kennethwright45 Reviews

The Old Dark House (1932)

Have a potato ...

[9/10 · 11 November 2003]

While perfectly enjoyable as a camp comedy of manners (that element comes courtesy of director James Whale) and as an elegant, low-key horror, The Old Dark House can best be appreciated when you know a little about JB Priestley, author of the source play Benighted. (Or was it originally a novel? It definitely exists as a stage play, at any rate.)

Priestley was an English playwright, novelist, radio broadcaster and journalist who became very well known in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s for presenting a kindly, commonsensical version of socialism and community spirit to a nation battling through the Great Depression, the Second World War and its aftermath. Several of his plays combine a supernatural or at least mysterious strain with an allegorical message about the importance of unselfishness and people working together to help one another. If you watch The Old Dark House with these points in mind you may see it in a more moving and profound light. Dangerous Corner and An Inspector Calls are similar examples of his work, still popular in Britain with amateur drama groups and touring theatre companies.

If you can, see Old Dark House and Whale's later Bride of Frankenstein as a home video double bill and compare Ernest Thesiger's delightfully feline and remarkably similar performances as Horace Femm and Dr Praetorius. "Have a potato" and "Have some gin" may well become part of your private family language for ever after.

Harvey (1950)

And how are you today, Mr Wilson?

[10/10 · 14 October 2003]

Perhaps the sweetest, saddest and kindest of all talkie comedies. Its shameless sentimentality could have been cloying but for the way the gently kooky script squeezes the odd dash of lemon into the cocktail; similarly, its fine balance between naturalism and fantasy allows it to get away with things that would have been embarrassingly maudlin in a more literal-minded film. That's why I always seem to get something stuck in my eye when Elwood P Dowd goes into his "Harvey and I have things to do ..." speech.

Among a great ensemble cast, I'd like to drop down the credits a little to say a word for Harry Hines in the small but delightful role of Mr Miggles, the ageing jailbird whom Elwood invites to dinner. (He's been away for a while, "doing some work for the government ... making licence plates".) This was Hines's film debut at the age of 60, and it started him off on a busy and distinctive career in character parts as mildly disreputable but good-hearted old geezers, with hardly a change in costume or make-up from one film to the next. You can see him in the finale of Strangers on a Train as the old carny hand who crawls under the speeding carousel to stop the ride.

Here's a wicked little thought to close with: I'd love to see a TV channel or repertory cinema show Harvey as the top half of a drinking man's double bill ... with The Lost Weekend as supporting feature.

The Shining (1980)

Nasty, brutish and long

[3/10 · 4 October 2003]

Though the best part of three hours long, The Shining simply flies past like an Andy Warhol triple bill: it's the very slowest commercial film I ever did see. Made by the world's most overrated director (who directed the world's most overrated film, 2001), with the world's second most charmless star (Jack Nicholson narrowly loses out to Marlon Brando in the Face You'd Never Tire of Kicking stakes), from a tuppenny-ha'penny shocker by arrested adolescent Stephen King, its reputation and popularity make a depressing comment on the decline of the movies.

Depressing also describes the film itself: it's far too ponderous and literal ever to be pleasurably scary, settling instead for presenting a succession of predictably edited horrors that each go on for a sadistically long time. A handful of bravura visual touches only help draw attention to the miles of slow-motion stodge separating them. However, I will allow that connoisseurs of the thrills to be savoured from watching women and children being systematically terrorised are in for the treat of their lives.

The Shining pretty much signalled the end of the intelligent and tasteful horror/spook film as a paying proposition, speeding the genre's descent into gore, grue and titillation. But it does improve one's appreciation of an earlier and less pretentious era of trash horror, typified by the films of William Castle and Roger Corman. Beside The Shining, drive-in teensploitation flicks like The Tingler and Fall of the House of Usher seem as scary as Don't Look Now, as funny as I Married a Witch, as poignant as Bride of Frankenstein, and - best of all - as short and fast as an episode of The Addams Family. Y'know what? They're just not making good rubbish like they used to ...

Body Heat (1981)

Evil under the Florida sun

[6/10 · 22 September 2003]

Body Heat is a watchable but inferior neo-noir homage to the "darling, let's kill your husband" adultery classics Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice - mainly Double Indemnity. Although the premise is the same in all three films, the plot details are too diverse for Body Heat to be called a remake of either of the older features; however, almost every significant character in Double Indemnity has his or her parallel in Body Heat, which one can't say of The Postman Always Rings Twice.

The 1981 film's biggest problem is a structural one: the first act, setting up the motive of sexual obsession, goes on far too long. The reason it goes on so long is its second problem: too much explicit sex. This isn't a prudish complaint, but a dramatic one. Explicit sex is dramatically null because it practically never advances the story and it seldom even illuminates character; usually it just stops a film dead, and the longer it goes on, the deader it stops it. (It also alienates those viewers, such as myself, who don't care to be invited to be voyeurs.)

Consequently, Body Heat - a densely plotted film even by noir standards - is left with an awful lot of plot to pack into its second act, and the second half's dialogue and structure suffer from the need to make every line and scene contribute to the explication. A complicated story isn't a bad thing in itself. If it's clearly told - as in David Mamet's labyrinthine House of Games - we can follow it first time around. To say that the plot of Body Heat needs several viewings to be understood, as some reviewers on this site have quite rightly said, is not really a compliment.

To look on the positive side, which involves overlooking the blandness of William Hurt and Kathleen Turner's performances (compare them with the guilt-fired sexual derangement of Lana Turner, Fred MacMurray and John Garfield in the older films), there are good things about Body Heat. Ted Danson plays the film's most amiable role, that of Hurt's best friend, almost as touchingly as Edward G Robinson in the corresponding part in Double Indemnity. Mickey Rourke reminds us poignantly of the years when he was a very good actor. The Florida-summer setting is effectively employed as a perverse, ironic reversal of the traditional noir backdrop of darkness and rain. And it has aged gracefully: nothing about it screams 1980s! at you.

The film as a whole is a professional, intelligently manufactured piece of work that sets out to entertain a grown-up audience. That it looks like a classic to so many film fans today, however, is mainly a comment on how limited and juvenile are the ambitions of mainstream Hollywood cinema less than one generation later.

A Rage in Harlem (1991)

Sing it again, Screamin' Jay!

[9/10 · 12 September 2003]

(Includes one minor spoiler, but it's unrelated to the plot and really more of a recommendation.)

Surprised to see so few votes and comments for A Rage in Harlem - it was a modest commercial hit in Britain, so perhaps the all-black casting and setting just didn't play Peoria.

The tone of this stylish, good-looking period crime adventure swings wildly between brutal, raunchy, tragic and comic, but a clever, funny script and likeable characters - especially Gregory Hines's big-hearted wiseguy Goldy, but also several delightfully written minor roles - maintain attention and sympathy throughout what could otherwise have been a bumpy ride. It's an emotionally engaging film, much more character-driven than the average urban thriller of the 1990s.

Its purely incidental pleasures are many, topped by a splendid musical treat in the shape of cult R 'n' B hero Screamin' Jay Hawkins, giving a no-holds-barred performance of his voodoo classic I Put a Spell on You at the Harlem Undertakers' Ball. If you have a taste for the old school of black show business, this sequence will have you holding up the rest of the picture until you've given Screamin' Jay an encore.

Thrills, laughs, and pathos, dished up with verve and heart, make a film that many of us still remember very affectionately.

Jammin' the Blues (1944)

Cool for cats

[10/10 · 8 September 2003]

Simply but imaginatively filmed studio-set performance short, a perfect match of music and images that defines the very coolness of cool and the hipness of hip. The precise visual and musical arrangements give the lie to its claim to be a record of a jam session: what it is, is a pop video - every bit as stylised and knowing as that implies, and all the better for it. Among the very best music films ever made, and almost certainly the most cinematic. These cats are solid gone, daddy-o ...

The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)

Kissed off

[1/10 · 7 September 2003]

Charmless, dim, and entirely unloveable action trash with an unsympathetic protagonist, a style-free script and a pair of non-actor leads . . . but what about its bad points?

Mainly, it lacks the sense of the ridiculous that makes many equally silly actioners (eg the Terminators, Die Hards, Lethal Weapons, etc) far more enjoyable. Any humour it possesses comes in the form of crude wisecracks and comedy violence, while it plays its puerile scenario and story-line with dog-faced seriousness. On the side of positive unpleasantness, much of the action appeals to sheer sadism - one sequence combines torture with a wet-lingerie show - and there's something not far from fascism in the way it assumes our unquestioning willingness to root for a government assassin.

None of this is helped by Geena Davis's perky, smug punchability or Samuel L Jackson's standard recreation of a groovy-black-perp supporting role from an old episode of Kojak, but better performances by more likeable players would have been a waste of talent and craft. That Long Kiss Goodnight died at the cinemas like a louse in a hobo's beard is the only remotely enjoyable thing about it - it suggests that it's still possible to lose money by insulting the public's intelligence.