Christiane Genessier (Edith Scob) wanders the kennels

Eyes Without a Face (1960): A particularly gruesome premise this; Dr Genessier (Pierre Brassuer) is an eminent plastic surgeon whose daughter is horribly disfigured in an accident and in order to find her a suitable donor for a face transplant, his assistant Louise trawls Paris for young women who resemble her and kidnaps them. The doctor then performs surgery on the victims, cuts off their faces and then disposes of their bodies when ultimately the experiments fail and they die. Oh yes, not only does Genessier keep a huge kennel of dogs which he uses to conduct primitive transplants on but he also looks like a portly David Guest which only adds to the creepiness. His daughter Christiana floats around the huge family house in a ghostly Jean Cocteau-like manner, spending the majority of the film wearing a mask to cover her disfigurement; all this beneath a backdrop of the police hunt for the murderer of these defaced young women. I mean, what’s not to like? Best described this as a poetic horror-noir, this film is a rare treat. The doctor’s black Citroën DS is the real star of the show though…

The delightful Hugo Fitch

Dead of Night (1945): A recurring nightmare, a mirror with murderous foresight, a ghostly game of sardines, and an evil ventriloquist’s dummy; this supernatural portmanteau is quintessentially English and quintessentially Midnight Cheese and Biscuits. Architect Walter Craig pulls up to a country house in his car for a possible work assignment and is immediately struck with a strong feeling of Déjà Vu. When he meets the other people in the house he’s convinced he’s been there before and is able to predict certain events before they occur. This sparks a discussion with the other assembled guests about strange coincidences and eerie tales from their own lives; all in the presence of Freudian psychiatric stereotype Dr Van Straaten whose job it is to rationalise each situation. Yes it’s rather clunky and yes the daft golfing story (courtesy of Ealing stalwart Charles Crichton) takes some of the power away from the other creepier tales (HG Wells is among the contributors) but this is still wonderful stuff. The famed dummy sequence directed by Alberto Cavalcanti and featuring a young Michael Redgrave is the pièce de résistance; it’s quite simply one of the most sinister and unforgettable images in cinema. There’s a lovely twist at the end of this film which not only brings to mind the great Dali-designed dream sequences from Hitchcock’s classic Spellbound, but also famously inspired cosmologists Thomas Gold and Hermann Bondi to develop the Steady State Theory no less!

Leon Niemczyk as Andrzej, Jolanta Umecka as Krystnya and Zygmunt Malanowicz as Young Man

Knife in the Water (1962): Shot through with enough emotional electricity to rival Bergman’s finest work, Polanski’s claustrophobic first feature is nothing short of a masterpiece. An intense love triangle between an middle-aged journalist, his nubile wife and a mysterious young hitchhiker they pick up; most of the action occurs on a small yacht, as this minimal cast spend their day navigating the waters of Northern Poland. We see from the opening scene that Andrzej and Krysynya’s relationship is strained; he remonstrates with his wife about her driving skills and exasperated, she stops the car and walks around to the passenger seat for him to take over. Upon taking the wheel, Andrzej almost runs over a young man; a hitchhiker somewhat intimidatingly standing in the middle of the road. An argument ensues but eventually the stranger is invited to join them on their trip. Andrzej is a bit of a bully really; an egotistical but ageing journalist who revels in taking pot-shots at the younger man; hell bent on proving his physical and intellectual superiority. Quite logically, his wife Krystnya soon becomes attracted to the object of her husband’s derision and we see a gradual metamorphosis from the bespectacled and rather repressed looking woman we are first introduced to into much more of a powerful sexual being. Malanowicz plays the young man with just the right amount of mystery and air of menace; he unnervingly plays with a large flick-knife throughout the film to great dramatic effect. Niemczyk is perfect as the older man with something to prove; despite his behaviour he is still able to elicit some degree sympathy for his childishness. After all, he’s jealous of the young stranger and is worried his wife will leave him. Polanski’s direction is wonderfully taut and the constraints faced by the cast and crew (they often had to hang off the side of the boat to all fit on) only add to the film’s suffocating power.

Rock Hudson as Arthur Hamilton as Tony Wilson

Seconds (1966): This film reminded me of a particularly disturbing and effecting episode of the Twilight Zone entitled The Eye of the Beholder which is set in a hospital where the main character has undergone reconstructive surgery and the hospital staff are revealed to have horribly deformed pig-like snouts. Despite the absence of such human-sus hybrids in Seconds, there are plenty of chilling scenes featuring gurneys, bandages and surgery which definitely merit the comparison. Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) is rich, middle-aged and bored. Luckily his (supposedly) dead friend Charlie contacts him and tells him about a company that is able to fake his death and give him a completely new life. After some major plastic surgery and many months of physiotherapy, Hamilton is reborn as Malibu-based playboy artist Tony Wilson and his new face comes courtesy of Rock Hudson; not bad for a mere $30,000 huh?! The film opens with a suitably sinister title sequence courtesy of the legendary by Saul Bass and there is a particularly noir-style pursuit of a man at a railway station. The film contains some very curious over-the-shoulder camera angles and interesting fish-eye lens shots courtesy of Oscar nominated cinematographer James Wong Howe; all underpinned by a rather creepy otherworldly score by Jerry Goldsmith. Interestingly there is some pretty revolting footage of an actual rhinoplasty which apparently had to be shot by the director as the cameraman had fainted during filming. With whiffs of 1960s anti-establishment sentiment thrown in; courtesy of a bacchanalian wine festival and some great lines: ‘The years I’ve spent trying to get all the things I was told were important - that I was supposed to want! Things! Not people… or meaning. Just things.’ Seconds is an ambitious piece of paranoid sci-fi and famously this is the film Bryan Wilson thought Columbia Pictures made to ‘mess with his mind’.

I hope I don’t end up like this

If you ever find yourself alone watching Andrei Rublev at one in the morning then it’s probably safe to assume you appreciate cinema. Or that you really need a girlfriend. Or both.

I used to believe that I liked films as much as the next man; I mean who doesn’t like films right?! However, after a lifetime of staying up late, being useless at work the following day and purposefully missing nights out in order to devour the works of Lynch, Polanski, Bergman, Hitchcock and Kubrick (to name just a few), I think I’m actually a bit of a film geek. There I said it! Yes, I used to own an unlimited cinema pass. Yes, I go to the cinema alone. The thing is, after this realisation, it struck me that I should at least try and do something constructive with all the useless movie knowledge I’ve gathered over the years. Therefore, in the autumn of 2010 I started this very blog about the joys of watching old films on TV late at night and I also recently enrolled on the inaugural film appreciation course run by The Guardian as part of their Masterclass series of lectures and seminars.

The course was held on the last weekend of January at the very swanky Guardian and Observer buildings in the slightly less salubrious surroundings of York Way in London’s Kings Cross. Picture the kind of inner city area where fast food restaurants refuse to deliver to and you’re pretty close. Anyway, the Kings Place building is a stunning mix of visual arts and music venues and seven floors of office space encased neatly in glass.

The entrance to the Guardian and Observer building in Kings Cross

According to the guardian.co.uk website, the course is ‘designed for absolute beginners to budding cinemaphiles and will leave its students with a wealth of great films to investigate and the analytical tools required to “read” them.’ My interest was piqued by the inclusion of director Stephen Frears, the Guardian’s Xan Brooks and hosting the weekend would be BBC’s Film 2011 Danny Leigh.

The lecture room was a decent size, the only draw-back being that the seating wasn’t tiered which meant during the screenings and Q&A sections, my view was sometimes obstructed. Danny started proceedings by asking us what we expected to gain from the course-this being as much a learning curve for them as it would be for us. The first response was priceless; ‘I want to sound more intelligent at dinner parties’. At first I considered this a joke; this woman was surely a plant to play with our pre-conceptions of Guardian readers as middle-class-farmer’s-market-frequenting-champagne-socialist types but it appears she was deadly serious. Much respect to Mr. Leigh for not laughing her out of the room but I also remember thinking I’ve just paid £199 for a weekend of sitting around discussing the merits of Jean Cocteau and German expressionism so who the f*ck was I to judge?!

The lecture hall with Danny Leigh just visible at the podium

The weekend was structured into genres which kicked off with Xan Brooks on Comedy. We examined its roots in Vaudeville with some silent slapstick clips from Buster Keaton and the classic mirror sequence from The Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup. We also discussed the seismic effect that sound had on the genre which subsequently lead to the stalwart screwball comedies and the development of jokes about jokes (with a clip from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall). We concluded by examining the common current trend for gross-out comedies courtesy of the Farrelly Brother’s There’s Something About Mary. Obviously trying to cram in 100 years of cinema comedy into an hour of lecture time is impossible but I thought there was enough of an overview for me to investigate any areas further at my leisure and the Q&A section helped clarify some points. Three more similar genre lectures followed; ‘Love stories’, ‘Reality/documentary’ and ‘Horror’ (these all were punctuated by regular coffee breaks) followed by a screening of Charles Laughton’s dreamy chiller The Night of The Hunter.

My view from the 4th row

Sunday started with a Q&A about Saturday’s screening in which someone seemed baffled as to why we were given Night Of the Hunter to watch in the first place, apparently it seemed ‘slow and the acting was creaky’. Doh! A Thrillers and crime section followed which I was particularly excited by as I would happy attend a weekend seminar devoted merely to film noir if I had my way. Next up was the excellent Leslie Filperin from Variety with an great presentation called ‘Filmmaking for film lovers’ which highlighted what to look out for when watching films; from direction, sound FX, lighting and cinematography. She followed this up with a talk on Sci-Fi, which although not exactly my favourite genre of cinema, I also found hugely engaging due to Leslie’s obvious passion for the subject.

Next up came the Guardian’s pièce de résistance; we were shown Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life followed by a Q&A with director Stephen Frears and veteran producer Sandy Lieberson. I enjoyed the film and the Free Cinema movement is a fascinating one but I found the whole Q&A a little disappointing. Frears seemed a little bemused by proceedings, and memories of the swinging sixties (I guess if you can remember it you weren’t there) were hazy to say the least. Sandy has an impressive CV and when I asked about his relationship with the legendary Bob Evans, I was beguiled by the fact he used to be Evans’ agent. I’m not exactly what I learnt from either of them but it was certainly a coup by the organisers to get these two stalwarts of cinema to be involved. This was followed by our last lecture of the day by Danny entitled Groundbreakers of cinema which included clips from Man With a Movie Camera, Metropolis, Touch of Evil, Rashomon and Festen to name but a few. Again, here was another really interesting genre idea to examine and one which left me with plenty of previously unheard of film-makers to research.

So, what did I learn? Well, the course made me realise that I probably know more about cinema than I once thought. This may sound trivial but I’m hoping it will give me the confidence to start writing about film a professional capacity and perhaps venture into broadcasting. I also found Danny particularly approachable and he promised to be on hand should I need any help or advice which is very generous; it’s also encouraging to know that he doesn’t come from a film studies or journalism background either. I was very impressed with Kings Place as a venue and I think whatever your level of interest in film, you could have made use of much offered on this course.

The true test of a film?

Compressed air. Turbulence. Barely audible dialogue. A screen the size of a post-it note and absolutely no legroom. Not the ideal conditions for watching movies but when you’re on a 7-hour flight and you have a film blog to maintain then you have little option. Plus it might be useful to see if any of these films can transcend the confines of an aircraft and still manage to entertain. I don’t usually review new films (there are far too many superior old ones to recommend) but I thought a break in tradition would be interesting. I squeezed 3 and 3/4 films in during my recent trip to the Big Apple and here’s what I thought….

George Clooney as Jack and Violante Placido as tart-with-a-heart Clara

The American (2010): I remember The Guardian’s Jason Solomans waxing lyrical that this performance could be George Clooney’s best bet for an Oscar. Perhaps the fact that he hasn’t even been nominated might tell you something. Clooney stars as Jack, a jaded hit-man hiding out in the Italian hills waiting for details of his last job. In the meantime, someone’s trying to kill him. He’s also managed to strike up an unlikely friendship with a local priest while at the same time romancing the beautiful Clara-perhaps the most implausibly attractive prostitute since Jessica Alba in The Killer Inside. As you would expect with Corbin, everything looks fantastic and is framed flawlessly but unsurprisingly perhaps this examination of existentialism and ennui left me feeling slightly underwhelmed. My ambivalence towards Jack was intentional I’m sure but as a consequence, I didn’t really care either way what became of him. Perhaps the most interesting character is fellow assasin Mathilde but unfortunately her story is never really developed due to the plot twist. As I found with Control, Corbin has a rather cold and detached eye as a director. This worked particularly well with the bleak backdrop of 1970s Manchester but here it just felt like he was holding me at arm’s length.

Guy Pierce as Leckie and James Frecheville as Joshua Cody

Animal Kingdom (2010): Very promising debuts from both writer/director David Michod and actor James Frecheville. Animal Kingdom is a riveting study of the gradual disintegration of the family unit. The Codys are three brothers who’ve made their livings from crime (namely armed robbery and drugs) and are held together by the matriarchal mother Janine (played with expert menace by the Oscar nominated Jacki Weaver). Due to the death of his mother Julia Cody to a drugs overdose, Joshua has little choice but to stay with his estranged grandmother and immediate family-a situation his mother had previously tried to avoid. Will the young Cody be enveloped in this criminal fraternity or will the armed robbery squad’s Guy Pierce manage to keep him on the straight and narrow? A brief glimmer of hope is provided in Joel Edgerton’s flawed but sympathetic character Baz who appears to provide a stable (if unorthodox) paternal role for Joshua but elsewhere the portents aren’t looking too good for him. This is a taught ensemble piece. The cast is immaculate; from Ben Mendlesohn’s gloriously unhinged Andrew through to Dan Willey’s highly dubious lawyer Ezra White. Special mention goes to Jacki Weaver’s Janine who gives her not only strength and power but just the slightest hint of incestuous love for her disturbing brood.

Leo watches in awe as Ellen Page unleashes some origami on Paris’ sorry ass!

Inception (2010): Do you remember when The Matrix came out and some of your friends surprised and disappointed you with embarrassing guff about how it was a life changing cinema experience? Unfortunately, I heard some equally silly notions about this film; including the fact that it’s really confusing. Well, if you can’t get to grips with the notion of dreams within dreams then yes, you’ll probably struggle with this enjoyable but instantly forgettable film. The title of the movie refers to the method of entering into someone’s dreams and stealing secrets for gain-in this instance it’s corporate espionage. Leo DiCaprio heads up the team of dream hackers but he’s also on a final mission which he hopes will reunite him and his estranged children. The two most memorable scenes are ones you’ve probably seen in the trailers; the obnoxious girl from Juno folding Paris in on itself and the two blokes fighting up the walls and on the ceiling-and very bloody impressive they are too. So despite some serious turbulence, disgusting veggie pasta airline food and a tiny screen never more than 12” from my face, Inception still worked. Problematically, I have issues with DiCaprio which I’ll admit aren’t necessarily his fault. I think he can act well enough but he just looks a tad too young and lightweight to play this kind of adult action role (imagine how uncomfortable I was during The Aviator). Anyway, aside from any personal misgivings I have about the star, the supporting cast do a good job of taking themselves very seriously (Tom Hardy gives a nice performance) and they all tackle the action sequences with great aplomb which helps propel the film along at a decent pace. So, although this kind of nonsense isn’t really my cup of (weak airline) tea, it passed a couple of those red-eye hours quite comfortably.

Michael Douglas gives tips on screen presence to Whatshisname

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010): Who the f*ck is Shia LaBeouf? I’ve no idea. Anyway, I put this film on knowing full well that we would have touched down in Heathrow just before it finished; that’s how much I thought I was going to enjoy it. In hindsight, I probably should have started it as we taxied because the opening scenes of Gordon Gekko being released from prison and getting handed back his silk hankie and Rolex watch were about as good as it got. For reasons I cannot explain I really want to like an Oliver Stone movie. I really enjoy some of the things he does. Salvador is a really good film. I thought the much maligned The Doors was great value. Try and think about the assassination of Kennedy without thinking ‘back and to the left, back and to the left’. Somehow he fails to deliver once again with this pointless sequel to Wall Street. The recent global financial meltdown should have been the perfect opportunity to refresh the themes of corporate greed and the dangers of the American dream but to do so in such an inane and unimaginative way is disappointing for a director as obviously talented as Stone. LaBeouf stars as Jake, a hot-shot young broker-with-a-heart with interests in renewables (the noughties version of a capitalist) who just happens to be in a relationship with Gekko’s daughter (played charmlessly by Carey Mulligan). Jake finds himself teaming up with her father in order to exact revenge on Josh Brolin’s character Bretton James, whom he holds responsible for the suicide of his old mentor. Douglas is hugely watchable as the seemingly benign Gekko (his line ‘Stop telling lies about me and I’ll stop telling the truth about you’ is a corker) but whenever he wasn’t on screen I just found myself consulting the in-flight safety manual for stimulation. I never did catch the end…

Marlow (Bogart) and Dorothy Malone’s bookshop seduction scene

The Big Sleep (1946): If you’re a fan of Raymond Chandler novels then you’re bound to be a little disappointed by any big screen adaptation. The simple fact is that no actor can really come close to the wise-cracking, charming, hard-boiled-but-cultured private detective Philip Marlowe. Certainly not some lisping, short arse called Humphrey surely?! It’s well known that Chandler wanted Marlowe to be portrayed by the debonair Cary Grant (think Roger Moore 007) but director Howard Hawks plumped for an altogether tougher and world-weary looking Bogart and this choice turned out to be quite inspired. Bogart has buckets of contempt on screen and it’s these darker Marlowe traits that Hawks employs to good measure here. The studio was very keen to shoehorn a little light relief and romance into the original story (to help the war effort) and Bogart’s Marlowe provides a nice contrast. The story is pretty convoluted so I won’t confuse you with it here. However, to bemoan the lack of cohesive narrative is missing the point somewhat. I would never accuse Chandler of style-over-content but famously, when quizzed by the director as to who killed the chauffer Owen Taylor in the story, he simply told Hawks ‘I’m damned if I know.’ Anyway, this matters not as there’s more than enough here to keep your mind off the plot! The newly married Bacall and Bogart fizzle nicely and suggestively throughout. Pin-up Martha Vickers plays the Lolita-like Carmen with great aplomb (she was 19 at the time) and there are some great little cameos (look out for the very saucy book store scene with Dorothy Malone). Despite my continued reservations that somehow The Big Sleep isn’t quite dark, angular and bleak enough to be the definitive noir (don’t get me started), it’s one hell of a stylish, sleek and sharp piece of art.

Richard Gere (Tony) and Diane Keaton (Theresa Dunn)

Looking For Mr Goodbar (1977): Ah, the halcyon days of New York City; dirty, sleezy and dangerous. The 70s; where every day could be your last and Washington Square in Manhattan’s Lower East Side was populated by the druggie underbelly rather than the affluent middle classes pushing Bugaboos around. Looking For Mr Goodbar follows the exploits of 20-something teacher Theresa Dunn (Diane Keaton) who rebels against her strict Catholic upbringing and finds herself embarking on a doomed mission to find sexual enlightenment with a succession of random suitors. The film is based on a famous murder case which was later popularised by Judith Rossner’s book of the same name. Unaware of this, I viewed it very much as an examination of women’s liberation, the breakdown of the traditional family model and of the sexual and emotional relationships involved. I only became suspicious when Keaton’s relationship with Richard Gere (his first film appearance and an obvious precursor his role as Julian in American Gigolo) turns sour and she befriends the violent, emotionally volatile and sexually ambiguous Tom Berringer in a bar. Aside from the powerful and shocking finale, director Richard Brooks sucessfully re-creates the nightlife and associated lowlife of New York City’s clubs and bars and both Keaton and Weld give strong performances. There are some nice visual touches, the script is snappy and Keaton’s Theresa is a hugely complex character who’s full of sadness, anger and love. I found it impossible not to empathise with her.

Marco (Marco Macor) and Ciro (Ciro Petrone) as the Tony Montana wannabes

Gomorrah (2008): This is an unconventional and lugubrious gangster film. There’s no rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack accompanying herculean cocaine abuse, no glamorous molls and certainly no wise-cracking dialogue for students to memorize and quote verbatim at any opportunity. For all these reasons we should be thankful for Matteo Garrone’s adaptation of Roberto Saviono’s expose of the Neapolitan crime syndicate known as the Camorra. We open on a gangland slaying in a cheap beauty salon which largely sets the tone for the rest of the movie. Three men are gunned down while they’re topping up their tans and getting manicures respectively. We see their blood-soaked and overweight naked bodies in the strangely clinical ultra violet (or ultra-violent) light of the tanning booths. We don’t know the characters involved so we’re not given the chance to feel compassion or empathy; and it’s this arm’s length approach that remains throughout. There is a modicum of light relief courtesy of a couple of young would-be-gangsters who are hopelessly caught up in a Hollywood dream, quoting Scarface and waving stolen guns around; however, they eventually experience the Camorra’s own special brand of justice. It’s the pervasive reach of the Cammora that we encounter a host of characters from pitiless money-men and low-level dealers, to respectable tailors and waste management officials; none of whom are particularly sympathetic-bar perhaps the dress-maker. So friends end up as enemies, families rat on each other for the sake of a few Euros and the money earned from various nefarious activities ends up financing legal ones throughout the world. This is a cold-eyed view of the realities of organized crime. De Palma or Scorcese it ain’t…

Max Records is crowned King of the monsters. Yawn.

Where The Wild Things Are (2010): Even though I’m particularly adtriot at being slothful, I massively resented having to spend an hour and a half watching this ill-conceived adaptation of Maurice Sendack’s classic children’s picture book. Where The Wild Things Are is a very slight (if beautifully illustrated) story about a mischievous boy Max who dreams he sails to a little island inhabited my monsters who crown him as their king but things soon turn sour as he has to escape their subsequent carnivorous advances. And that’s about it as far as the synopsis goes. Fine for a 7 year old but the alarm bells were ringing when I heard they were going to try and strech a movie out of it. At least there are no musical numbers. Max is a little sh*t who quite frankly deserves a beating-ADD or not. The appearence of the ubiquitous Catherine Keener also put my back up; ‘Quick, we’re shooting a Kaufmann/Jonze quirky indie and we need a kookie-but-cute mom type. Get Keener!’. I found the monsters rather hard to warm too as well; they just seemed like the giant furry equivalent of the ageing hipster dullards that give Williamsburg a bad name. Maybe I should be thankful that they weren’t blue and CGI. Where The Wild Things Are is a strangely cold and flat film; even the presence of Tony Soprano couldn’t save it.