One heckuva film !

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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13 December

* Contains spoilers *

Gone with the Wind (1939), seen on Monday night, has been digitally restored, but still runs to 233 minutes...

One thing that one has to get over is its great nostalgia for The South as it was before the Civil War, because that meant slavery, however nice the O'Hara family was to its slaves. Another is that The United States were still segregated at the time of the film's making, as films like Michael Roemer's Nothing But a Man (1964) make clear.

Kitty Scarlett O'Hara, Gerald O'Hara's (Thomas Mitchell's) most winning daughter, is of course played by Vivien Leigh, who would have been around 25 at the time (and only lived until 53) - naturally, an accomplished piece of acting, however old she was supposed to be at the opening of the film, though, much as we might admire O'Hara, we can rarely like her. Leslie Howard, as Ashley Wilkes and about whom she was besotted, was (because of the war) to live to a similar age to Leigh, but was much Leigh's senior at around 45 at the time of filming.

(Such things would commonly matter much more now, as if these were times of greater verisimilitude... A long-shot of Tara, with the building so obviously painted in, or a red sky, supposed to be Atlanta burning, but clearly just a back-drop, is not, though, our modern expectation.)

One of the most striking things about the film, other than O'Hara's steadfast regard for Wilkes, is Max Steiner's music, which underpins so much of the action in a non-distracting way, but, when it wants to bring back the big themes of The South or of the family homestead Tara, does so unmistakably, and weaves in tunes such as Dixie.

Olivia de Havilland was wonderful in the digital restoration of Gone with the Wind (1939) at @CamPicturehouse - complete with intermission.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 9, 2013

Clark Gable (Rhett Butler) is one of the treasures of the film (38 at the time of filming), and with whom there necessarily is such chemistry with Leigh, believing that she might love him when he knows that (through having overheard, right at the beginning) all that is on her mind is Wilkes, and her carelessly losing two husbands before marrying Butler. The other is Olivia de Havilland's non-judgemental performance as Ashley Wilkes' cousin and wife Melanie, loving Butler and O'Hara much more than they can ever love her.

Rather meanly, O'Hara characterizes Butler, after seeing him for the first time at the ball at Seven Oaks, as 'able to see through my shimmy [sc. chemise] as if I weren't wearing it', which raises the issue of his licentiousness from the start - as if, in her own way, O'Hara were any less licentious, as time progresses, willingly dancing with Butler, although in mourning, at the fund-raising ball in Atlanta for The Confederate Southern Army shortly afterwards, where she has chosen to be because Wilkes will return there on leave.

With Melanie's death, apart from the disconcerting, famous lines, the film is but at an end, except for whether Scarlett will descend into her father's condition, or rise up to win back Rhett by going back to Tara (which she fought for, and then forgot about).


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

I was looking forward to the sheep... !

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

21 October (updated 23 October)

62 = S : 11 / A : 13 / C : 10 / M : 13 / P : 8 / F : 7 

A rating / review of Killer of Sheep (1977)

S = script
A = acting
C = cinematography
M = music
P = pacing
F = feel

Mid-point of scale (all scores out of 17) = 9


If I were told that Killer of Sheep (1977) came to be made because its director and cinematographer had been working on a commissioned documentary about an abattoir, and thought of weaving a human story around that of the sheep, I would readily believe it. They might also have had some unstaged footage of black children playing, which they could supplement.

One could almost jump mentally straight from there to Dinah Washington singing over the closing shots of massed sheep being herded up a ramp. The sheep have been far more alive than the adults talking to each other, encouraging action or belief, or heavily making a mess of an engine that they have troubled to bring down an exterior staircase and put on the back of a pick-up – though it must be said that this latter sequence, concerned as the abattoir is with motion and process, is nicely shot and put together.

Where life is utterly lacking is in reaction-shots, where it is abundant that what we have just seen is not what was being looked at, or where Stan’s wife (Kaycee Moore, seeking to allure), in an excruciatingly slow dance that feels like sleepwalking or involuntary movement during a coma set to a blues, touches his bare torso in a way that looks so forced that it is no wonder that it does not arouse Stan (Henry G. Sanders).

Some scenes of those children playing feel the same, and as fake as when two guys lug a t.v. over a back fence, but none of this has the ring of artifice that would have us know it as such, because one would not, at the same time, have a boy hiding behind a piece of panel, and only artfully reveal that the projectiles hitting it are part of a big military game, where positions are besieged or stormed. The film is, essentially, very uneven, and too rooted in the manners and behaviour of its time, as if, in themselves, they provide interest.

The clue may be in the title, but Killer of Sheep (1977) is an embarrassment after last week's screening of Nothing But a Man (1964).
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 21, 2013

At one point, we suddenly hear Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 4, at another the unmistakeable voice of Louis Armstrong with a fine clarinettist (‘West End Blues’), but both just steal from what is on screen, rather than adding to it – fine music cannot simply build up what has been filmed, if one is suddenly more aware of and drawn to those sounds and into identifying them.

There are a few nice touches, such as when Moore comes into the kitchen where Sanders and a friend are playing dominoes, and we have both heads momentarily telescoped together as if it were her point of view, but the camerawork only generally comes alive with action such as the engine, and hence the feeling that the parts of the film and their styles do not belong together.

Yes, the film wants to say something to us through the meaning of the Washington song ‘This Bitter Earth’ and the sheep (and Samsara (2011) could have its roots here, as Cloud Atlas (2012) might), but it has taken too much strain to get here, and it is simply a source of gratitude that, in some form, the end has now come.


Put another way (not to seem so hard on the film) :

Maybe the film is deeply clever, but it still seems like a one-trick pony : nice interchanges about the cousin, the uncle, the woman rubbing cream on her leg, but all just leading up to the sight-gag of the engine falling off the back - Laurel and Hardy with no laughs, no infuriated recriminations, just sheep-like acceptance.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Immediacy of the moment

This is a review of the re-release of Nothing But a Man (1964)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

15 October (updated 22 October)

This is a review of the re-release of Nothing But a Man (1964)

96 = S : 16 / A : 17 / C : 17 / M : 15 / P : 15 / F : 16


S = script
A = acting
C = cinematography
M = music
P = pacing
F = feel


I could estimate the running time of this film, but I do not wish to - doing so would only satisfy that curious sensation of how much cinema-time has elapsed.

I had heard the re-release of Nothing But a Man (1964) reviewed on BBC Radio 3's Night Waves [now Free Thinking], but nothing prepared me for the perfection of the picture quality - from its age, it must have been restored, and it has been done gorgeously in this digital re-issue.

This is a piece of work that is not afraid to keep you aware that cinema is a social construct, and it has just that remove, that distance to keep us from thinking that we are engaging - or want to engage - with it. By which I mean nothing bad, nothing that did not connect, for a moment, with feeling that we might stray into Georg Büchner's drama Woyzeck, but moved away again. Cinematically, starting with the chain-gang and the laying of railroad tracks, we have just the right level of interest, and the progression of the work seems effortless, with easy, fluid camerawork.

The story - for which I experience no need to seek out what some call a back story - is of a man (Ivan Dixon as Duff Anderson) not prepared to be a white man's nigger, which is what he calls the father (a preacher embodied by Stanley Greene) of the woman whom he marries (Josie, played by Abbey Lincoln), and so not finding things easy.

As the closing words say, it is not going to be so, but there is a finality through the arc of lives that has resolved towards the end. It is set, we are told, eight years since the last racial violence, and after Birmingham, Alabama, has been the home of lynchings : as Duff sees it, those lynchings still go on, but are of a different character.

Contemporaneous with Nothing But a Man, co-writer and director Michael Roemer seems only to have directed one other feature*, and then not to have done anything of this kind except with t.v. twenty years later, so it is hard to know what perspective a Berlin-born child of 1928 brought to these tensions, or how the film was received in the mid-1960s (now see below, on the latter point, and follow the links for how the film came to be made).


End-notes

* According to the Wikipedia® entry for the film, and that given by IMDb for Roemer, he started teaching at Yale University in 1966, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1971. He published a book in 1997, and a two-volume work in 2001, both relating to stories.

Despite winning the San Giorgio Prize at Venice Film Festival, being very favourably reviewed at New York Film Festival, and apparently being a favourite of Malcolm X's, the film was essentially only distributed in film theatres (i.e. cinemas) that specialized in independent and foreign films. In 1993, The Library of Congress selected it to be preserved in The National Film Registry, since when it has achieved a wider release and a warm reception.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)