Wyler

I was surprised to find that William Wyler's film "The Desperate Hours" was not included in David Thomson's book "Have you Seen?" Evidently he doesn't rate it as highly as the others included, like "Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein". Again, I was equally surprised that the film was given a one star rating in "Helliwell's Film Guide". It's a good film. Maybe it suffers a little from it being an adaptation of a theatre play by Joseph Hayes and that he himself wrote the screeplay - theatre dramatists are not usually the best people to adapt work for the quite different style involved in film making, even if it is their own work; indeed this may create greater barriers to its success since the writer sees the action taking place on one set (usually in those days) and cannot visualise going outside that set. When this is done you can usually see that the action outside the "one set" is forced on the story - it is taken outside merely to show the audience that "this is a film not a play".
But William Wyler, the film's director, surely helped make it fairly presentable as a film. He had done it before in 1936 with "These Three", adapted from the play "The Children's Hour" by Lillian Hellman; she also did the adaptation to screen. He remade this film later in the 60's with a different cast, Audrey Hepburn and Shirley Maclaine. Neither of these two film are in Thomson's book and this one, like "The Desperate Hours", is only given one star in Halliwell's book.
I think Wyler is a better film director than either of these pundits claim; he made some fine films over a long career: "Dodsworth" from a novel by Sinclair Lewis is a fine study of an ageing business man; "Dead End" seemed good in its day and had a raw edge to it (another from a stage play - and it showed); "The Letter", a masterpiece (again from a play by Somerset Maugham); "The Westerner", a fine western with an oscar performance from Walter Brennan and an equally good performance from Gary Cooper; "The Best Years of your Life "; "The Heiress" with an almost frightening performance from Ralph Richardson; "Detective Story" with Kirk Douglas; "Roman Holiday", Audrey Hepburn's best film I think; "The Big Country". Those are some of them. "The Desperate Hours" ranks alongside them I believe with two outstanding performances from Humphrey Bogart and Frederick March.

British Films

One day in the library in Cardiff some years back, I came across a friend of mine who held a rather large book in his hands. He had a great, cynical sort of grin on his face. "Look at this," he said in a way that could have meant ''Have you ever seen anything like this?'. He showed me the title: "Masterpieces of the British Cinema". I had to laugh. Neither of us believed there was such a thing never mind more than one. We had, I suppose, been brought up on American films: Bogart, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Edward G. Robinson films. Gangster films, westerns, musicals. We considered British films to be inferior and I think we were right. Though in retrospect I think we, or I anyway, weren't used to the kind of film the British studios were producing.
Simon Heffer is giving a series of talks this week on Radio 3 (at 11 pm every night, a time when most of us are in bed - well done BBC!) on, maybe not actual masterpieces of the British cinema but quality films that were made during the war and which were reflecting on our island's way of life before the war and wondering what it would be like afterwards. Films that were essentially revolutionary in content and intent (most studios were, he said, full of socialists).
The first film he highlighted was "Went the day Well". He didn't say so but I have the feeling the idea came from Graham Greene, maybe a short story? A troup of soldiers arrives at an archetypal English country town and wishes to have help from the villagers in a project that they have in mind. However, they are not English at all though they seem to be: they are Germans there to disrupt communications - or some such thing. They are brutal and start to take over the village, killing some, threatening to kill schoolchildren - in short carry out what we believed were typically German atrocities.
I saw this film some years ago and thought it a real thriller. I have to say that I was amazed to find that here was a British film that, while keeping that special quality of Englishness - the local yokels were there, the vicar was there (the first to be shot), the grand lady was there - all the stereotypes were there, it painted a picture of a Britain in which all pulled together, one society working together, class barriers pulled down and so on.
OK, it never happened but to a degree it did: the Atlee government brought in reforms the like of which the country had never seen, a National Health Service came into being, children from all kinds of homes were educated to a higher level than ever before, people went to universities from quite ordinary backgounds and so on.
The next film he talked about was "A Canterbury Tale" which I did not like when I saw it years ago. He called it a masterpiece - maybe there was one after all then! It flopped at the box office. After Heffer's talk I'd like to see it again; seems there was more in it that met the eye.

Films

When I was a kid I went to the cinema a few evenings a week and again on Saturday morning when it was full of kids of all ages up to about 13; they showed a cartoon or two, a "main feature" - usually one of the B pictures shown in the week (which I had already seen!) - and a serial: Flash Gordon or Buck Jones or The Lone Ranger. We never knew who had directed these films. I doubt in those days if anyone knew. Directors' names were not known. Maybe you'd see the name on the screen at the start of the film but you took no notice of it. When you went to see a film you went because you liked the actor or because someone had told you it was good. The newspapers' reviews, if there were any, weren't read. I doubt if most people knew the name Alfred Hitchcock.
Then something happened. In France. The New Wave of critics and film makers came along and began talking and writing about directors as creative artists. Indeed it was in France that Hitchcock became revered first. Then gangster films were glorified - "Film Noire" became the descriptive term for them, surely coming from the New Wave gang.
I'm not sure the same sort of trend is relevant today because there are so many directors out there who are technically brilliant. I have seen four or five excellent films over the past decade or so which are brilliant in most respects for their scripts. Get a good script, maybe, and anyone with any feeling could direct it.
That's a bit of a simplicity maybe but directors these days don't seem to have a particular style about which you can say that his second or third films are examples of it. Good directors like Ridley Scott do such variable work. The director of "The Usual Suspects" has not made a better film yet (he had a superb script for that film).
But against this I have to say that Roman Polanski's latest film "The Ghost" shows he hasn't lost his touch.

50 Top Films

Here we go again: a list of the 50 best films, this time from The Spectator magazine. Some time ago Orson Welles's "Citizen Kane" always took pride of place at the top of these lists; now it hardly ever does. Here it is at No. 14; and here too is "The Magnificent Ambersons" which most people would, I think, have put at a lower level (if appearing at all) - here it is at No. 7! There is a lot of doubt about whether Welles was completely in charge of the filming of "Ambersons"; certainly the editing of it was not done solely by Welles who, I believe, "washed his hands" of the project since the producers wanted so many changes, believing it to be a money-loser. They were right. It's a hard film to like. There is one outstanding performance in it though; not only outstanding but altogether surprising. Tim Holt, a B picture actor, gave a great performance as a rather "spoilt child" of a young man (his other great performance in film was in "Treasure of Sierra Madre").
There is one serious omission from the list I believe: "Shane". It's never in any list now that I know of. A superb masterpiece of a Western, better than any.... OK, maybe "The Searchers" is as good - that is on the list at No. 6. And where is "High Noon"?
Film critics of newspapers used to offer their lists of best films to a certain newspaper or magazine (was it "Sight and Sound"?) and someone would compile a "critics list" from them. I recall Dilys Powell, well known film critic then, writing that she would have liked to have included a couple of Laurel and Hardy "shorts" in her list - probably not allowed or maybe they would have been deemed "fascetiously chosen". She was quite serious. Why not? Those L and H "shorts" are wonderful. Well, some are.
The No 1 in this list is a surprising choice, directed by an actor, his one and only film as director; not a popular film, one that produced heaps of problems in its making, and one that is not just frightening but alarming in a way that makes me sometimes feel that I shouldn't be watching it as if I am watching porn. The film is "The Night of the Hunter" directed by Charles Laughton with an astonishingly unsentimental and real personification of a religious basket case by Robert Mitchum.
Here are a few films on the Speccie list that I think should not have been included: "The Red Shoes" (No. 20); "Blade Runner" (No. 17); "Le Grande Illusion" (no. 13); "Rio Bravo"(no. 10); "The Magnificent Ambersons" (No. 7).

Jargon

I was once at a teacher's union meeting where a man got to his feet and spoke for some five minutes and, though he sounded highly intelligent, used words that seemed perfectly OK, I must say I did not understand a single sentence - I understood separate words but when they were strung together I could not fathom what he was saying.
Martin Vander Meyer, in an article in which he speaks (intelligently, cogently) about the dreadful council tax writes that at a meeting he attended there was a debate about 'regional biodiversity strategy' (?). Someone said it "has a major role to play in contributing to the development of the Integrated Regional Strategy, as conservation of biodiversity is a core pillar of sustainable development." That's good to know, he said with an exclamation mark attached.
It's crazy: when committees are formed a certain kind of language develops or, rather, evolves that is full of the sort of jargon only members of the committee comprehend.
A long time ago I attended a weekend course (get together more like) on Film in Education; one of the leading lights of the course was a man from the magazine "Screen", maybe its editor. Whenever he spoke I made it my aim to try to understand what he was saying, but not once was I satisfied. He spoke in a jargon that, probably, other "Screen" people would have understood but I didn't. Individual words I knew (most of them) but strung together they were, to me meaningless.
I had, I felt, been duped into attending this conference thinking it had to do with Film in Education whereas what it turned out to be was an effort to introduce Film Study into the GCSE (then O level) syllabus. They had invited a man from a government department to come and speak to them and listen to their arguments. He came, dressed in a suit with stiff colar and tie - he came, I felt, straight out of an Ealing comedy depicting a government minister. His face was pale, humourless and composed like a doctor's as he listened to the arguments (including one from our "Screen" rep whose contribution, of course I did not follow) and when everyone had finished he spoke. It was almost beautiful. Calmly, logically, as if working on a specimen that needed a thorough examination, he cut all the arguments to pieces and after he had done so, he left, placing his government trillby firmly on his head and saying goodbye to the stunned audience.
I have never beheld such a thorough demolition of what had seemed (when I could follow them) sensible points of view, leaving them scattered to the air like so much chaff. He spoke words that anyone could have understood - anyone!. It wasn't jargon, it wasn't even government inspired jargon, it was plain speaking like Fowler urges us to speak.

Real people in fiction

I have just seen the film "The Last King of Scotland" which features Idi Amin (played well by Forest Whitaker). But the main character in the film is a Scottish doctor who goes to Uganda to help and to have a good time. Did the person really exist? I don't think he did. We'd surely have heard the news of what happened to him there - pretty horrible stuff - and how he escaped to tell the story of the brutal regime.
So while I enjoyed the film, liked the acting, the setting in Africa, the various characters and their way of life, I was continually up against the feeling I always have in such dramas - I ask myself: "If he isn't a real person then what else in the film is untrue?"
I felt this when I saw a film about the four Irishmen who were unjustly imprisoned for years after being accused of bombing a city in England: the main character was in the same prison as his father.... But he never really was. So, I ask myself: "Should I believe any of this, is any of it true?"
Apparently the newish film "Hunger", about Bobby Sands, has similar incidents that are not true; so, again: "Can I believe any of it?"
The trouble is it's not fiction where I don't have to believe but where I suspend my disbelief; In these cases you can''t suspend your disbelief because they are telling you not to, but to believe.