1. CHRIS WITTY: British Film Noir

2. NATHAN GILMORE: Three Reviews

3. SAM STEPHENS: Doctor Zhivago

CHRIS WITTY: BRITISH FILM NOIR

Over on his substack Chris Witty excerpts a beautiful passage about British film noir by Quentin Tournour, and then offers his reviews of many of those hard-boiled classics which are underrepresented and underrated in the noir canon, and in older days scoffed at. We are in better times now and those British noirs can now be rediscovered and treasured for the masterpieces they are. Here is an excerpt of Witty’s review of Odd Man Out starring James Mason:

A strong contender for one of the best British films ever made, Odd Man Out stars James Mason as the Organisation man dying and on the run in an unnamed Northern Ireland city.

A film about the "troubles" without mention of the IRA or Belfast, this is an exceptional film, incorporating Greek tragedy, poetic realism, neorealism and film noir, the latter aspect due to Robert Krasker's high contrast cinematography. Like The Third Man, every shot is a piece of art; you could pause this film at any given moment and frame the shot on your wall.

Performance-wise, Mason is on fine form as Johnny McQueen, an almost mythological figure in the eyes of the kids who replay his shoot-outs with the cops, and the residents who peer from behind closed doors to avoid being questioned by the law. It's significant too that we hear his voice first before we see him, as though we're expected to recognise Mason's distinctive whisper as McQueen's own.

NATHAN GILMORE: THREE REVIEWS

“El Norte” (1983), dir. Gregory Naya. There are certain ways that a camera can interact with the way that a story is told. There is the one style, sometimes much in vogue, where artifice is shunned and gritty realism is the rule. Handheld cameras and shaky framing can imbue a scene with immediacy and life. The camera observes but does not interpret or embellish.

Then there are those films that employ artifice, either aesthetically or in service of a specific message, where the camera adds an imaginative layer to the raw material of reality. The camera processes the visual information that it takes in and changes something fundamental about it.

“El Norte” is firmly of the second type. It is as close as I have ever seen a director come to translating the literary movement of magical realism to the medium of film.

The story is simple, as all fables are.

The action is rooted firmly in realism. These are real people and the issues that they face are real, no less because they are trifling. In one scene, an old man instructs a young immigrant on the proper seasoning of his conversation with the f-word… “otherwise they’ll know you’re not Mexican.”

Not all obstacles are so gargantuan. A memorable moment finds Rosa staring down a hopelessly complicated washing machine. I felt a shock of pity, and of recognition, at that scene because as an immigrant, I have found myself in much the same circumstances, feeling much the same timidity and bewilderment, close kin to shame, that is so evident on Rosa’s face.

No amount of stumping, sloganeering or political rhetoric could ever touch the blood and guts of the immigrant experience— these immigrants’ experience— in quite the same way.

If the story is so intricately realistic, the imagery has something of the dream and the fable about it. The color palette is endlessly pleasing: greens, reds, blues; the ponchos and shawls and shirts that populate the screen pop out in a burst of color. This is not a fairytale, but it looks in places like one, and works upon the imagination in many of the same ways.

This is not a movie for kids, but the plainspoken honesty that is its common tongue would be understood by all but the youngest child.

“El Norte” could have taken one route: it could have given us the gutter-level view, the squalor of life in the slums. That tack would have set up the story, for certain. But it takes another nobler and more gracious approach. In its unabashed beauty, its sheer aestheticism, its unironic sentimentality, it elevates and humanizes.

Let us not here get entangled in the philosophical cessmire of immigration politics. Those who see it one way will be moved by this film in one way, those on the other side of the issue will see it in another.
The producer and the director denied any overt political agenda in their film, with a certain success, but overtones remain. If there is a square foot of common ground on which the two sides might meet, it is at least at the merest acknowledgment that these immigrants are people, not political issues. What this movie adds to the conversation/controversy is the human element. Merited or not, legal or not, their problems are real enough to make a long, uncomfortable journey seem not only necessary, but a matter of life and death. The film has been accused of melodrama, but a life of born poverty necessarily involves some melodrama— matters inevitably become life-and-death in the most literal sense.

And the literary sense. The twin underpinnings of this movie, the fundamental paradox at its core, is the juxtaposition of realism and fantasy that is woven throughout. Because the film has pulled no punches in casting itself in an artistic and symbolic mode, even the most quotidian and realistic events of the plot are imbued with a sense of symbolism, of literary significance. Consider the harrowing and infamous scene where Rosa is set upon by rats in the tunnel. It is both grittily real (the actress in real life is genuinely terrified of rats, yet insisted that real rodents be used) and deeply allegorical.

Both in the subject matter and the initial style, we the viewers have no reason to believe that stories like this do not play out every day, week after week, year after year in the forest hills and valleys of this lovely but beleaguered country, in the dim and distant backroads of frontier crossings, in the filthy ghettos of the border towns.

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“The Madness of King George” (1994), dir. Nicholas Hytner. Uneasy lies the head. “The Madness of King George” is set in that strangest of times, the near aftermath of the American Revolution. It is a mere twelve years since those rowdy colonials have thrown off their imperial shackles and Britain is now sullenly wondering if they might follow suit. The monarchy is on the way out.

If ever there was a time for a reigning monarch to fall victim to seeming madness, this is not it. Based on factual accounts, the story of King George’s “madness” (which many historians now believe to have been porphyria) seems primed for lowbrow comedy. One suspects the movie of as much, glancing at the cover photo of Nigel Hawthorne skipping down the halls of Buckingham. There is a pervading sense of humor: the madness emerges as more quirky than terrifying, and much is made of the royal chamber pots. A clumsier directorial hand would have stopped and wallowed here.

The movie does not so stoop. The show must go on. A good portion of it— pre-madness—is devoted to those myriad unseen but necessary details that go into maintaining a kingship— we see cohorts of courtiers move and machinate with the precision of the finest stage actors. For all the many people surrounding the kingship, this is the paradox at the heart of the institution: that all political power should be vested in a single person. When that person is not himself, what then of the country? If the king’s word is law, what does a nation do when the only word he utters is “peacock”?

In order for this movie to work, for these questions to be considered, we the viewers must have a proper and real sense of how important the monarchy was, even as it dwindles in power. We do. Now in these times, we are prone to look at the royalty of our friends overseas as charming, quaint, maybe with a little touch of envy as we see its pomp and romance. The monarchy, at its heart, has always depended on an element of showmanship. It is a production, a play with assigned characters and roles and choreography and memorized lines and costumes.

Until the moment when the leading actor begins to lose his reason. Then, the showmanship becomes not irrelevant, but paramount. The monarchy may be all pomp and circumstance, but the government is irretrievably tied up with pageantry. There is a pervading sense of showmanship about the entire affair. With no trace of superciliousness or brutality, Hytner strips away the trappings of the institution as surely and decisively as if he were changing bedclothes. The tonal mood is a good dose of 90’s levity, combined with the gravitas of the historical import of the matter at hand.

The movie is languorous, almost luxurious in its pace, with plenty of time devoted to pondering these questions. We see the younger generation rising up, a more forward-thinking class of politicians who imagine America might be forgiven and England brought much up-to-date.

A year later, Nigel Hawthorne would return to the monarchy in Richard Loncraine’s “Richard III” as Clarence, and he strikes the same note here: weak, timid, innocent and in over his head… but always aware of the position he holds, aware that the institution will survive him and his failings. There are, as well, Shakespearean shadings to his portrait of the king: the expected yet effective allusions to Lear, the self-reflective near-soliloquies that seem to come so naturally to Hawthorne.

Helen Mirren, who would make her return to the cinematic throne in “The Queen”, is an interesting choice for the German-born Queen. The most British of actors, here she is self-possessed, an outsider who struggles to find her place in society but not in her personal world, where she is firmly and fiercely devoted to George.

Ian Holm is perfectly cast as George’s doctor— part confidant, part exorcist, part father figure— and a large bit of the movie’s entertainment comes from the battle of wills between these two stubborn old men.

I have always preferred my historical dramas salty, sour, or bitter, rather than sweet. “The Madness of King George” pulls off a neat, near-impossible trick: it is all of these at once, as well as being literate and popular, accessible and theatrical.

I haven’t enjoyed a movie this much in a long time.

—

“Doctor Zhivago” (1965), dir. David Lean. A sound and fury, signifying… what? “Dr. Zhivago” presents a refined and genteel version of the Russian Revolution. David Lean’s characteristic style of bustling scenes and lavish set designs and minutely-detailed art direction is on full display, in the sort of movie we don’t get much any more. The plot is a mildly interesting setup for a love triangle, but doesn’t do much with itself.

My problem with “Dr Zhivago” is that it’s an old-fashioned movie trying to wrestle with the ideas of a brave new world. The movie, in my mind, stands in the shadow of that other epic of the Russian Revolution, Franklin J. Schaffner’s “Nicholas and Alexandra”. The later film was so overtly sympathetic to the royalists that few nuances survived its romanticism. However, the romanticism is far more authentic than in “Dr. Zhivago”.

Zhivago is neither a communist nor a socialist, and does not occupy any position of real importance in the sweep of history. He is a doctor and a poet, and his circle is small. Likewise, his world within the Revolution is small. He spends most of the war on a pretty little hamlet with his lady, reading the somehow always-available newspaper (“Oh Lord, not another purge!”)

Omar Sharif as an actor seems slightly outmatched by the plot, squinting vaguely at people while delivering monologues not quite addressed to them. They are, of course, addressed to us, the Moviegoing Posterity, but I wonder that the people around him have any patience for it, being, as the are, in the middle of a violent revolution.

“The personal life is dead in Russia”, he pronounces at one point. The problem that, for all his wistful gazing into ladies’ eyes (and also the camera), it seems to be dead in his character.

SAM STEPHENS: DOCTOR ZHIVAGO

Doctor Zhivago is far from my favorite film, but it does fall into that category which I call great. The Last Emperor, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and The Witch are two others I feel the same way about. They are excellent and perhaps enjoyable, but for different reasons. They don't inveigle their way into my affections. But that does not mean they weren't worth my time or worth yours. I saw Doctor Zhivago for the first time years ago, well into the DVD era, but on VHS—an important detail. In dvd cases every movie looks standard and equal. But in the VHS era you understood better that certain movies were BIG. Lawrence of Arabia, Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, Quo Vadis, and...Doctor Zhivago. You saw those double video-tapes and you knew you were gonna see a big movie. That fact as much as anything else was exciting. It was special. Now those old running times are considered a point against the films, an obstacle to be overcome. Not so for me.

The story of Doctor Zhivago is a true Russian tragedy-romance. Only a Russian like Pasternak would make rape and its consequences the central event on which the story must turn. The scene is burned into my mind. We are meant to be horrified by it, of course, but also to remember it. Lara endures. Zhivago, a poet, is making his own way. He is married when he meets Lara. I don't know what it is about British and Russian cultures, but on film they treat affairs with a sort of cold, inevitable dignity. They don't say they are moral and they don’t say they aren’t tragic (in contrast, the French treat them very humorously), but the women involved are never shown hating each other. It had to be David Lean, British, and a chronic philanderer, who made the film version of the book.

With its director and cast the film is perhaps more British than Russian, offering no extreme position on politics. Zhivago’s reality is one that hates extremes. I think that had to be Lean’s position too, who was patriotic but not a jingoist.

The story is a picaresque chronicle, not a true history, and so it glides by, beautifully evocative but insistently unphilosophical. Even love is not its philosophy. Only Zhivago’s love for Lara matters. The ugliness of the world around them, in contrast to their love, mattered only because it was an interruption of their love. Pasternak’s necessary critique of Soviet politics was aimed at a western audience, but with a White Russian (non-communist) as its cruel villain to gratify the politburo at home. So it isn’t perfect, but it is grand and beautiful and a tapestry of life that I really enjoy.