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Three propoganda films, of varying shades. And a film so bad it made Da Davinci Code seem interesting. No really, that bad.
LXXXVI: Destination Tokyo (Delmer Daves, 1943)
Cary Grant captains a submarine which sails on Christmas Eve and has orders to head for Tokyo to set up the information needed for the first bombing run. There are the various sorts - the green kids, the wise cook, the womaniser - and the various perils - aircraft attack, a trapped bomb, illness, depth charges - but basically the Japs are evil because they are brought up to be killers. Not exactly stretching for Grant in a straight role. Rather dull and has not dated well
LXXXVII: Torn Curtain (Alfred Hitchcock, 1966)
Rather flat and probably miscast late period Hitchcock, and a rare original story. Sarah Sherman (Julie Andrews) is puzzled by the behaviour of her lover and boss, nuclear scientist Professor Michael Armstrong (Paul Newman). She follows him to East Germany, where he defects and is prepared to give away state secrets.
Made between Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, I don't think Andrews can pull off the innocent abroad of some of Hitchcock's heroines, nor the femmes fatales of others - she is too prim here. And Newman doesn't have the cool he has elsewhere.
I don't think I've seen this before, but I particularly watched it now because it was designed by Hein Heckroth and - guess what - has a ballet as its climax. But it's no The Red Shoes. The stand out scene is when Armstrong is at a farmhouse and has to kill his minder - with the help of the farmer's wife. Some nice studio work, too, but equally some unlikely back projection.
LXXXVIII: 49th Parallel (Michael Powell, 1941)
A Nazi sub is sunk in Hudson Bay and a dwindling number of survivors try to make it across Canada to meet up with a Japanese ship. There are a few nice set pieces - an escape in a plane, a Hutterite community and an eccentric English anthropologist - the politics are worn on the sleeve. The chief Nazi Lieutenant Hirth (Eric Portman) is given a long speech about a new wind blowing from Eutope - to scare the still neutral US and a Canadian soldier defines democracy as the right to moan.
Editing by David Lean (after a further Powell and Pressburger gig he was to co-direct In Which We Serve), Photography by Freddie Young who was to work for Lean and instantly identifiable music by Ralph Vaughan Williams, although I don't know the score. Too long, too preachy.
LXXXIX: The Oxford Murders (Álex de la Iglesia, 2008)
Thank god this was a freebie - but the cinema was full and boiling.
Frodo Baggins is an American graduate student who wants to do a PhD with the Elephant Man and so rents a room from Raymond Massey's daughter. Shortly after blotting his copy book at a public lecture (or "conference" as the film has it) and meeting a Welsh accented Owen Harper (who claims to be Russian), Massey is killed, and the Elephant Man tells the police he has been sent a symbol indicating this is the first in a sequence. Before you can question why the cops are sharing so much information with a professor and a kid, there are more murders and everyone is a suspect, including Louisson from Delicatessan. And the only way to solve the crime is for everyone to speak ponderously (which Hurt is good at, and Frodo and finally shaved, including his feet) and define the Fibonacci Sequence, the golden mean, Wittgenstein, Heisenberg and Quantum Thing at each other, and repeat the joke about missing that day at school. There are some nice touches - Frodo's squash court with instructions on where to run to when the ball bounces and a joke about an amateur orchestra at the Sheldonian - but this is some of the worst dialogue I've heard in years. The visit to Cambridge to see someone prove Bermat's Last Theorem is equally silly.
I find it hard to believe that Oxford graduate studies would have been quite that woolly even in the 1990s, and that the original novel was quite so cavalier about Frodo's character development. And he presumably had more than one jacket and hoodie. But it feels like they've read the Wikipedia entries on maths, so they might as well have characters read them out.
It almost made me nostalgic for Da Davinci Code. Avoid.
Totals: 89 (Cinema: 33; DVD: 51; TV: 5)
LXXXVI: Destination Tokyo (Delmer Daves, 1943)
Cary Grant captains a submarine which sails on Christmas Eve and has orders to head for Tokyo to set up the information needed for the first bombing run. There are the various sorts - the green kids, the wise cook, the womaniser - and the various perils - aircraft attack, a trapped bomb, illness, depth charges - but basically the Japs are evil because they are brought up to be killers. Not exactly stretching for Grant in a straight role. Rather dull and has not dated well
LXXXVII: Torn Curtain (Alfred Hitchcock, 1966)
Rather flat and probably miscast late period Hitchcock, and a rare original story. Sarah Sherman (Julie Andrews) is puzzled by the behaviour of her lover and boss, nuclear scientist Professor Michael Armstrong (Paul Newman). She follows him to East Germany, where he defects and is prepared to give away state secrets.
Made between Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, I don't think Andrews can pull off the innocent abroad of some of Hitchcock's heroines, nor the femmes fatales of others - she is too prim here. And Newman doesn't have the cool he has elsewhere.
I don't think I've seen this before, but I particularly watched it now because it was designed by Hein Heckroth and - guess what - has a ballet as its climax. But it's no The Red Shoes. The stand out scene is when Armstrong is at a farmhouse and has to kill his minder - with the help of the farmer's wife. Some nice studio work, too, but equally some unlikely back projection.
LXXXVIII: 49th Parallel (Michael Powell, 1941)
A Nazi sub is sunk in Hudson Bay and a dwindling number of survivors try to make it across Canada to meet up with a Japanese ship. There are a few nice set pieces - an escape in a plane, a Hutterite community and an eccentric English anthropologist - the politics are worn on the sleeve. The chief Nazi Lieutenant Hirth (Eric Portman) is given a long speech about a new wind blowing from Eutope - to scare the still neutral US and a Canadian soldier defines democracy as the right to moan.
Editing by David Lean (after a further Powell and Pressburger gig he was to co-direct In Which We Serve), Photography by Freddie Young who was to work for Lean and instantly identifiable music by Ralph Vaughan Williams, although I don't know the score. Too long, too preachy.
LXXXIX: The Oxford Murders (Álex de la Iglesia, 2008)
Thank god this was a freebie - but the cinema was full and boiling.
Frodo Baggins is an American graduate student who wants to do a PhD with the Elephant Man and so rents a room from Raymond Massey's daughter. Shortly after blotting his copy book at a public lecture (or "conference" as the film has it) and meeting a Welsh accented Owen Harper (who claims to be Russian), Massey is killed, and the Elephant Man tells the police he has been sent a symbol indicating this is the first in a sequence. Before you can question why the cops are sharing so much information with a professor and a kid, there are more murders and everyone is a suspect, including Louisson from Delicatessan. And the only way to solve the crime is for everyone to speak ponderously (which Hurt is good at, and Frodo and finally shaved, including his feet) and define the Fibonacci Sequence, the golden mean, Wittgenstein, Heisenberg and Quantum Thing at each other, and repeat the joke about missing that day at school. There are some nice touches - Frodo's squash court with instructions on where to run to when the ball bounces and a joke about an amateur orchestra at the Sheldonian - but this is some of the worst dialogue I've heard in years. The visit to Cambridge to see someone prove Bermat's Last Theorem is equally silly.
I find it hard to believe that Oxford graduate studies would have been quite that woolly even in the 1990s, and that the original novel was quite so cavalier about Frodo's character development. And he presumably had more than one jacket and hoodie. But it feels like they've read the Wikipedia entries on maths, so they might as well have characters read them out.
It almost made me nostalgic for Da Davinci Code. Avoid.
Totals: 89 (Cinema: 33; DVD: 51; TV: 5)
