predator.

The Birdman of Alcatraz (1962)

More 1962, that’s three in a row, plus Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, that makes four. Turns out the year of my birth was an exceptionally good one for movies…

This is one I first watched with my dad, and later watched with my own sons. I’m glad to report they found it as engrossing as I did, despite its considerable length.

The film, based on the 1955 book of the same name by Thomas E. Gaddis, tells the story of Robert Stroud, brilliantly played by Burt Lancaster, who spent more than five decades inside the American penal system, firstly for the murder of a bartender in 1909, with his sentence extended for stabbing and killing a prison guard in 1916.

In 1920, whilst in solitary confinement in Leavenworth prison, he began to care for and train sick birds, also supplying them to fellow inmates, the most notable of whom was played fabulously here by future Kojak and unlikely pop star Telly Savalas. Eventually given equipment and books by a sympathetic guard, he became a leading expert on a rare form of bird sickness, and well-respected ornithologist following the publication of his book Diseases of Canaries in 1933.

In 1942, he was transferred to the fortress-like prison of Alcatraz where he remained until transferred, for reasons of ill health, to a less forbidding penal environment shortly before this film was made. At Alcatraz, he was not allowed to keep birds, thus the name of the film is somewhat miss-leading, the ‘Birdman’ nickname becoming established through Gaddis’ book. He died at the Springfield Medical Centre for Federal Prisoners the day before the shooting of John F. Kennedy on November 21^st 1963, having never got to see the film, or, rather surprisingly, to even read the book upon which it was based.

The film has been criticised for ‘sanitising’ a dangerous criminal, with even a former fellow inmate describing the real-life Stroud as a ‘jerk’. The apparent fact that he was a ‘wolf’, an American prison slang name for an aggressive, predatory homosexual was ignored in the film, though Stroud did cite, in discussion with his biographer, his homosexuality as one of the reasons for the consistent refusal of his many parole applications. His ‘prurient’ interest in homosexual activities was also given as one of the reasons that permission was refused for the publication of the history Stroud wrote of the American penal system, ‘Looking Outward: A History of the U.S Prison System From Colonial Times to the Formation of the Bureau of Prisons towhich he devoted his time after being denied further access to birds.

But we do see the violent acts which led to Stroud’s long incarceration, as well as some of his other documented transgressions, for instance his using of some of the equipment supplied to him for his bird experiments as a distillery. His role in defusing a major prison riot at Alcatraz in 1946, which possibly saved many lives and is one of the high points of the movie, appears to be true.

The best in a great tradition of American prison movies, which includes the likes of Pappillion and The Shawshank Redemption.

Lord of the Flies (1963)

Another great British film based on a great British book, this time Peter Brook’s adaptation of William Golding’s 1954 novel.

I found this movie to be wonderfully engrossing and creepy when I first saw it, probably in my early teens, and it’s another of the many I had the pleasure of later introducing my own children to. It’s a great movie for children in that, until the very end, no adults at all appear. Great for children, but very definitely not a children’s film.

The story concerns a group of schoolboys marooned, following a shipwreck, on a tropical island, far from civilisation. We watch as the children first attempt to establish a rule-based order as an essential component of their struggle to survive in a world devoid of grown-ups, before rapidly dividing into warring tribes, and eventually savagery.

The movie is very close to Golding’s original book, and there are many great philosophical points explored here. Firstly, I suppose, both the book and the film can be seen as a refutation of Rousseau’s noble savage idea, the notion that in our original state of nature we were all equal and free.

Contrarily, LOTF teaches us that one aspect of human-nature, though not all of it, is driven by the desire to dominate, to control, that feudal chiefdoms, Kings, slavery etc arose from that impulse, and that for civilisation to flourish, sophisticated and enforceable rules must be in place. In the beginning, the children instinctively realise this, but being children, they lack the knowledge and maturity to be able to maintain a functioning, humane society.

The tragic figure of Piggy, played by Hugh Edwards (no, not that one!), ridiculed, taunted and eventually killed because of his otherness and disposability, is representative of all of those at the bottom of society who need protection from those for whom Might is Right. ‘Jack’ (Tom Chapin) is the personification of this strand of our nature, whilst ‘Ralph’ (James Aubrey) represents our capacity for reason and compassion.

Looked at from a modern perspective, we are also shown, through the myth of ‘The Beast’, how those with power will use outside threats, both real and imagined, as a means of protecting that power. 

There was very little scripting done for the movie. The boys, who spent much of 1961 filming on the island of Vieques, Puerto Rica, almost as isolated from their normal lives as the characters they played, and none of them professional actors, were given the book to read, had each individual scene explained to them, before being left to act them out in a semi-improvised fashion. Sixty hours of footage was originally shot, edited down to a four-hour rough-cut, which ended up as the hundred-minute movie which premiered in 1963. For once, the length is just about right. It doesn’t need to be longer.  

The 1990 remake emptied the story of all philosophical subtlety in favour of a run-of-the-mill adventure yarn.

Dogville (2003)

Another of my more off-the-wall, less-classic, more recent(ish) choices, which it seems few have seen, despite it starring the great Nicole Kidman, one of our greatest and most loved modern screen-stars.

Dogville is a film by Lars Von-Trier, a filmmaker with a taste for the Ava-Garde, and you can’t get much more Avant Garde than this, not whilst still maintaining a cracking, engrossing, thought-provoking, intelligible narrative.

Told in nine chapters, each proceeded by a short, written description (as an example, ‘Chapter Six: In Which Dogville bares its teeth’), with some more expository narration by John Hurt, it is performed on a minimalist stage-like set, with no attempt at visual realism, and only white markings dividing one location from another.

The movies’ form polarised critics, with the word ‘pretentious’ being frequently applied, and no doubt many viewers got no further than the first few minutes, before exclaiming ‘what is this crap?’ and turning off/walking out. But stick with it, and you will discover a great story, which is ultimately enhanced rather than weakened by Von-Trier’s stylistic choices.

The story concerns the Kidman character, Grace, turning up in small-town America, in the town that gives the film its title, seeking refuge from her involvement with the mob. The towns folk, led by Tom Eddison Jr, played superbly by Paul Bettany, a would-be philosopher from whose point of view the story is largely told, allow her to remain in return for the performance of menial, everyday chores. This escalates, until Grace eventually becomes a slave, literally in chains, used and abused, primarily for the sexual gratification of the men of the town.

I won’t give away the ending, as it is rather surprising, and well-worth the wait if you’ve never previously seen the film.

 Von-Triers said the message of the movie is ‘that evil cam arise anywhere, as long as the situation is right’, and that point is superbly made in this powerful, unusual, experimental movie. The sequel Manderlay released two years later with essentially the same cast, though with Kidman replaced by Bryce Dallas Howard, is also worth watching. There is supposedly a third movie in what Von-Triers has called his USA Land of Opportunity trilogy, provisionally entitled Washington, though this has yet to appear.

Wuthering Heights (1939)

Back to the classics, and you don’t get much more classic than this, either in the form of the original 1847 Emily Bronte novel, or of this film adaptation, one of many, but still definitive, with Laurence Olivier, in perhaps his greatest screen role as Heathcliffe, and Merle Oberon as Cathy.

Again, this could be a case of false memory, but in the story of my life that exists inside my head, I watched this on television the very first night I was deemed old enough to stay Home Alone on a Saturday night, whilst my mam and dad went out for the evening, probably to a ‘Dinner and Dance’, a favourite activity for older 1970’s parents . I’m not sure how old I was then, eleven, twelve, whatever, but I must have been a strange child to have spent my first evening in the house without my parents watching something like this, but there you go, and I’ve loved the film ever since.

It was a dark and stormy night, as I remember it, and the howling wind outside, and rain lashing against our council house window only served to super enhance the frequent meteorological inclemency on screen.

OK, the movie was filmed in California, but the Yorkshire Moors, Bronte country, has never been better invoked than this, leaving aside the original novel.

The film only covers about half of the action in the book, and there are significant if small changes to the plot which change the dynamic between the two main protagonists. So, if you see the film first, as I did, and you should accept no other adaptation than this, there is still much to uncover in Bronte’s original novel.

There’s not much else that needs saying. You all know the story, a tale of doomed, cross-class love, like Lady Chatterley’s Lover with less sex, and more supernatural elements. If you haven’t seen it, then you are culturally incomplete.

The Wicker Man (1973)

The film that best exemplifies the sub-genre of Folk-Horror, though Blood on Satan’s Paw is usually credited as the first of said genre, followed by The Witchfinder General with some revisionists adding earlier, rural-America set movies like the excellent Night of the Hunter. Personally, as a big Folk-Horor fan, I think we should stick to British movies, and with full respect to the more recent, and near-uniformly excellent work of Ben Wheatley, this will always be the best.

(And yes, I am aware that the term ‘Folk Horror’ only originates from 2010, from Mark Gattis’ superb three-part television History of Horror series, which was still available for free on You Tube the last time I checked.)

The story of the cuts made to the film, the various edits and different versions that have appeared since, is a long and convoluted one, and which is still ongoing. The 100- minute restored, 4K Final Cut of the early-2000’s Director’s cut was only released, to limited cinemas in June of this year. I haven’t seen that, but the Directors cut, which re-instated the twelve minutes omitted from the original theatrical release, is the one to go for until the Final Cut becomes available on disc.

Having said this, the ‘Final’ cut may not be ‘final’ at all. Still photographs exist which suggest other scenes were filmed which have since been lost, or perhaps merely temporarily mislaid. Film buff and filmmaker Alex Cox suggested, I think with tongue firmly in cheek, that his original negative had ended up ‘under the pylons supporting the M4 motorway,’ though the movies co-star, the great Christopher Lee, and its director Robert Hardy both opined that the lost reels likely exist somewhere, probably in unmarked film cannisters.

We’re talking about minutes anyway. What we have is enough to make for one of the best British movies of all-time, a horror film where the horror is more-or-less saved for the very end, and where visuals, dialogue and music combine to make a highly unusual and distinctive, cohesive work of art.

We have fantastic performances by Lee as the sinister Lord Summerisle, Edward Woodward as the Christian policeman who finds himself in an environment that goes against everything in which he believes, and Britt Eklund as sexy as f… as Willow, the ‘Landlords Daughter’, even if she did hate the film and used a body double for that scene.

Modern Pagans love The Wicker Man, which I’ve always found strange, given that it doesn’t exactly show them in a positive light. But the film does posit an alternative reality where Britain, or at least this small, remote piece of it, was never Christianised, and where the ‘old beliefs’ (which are mostly a modern invention) survived and thrived, leading to very different moral codes, passed down through the generations. One of my favourite scenes is a small one, where the Woodward character observes a teacher in the Isles sole school, casually teaching the children about the role of the Phallus in nature.

The Soundtrack is great in and of itself and is a great listen as a stand-alone album. It was performed by Magnet, a band that was a purely studio creation, and contained a mixture of traditional English folk songs, and new songs composed by Paul Giovanni, which sound as though they could be traditional English folk songs.

The film has probably the greatest ending in any British horror movie, ever.

The 1967 novel Ritual by David Piner upon which the film was based is worth reading. The 2006 re-make of the film starring Nicholas Cage is pointless crap, and the 2011 ‘spiritual sequel’ The Wicker Tree, which features a cameo from Lee, is not as bad as its reputation.  

 The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

This is a film that has stayed with me since I was a child, and revisiting it is still a rewarding and worthwhile experience.

Directed by Robert Wise, who’d worked as film editor on Citizen Kane (see the next, and final, entry) and with another fantastic, groundbreaking musical score by the great Bernard Hermann (who also worked on Kane). The film is very much of its time, set during the early days of the Cold War, and around the time of the first great wave of UFO, or ‘Flying Saucer’ as they were more commonly known in this period, sightings which followed news of the (in)famous Roswell incident.

The Day the Earth…is however different to most of the movies that arose from these events. As a corollary to the rapidly developing tensions between the United States/NATO and the USSR/Warsaw Pact, with an ongoing ‘hot’ ‘proxy’ war continuing in Korea, and two years on from the first testing of a Soviet atomic bomb, fear of communism was becoming ever more rampant in America, with the McCarthyite witch-hunts of suspected communists in the entertainment industry (including Chaplin, as we have seen) in the stage of gestation. We would soon see such movies as The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and I Married a Monster From Outer Space (1958), in fact, a whole genre of Science Fiction movies which are generally interpreted as manifestations of the fear of the communist threat from within and without.

However, we weren’t quite yet there in 1951. Idealistic post-war faith in the United Nations as a means of ending war for good, following the horrors of World War Two and the Holocaust, was still battling for supremacy with the more confrontational tendencies amongst US policy makers.

This accounts for the positive message of this movie. Here, the alien, Klaatu, played by the relatively unknown but suitably other-worldly looking Michael Rennie, comes not to kill, to destroy, and to enslave, but to aid the UN in bringing people and nations of differing ideologies together, the original motivation for his two-hundred-and-fifty-million-mile journey being that huminites’ discovery of the means to channel nuclear energy for destructive purposes now poses a threat not only to ourselves, but to other, more advanced, civilised, worlds such as his own, where war has long since been banished.

This idea, of benevolent aliens arriving on our planet to save us from ourselves, and to prevent our propensity for conflict spreading outwards, was novel in 1951, but has long since become almost the dominant ideology amongst the Ufologist milieu, and indeed has become a staple of the popular imagination and of popular culture.

Though positive, I suppose there is also an implicitly authoritarian element to the central theme of the movie. The idea of an everlasting peace imposed by extra-terrestrial force, isn’t a million miles away from where we are now with, what some would argue, is an accelerating gallop towards a centralised New World Order, where peace and environmental sustainability is to be guaranteed by an enlightened elite that sits above the individual and the nation-state.  

The film looks and sounds great in its beautifully restored version, and the two-disc versions contains some great Extras, including a commentary by Wise, clearly recorded before the passable but unnecessary 2008 remake.

I must admit that this is the one film where I did cheat a little, buying a copy after I’d already complied my list, so that I could justifiably include it; and a fiver on eBay for a Steelbook, a lovely artefact in and of itself? It was a no brainer, and the movie didn’t disappoint.  

M (1931)

OK, another last-minute cheat. I finally got around to buying and watching the extended version of the 1927 silent, influential Science Fiction epic Metropolis, and although it was never in serious consideration for this list, reading about its maker Fritz Lang and all things concerning German Expressionist cinema of the 1920’s and 1930’s, led me to this, Lang’s follow up, an early ‘talkie’ proto psychological horror/Crime Fiction movie that has more than stood the test of the passing (nine +) decades.

Like its predecessor, Metropolis, the screenplay was written by Lang and his wife/collaborator Thea Von Harbou. It stars Peter Lorre, known to me from my youth for thirties’ Hollywood movies like The Maltese Falcon. I had been unaware he was Hungarian, born in the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and had started his stage career in Vienna, which accounts for his fluent sounding German (I’m no expert) in this German speaking classic.

The plot concerns the ongoing disappearance of children in Berlin during what turned out to be the last years of the Weimar Republic. The moment we see the silhouette of Lorre’s character Hans Beckert fall across a ‘Wanted’ poster warning of a serial killer preying on young children early in the movie, we know that he is the serial killer in question. But, as with Rope, our early knowledge of who the killer is, does not detract from the power of the drama as it unfolds.

As is the case with Metropolis and with German Expressionist film in general, especially in their technologically enhanced, modern, clean, pristine, restored form, M is visually stunning.

It also has great dialogue, though, in common with many early ‘Talkies’, some of the film remains silent, and in this case, silent means really silent, as M it completely lacks any form of musical score, that is, apart from the whistled theme of In the Hall of the Mountain King by Edward Grieg, whistled by the killer as he approaches his next victim (actually whistled by Lang himself), and heard as a re-occurring theme throughout the movie.

This lack of music apart from this whistled motif, a chilling motif that the viewer is always aware means a child is about to die, adds to the supreme eeriness of the movie.

(Some later revived versions did add music, completely missing that to avoid doing so was a brilliant artistic decision by the filmmaker).

One of the other interesting features of the film is the involvement of the criminal underworld in the search for the killer, not out of moral outrage against the murder of children (though of course ‘ordinary’ criminals the world over loathe those who harm or would harm children, often administering swift justice against such types, both inside and outside of prison), but because the ongoing search for the killer has led to the city being swamped by police force officers, which is interfering with the ‘legitimate’ pursuit of their usual criminal activities.

This sets up the climax of the movie, when a ‘Kangaroo Court’ of criminals and normal residents of the city discus the fate of the killer after he has been apprehended following a lengthy chase and siege. This scene raises interesting questions about the nature of justice, and the right, or otherwise, of everybody to a fair trial.

This is especially pertinent given what we now know of what was soon to happen in Germany.

At this ad hoc ‘trial’, Beckert (Lorre), as well as fearfully demanding to be handed over to the police, invokes a defence based on his inability to control his murderous impulses. This skilfully leads us into pondering the relationship between free will and justice. After all, if our actions are determined by our upbring and past experiences (at this time, under the influence of Freudian and Jungian psychology, this was much more current than ideas of biological determinism which had fallen out of favour, but are now once more in vogue), then how can we be held morally responsible for them?

I’ll leave the ending for you to discover for yourself. All I will say here, is that Fritz Lang himself regarded ‘M’ as his magnus opus, and it is indeed a beautifully, weird, thought-provoking and rather wonderful movie that has rightfully earned its place amongst the all-time greats of World Cinema.     

Citizen Kane (1941)

A film that has rightly been described as the Citizen Kane of movies, the film that most often comes up when critics discus the all-time greatest film of all time. Its critical pre-eminence has now lasted for over eight decades and has never really fallen out of favour. Although others are far more qualified than I to dissect the cinematic bag-of-tricks that Orson Welles used in the creation of his masterpiece, and you could do worse than check out the excellent ‘One Hundred Years of Cinema’ channel on You Tube for brief but enlightening discussion of this and many other great films, I think the main point to be made is that everything Welles used had been used before by others (not least by the likes of Chaplin and Lang, but never before had such an eclectic mix been used all at once in one movie, and in the service of such a powerful narrative. In essence, Citizen Kane is art-house cinema with a story strong enough to give it mainstream appeal.

Welles, it is genuinely accepted, never came close to equalling Kane, though there are those who rate 1958’s A Touch of Evil even more highly, and his career can, in those terms, perhaps be described as never quite reaching the heights promised by the movie he made when he was a mere twenty-five-years-old.

Indeed, to people of my generation, growing up in the 1970’s, he was perhaps best known for advertising sherry on T.V, to the extent that one tabloid newspaper in the UK, I forget which, marked his death under the headline ‘Sherry Man dies,’ not an epithet he would have wanted, nor deserved.

Accepting the received wisdom that Welles never came close to equalling Kane, it’s worth noting that if you only realise a vision of genius once in your life, that’s an accomplishment that has, and will continue, to allude the vast majority of humanity.

It’s a film I’ve seen many times, and as is true of all great works of art, there is always something new to discover. It wouldn’t be my all-time number one, if I was forced to make such a choice, but it’s certainly a movie I’ll happily continue to rewatch for the rest of my life.

So, that’s it, that’s my list completed.There’ll be regrets, as I mentioned in my introduction, but for now I’m happy enough with my choices. Now, all that remains is for me to decide how I shall plan my viewing schedule during my unknown tenure in my luxury place of incarceration: one a day in rotation over forty days? Two a day over twenty? Or as and when, whatever I feel like watching at any given moment?

It’s a tough one…

Anthony C Green, August 2023

Anthony C Green is the author of four novels: Dark Gardening, The Angela Suite, Special, and Better Than The Beatles. He plans to publish a Dark/Science Fiction Novella before the end of 2023. He is also a regular contributor to Counter-Culture, writing film, book reviews, and autobiographical articles. Please ‘Like’ and Follow his Anthony C Green Authors Page.

Picture credits

Angels with Dirty Faces: By Warner Bros. – This image was retrieved online, at: http://www.movieposter.com, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48754865
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Whose afraid of Virginia Woolf? By http://www.moviegoods.com, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7035663
A Hard Days Night: By Derived from a digital capture (photo/scan) of the Film Poster/ VHS or DVD Cover (creator of this digital version is irrelevant as the copyright in all equivalent images is still held by the same party). Copyright held by the film company or the artist. Claimed as fair use regardless., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3357114
King Creole: By Paramount Pictures (corporate author) – Studio promotional material for King Creole. Immediate source: Conway’s Vintage Treasures, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8817985
Rope: By sadibey.com, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7617447
The Birds: By Copyrighted by Universal Pictures Co., Inc.. – https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056869/mediaviewer/rm1418251264, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25318690
Sunset Boulevard: By “Copyright 1950 Paramount Pictures Corporation” – Scan via Heritage Auctions. Cropped from the original image., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=85715545
Downfall: By The poster art can or could be obtained from the distributor., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56186129
Battleship Potemkin: By Not mentioned on poster – https://www.imdb.com/title/tt00000000015648/Description and large version in Russian State Library: https://search.rsl.ru/ru/record/01008520003, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2957676
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane: By The poster art can or could be obtained from Warner Bros. Pictures., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9756821
The Curse of the Werewolf: Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17682189
Double Indemnity: Copyright 1944 Paramount Pictures Inc.” – Scan via Heritage Auctions. Cropped from original image., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=86210051
Fame is the Spur: By Unknown – http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/FAME-IS-THE-SPUR-1947-Michael-Redgrave-Rosamund-John-ROGER-HALL-UK-PRESSBOOK-/110781762937, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44708440
Lawrence of Arabia: By Incorporates artwork by Howard Terpning – http://www.impawards.com/1962/lawrence_of_arabia_ver3.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25628293
Lolita: By Published by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). – Scan via Heritage Auctions. Cropped from original image., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=88372302
The Birdman of Alcatraz: By Saul Bass – http://www.movieposter.com/posters/archive/main/72/MPW-36278, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25518655
The Lord Of The Flies: Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10547613
Dogville: By Impawards.com, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21073472
Wuthering Heights: By Scan via Heritage Auctions. Cropped from original image., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=86209000
The Wicker Man: By ilgiornodeglizombi, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45455796
The Day The Earth Stood Still: By “Copyright 1951 by Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp.” – Scan via Heritage Auctions., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=86859809
M (1931): Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12951372
Citizen Kane: By William Rose – Scan via Heritage Auctions. Cropped from the original image., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=85708195