JamesHitchcock

How many years must pass before an area can be referred to as "old" in a historical movie. I doubt if anyone today would use the format "In Old (add name of state here)" for a film set during the late 1980s, but in 1943 it evidently seemed quite reasonable to call a film"In Old Oklahoma", even though it is set as recently as 1906, less than forty years previously. I think that the reason is that the differences between the Oklahoma of 1943 and the Oklahoma of 1906 were very great, much greater than the differences between any American state in 2024 and the same state in 1987. In 1906 Oklahoma, not yet a state in its own right but still Indian territory, was perhaps the last surviving part of the Wild West, although it was changing fast after oil was discovered there.

The film is also known as "War of the Wildcats", and was billed under this title when I saw it on British television. "Wildcat" at this period was a term for an oil prospector, and the "wildcats" of the title are wealthy oil baron Jim Gardner and a cowboy named Dan Somers who works for him. There are two phases to their "war". In the first half of the film their rivalry is purely romantic as both men are interested in a young schoolteacher-turned-novelist named Catherine Allen. In the second half their rivalry becomes commercial, as Dan realises that Jim's business ethics are virtually non-existent and sets up in business himself. (Dan, like a lot of characters played by John Wayne, is a bit of a rough diamond, but essentially honest and decent).

Oil has been discovered on an Indian reservation, and Dan wins the contract to drill for it by paying the tribe a much more generous price than Jim was prepared to offer. A term of the contract, however, requires that Dan must deliver 10,000 barrels to Tulsa by the end of August- and Jim, who controls the pipeline, refuses to allow Dan to use it. The film ends with a crazy race to get the oil to Tulsa before the deadline, using rickety wooden horse-drawn tankers- with Jim and his henchmen doing their best to sabotage them. By now Catherine, who was initially prepared to defend Jim as a go-ahead modern businessman, has realised what a heel the man is, and has thrown her lot in with Dan. Inevitably, the two fall in love.

The first half seems like something out of a rather dull romantic comedy. The second half is a lot better, especially the depiction of the Great Oil Race, although I felt that these scenes could have benefitted from having a lot more money spent on them than Republic Pictures, always one of the more cash-strapped Hollywood studios, could afford. (Even so, the film cost more than most of Republic's productions). The film might also have been better if it had been in colour to export the spectacular Western scenery, and probably would have been had it been made a few years later, but in 1943 colour was an expensive luxury. Even so, this is not a bad film. I considered switching it off around halfway through. I'm glad I didn't. 6/10.

In 1976 the Academy gave the Best Picture Oscar to "Rocky" rather than "Taxi Driver". In 1983 they totally ignored "The King of Comedy"- and that was the year in which the Oscars were dominated by "Terms of Endearment", possibly the worst ever Best Picture. In 2004 they went with "Million Dollar Baby" rather than "The Aviator". So just what did the Academy have against Martin Scorsese, possibly the greatest director of his generation? OK, I could live with, say, "Dances with Wolves" beating "Goodfellas", but why were some of his greatest films overlooked in favour of what I saw as weaker competitors? 2006 was the year when the Academy tried to make amends, giving Scorsese his first Best Picture and Best Director wins.

Like "Mean Streets" and "Goodfellas" "The Departed" is a gangster crime drama. The action takes place in Boston. I won't set out the complicated plot in full, but it revolves around the fact that the Massachusetts State Police are trying to infiltrate the Irish-American crime gang led by Frank Costello, while at the same time Costello is trying to infiltrate the police. Billy Costigan, a recent recruit to Costello's gang, is really an undercover state trooper, whereas trooper Colin Sullivan is secretly acting as Costello's spy within the police. Both the police and Costello suspect that they may have been infiltrated, so both Costigan and Sullivan are instructed to discover the identity of the other side's "mole". A complicating factor is that both Costigan and Sullivan are involved with the same woman, psychiatrist Madolyn Madden. The significance of the title is that many of the leading characters will end up dead.

One of Scorsese's strengths is his ability to elicit great performances from his actors. This was his third collaboration with Leonardo di Caprio after "Gangs of New York" and "The Aviator"; they were later to work together on "Shutter Island", "The Wolf of Wall Street" and "Killers of the Flower Moon". I must admit that I was not di Caprio's greatest admirer during the nineties when he seemed like a lightweight pretty-boy in films like "Titanic" or "Romeo and Juliet", but was a lot better in "Catch Me If You Can", and in "The Aviator" he showed that he had the potential to be a great actor. In "The Departed" his development as an actor continued. Here he is excellent as Costigan, a man torn between on the one hand his desire to see criminals brought to justice and on the other his fears for his personal safety should his secret ever be discovered. He also has a sense of divided loyalties, because he grew up in the same area of South Boston where Costello's gang is based, and knew some of the gangsters personally in his youth. (Which, of course, explains why he is able to infiltrate the gang; they would never have accepted someone who did not grow up in that particular milieu).

Scorsese wanted another of his regular stars, Robert de Niro, as Costello, but he turned the role down in order to direct "The Good Shepherd". Ray Liotta, the star of "Goodfellas", was also unavailable, and the part instead went to an actor not normally associated with Scorsese, Jack Nicholson. Nicholson gives another titanic performance, similar in my view to the one he gave as Colonel Nathan Jessup in "A Few Good Men". Like Jessup, Costello has a nasty streak of uncontrolled anger and aggression just below the surface, hidden in Jessup's case by an air of calm authority and in Costello's by a false sense of friendliness and avuncularity. He treats both Sullivan and Costigan as a favourite nephew, but we are left in little doubt that he is at heart a ruthless thug. He does not even subscribe to a code of "honour among thieves"; we learn that he is secretly an FBI informant and therefore enjoys a certain level of immunity for his crimes. (He is said to have been based upon the real-life gangster Whitey Bulger).

Other good performances come from Matt Damon as the treacherous Sullivan, Martin Sheen as Costigan's superior Captain Queenan and Alec Baldwin as another senior officer. Rather surprisingly, the film received only one acting Oscar nomination, for Mark Wahlberg as Queenan's assistant Sergeant Dignam.

"The Departed" is an excellent crime thriller with some great acting, a film which asks some very pertinent questions, not just about crime but also about about loyalty, betrayal, identity, friendship and the ethics of law enforcement. As in "Goodfellas", Scorsese avoids the trap (a common one in Hollywood ever since "The Godfather") of glamourising or mythologising gangsterdom. So how do I feel about the Academy's belated honouring of my hero after overlooking him for so long? Well, of course I am relieved, but paradoxically I would not have given "Best Picture" to this film. Yes, "The Departed" is a good film, but in my opinion Alejandro González Iñárritu's "Babel" is a better one. 8/10.

After making "Summertime" in 1955, David Lean's career was to undergo a surprising change. In the remaining three decades of his career he was only to make five more feature films, all of which were to be epics on a grand scale dealing with some aspect of modern history. "Doctor Zhivago" was the third of these after "Bridge on the River Kwai" and "Lawrence of Arabia".

After it was published in 1957, Boris Pasternak's novel was highly popular in the West, even though it was banned in the Soviet Union where it was seen as anti-Communist. It tells the story of the title character, Yuri Zhivago, a physician and poet, and his affair with a woman named Lara Antipova, even though both are married, he to his cousin Tonya and she to the revolutionary Pavel "Pasha" Antipov. The story of their romance is told against the background of the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War, and the film is madd in the grand epic style which was becoming Lean's trademark. Even though Pasternak had died since publication of the novel, the Soviet authorities' attitude towards him remained hostile, making filming in Russia itself impossible, so it was mostly shot in Spain or Finland.

The two leads, Omar Sharif and Julie Christie, are adequate, but not a lot more, and nether is the best thing about the film. (Christie was better in "Darling", another film from 1965 for which she won a "Best Actress" Oscar, and was to be better in another historical epic, "Far from the Madding Crowd", a couple of years later). Pasternak's novel (as is common with Russian novels) is a very complex one with a big cast of characters, and this is one of those films where some of the supporting cast are more interesting than the leads. I was particularly impressed by Tom Courtenay as Pasha. (As were the Academy; he received the film's only acting Oscar nomination). He starts the film as an idealistic but peaceful young radical, opposed to both the Tsarist regime and to the Bolsheviks, whom he sees as too violent. Later, however, he becomes harder and fanatical, willing to embrace the revolutionary violence he once condemned, and leads a pro-Bolshevik military unit during the civil war. Others who impressed me included Alec Guinness as Zhivago's brother Yevgraf, a convicted Communist but a relatively humane one, and Rod Steiger as the corrupt and debauched businessman Victor Komarovsky who later throws in his lot with the triumphant Bolsheviks.

The film was a great success at the box office; even today it remains in the list of the ten top-grossing films when adjusted for inflation. It was not, however, the highest grossing film of 1965; that honour went to "The Sound of Music". Both films were nominated for ten Oscars, and both won five, but it was "The Sound of Music" which took the top honours of "Best Picture"and "Best Director". Despite its popular success, the movie was not always well liked by the critics. The most common criticisms were that at over three hours it was overlong, that it was not always faithful to Pasternak's novel and that by concentrating on the love story it trivialised or romanticised the history of the Russian Revolution.

These three criticisms are essentially linked; indeed, I think that the first two cancel each other out, and the reason lies in the complexity of the novel which I have already alluded to. Yes, it would have been possible to make the film shorter, but only at the expense of faithfulness to its source. Yes, it would have been possible to have made the film more faithful, but only by making it considerably longer. And nobody would really have wanted to see a five or six hour epic. And in editing the novel for filming, screenwriter Robert Bolt naturally concentrated upon the easiest parts to film, rather than the complicated political background. The resulting film is none the worse for being a love story set against the background of war and revolution rather than a docu-drama about Russian political history in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

Of Lean's Big Five epics, it is a long time since I last saw either "Lawrence of Arabia" or "Ryan's Daughter", so I will not compare "Doctor Zhivago" with those. I would not rank it quite as highly as "Bridge on the River Kwai", probably Lean's greatest film along with his two Dickens adaptations. I would, however, rank it above his last film, "A Passage to India". E. M. Forster's novel, more concerned with personal relationships than with great historical developments, was not really suited to the epic style, and that film might have benefited from a more intimate touch.

Pasternak's novel, however, does deal with great historical developments, and in my view is admirably suited to the epic sweep which Lean brings to it here. There are grand set-pieces like the battle scenes and the Tsarist troopers savagely riding a peaceful demonstration led by Antipov. Although the film was not actually shot in Russia, its look calls to mind the wide-open spaces of that country. The film's emotional impact is heightened by the Maurice Jarre's evocative musical score which makes use of the balalaika, an instrument which plays a part in the plot. This is a fine example of film-making on the grand scale. 8/10

Some goofs. At one point Yevgraf Zhivago tells Tonya Komarova, who he believes to be his niece, that a book of poems "by Y A Zhivago" is not by him but by his brother, Yuri. In Russian the names Yevgraf and Yuri would be written with different initial letters, so such an explanation would not be necessary. Tonya believes that she is Komarovsky's daughter- in which case her surname would be Komarovskaya, not Komarova.

"Sunset Across the Bay" was Alan Bennett's first play for the BBC's "Play for Today" series. (He was only to write one more, "Intensive Care" from 1982). It was also the first of Bennett's explorations of the lives of older people, something which was to become a major theme in his work. (He was forty when he wrote it, but his main characters are in their sixties).

Those main characters are an elderly couple from Leeds; for most of the time they simply refer to one another as "Mam" and "Dad", although they only have one son, Bertram, who has won up and gone to live in Australia. We eventually discover that their real names are Alice and Frank. As the play opens, Dad is approaching retirement and they are making plans for the future. They realise that they cannot remain in their Victorian terrace house in Leeds, as this is due to be swept away in a so-called "slum clearance" programme, even though the area seems far from being a slum, and Mam bristles at the idea that it might be described as one. (They live in the sort of house which today would be worth around £200,000. Similar houses in some parts of the country would be worth a lot more). Another "Play for Today", Alan Plater's "Land of Green Ginger" from 1973, had also dealt with the theme of misguided clearance projects which sought to replace perfectly serviceable homes with high-rise tower blocks. Plater's play was also set in a Yorkshire city, in that case Hull.

Bertram and wants Mam and Dad to join him and his family Down Under, but they feel they are too old for such a move. In the end they decide to relocate to the seaside resort of Morecambe. The title derives from the fact that Morecambe lies on the west coast, looking across a bay, and enjoys fine views of the sunset behind the Lake District mountains on the other side. Mam and Dad have enjoyed holidays in Morecambe, but outside the holiday season the town, like many smaller seaside resorts, is a dull, bleak place. They find themselves struggling to cope with retirement; they have no friends in the town and have never had any hobbies or interests outside work. The one happy period in the film occurs when Bertram comes over to visit them from Australia; we see them spending an idyllic day in the Lake District together. Once he has gone back home, they are thrown back on their own devices.

As another reviewer states, nothing happens quickly, and indeed for much of the time nothing much seems to be happening at all, until the poignant ending. Bennett, however, can be a superb observer of human nature and of everyday life, and this play is an excellent example of his gifts for observation and for writing dialogue at work. His Mam and Dad reminded me of my own grandparents, who would still have been alive at the time this play was filmed. They were another working-class Northern couple who had to settle down quietly into retirement and were thrown on each other's company after the bustle of their working lives was over. (They did, however, have the advantage of being able to remain in their old home, a terrace house very similar to the one shown here).

"Sunset Across the Bay" can be seen as a tragedy, if that is not too portentous a tone, but it is a tragedy of an understated kind. It does not end with a grand catastrophe or disaster, only a banal death in a public lavatory. Yet its understatement does not detract from its tragic impact; it is the tragedy of two old people who find themselves redundant in a society which is changing more quickly than they would like, and more quickly than they can even understand. My uncle, who spent his last years in a similar seaside town, used to call it "God's waiting room". Bennett does not actually use this phrase, but watching the play reminded me of it. Morecambe here becomes a place where there is little to do but wait for death. 8/10.

"The Raven" was the fifth in the Corman-Poe cycle of films based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe and produced and directed by Roger Corman in the early sixties. (The number of films in the cycle is normally given as eight, but in the case of "The Haunted Palace" only the title is taken from Poe; the film itself is based on a story by H. P. Lovecraft). Like all but one of the cycle, it stars Vincent Price.

Unlike most of the Corman-Poes, "The Raven" is based upon a poem rather than a short story. Poe's poem tells of a scholar who sits by the fire on a dreary December night, reading "many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore" as a way to forget the death of his beloved, Lenore. I wondered how the poem could be spun out to form enough material for a feature film, but it does open with the same scenario as the poem. A scholar, Erasmus Craven, sits reading at night by the fire in his study, while mourning the death of his wife Lenore, who died two years ago. (The name Craven was presumably chosen because of its similarity to "raven"). As he reads, however, he is disturbed by the sound of a raven tapping at his window.

The mood of seriousness is dispelled, however, when the raven opens its beak and addresses Craven in a broad New York accent, even though the action is supposed to be taking place in 16th century Europe. The raven announces itself as a sorcerer named Dr. Bedlo, who has been turned into that form by a rival, Dr. Scarabus. Craven, himself a sorcerer, manages to restore Bedlo to human form.

This development, of course, has nothing to do with Poe's original poem. Neither does anything that follows as the film turns into a sort of comedy-horror movie as Craven and Bedlo do battle with the evil Scarabus. A lot of the humour derives from the contrast between the characters. Price plays Craven as grave and serious, whereas Peter Lorre's Bedlo is boastful but cowardly. Scarabus, as played by Boris Karloff, initially seems polite, kindly and unthreatening, but quickly reveals himself as a megalomaniac villain similar to Voldemort in the "Harry Potter" stories. The film culminates in a wizard's duel between Craven and Scarabus, possibly influenced by the one between Merlin and Madame Mim in T H White's "The Sword in the Stone". (That book was filmed by Disney in 1963, the same year as "The Raven" came out).

There is a subplot involving a romance between Craven's daughter Estelle and Bedlo's son Rexford, played by a young, pre-stardom Jack Nicholson. Lenore also makes an appearance, but she is very different from the beautiful, innocent maiden imagined by Poe. It turns out that she faked her own death so that she could leave Craven for Scarabus, whose mistress she became.

Corman tries hard for laughs, but never quite succeeds. When he took Poe seriously he could come up with some good films such as "House of Usher" and "The Tomb of Ligeia", and an excellent one in the case of "The Masque of the Red Death". When he tried to use Poe as the starting-point for a comic parody of the horror genre, the result was this so-so film, not altogether bad but mediocre compared to his best work. Quaint and curious, if not quite forgotten. 5/10.

Most British people know two things about "Lady Chatterley's Lover". The first is that it concerns an adulterous affair between a titled lady and her husband's gamekeeper. I don't really need to say much more about the plot except that the three protagonists are the aristocratic Sir Clifford Chatterley who has been confined to a wheelchair after being wounded during the Great War, his attractive young wife Constance and the gamekeeper Oliver Mellors. Mellors is himself estranged, but not legally divorced, from his own wife Bertha.

The second thing most people know about the novel is that it was once banned for obscenity in the United Kingdom. The ban lasted from 1928 until 1960, when Penguin Books attempted to publish it after the passing the Obscene Publications Act 1959, which was significantly more liberal than the law it replaced. The comparative liberalism of the new law did not prevent the authorities from attempting to prosecute Penguin, but the company was acquitted following a sensational trial and the ban was lifted. (Under the pre-1959 law the prosecution would probably have succeeded). The book was also banned in several other countries, including the United States, Canada and Australia. Oddly enough, it had been first published privately in 1928 in Italy, making it a rare example of a novel which could be read under Mussolini's Fascist dictatorship but not in the English-speaking democracies.

I have often suspected (and I am not alone in this) that censorship of the book, at least in Britain, had as much to do with political considerations as with moral ones. Had Constance taken as her lover another aristocrat the book might have been less controversial, but in the twenties the theme of adultery across the class divide was not to the liking of the Establishment. This attitude had not entirely changed by the fifties; the most-quoted line from the Penguin case came when Counsel for the prosecution asked the jury whether this was "a book you would wish your wife or servants to read".

Despite the lifting of the ban, "Lady Chatterley's Lover" was still, in the minds of many people, a "dirty book" rather than a literary classic. It was, for example, banned from my school library in the seventies. Film-makers in the English-speaking world avoided it, although there were two French films based on it (the first as early as 1955), and, rather surprisingly, the first English-language adaptation of the book in any medium was this one from 1993. I say "surprisingly" because at one time the BBC's literary adaptations, traditionally shown at Sunday tea-time, were noted for decorum and restraint and contributed to the Corporation's well-mannered "Auntie Beeb" image.

By the nineties, however, the winds of change were beginning to blow even through Broadcasting House. To make its version of one of the century's most notorious novels, the BBC turned to one of Britain's most notorious directors, Ken Russell, a noted admirer of D. H. Lawrence who had already made feature films based on "Women in Love" and "The Rainbow". (Russell also cast himself in a minor role as Constance's father). Russell does not always follow the plot of the book faithfully, largely because he includes material from Lawrence's alternative version of the story, "John Thomas and Lady Jane").

And, certainly, Russell does include sex scenes here. Given that Lawrence had described the sexual encounters between Constance and Mellors in graphic detail, any adaptation which was not equally sexually explicit would probably have been denounced as a betrayal of the author's intentions.

Lawrence did not intend his book to be read merely as a sexy romance. He also intended it as a political novel and as a critique of the upper classes. The Chatterley stately home, Wragby, is situated in a coal-mining district of the Midlands, probably on the borders of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, and Clifford is a coal-owner whose wealth largely derives from the royalties he earns from the coal mined beneath his land. This is something that Russell brings out well, contrasting the beauty and freshness of the countryside around Wragby with the grime and squalor of the nearby mining town of Tevershall. There is a fine performance from James Wilby as Clifford, a monstrous snob who can barely bring himself to accept the working class, whether they be miners or his servants, as human. Wilby had begun his career as Britain's King of Period Drama in the eighties playing fresh-faced young heroes in films like "Maurice" and "A Summer Story", but by the nineties he was starting to tackle more unsympathetic roles. (Charles Wilcox in "Howard's End" is another).

Of the other leading actors, Sean Bean was fine as Mellors, but I found Joely Richardson as Constance a bit anonymous, too much the nineties actress rather than the twenties aristocrat. (Her hairstyle in particular contributed to this impression). My other main criticism would be that Russell rather neglected another major theme of the book. Lawrence's main criticism of Clifford, apart from his snobbery, is not that he cannot satisfy Constance sexually. Given that his injuries have left him impotent, this would have been unfair. It is that he cannot satisfy her emotionally. The book is about the threefold relationship between mind, body and the emotions. Both Clifford, too much the intellectual, and Bertha Mellors, too concerned with the physical side of sex, ignore the importance of the emotional side of relationships to heir respective spouses. This theme does not, however, emerge strongly from this serial.

Apart from the sex scenes, and a typically Russellian dream sequence, the serial is not as far removed from the typical BBC "heritage television" adaptation as one might expect. It is certainly closer to the Beeb's house style than to the style of most Ken Russell movies. It is a decent enough attempt, but it left me wondering what Russell might have come up with had he had the opportunity to make the first-even English-language feature film of the book. 7/10.

The story takes place at St. Mark's, a boarding school for girls. Five years ago, the school was closed down following the mysterious disappearance of Elizabeth, one of the students. It has recently reopened, but only has five pupils, Alex, Mara, Cecilia Leah, and Connie, all of whom have been sent to the school by their families because of their emotional problems and troubled behaviour.

The school only has two teachers, a well-meaning but ineffectual Catholic priest named Father Drake, and the headmistress, Anna Pearce, a strict disciplinarian despite the fact that she seems hardly any older than the girls she teaches. One of Miss Pearce's strict rules is that none of the students are to go to the third floor. Which of course they do. And, of course, they soon wish that they hadn't because they find that they have unleashed malignant demonic forces.

Have you ever wondered what a cross between "The Exorcist" and "The Belles of St Trinians" might look like? I must admit that I hadn't really given much though to this particular exercise in cinematic crossbreeding, until I came across "5ive Girls". On the one hand it is a naughty schoolgirl fantasy with several nubile actresses, all rather older than the characters they are supposed to be portraying wandering about in revealing mini-skirts. There is even a bit of lesbian sub-text when Anna gives Alex a good spanking for breaching the school rules. On the other hand, it is a creepy horror film about demonic possession with the schoolgirls battling with the demon who was responsible for Elizabeth going missing.

Crossbred films, especially when they are crosses between two genres as incompatible as the schoolgirl romp and demonic horror, are often a failure because they inherit the worst faults of both parents. The original "demonic possession" films from the seventies such as "The Exorcist" and "The Omen" could be quite genuinely frightening. Since then, however, the genre has become stale and predictable, relying upon the standard cliches of disquieting camera angles, sudden surprises and eerie music. Juxtaposing it with schoolgirl softcore only emphasises how ridiculous the genre can be at its worst. The film has been compared with "The Craft", another horror film set in a girls' school. "The Craft" is by no means a good film, but at least it manages to avoid becoming a really bad one.

"5ive Girls", by contrast, is really abysmal. The script and storyline are frequently incomprehensible, the special effects unconvincing, and the standards of acting are generally low, with the possible exception of Ron Perlman, the only member of the cast I had previously heard of, as the hapless Drake. Watch this film if you want a good laugh at how bad it is. I cannot think of any other reason for watching it. 2/10.

The screenplay for "Heartbreak" was written by Nora Ephron, based on her own novel. It was an open secret in the American literary world that the novel was a roman a clef, a thinly fictionalised version of the breakdown of Ephron's own marriage to Carl Bernstein (of Watergate fame) because of his affair with Margaret Jay, the daughter of the British Prime Minister James Callaghan. Although the film deals with a serious subject, marital breakdown, Ephron's script contains a good deal of comedy, although much of it is rather black or cynical.

Rachel Samstat, a New York-based food writer and Mark Forman, a Washington political columnist meet at a mutual friend's wedding. Although both have one failed marriage behind them they fall in love and are soon married. Rachel gives birth to a daughter, Annie, but soon after discovers that Mark is having an extramarital affair with Thelma Rice, a Washington social hostess. After an attempt at a reconciliation, Rachel realises that Mark's relationship with Thelma is still continuing, and the two separate.

Boy meets girl, boy marries girl, boy cheats on girl, girl calls in the divorce lawyers. As others have pointed out, this is hardly an original scenario. It is one that has been played out millions of times in real life, and thousands of times in literature, the theatre and the cinema. So why (to borrow the question rhetorically asked by David Essex in his song "A Winter's Tale") should the world take notice of one more love that's failed?

The answer to that question, in the case of "Heartburn", is that it stars as Rachel and Mark two of Hollywood's major stars, Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson, at or close to their best. Nicholson's Mark is a man torn between his feelings for Rachel and his wilder instincts. After the breakdown of his first marriage, he became known as a notorious womaniser, and he is self-centred enough to want the best of both worlds, to combine the security of marriage with the freedom of his bachelor days. Nicholson said he wanted the role because he wanted to work with Streep; they were to work together again in "Ironweed" the following year. Streep's Rachel is more than just the "wronged woman"; she can be tough and even ruthless, as when she spreads a false rumour that Thelma is suffering from a "social disease", but never completely forfeits our sympathy.

Roger Ebert called "Heartburn" "a bitter, sour movie about two people who are only marginally interesting", but Nicholson and Streep have the ability to invest characters with their own inner life, even they might come across as "only marginally interesting" on the page. Their contributions mean that the film still seems fresh and watchable nearly forty years after it was made. Another plus factor is Carly Simon's theme song "Coming Around Again", which became a major hit. 7/10.

Contrary to what is sometimes claimed, Jayne Mansfield did not die in a road accident while working on "Single Room Furnished". It was not even her final film- that was "A Guide for the Married Man" in which she had a brief cameo- although it was her final starring role. The film had a brief cinema run in 1966, but was re-released in 1968, about a year after Mansfield's death, with an introduction by the broadcaster Walter Winchell who had been a close friend.

Another misconception about the film is that Mansfield plays three different characters in it. She is credited in the cast list as playing "Johnnie/Mae/Eileen", but these are not three separate people. Mansfield plays one single individual, who goes by different names at different times in her life.

The plot is a complex one. The action begins in a downtown New York City apartment building, where the Italian-American janitor is telling some cautionary tales to his daughter Maria. The girl has caused some concern to her family by associating with Eileen, one of the tenants, who works as a prostitute but whom Maria sees as stylish and glamorous. The first story he tells is about a girl named Johnnie who was abandoned by her husband, Frankie, when she became pregnant. The second story concerns their neighbours, a married couple named Charley and Flo, and their involvement with Mae, a young woman who became pregnant out of wedlock and had the baby put up for adoption. A third story is told to Maria by Flo, about Eileen and how her sailor boyfriend Billy committed suicide when she rejected him. It becomes clear that Johnnie, Mae and Eileen are all the same person.

In his introduction, Winchell says that this film contains Mansfield's finest performance, one which shows that she could be a serious dramatic actress as well as a comedienne and a sex symbol. (Like her British contemporary and lookalike, Diana Dors, Mansfield yearned to prove herself as a serious actress after becoming typecast as a "blonde bombshell"). With all respect to Mr Winchell, he does not seem to have seen the same film as I did- or for that matter the same film seen by all those IMDb members who have given it an average mark of 4.4.

Mansfield is handicapped by the odd structure of the film which makes it difficult to follow. The Johnnie/Frankie and Eileen/Billy segments could easily have been the subject of an entire film alone; the way they are presented here makes them seem rushed and incomplete. Although Johnnie, Mae and Eileen are all supposed to be the same person, we do not get any sense of this from Mansfield's performance; there is little sense of any continuity between the sensitive, vulnerable Johnnie and the hard, brassy and uncaring Eileen. Mansfield, in her mid-thirties in 1966, is really too old for the role, and is particularly unconvincing as the supposedly teenage Johnnie.

Not all the film's faults can be laid at Mansfield's door. This was the first film to be directed by Matt Cimber, who had previously worked as a theatre director, and he did not seem to understand the difference between the two media. "Single Room Furnished" is based on a stage play, and comes across as a piece of filmed theatre rather than something genuinely cinematic. (Cimber was Mansfield's third husband; they were to divorce soon afterwards). None of the other acting performances are memorable, and the dialogue is banal and uninteresting. The Charley-Flo subplot is particularly dull and could easily have been shortened considerably.

I have not seen all of Mansfield's films, but of those I have seen I can say that this is the worst, not the best. She is certainly not as good here as she had been in a frothy light comedy like "The Girl Can't Help It". Despite their similarities, there was one big difference between Mansfield and Dors. When Dors was offered a serious role, she normally rose to the challenge, as she did in "Yield to the Night" and "Tread Softly, Stranger". In "Single Room Furnished", Mansfield signally failed to do so. 3/10.

The credit "directed by Howard Hawks and William Wyler" might suggest a collaborative effort between two of the greatest directors of the Golden Age of Hollywood, but in fact the two did not actually work together on this film. The original director, Hawks, was sacked (or, according to some sources, resigned) owing to "creative differences" with the producer Samuel Goldwyn and Wyler (much against his will) was drafted by the studio to complete the project.

"Come and Get It" is based on a novel by Edna Ferber, the writer who also provided the source material for "Cimarron", "Showboat" and "Giant". The story is set against the background of the timber industry in 19th century Wisconsin. The main character is Barney Glasgow, a foreman with a logging company. Barney's girlfriend is a saloon singer named Lotta Morgan, but he has ambitions to rise in the world and abandons Lotta to marry his boss's daughter Emma Louise. Barney becomes a partner in the business and the jilted Lotta marries his Swedish friend Swan Bostrom.

Fast forward to 1905. Barney is now a wealthy and successful man, the head of the firm since his father-in-law's death and the father of two children. Swan is a widower and the father of a daughter, also named Lotta, who bears a striking resemblance to her mother. (The two Lottas are played by the same actress, Frances Farmer). Barney, whose marriage to Emma Louise is not a happy one, falls in love with the beautiful young woman, hoping to recover his lost youth. This causes a rift in the family as Barney's son Richard is also in love with the girl. A subplot deals with the romance between Barney's daughter Evvie and Tony, one of her father's employees.

The differences between Goldwyn and Hawks arose because Goldwyn wanted the film to reflect one of Ferber's main themes, the damage wrought by the logging industry to the environment. Barney, who can see no further than the company balance-sheet is quite happy to cut down forests without planting new trees, a practice which both Ferber and Goldwyn regarded as environmental vandalism in the name of profit. Hawks, however, preferred to concentrate on a love-triangle involving Barney, Swan and Lotta and to ignore Ferber's environmental themes. Goldwyn objected, and brought in Wyler to restore the balance; in the final version of the film, there is no element of rivalry between Barney and Swan, and Richard becomes the main proponent of the environmentalist point of view, something which increases the tensions between him and his father.

I think that Goldwyn was right, because the theme of environmental degradation- very topical today, perhaps more so than it was in 1936- is more interesting than the various romantic shenanigans which dominate the second half of the film. The logging scenes in the early part are very well done; the cinema of the thirties was more capable of achieving special effects and spectacular outdoor scenes than we sometimes imagine. The film becomes less interesting when the action moves indoors, with only Richard's occasional sallies reminding us of how the Glasgow family make their money.

The film suffers from some eccentric miscasting. It would have been better if different actors had been used to play Barney and Swan as young men. Edward Arnold (46 in 1936) is OK as the older man, but very unconvincing as the young Barney, who is supposed to be in his twenties. Walter Brennan (42 in 1936, but looking far older) is even worse as Swan; he gives the impression that Lotta, having been jilted by a man old enough to be her father, settles for one old enough to be her grandfather. Brennan's phoney Swedish accent also makes him difficult to understand; I cannot understand why his performance was considered worthy of the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. (He was the first-ever recipient of this particular award; he was to win an equally undeserved Best Supporting Actor Oscar four years later for his part in "The Westerner", also directed by Wyler. I have never seen "Kentucky", the film for which he won the same award in 1938).

I sought this film out online because I had become interested in the career of Frances Farmer after seeing "Frances", the 1982 biography of her with Jessica Lange, and realised that I had never seen any of her films. She was certainly enchantingly beautiful; much more so than some more publicised sexy symbols of the era such as Jean Harlow. Whether or not she was the great actress which some have claimed is difficult to say on the basis of this film, because "Come and Get It", apart from the logging sequences, is really little more than a rather dull family melodrama which allows little scope for great acting. Suffice it to say that she does enough to suggest that she could have been better in a better film. 5/10.

Frances Farmer was an actress who today is remembered less for anything she did during her brief film career but for the way in which that career ended and what happened to her afterwards. I must admit that I have only seen one of her films, "Come and Get It", and I only watched that because my interest in her was aroused by seeing "Frances". Although she worked for well-known directors like Howard Hawks and William Wyler and starred alongside big names like Bing Crosby and Cary Grant, few of her films are well-known today.

According to this film, Frances's initial ambition was to become a stage actress, but when she achieved little success in that direction she was persuaded to accept a contract with Paramount, although she was never happy with the studio system. Her status as a Hollywood star attracted the attention of the playwright Clifford Odets, who in 1937 persuaded her to leave Hollywood for Broadway and to join the prestigious Group Theatre.

The time Frances enjoyed greater success and became a Broadway star, taking the lead in a production of Odets's "Golden Boy". She also began an affair with Odets, even though she was married to actor Dwayne Steele. Her Broadway career, however, came to an end at around the same time as her relationship with Odets, and she was forced to return to the Hollywood she despised. Once there, she became known less for her acting than for what might euphemistically be called her "challenging" behaviour. She was frequently drunk, turned up late on set, and had a violent temper. In 1942 she was arrested for drunk driving and assaulting a police officer, and ended up in a mental health clinic.

The above paragraphs represent Frances Farmer's life according to the film, as opposed to Frances Farmer's life according to history. Some of the changes are minor; her real husband was called Leif Erickson, not Dwayne Steele. This change was possibly made for legal reasons: Erickson was still alive in 1982. Others are more major; Frances remained on Broadway after the end of her affair with Odets, and did not return to Hollywood until 1940. (Frances may have disliked the studio system, but Paramount were remarkably forgiving of her bad behaviour). One character, Harry York, is entirely fictitious; he seems to be an amalgam of various men who featured in Frances's life. Many of the inaccuracies in the film are due to the fact that the scriptwriters were over-reliant upon William Arnold's fictionalised biography "Shadowland", accepted as accurate in 1982, but since discredited.

The film's main weakness is that it never seems able to decide whether or not Frances was genuinely mentally ill. At times it flirts with the idea that she was the victim of a misdiagnosis and was forced into an institution by studio executives embarrassed by her difficult behaviour and her over-protective mother Lilian. At other times, however, the scriptwriters seem guiltily aware that, shorn of the excuse that she was not responsible for her own behaviour, the Frances portrayed in this film would be a very unpleasant character indeed, the sort of person nobody could sympathise with. Certainly, if she had not ended up in a mental hospital, she would doubtless have ended up in prison.

Mind you, it is difficult to say which of the two would have been the worse fate. The picture drawn of mental health care in 1940s America is a grim one. According to the film, Frances was subjected to insulin shock therapy and electroconvulsive shock therapy, and was forced to undergo a lobotomy against her will. (This last claim is definitely false; it was one of the fabrications in Arnold's book).

The thing that holds the film together and saves it from a lower mark is a powerful dramatic performance from Jessica Lange. Lange was nominated for a "Best Actress" Oscar but lost to Meryl Streep. Some have criticised the Academy for that decision, but in my view it was the right one. Lange is certainly good, but Streep in "Sophie's Choice" was absolutely out of this world. If Lange had won, she would have pulled off a unique double. 1982 was the year in she won the "Best Supporting Actress" award for "Tootsie". Kim Stanley was nominated for "Best Supporting Actress" here for her role as the domineering Lilian, a woman who undoubtedly loves her daughter but whose heavy-handed approach contributes to making Frances's life a misery. Sam Shepard is also good as Harry. The contributions of the cast, however, cannot altogether overcome the fact that the film cannot decide what story it wants to tell. 6/10.

The First Doctor and his travelling companions Ian Chesterton, Barbara Wright and Vicki, arrive on the desert planet Aridius, where they learn, though the use of a Time-Space Visualiser, that the Daleks are on their trail. They try to escape back to Earth in the TARDIS, only to find that the Daleks, who have their own time machine, are pursuing them through space and time. Cue a series of adventures, which sees our intrepid travellers visiting the top of the Empire State Building, the good ship Mary Celeste, a haunted house and another alien planet, Mechanus.

This was the series which saw the departure of Ian and Barbara from the show, leaving William Hartnell's First Doctor as the last remaining member of the original TARDIS crew. (Carol Ann Ford's Susan had left earlier in the second season). Both William Russell and Jacqueline Hill had decided, quite independently of one another, that they wanted to leave, so a storyline was devised whereby they used the Daleks' time machine to return to their day jobs as schoolteachers in 1960s London. Apparently Hartnell was not best pleased with them, and something of his annoyance is perhaps visible in the scene where the Doctor angrily tries to persuade Ian and Barbara that their scheme for returning to Earth is dangerous folly.

"The Chase" reminded me of "The Keys of Marinus", a serial from the programme's first season. Both serials are six episodes long, and both consist of a series of mini-adventures, each of which has little logical connection with the others but which are loosely held together by the overarching framework story, in this case the flight from the Daleks. It suffers from one of the drawbacks which affected "The Keys of Marius", namely that the serial tries to introduce too much thematic material and that there is insufficient time to develop each of the mini-adventures to full advantage.

Of the two, I would rate "The Keys of Marinus" more highly, because in that case each of the adventures could have made for a good story in itself if it had been fully developed. In the case of "The Chase" this is true of some of the episodes; in particular the Mechanus story, in which the Daleks come into conflict with another robotic race, the Mechanoids, could have made a decent full-length serial in its own right. The haunted house episode, however, is so inherently silly that I doubt if it could ever have been developed into something worthwhile, and the serial would probably have been better if it had been omitted. The Empire State Building and Mary Celeste storylines are not so bad, but both are largely played for laughs, and make a rather uneasy fit with more serious episodes.

Terry Nation, who wrote this serial, is something of a revered figure among Whovians, largely because he was the originator of the Daleks, but this is one of his weaker stories. It is one that could have been improved, but only with a good deal of rewriting. 5/10.

Leslie Nielsen started his career as a serious actor in films like "Forbidden Planet", but he is best remembered today for the comedies he made later in his career, starting with "Airplane!". This was a spoof of the disaster movies so popular in the seventies, especially the "Airport" franchise. (Another of Nielsen's serious dramas had been a bona fide disaster movie, "The Poseidon Adventure").

In "The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!" (and also in "Police Squad!", the television series on which it was based), Nielsen did for another popular seventies genre, the tough cop movie, what he had done for disaster pictures in "Airplane!" The same team of film-makers, David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker, were behind both movies. The storyline involves a plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II during a visit to Los Angeles, a plot which it falls to Nielsen's character, Police Squad Lieutenant Frank Drebin, to foil.

Drebin's friend and partner Nordberg is played by O. J. Simpson, several years before his notorious murder trial, although he does not have a lot to do as Nordberg spends most of the film in a hospital bed after being shot. His love-interest Jane is played by the lovely Priscilla Presley, who shows here that she had a real gift for comedy and that her acting career was due to something more than a combination of looks and her fame as the Queen of King Elvis.

The TV series had not been a great success, being cancelled after a single series of only six episodes, but the film proved a big hit and gave rise to two sequels. Much of its success was due to Drebin, one of the cinema's great comic characters. He has been described as a detective with a heart of gold but a brain of wood. Nielsen plays him with a deadpan face as a man who takes himself very seriously but who always manages to get himself into absurd situations because he is both physically clumsy and prone to making verbal gaffes. (The character owes something to Peter Sellars's Inspector Clouseau). The film takes many of the standard cliches of the tough cop genre- the hero's partner who is also his best friend, the seemingly respectable businessman who is secretly a criminal mastermind, the cliffhanging scene, the tense ending in which the hero has to work against time to prevent disaster- and plays them all for laughs. There are also occasional references to other genres- the opening scene, in which Drebin foils a plot by a coalition of America's greatest enemies, may have been a reference to James Bond films, which often open with a pre-title sequence which has little or nothing to do with the main storyline.

So why do I love this film? Trying to answer that question is difficult, because the appeal of comedy is notoriously difficult to analyse; you either find it funny or you don't. I just love its combination of fast-paced slapstick, visual jokes and verbal puns. I just love Nielsen's style of humour. If you are still unconvinced, go and watch the film itself. That will do more to persuade you than anything I could write. 8/10.

Daughter of a baronet and granddaughter of an earl, Nell Dunn was an unlikely member of the "kitchen sink" literary movement of the fifties and sixties, which sought to chronicle contemporary working-class life. Despite her aristocratic background, however, she went to live in the working-class London district of Battersea, where she worked for a time in a sweet factory. In 1963 she published "Up the Junction", a collection of short stories depicting life in the area, and in 1967 a novel "Poor Cow". The novel was filmed in the same year by Ken Loach who had earlier turned "Up the Junction" into a television play.

The story is not so much about working-class life as about life among the criminal underclass. The heroine is Joy by name, but joyless by nature. (Dunn's choice of the name was doubtless ironic). The film, immortalising a dull West London suburb, opens with the line "When Tom was in the money, the world was our oyster. And we chose Ruislip". Tom, a local criminal, is Joy's husband, but the marriage is not a happy one. He is abusive towards her and shows her little affection. When he is jailed for his part in a robbery, Joy and their young son Johnny are left on their own.

Although she is still legally married to Tom, Joy begins a relationship with Dave, one of his friends. Dave is more affectionate and loving towards Joy than Tom, but he is no more law abiding, and he too is sentenced to prison after a robbery in which a woman is seriously injured. After this Joy goes to pieces and she descends into promiscuity while finding work as a barmaid and a model for a seedy "camera club". When Tom is released from jail, Joy must decide whether her loyalties are with him or with Dave, who is unlikely to be released for a long time.

This was Loach's first feature film and starred Carol White as Joy. This was the last of three films directed by Loach which brought her to public notice, the others being "Up the Junction" and "Cathy Come Home", another television play written by Dunn's husband Jeremy Sandford. This concentration upon social-realist drama won White the nickname "the Battersea Bardot", although she herself was from Hammersmith, on the opposite bank of the Thames. In the mid and late sixties she was hotly tipped as the next big star of the British cinema, although she never really achieved stardom, largely because of problems with drug and substance abuse.

"Poor Cow" did surprisingly well at the box-office but was not popular with the critics when released in 1967. The Guardian called it ""downright awful". I would not perhaps go that far, but I have never liked it as much as "Up the Junction" or other British kitchen sink dramas such as "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning", "A Kind of Loving", "Alfie" or "A Taste of Honey". I think that the reason is that there is no character in the film with whom one can identify. Characters like Vic Brown in "A Kind of Loving", Arthur in "Saturday Night...", Jo in "A Taste of Honey", even Alfie himself, are by no means wholly admirable, yet one can at least understand their struggles to make something of their lives, often in difficult circumstances.

Joyless Joy, by contrast, is too passive, too dependent upon men, too unwilling to take control of her own life, or even to attempt to do so. She turns a blind eye to the obvious criminality of both Tom and Dave so long as they are able to put food upon her table, and never gives a thought to the victims of their crimes, not even the old lady blinded by Dave's thuggery. White and Terence Stamp as Dave do their best, and give reasonable performances, but they cannot really save this unpleasant and joyless tale. 5/10.

When the legend becomes fact, film the legend (to adapt the famous quotation from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance). The story is the well-known one of how a British naval crew, while on a voyage to transport breadfruit from Tahiti to the West Indies, revolt against their brutal and sadistic captain under the leadership of the humane first mate and sail off to make a new life for themselves with their Tahitian sweethearts on the remote Pacific island of Pitcairn. Historical evidence, in fact, suggests that Captain William Bligh was not particularly brutal or sadistic by the standards of 18th century sea captains, but this film, like its 1962 remake, is a film based upon legend rather than upon strict historical fact.

It would be wrong to see the film's departures from the historical record as "goofs", a word which implies that the film-makers were trying to get things right but inadvertently got them wrong. The film was based upon a novel rather than on history, and the filmmakers, like a novelist, wanted to tell their story in the way which would best hold their audience's attention. Bligh's harsh discipline is therefore emphasised; in one scene he orders one seaman to be keelhauled as a punishment, which results in the man's death. In fact, there is no evidence that keelhauling was ever used as a punishment in the Royal Navy. Only two members of the Bounty's crew died during the voyage, and in neither case was Bligh responsible. And Bligh did not sail on board HMS Pandora, the ship sent by the navy to hunt down the mutineers, as he is shown doing here.

Fletcher Christian, the first mate, is played by Clark Gable as Bligh's complete antithesis, charismatic, compassionate and humane. In reality, personality clashes between the two men were an important factor in the growing atmosphere of tension on the ship, but Christian seems to have been as much at fault as his superior. Besides Bligh and Christian the most important character in the film is Roger Byam, an idealistic young officer who is torn between his friendship with Christian and his sense of duty. Byam is a fictitious character, but he is based upon a real individual, Midshipman Peter Heywood.

The mutiny on the Bounty took place on 28th April 1789, only a few weeks before the seizure of the Bastille. No mention is made in the film of the French Revolution, but the story the film-makers want to tell is essentially one of revolution, with Bligh standing for outdated and inhumane authoritarianism, and Christian representing a more enlightened future. The film explicitly makes the (historically dubious) claim that the mutiny was responsible for a reform in the way the Navy was run and for a movement towards greater mutual respect between officers and other ranks. Given this agenda, it is unsurprising that the film is not always historically accurate.

The film was famously remade in 1962 with Trevor Howard as Bligh and Marlon Brando as Christian. Another film, simply entitled "The Bounty", followed in 1984, starring Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson. It is noteworthy that in all three films Bligh was played by a British actor, while Christian (historically from Cumberland) has been played by two American and an Australian. (Another Aussie, a then-unknown Errol Flynn, played Christian in a now-forgotten Australian movie from 1932). The 1935 film is probably the best of the three and Gable is, dramatically speaking, the best Christian, for all the historical inaccuracies in his performance. I didn't like Brando's portrayal of Christian as a languid, passive dandy. The best Bligh, however, is probably Hopkins from 1984; Charles Laughton and Howard are both splendidly tyrannical, but rather one-dimensional, whereas Hopkins brings a greater depth to the role and shows another side to Bligh's character.

This "Mutiny on the Bounty" was a huge box office success when first released in 1935, and won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Its appeal has not faded over nearly nine decades and it remains highly watchable today. 8/10.

What do you get if you cross a war film with a comedy heist caper? You might object that nobody with any taste or decency would want to cross a war film with a comedy heist caper, but if you really want to know what the illegitimate offspring of, say, "Where Eagles Dare" and "The Italian Job", or "The Dirty Dozen" and "Seven Thieves", might look like, then take a look at "Kelly's Heroes".

In the autumn of 1944 a group of American GIs are fighting their way across northern France, when they discover that the Germans are storing around $14 million worth of gold bars in a bank in a small French town not far away. They decide to go AWOL and "liberate" the gold, not so that it can be used to fund the Allied war effort or to compensate the French people for the way the Germans have treated them, but in order to keep it for themselves. The film then shows us how they go about their task.

The title derives from the fact that the leading light in this scheme is one Private Kelly, a one-time lieutenant who as reduced to the ranks after being made the scapegoat for a failed attack. Kelly's main subordinates, in terms of their position in this criminal enterprise if not of their official military rank, are his sergeant "Big Joe" (we never learn his surname) and a long-haired, bearded oddball named Oddball. (That, at least, is how he is known to his comrades-in-arms, if not the name given to him by his godfathers and godmothers at his baptism). Oddball, as played by Donald Sutherland, looks and sounds like a hippie from the late sixties somehow transported back and quarter of a century in time and inexplicably promoted to tank commander. He may look and sound like a hippie, however, but sure doesn't act like one. He would rather live by the maxim "make war, not love" rather than the other way round.

There is a reason why the war film and the comedy caper don't really mix. The heroes of comedy capers are generally people who are both selfish and dishonest, so to make such films palatable, or even semi-palatable, two unofficial rules have to be observed:-

1. Nobody should care about the victim or victims of the heist. They should be a large, impersonal corporation such as a casino, or a rival gang of crooks, or a wealthy and unpleasant individual.

2. The robbers may take a cavalier attitude towards other people's property, but they should always be respectful of other people's persons. The robbery should be as non-violent as possible and nobody should end up getting seriously injured or (God forbid) killed.

In the sixties and seventies, there was a third unofficial rule, not generally followed in modern heist movies:-

3. The robbers should not get away with it. That did not mean that they should end up in jail, but fate had, somehow, to intervene to prevent them from profiting from their crime. (See, for example, the famous cliff-hanging ending of the original "The Italian Job").

"Kelly's Heroes" observes the first rule punctiliously. The gold legally belongs to the Nazis, but who cares about them? The film, however, blatantly disregards the other two rules. The robbers do get away with it, successfully removing the gold from the bank. (How they actually manage to get it back to America undetected is never actually explained, but we are presumably meant to assume that they do). And as for the rule against violence, the robbers only succeed in their endeavours by perpetuating wholesale slaughter against their German foes, while taking a few casualties of their own. The body count in this film is pretty high, certainly as high as that in many "straight" war films.

So why is the film called "Kelly's Heroes", when "Kelly's Villains" might have been thought more appropriate? Why make a film glamourising the exploits of a gang of murderous armed bandits? I wondered if the title might have been meant ironically and that the film was intended as a black comedy. Now it is certainly possible to make black comedies about war, and good ones too. "Catch-22" and "Doctor Strangelove" come to mind, but those films succeed because they use humour- "Strangelove" in particular is brilliantly funny- in order to make a serious point. "Kelly's Heroes" doesn't contain a lot of humour, and certainly isn't making any serious point. The film-makers seem to have intended us to accept that Kelly and his gang really are heroes in some sense of the word, however insulting such a concept might be to the real heroes of World War II film, men who were prepared to risk their lives for their country and in the cause of freedom, not in the cause of personal enrichment.

The film's questionable moral stance is not its only weakness. It is massively overlong, even though the studio removed around 20 minutes from director Brian G. Hutton's original cut. The acting is not of a high standard. Sutherland as Oddball is never remotely credible as a World War II soldier, and Clint Eastwood as Kelly seems too laid-back. I would say that this is the worst Eastwood film, and the worst Sutherland film, I have seen. Only the fact that the action sequences are relatively well handled saves it from a lower mark. 3/10.

You can wait ages for a cinema adaptation of Oscar Wilde's "An Ideal Husband", and then two come along at once. This was one of two versions which came out in 1999/2000. Such coincidences occasionally happen in the cinema; there was another one in 1973 when two studios were independently working on disaster movies about a fire in a skyscraper. When they discovered the coincidence they combined forces to produce the film now known as "The Towering Inferno". There were two biopics of Wilde himself in 1960 and two of Coco Chanel in 2009, and two versions of Ibsen's "A Doll's House" in 1973.

Wilde is often thought of as a primarily comic playwright, but of his seven completed plays only one, "The Importance of Being Earnest", is a pure comedy. Three other plays are sometimes bracketed with it as "drawing-room comedies", but all three are in many ways problem plays, combining plenty of witty dialogue with serious examination of social issues. In "Lady Windermere's Fan" and "A Woman of No Importance" these are questions of sexual morality, whereas "An Ideal Husband" revolves around political corruption, questions of honour, and the relationship between the sexes.

"An Ideal Husband" has been filmed four times. Oddly, the first version was made in Germany in 1935. Given the Nazi detestation of homosexuality, it seems strange that they should have chosen to film a work by a famously gay author. The next version from 1947 is an early example of the British "heritage cinema" style, being made in colour, which was still the exception rather than the rule in the British cinema of the forties, and featuring the lavish period sets and costumes which were later to become the hallmark of films set in the Victorian era.

Sir Robert Chiltern, a wealthy and successful politician, is approached at a party one evening by a mysterious woman named Laura Cheveley, who attempts to blackmail him to support a fraudulent scheme in which she has invested. She says that she knows, and can prove, that earlier in his career he was guilty of selling a state secret for money, and threatens him with exposure unless he makes a speech to the House of Commons recommending that the British Government support her scheme. The film then explores the complications which arise from this and Laura's other machinations.

Two key characters are Sir Robert's wife Gertrude and his closest friend Lord Arthur Goring. At first Arthur seems to one of Wilde's witty but foppish young men, a gilded dandy whose main talent is for uttering bons mots like "Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not", but in the end he proves to be a loyal and resourceful friend to Sir Robert. Gertrude Chiltern is high-minded and idealistic, but can be inflexible and unforgiving; she finds it difficult to make allowances for those, even her husband, whose moral principles are not as rigid as her own. The need to atone for one's past misdeeds, and the need to allow others to atone for theirs, is one of the key themes of the play. "No one should be entirely judged by their past." Although "An Ideal Husband" does not directly address the question of sexual morality, it does have some relevance to Wilde's own situation. Like Sir Robert, he was hiding what late Victorian society would have considered a guilty secret.

Wilde's story is a good one, but it needs some excellent acting if it is to work on the stage or in the cinema. Fortunately, this film, like its 1947 predecessor, can call on the services of some fine actors, not all of them British; Gertrude is payed by an Australian, Cate Blanchett, and Laura by an American, Julianne Moore. (The 1947 version also featured an American actress, in that case Paulette Goddard, as Mrs Cheveley). I particularly liked Rupert Everett as Arthur, which is not an easy role to play. On the one hand the actor's performance must be light and elegant enough to convey Goring's facade of the cynically witty boulevardier. On the other, it must also be substantial enough to suggest the decent man of principle and devoted friend who lurks beneath that facade, and Everett is able to bring off this difficult double, as was Michael Wilding in 1947. Mention should also go to Jeremy Northam, always good as solid, decent men of principle (like his Mr Knightley in "Emma") and to Blanchett.

The film follows the plot of Wilde's play, with one or two extra twists, and keeps the original period setting in 1895. (One difference is that the scene in the House of Commons is actually shown; in the play we merely hear about it at second hand). I think that this was the right decision as the details of Wilde's plots are often specific to late Victorian times and attempts to update them can fall flat. An example is "A Good Woman", an adaptation of "Lady Windermere's Fan", which makes the main characters American rather than British and transfers the action to 1930s Italy. In my view this film does not really succeed, and an important reason for this is that the film-makers never seem to have taken into account the fact that the world had changed in the four decades between the 1890s and the 1930s. (I understand that the 2000 version of "An Ideal Husband, which I have not seen, has a modern-day setting).

If one looks at the wider themes of Wilde's plays rather than the details, however, they can be seen to touch on many topics of timeless relevance to modern times. This was true of the 1890s, of the 1940s, of the 1990s and remains true today in 2024. The theme of political corruption, for example, seems perennially relevant today. Even more important is what Wilde has to say about love: - "It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love. It is when we are wounded by our own hands, or by the hands of others, that love should come to cure us - else what use is love at all"? The combination of wit with a serious discussion of important topics is what makes Wilde's "drawing-room" plays so compelling, and this version of "An Ideal Husband" is an excellent adaptation of a great play. It can stand comparison with the 1947 version. 8/10.

"Traitor" is one of a number of plays inspired by the notorious "Cambridge spy ring" who acted as double agents for the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Others include Julian Mitchell's stage play "Another Country", later made into a film, and Alan Bennett's "An Englishman Abroad" and "A Question of Attribution". What shocked British society most about the spy ring was not so much the treachery of its members as the fact that most of them were from well-off Establishment families and educated at the country's most prestigious schools. (Working-class spies such as John Vassall, Melita Norwood and the members of the Portland spy ring never achieved the same notoriety).

"Another Country" dealt with the schooldays of a thinly disguised Guy Burgess, referred to in the play as "Guy Bennett", and "An Englishman Abroad" is a portrait of Burgess during his days living in exile in Moscow. "Traitor" is also set in Moscow; the main character, Adrian Harris, is partly based Burgess and partly on Kim Philby. (Unlike Burgess and Philby, both Cambridge men, however, Harris was educated at Oxford). A group of Western journalists visit Moscow to interview Harris, a former Foreign Office official who defected before he could be arrested as a Soviet agent. Scenes of the interview are intercut with scenes of Harris's unhappy upper-class childhood, when he was largely ignored by his parents, patronised by the masters at his public school and bullied by his schoolmates. Mitchell was to suggest that Bennett (who like the real Guy Burgess was gay) spied for the Russians not because he was a convinced Communist but as an act of revenge against the British Establishment for rejecting him on account of his sexual orientation. This is not a theme explored here; we never learn whether Harris is homosexual (like Burgess) or heterosexual (like Philby).

Harris is played by John Le Mesurier, who is of course best known for playing Sergeant Wilson in "Dad's Army". Le Mesurier was something of a comedy specialist, so he was cast against type here. Nevertheless, he was to call the role "the best part I ever had on TV", and relished the chance to take the leading role in a serious drama, giving an outstanding performance for which he was to win a BAFTA Television Award for Best Actor.

This was the second play written by Dennis Potter for the BBC's series "Play for Today"; the first had been "Angels Are So Few", broadcast as part of the previous season. (Potter had also written contributions for "Play for Today"'s predecessor, "The Wednesday Play"). Themes of betrayal and childhood are common in Potter's work, and both elements play an important part in this play. Harris tries to defend himself in political terms, insisting that he may have betrayed his class but never his country, and insisting that everything he did was motivated by his belief in communism. For Potter, however, the child is father to the man, and he sees the roots of Harris's treachery as being as much psychological as ideological. Harris's his hatred of the English upper classes is clearly rooted in his miserable childhood. Le Mesurier plays him here as a weak individual, unable to cope with life without the crutch of alcohol; he is normally seen with a glass in his hand, and his attempts to justify himself to the journalists become more and more incoherent as he gets more and more drunk. (Both Burgess and Philby were alcoholics, and their alcoholism became worse after their defection to Russia).

Potter said that he wrote for television because he saw it as a democratic medium, able to reach a wider and socially more diverse audience than the novel or the theatre, literary forms he regarded as primarily middle class. In the short term, that was probably correct, but in the longer term it means that much of his work has been locked away unseen in the BBC's vaults. (Mercifully, little has actually been lost to the Beeb's short-sighted policy of wiping videotapes to reuse them). Fortunately, BBC4 recently gave an airing to "Traitor", giving us an opportunity to view this powerful drama more than fifty years after it was originally made. 8/10.

John Wayne's first starring role was in Raoul Walsh's "The Big Trail" from 1930, but when this film flopped at the box-office he spend most of the rest of the decade making third-rate horse-operas for the smaller "Poverty Row" studios. "The Man from Monterey", however, is a cut above that sort of thing. It was the last of six films Wayne made for Warner Brothers in 1932 and 1933, although it is still a B-movie, less than an hour long. The action takes place in California in 1848, during the brief interval between that territory's annexation by the United States following the Mexican-American war and the arrival of the miners in the Gold Rush of 1849, a period during which the majority of the white population of the area were Hispanic rather than Anglo.

The story revolves around a love-triangle between Wayne's character John Holmes, Dolores Castanares, the daughter of a wealthy Spanish landowner, and Don Luis Gonzales, the son of another landowning family. No prizes for guessing who gets the girl. Although Don Luis seems handsome and dashing, he and his father are plotting to acquire the Castanares land by underhand methods. The new US administration have required Spanish land owners to register their lands before a deadline, and the Gonzaleses are aiming to use this requirement as part of their plot. It falls to Holmes, a U. S. Army Captain charged with administering the registration scheme, to foil them.

None of the other cast members are of any great fame; second billing goes not to any of Wayne's human co-stars but to his white horse, Duke. (Presumably named after Wayne's own nickname). Duke had been introduced to the public the previous year in "Ride Him, Cowboy" (in which he plays a major role in the plot) and was a regular fixture in Wayne's Warner Brothers movies.

This film is a lot better than many of Wayne's offerings from the thirties. It is not marked by the sort of bad acting, cheap special effects and incompetently choreographed fight scenes that marred films like "Paradise Canyon" or "The Desert Trail". There is a relatively entertaining story and Wayne, although by no means at his best, is certainly than he was to be in those two films and many others like them. It is also better than "Ride Him, Cowboy", which has a glaring plot-hole at its centre. It would doubtless have vanished from public view entirely had Wayne not gone on to become an American legend in his later career, but it still remains relatively watchable. 6/10.

"Hemingway & Gellhorn" tells the story of the American writer Ernest Hemingway and his third wife Martha Gellhorn. Or perhaps I should say that it tells the story of American journalist Martha Gellhorn and her first husband Ernest Hemingway. Gellhorn always resented being referred to as "a footnote in someone else's life", especially after she and Hemingway were divorced in 1945.

Hemingway and Gellhorn first met, briefly, in Key West in 1936, but their romantic relationship began the following year in Madrid, when both were covering the Spanish Civil War. (This was Gellhorn's first experience of reporting on a war; she was later to become a famous war correspondent). They became lovers, even though Hemingway was married to his second wife, Pauline. Pauline, a practising Catholic, was for a long time reluctant to grant Hemingway a divorce, but she eventually relented and he and Gellhorn were married in 1940. Theirs was, however, always a turbulent relationship, and their marriage only lasted five years. The implication in the film is that their affair was based more on sexual passion and shared political views than on any real affection. (The film was advertised with the tagline "We were good in war. And when there was no war, we made our own").

Clive Owen is one of those actors I have never been quite sure about, largely because he gave poor performances in the first two films in which I saw him, the dull "King Arthur" and the awful "Derailed". He has, however, been much better in a number of other movies, notably "Gosford Park", "Closer" and "Inside Man", and "Hemingway and Gellhorn" is another one of his successes. He plays Hemingway according to every book lover's idea of the man, namely who needs to prove his manhood, possibly because he is secretly insecure about it, by exposing himself to danger in various war zones and by an addiction to macho pursuits like bullfighting, big-game hunting and deep-sea fishing. This view of Hemingway may be something of a cliche, (and I have long suspected that her must have had a more sensitive side to have achieved such success as a writer), but it was clearly the view that the director and scriptwriters wanted, and Owen is able to deliver.

Nicole Kidman is also good as Gellhorn. With her soft, gentle strawberry-blonde looks, Kidman could easily have allowed herself to become typecast as the heroine of kooky comedies and slushy romances, but she has had the courage to branch out into more demanding roles, and I have admired her for this, even if her choices have not always been successful. Her Gellhorn is determined to prove herself just as courageous as her partner and to achieve the same sort of success as a journalist as he has done as a novelist. Owen and Kidman are also able to hint at the dark underside to both their characters; both Hemingway and Gellhorn were eventually to commit suicide. Hemingway's death is shown in the film; Gellhorn's, which occurred many years later, is not.

At considerably over two hours, the film is surprisingly long for a television drama, and this was, I felt, its main drawback. Its running time could, with advantage, have been shortened to produce something tauter and leaner. With this reservation, however, this was a film I enjoyed, showing us something of the driven and self-destructive nature of its two protagonists. 7/10.

In late 19th century Mexico a big American corporation led by Tyler Jackson are building a railway, and in order to do so are resorting to ruthless methods, forcing farmers off their land and killing those who oppose them. Two young women join forces to oppose them. María Álvarez is a poor farmer's daughter whose father was one of those who lost his land to Jackson's depredations. Sara Sandoval is the daughter of a wealthy landowner who has been murdered for daring to stand up to the corporation.

Despite their differences in character and in social class, Maria and Sara team up to become bank robbers, or in Spanish "bandidas", female Robin Hoods who use the proceeds of their robberies to compensate the farmers who have lost their lands. To capture the "bandidas", Jackson brings in a private detective named Quentin Cooke, but when Cooke realises the criminal nature of his employer, Cooke changes sides and joins the two women.

"Bandidas" owes a lot to Louis Malle's "Viva Maria!", another film set around the same historical period which deals with the adventures of two female revolutionaries in a Latin American republic (probably based on Mexico). Penélope Cruz's character may have been given the name Maria as a tribute to that film, with the name of Salma Hayek's character, Sara, coming from "Two Mules for Sister Sara", another Mexican-set Western. The film also owes something to "Hannie Caulder"; like Raquel Welch's character in that film, Maria and Sara take lessons in criminal techniques from an experienced male mentor.

Like the other three films mentioned in the previous paragraph, "Bandidas" is an action comedy (although actually "Hannie Caulder" is one of those films which seems unable to make up its mind whether is a comedy or a serious Western). As such it works very well. Cruz and Hayek, two of the loveliest actresses of the noughties, combine well as the two-woman revolutionary army, better than Jeanne Moreau and Brigitte Bardot did in "Viva Maria!" (Bardot was handicapped by her poor command of English). The plot moves along at a brisk pace and while the film may not be the most comprehensive analysis of the social problems of late 19th century Mexico, it is entertaining and good fun. 7/10.

How do you make a film about religion in the twenty-first century? One thing you can't really do is to try and imitate the style of the great religious epics of the fifties and sixties like "The Ten Commandments", "Ben-Hur" or "King of Kings". These were made for a very different age in a very different style to anything we are used to seeing today. Recent years have seen attempts to remake "Ben-Hur" and "The Ten Commandments" (under the title "Exodus"Gods and Kings"), and these films, although they have points of interest and are by no means bad, cannot stand comparison with their mighty predecessors. The same is true of another recent attempt to make an Old Testament epic, "Noah".

The storyline of "Risen"- a Roman soldier in occupied Judaea- becomes obsessed with the figure of Jesus and the new religion which has grown up around him- is one that could have been taken straight from a traditional religious epic. This is essentially the storyline of "Quo Vadis?" or "The Robe".

Clavius, a Roman Tribune, supervises the crucifixion of Yeshua (as Jesus is always referred to in the film) and is ordered by his boss Pontius Pilate to ensure that the tomb is guarded; Pilate believes that Yeshua's disciples will try and steal the body and claim that He has been resurrected, and fears that such an event will lead to political unrest. Of course, the body does disappear, and Pilate angrily orders Clavius to find it at all costs. Clavius is originally a believer in Roman polytheism and regards the religion of the Jews, and its Christian offshoot, as pitiable superstitions, but his world is shaken when his investigations lead to him coming face to face with the man whom he saw being crucified.

Stylistically, however, "Risen" is very different to the likes of "Quo Vadis?" or "The Robe". It has much more in common with other twenty-first century New Testament movies such as "The Nativity Story" or "Mary Magdalene", perhaps even Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ", being less spectacular and much grittier and more realistic than the epics of the fifties, shot in dull, muted colours. (The early sixties "Barabbas" can in some ways be seen as a predecessor of this style, at least as far as its photography was concerned, but it also had elements of spectacle such as a gladiator fight).

Another difference between "Risen" and fifties' Biblical epics is in its ending. Those films inevitably ended with the hero embracing Christianity. Clavius seems to be going down the same route as he joins Yeshua and his followers, even witnessing Yeshua's ascension into Heaven, yet the ending is enigmatic, with Clavius left pondering on what he has seen but he never seems to make any definite commitment to the new faith. He is portrayed as a seeker after truth rather than as someone who finds it.

The film has a literate script, co-written by director Kevin Reynolds and Paul Aiello, and a fine performance from Joseph Fiennes in the central role of Clavius. This is perhaps the most intelligent cinematic treatment of Christian themes in recent years. 8/10.

Compared to the vast number of films made about the Second World War during the fifties and sixties, there were relatively few made about the First World War during the twenties and thirties. There were probably a number of reasons for this. The static nature of trench warfare did not make for exciting action pictures, and the relatively primitive film-making techniques of the time made it difficult to dramatise large-scale battles. Another reason is that, while World War II has passed into legend as a heroic struggle against tyranny, there was a widespread feeling during the inter-war era that World War I had all been a dreadful mistake, best commemorated (if at all) through monuments and solemn ceremonies, not through the medium of popular entertainment. This feeling was especially strong in America and contributed to the growth of isolationism during this period.

Hollywood films about World War II almost always concentrated on the American war effort. With World War I this was not always so. "All Quiet on the Western Front", for example, focuses on the Germans and does not include a single American character, and the only American in "A Farewell to Arms" is a volunteer serving with the Italian Army. "After Tonight" is another American World War I film without any American characters. Like the British-made "Secret Agent" and "The Spy in Black" it is a spy film, espionage being easier to portray on screen and affording more excitement than the war in the trenches.

The story is set on the Eastern Front between Russia and Austria-Hungary, a theatre of war which would have been unfamiliar to most Americans. Rudolph Ritter, an Austrian counter-intelligence officer, falls in love with a beautiful Army nurse named Karen Schöntag. (Or Schontag- the pronunciation varies according to which character is speaking). Unknown to him, Karen is really a Russian spy tasked with infiltrating the Austrian Army and discovering military secrets. Eventually, however, mounting evidence begins to indicate to Ritter that the woman he loves may be an enemy spy, in which case it will be his unpleasant duty to arrest her and have her executed. (The use of this unfamiliar setting was probably necessary to ensure that American audiences remained neutral between the lovers. Had Karen been an American spying on the Germans, she would have become the heroine and Ritter the villain, and vice versa had she been a German spying on the Allies).

The film was not a success when it was released in 1933, and lost $100,000 at the box office. The studio, RKO, apparently considered firing the leafing lady, Constance Bennett, although she is probably one of the better things about the film. Her leading man Gilbert Roland, however, is rather wooden, and with his Mexican accent it is difficult to accept him as an Austrian. (Bennett and Roland were later to marry). The film's main weaknesses, however, are its lame dialogue and its storyline, particularly the decision to substitute a contrived happy ending for the tragic one which the plot seemed to be leading up to. After 90 years this is not really a film that stands up well. 4/10.

"All Passion Spent" is based upon a novel by Vita Sackville-West published in 1931. Henry Holland, 1st Earl of Slane, distinguished elder statesman, is dead. Although Lord Slane was a prominent member of the British establishment, a former Prime Minister and Viceroy of India- a double not achieved by any one person in real life- he was originally from a humble social background in Huddersfield and possessed little private wealth. His elderly widow, Lady Slane, therefore decides that she cannot afford to keep up their grand house in central London. Where, therefore, should she live? Her children decide that she should come and live with them, but Lady Slane has other ideas. She decides to rent a cottage in Hampstead, today one of London's most fashionable and expensive areas but evidently something of a backwater in the 1930s, where she can live alone with her maidservant.

It has been said that every generation rebels against its parents and makes common cause with its grandparents. Lady Shane, by contrast, rebels against her children and makes common cause, not with her grandchildren (none of whom appear) but with her great-granddaughter Deborah. , whom she sees as a kindred spirit. Deborah is engaged to marry the son of a Duke, but she does not really love him and would rather pursue a musical career. Lady Shane feels that she has spent her entire life as mere footnote in her husband's life, and has basked in his glory without achieving anything of note herself; she wants to save Deborah from a similar fate.

It is easy to see why Lady Slane and her children do not always see eye to eye. Most of them, especially her eldest son Herbert, are pompous, stuffy and money-grubbing. The one exception is one of her younger sons, Kay, a gentle and reclusive bachelor who lives alone with his collection of antiques. Through Kay, Lady Slane meets his friend Mr FitzGeorge, whom she knew during her days in India, who was secretly in love with her. Lady Slane and FitzGeorge renew their acquaintance and become firm friends. When he dies, he leaves her his fortune, which includes many valuable works of art. The question then arises of what she will do with this unexpected legacy.

The series features some well-known names of the British acting profession. Some of the casting seems at first sight eccentric; Lady Slane and FitzGeorge, both opposed to being their mid-eighties are played by Wendy Hiller and Harry Andrews, both in their mid-seventies at the time. Hiller was only ten years older than Graham Crowden as Herbert, even though they were supposed to be playing mother and son. It is possible that the programme-makers were unable to find any actors in their eighties, but I feel that it is also possible that this casting may have been deliberate. Lady Slane is of course physically older than her children, but mentally she and FitzGeorge seem younger than them, and the casting of actors younger than the roles they are playing may be a way of stressing this. FitzGeorge is a generation older than Kay, but the two seem more like contemporaries.

The standard of acting is high, with good performances coming from all those mentioned in the previous paragraph. (The one performance I did not like was from Eileen Way was Lady Slane's French maid Genoux, too much the caricature of the "funny foreigner"). I did, however, have a problem with the series. When I read the book, I felt it was one of those novels which was all talk and little action, and it never really struck me as being a suitable subject for a television adaptation. Even less did it strike me as suitable for serialisation as a three-part mini-series as opposed to a one-off drama of, say, sixty to ninety minutes. It is perhaps not surprising that the series as made, extending to three hours, struck me as too drawn out and slow-moving. The title is perhaps appropriate. The whose thing seemed rather devoid of any passion. 6/10.

Gangster films have never had the same pedigree in Britain that they have long enjoyed in America. Part of the reason is that the formative years of Hollywood in the twenties and early thirties coincided with the growth of organised crime fuelled by Prohibition, a period when the doings of Al Capone and his contemporaries provided a rich source of inspiration for film-makers. Another part of the reason is that during this period the British Board of Film Censors tended to discourage home- made gangster movies. This form of censorship owed little to moral concerns about violence- the BBFC were quite happy to allow cinemas to show American crime flicks- and a good deal to political considerations. British governments, of all political complexions, liked to play down any suggestion that the country had a serious organised crime problem. (And, by American standards, it didn't).

There have, however, been a few isolated British gangster films which have achieved classic status, such as "Brighton Rock" or "Get Carter". The 1980s were to add two more British gangster classics, "The Long Good Friday" and "Mona Lisa", both starring the same actor, Bob Hoskins.

Like "Get Carter", "The Long Good Friday" is very much a product of a particular place and time. Mike Carter's film reflected the Tyneside of the late sixties and early seventies, John Mackenzie's the East London of a decade or so later. For at least a century the economic heart of the East End had been the London docks, which provided employment for many East Enders, either directly as dockers or indirectly as workers in the factories which made use of the raw materials imported through the docks. By 1980, however, the docks were in decline, hit by the growing move towards containerisation, and schemes were afoot for the redevelopment of the Docklands. This process started with St Katharine's Dock, the basin closest to central London; early in the film we see shorts of this area, now transformed into an upmarket marina where the main character, Harold Shand, keeps his luxury yacht.

Shand is a London gangster who is trying to put together a legitimate, or at least semi-legitimate, property development scheme to redevelop parts of the Docklands in partnership with Charlie, an American mafioso and with Harris, a corrupt local councillor who also runs a construction business. His world is rocked, however, by a series of bomb attacks on his property and the murders of some of his associates, including his closest friend Colin. The film revolves around Shand's efforts to discover who was responsible for these attacks and to take revenge. The plot involves a number of the social concerns of the period, including violent crime, terrorism, political and police corruption; besides Harris, Shand also has a senior local police officer on his payroll.

Although there are other good contributions, notably from Helen Mirren as Shand's wife Victoria and Bryan Marshall as Harris, the film is dominated by a tremendous performance from Hoskins as Shand, a man who tries to present himself to the world as a cheerful, likeable cockney geezer but who, beneath his jovial exterior, is no more than a vicious thug. Strangely, the filmmakers wanted to dub over Hoskins's cockney accent, believing that it would be difficult for Americans to understand. Even more strangely, the actor chosen to do the dubbing was from Wolverhampton; a West Midlands accent would have been no more comprehensible in America and in Britain would have sounded completely wrong on the lips of a London gangster. Fortunately, this scheme was dropped when Hoskins strongly objected. This was the film which made Hoskins a star and led to him becoming a leading figure in the British cinema of the eighties and nineties.

The one thing I din't like about the film was the revelation that the Provisional IRA were behind the attacks on Shand's empire, making for an uneasy combination of London gangsterism and Irish politics. (The IRA, and other terror groups, ran their own organised crime rackets in their Northern Irish fiefdoms, but never tried to tangle with mainland gangsters). With that one reservation, however, I found "The Long Good Friday" a gripping gangster film which deserves its classic status. 8/10.