Film of the Week
Brazil, Monday 9th, 12.20am, Film Four
Quite simply, the zenith of Terry Gilliam’s career. This Orwellian sci-fi story deals with the down-trodden Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) and his struggle to rectify a bureaucratic error – a Harry Buttle rather than a Harry Tuttle gets arrested and imprisoned after a bug falls into to the teletext machine. Whilst on this mission he meets the girl of his dreams (quite literally in this case, as he dreams of being a winged knight that rescues a damsel in distress) and gets involved in an adventure with renegade plumbers, plastic surgery mad mothers and sinister government forces. As ever with Gilliam, it’s like Easter Sunday squared in terms of candy for the eye and in his ever recurring debate between fantasy and reality, the argument is heavily weighted in fantasy’s favour. What I’ve never really understood though are the accusations that, although Gilliam’s films are wonderful to look at, they are a mess narratively. The plot here is as tight as a drum and, with a secretive government dispensing with civil liberties due to a (possibly non-existent) terrorist threat, more relevant than ever.
The Classic
Rear Window, Tuesday 10th, 12.55pm, Channel 4
Yet another of Hitchcock’s displays of his technical mastery of the cinematic medium. James Stewart plays a rich socialite whose broken leg gives him an excuse to indulge his habit of observing his Greenwich Village neighbours. Witnessing an argument between one couple and the subsequent disappearance of the woman, he begins to suspect that there’s a murderer in their midst. Grace Kelly plays the classic cool Hitchcockian blond who Stewart is due to marry despite his reservations. Having witnessed the shot where she glides in like an angel borne on cherubs to rouse a snoozing Stewart, I was on the point of giving Stewart a good hard slap and telling that if he didn’t marry her with the next ten minutes then I was going to somehow force my way onto the screen and jolly well marry her myself.
As the suspense heightens, we are drawn into Stewart’s obsession with spying and are complicit in his journey into voyeurism. Like films such as Peeping Tom and Blue Velvet, this is a study in the pleasure and guilt of seeing and is really about the idea of cinema itself. This is the first of a mini season of afternoon Hitchcock films this week, which also includes North By Northwest and The Man Who Knew Too Much. It also provides a decent excuse to an extraordinary video that was posted online last week. Jeff Desom, using Adobe After Effects, has stitched together all the various viewing shots from Read Window to produce a Rear Window Timelapse. More information about the video is available here.
Another Classic
Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Tuesday 10th, 11.05pm, Film Four
I had my doubts about including this in my week’s selection, but not because it’s not a brilliant film (it is, and then some), but because if you need to be told to watch this superb comedy, then there’s probably not much hope for you anyway and I’m just wasting my time by typing this out. If, by any chance, you haven’t caught this masterpiece yet, then here’s a quick list of what you’ve been missing: Peter Sellars on the top of his game whilst playing three different roles; Sterling Haydn’s darkly comic turn as a general bent on starting World War Three in order to keep his ‘precious bodily fluids’ safe from the clutches of the Commies; the retooling of a sweet popular song in such a way that you can never listen to it the same way again – “We’ll Meet Again” by Vera Lynn (a trick Kubrick would repeat with “Singing In The Rain” in A Clockwork Orange); Slim Pickens riding the back of a nuclear missile while whooping like a rodeo cowboy; Goerge C Scott’s skewering of the kind of macho male that he would go on to be famous for playing in films like Patton and finally, the line “Gentlemen, gentlemen, you can’t fight in here. This is the war room.” A razor-sharp blacker-than-night satire from Kubrick from before he became a bit too self-indulgent and po-faced.
Guilty Pleasure
Working Girl, Friday 13th, 9.00pm, More4
Although nominally set in the cut-throat world of business in the avaricious eighties, this screwball comedy really harks back to the zippy dialogue and battle-of-the-sexes frisson of the classic Hollywood films of the forties and fifties featuring stars like Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant and Myrna Loy. Melanie Griffith, as actress whose squeaky perkiness is usually pretty grating, is perfect here as an ambitious secretary who grabs at a chance to move up the corporate ladder when she’s mistaken for her boss and hatches a wily business plan. Harrison Ford plays the affable businessman who has faith in her vision, whilst Signourney Weaver unleashes her inner bitch as the ruthless boss with no morals. Screwball comedy, like film noir, is a genre that Hollywood often returns to with disastrous results (need I remind you of Madonna’s appalling Who’s That Girl?) but here Mike Nichols (who’s sure comedic touch also guided films such as The Graduate and Postcards From The Edge) knits together a feelgood tale of love, sex and money. Oh yeah, and it also has Alec Baldwin as Griffiths’ sleazy boyfriend, who, when caught by Griffiths with a writhing, naked bimbo astride him, has the cheek to blurt out, “This isn’t what it looks like!” – the eighties in a nutshell.
Noel Curry has degrees in both film studies and film production and now works as a freelance television editor. When he’s not editing, looking after his kids or watching the latest series of Mad Men with his wife, he likes to draw silly cartoons and publish them online (see www.miltonslife.com, www.djbogtrotter.co.uk and www.sascomic.com). He has views on films, which he has now decided to start writing down rather than just shouting them out of windows.
You can find Noel on Twitter: @DJBogtrotter