the texture of men's souls

A character in David Lean’s film The Passionate Friends quotes from John Galsworthy’s The Forsythe Saga (1918): "By the cigars they smoke, and the composers they love, ye shall know the texture of men's souls." It’s an inversely very apt way to describe Lean’s work. When his Brief Encounter was re-issued last year (Park Circus Lean tour), I mused on how the film would play using just sound-effects (in Jean-Pierre Melville French film mode) without the ‘now-classic’ use of the Rachmaninov piano concerto. And watching this glowing restored B/W print of The Passionate Friends(1948) (for the Lean centenary celebrations) I mused even more upon this. It’s both inverse and somewhat perverse because one of the most recognisable elements of a David Lean film is his soundtrack music and theme e.g. Maurice Jarre for Doctor Zhivago (YouTube), Lawrence Of Arabia (YouTube) and Ryan’s Daughter. Yet Lean was so cinematically articulate that music seemed more a concession to his popularising cinema. Adapted by suspense writer Eric Ambler from an H.G. Wells novel, Passionate Friends opens by resembling that Edward G. Robinson Brit flic (the title of which I couldn’t remember the last time I tried to remember) in which the doctor husband discovers his wife’s affair and almost gets away with ‘doing in the blighter’ after imprisoning him in a bunker for several months. In The Passionate Friends, Claude Rains is the much less malevolent banker husband who discovers his wife’s affair, Mary(Ann Todd who became Lean’s wife) a passion for first love Steven (Trevor Howard) who she meets him again on holiday by accident after WWII. For respected film historian David Thomson this film is “the kind of thing Lean was made to do” and he’s always urged its restoration. I’d never seen The Passionate Friends before and viewing it in the cinema proved to be absolutely fascinating for all the reasons many critics at the time found irritating: “a maze of flashback sequences that might cause even Einstein’s brain to spin” (The News of the World), “such a wild mêlée of retrospection and reminiscence that it would appear to be shot with a time machine instead of a camera” (The Evening Standard).

Many actors didn’t enjoy working with Lean and in The Passionate Friends you certainly sense a ‘detachment’ - rather like that of an artist whose interest is in representing the model rather than in engagement. “I want to belong to myself,” says Mary. Early on in the film, Mary’s flashback in the back seat of the taxi is more her face being sculpted in light (Guy Green’s cinematography) and time (Lean began his career as a film editor) than a normal ‘Hollywood effect’ of the era that would cut a scene long before Lean does. You often see modern video/film art that re-edits Hollywood movies to accentuate film semiotic themes of feminism or whatever. But Lean got there first. Unusual too, is the moment in the theatre when her husband twigs at the affair as he spies their two empty seats and later his enraged “Get out!” is off-camera under a two-shot on Mary and Steven. “Nearness, belonging, fulfilment. That’s not the kind she wants,” sagely advises her husband to Steven. Lean uses the white of his film stock to accentuate Mary’s beautiful distance from the ‘real’ world. First in the close-up flashbacks, then with the white of the Swiss Alps and the fog that envelops Mary and Steven in the cable-car after their impromptu meet. “My love isn’t worth very much,” could be uttered by either Mary or her husband in affluent pragmatism. Many said Lean never had ‘the gift of friendship’. Maybe that was his way of surviving a cruel, unjust and indifferent world. Quintessentially English, there’s something terribly cold, terribly sad and fractiously beautiful about The Passionate Friends. For ultimately deep within those crevices is clinging the lichen of love.

David Lean Centenary Season
Julie Christie (Dr. Zhivago) gives a rare interview to BBC Radio 3’s Nightwaves about her Human Rights Watch event at the Theatre Royal Haymarket on Sunday(Cries From the Heart: Tyranny), and a discussion of Lawrence Of Arabia on Thursday’s programme.

Lawrence of Arabia (Collector's Edition, 2 discs)
Great Expectations ( ITV DVD Blu-ray out June 16)

Re-issued in a new B/W print for Jeanne Moreau’s 80th birthday, François Truffaut’sJules et Jim(1962) based on Henri-Pierre Roché’s 1953 novel (best-known as ‘the man’ who introduced Gertrude Stein to Picasso) also concerns the forces of the soul. As Richard Roud noted in his 1962 Sight and Sound review: “Friendship, Truffaut seems to be saying, is rarer and more precious than love. Or perhaps he is also saying that friendship, not being as natural or as innate as sex relationships, must always be destroyed by the forces of nature re-asserting themselves- just as in Goethe’s Elective Affinities, to which several references are made in the film, the wilderness is always waiting to destroy the carefully nurtured garden.” Catherine is “a vision for all men, not a woman for one.” Both the Austrian Jules (Oskar Werner) and the Frenchman Jim (Henri Serre, also a young avant-garde theatre director) fall for Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) but she marries Jules. Both men fight on opposing WWII sides and Jim subsequently visits Catherine forming a ménage à trois. Truffaut began as a film critic and seems to be emulating, in his very own way, the ‘emotional canvases’ of Cinemascope Hollywood films such as Minnelli’s Some Came Running(1958) – a film he must have seen. Truffaut triumphs in his third film as a cross between David Lean and Godard’s jump-cutting nouvelle vague (New Wave) with Godard’s cinematographer Raoul Coutard and Georges Delerue’s score intrinsic to the mix. Oh for the £3 double bill repertory picture houses of yesteryear (Ed Lewis’ Riverside Studios was the closest and still lives in his absence as he peers through clouds of cigarette smoke from heaven). The Passionate Friends/Jules et Jim double bill anyone?
Criterion DVD in the States

Jeanne Moreau BFI season

“The real story always lies between the [editing] cuts...the most interesting thing about film is not what you show but how you cut from one scene to another. The audience’s imagination brings a whole new dimension to the film as they start filling in the gaps,” explains Indian director Shekhar Kapur who never really got along with his Brit cinematographer and “the art design, European way of shooting films”. Luckily he had an Indian one as well to make his “film of the earth”. Bandit Queen(1994, now out on DVD) is the true story of Phoolan Devi (the Goddess of Flowers) “a low caste bitch” who was sold into marriage aged 11 never enjoying a childhood, was gang raped, and formed a makeshift army in a 5-year reign of bloody vengeance. After imprisonment for massacring the high castes at Behmai, a low-caste Uttar Pradesh government finally came to power. This is an extraordinary film with a blisteringly incisive commentary by the director who hadn’t seen the film for 12 years. “After the film was released in the West everyone started to say I’m the new Sam Peckinpah. I’m not but I can understand...Thank God I’ve seen this film again [because I’ve realised] I’ve become a captive of that system of world cinema. Whatever film I make now after having seen this film again, I must now unshackle - unshackle the other system that has taken over [me]. Seema Biswas is unforgettable as Phoolan Devi and music score is by the great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

Cinematographer Robby Müller doesn’t much like unnecessary ‘art design’ cinema either. And listening to the Down By Law 20 minute interview extra on Optimum’s The Jim Jarmusch Collection (Volume 1) probably ‘teaches’ you more about shooting a film than spending years at film school. Down by Law (1986) is one of indie cinema’s masterpieces with the hitherto unequalled trio of Italian comic star Roberto Benigni and musicians Tom Waits and John Lurie (Lounge Lizards) who break out of their New Orleans jail cell escaping into the swamp wilderness of the Bayou. Müller’s black and white photography looks breathtaking in this new DVD print, that “strange enchanted quality” according to Lurie. There are other wonderfully wacky extras including Jarmusch’s home video ‘pop’ of Tom Waits version to end all versions of Cole Porter’s It’s Alright by Me, and taped phone conversations between Jarmusch and his acting trio. Benigni phoned “deep in the night” is outrageous as always describing his “brain in fire period” and “why is 6 afraid of 7? Because 7-8-9.” Think about it.

Made for just $15,000, Permanent Vacation (Jarmusch’s first film from 1980) was rejected by the Tisch school as Jarmusch’s final thesis for being “a waste of their time”. It’s the existential journey around New York of Aloysius “Allie” Parker (Chris Parker) photographed in 16mm colour by Tim DiCillo who went onto direct Living in Oblivion. John Lurie again appears and his version to end all versions of Somewhere Over the Rainbow plays out the film, “Let’s just say I’m a certain kind of tourist, a tourist on permanent vacation.” The deservedly award laden 1984 Stranger Than Paradise again with Lurie rounds out the set.
Jim Jarmusch Speaks on Evolution of Broken Flowers
Criterion Down by Law DVD
Criterion’s Stranger than Paradise DVD

Tom Waits surfaces again in the comic/tragic Wristcutters – A Love Story that I’ve recommended several times on this site. And Müller’s unique photography can be seen in Wim Wenders’ existential Alice in the Cities (out on DVD). Also just out is Axiom’s DVD Libero - a captivating Italian film about childhood by actor turned director Kim Rossi Stuart.

BBC Radio 4's The Film Programme has writer/director Chris Petit discussing his Brit cult classic Radio On, just released on BFI DVD. And Michael Medwin, 70s film producer of Memorial Enterprises, is interviewed. He gave debuts to Stephen Frears, Mike Leigh and Tony Scott amongst others.

I approached Arrow’s The Andrzej Wajda War Trilogy (DVD) with some trepidation not having seen them for 20 years and hoping I wouldn’t have to be simply ‘polite’ to Polish cinema’s hero Andrzej Wajda. Not in the least. Canal (1957) is probably the one to start with (note the almost pictogram ‘letter-play’ irony in the Polish title (Kanal) with the final ‘broken’ crossed ‘L’) and the existential almost hallucinatory escape (very dark cinematography so typical of the Polish spirit) into the sewers of Warsaw during the Nazi onslaught (the Warsaw Uprising). For those, like me, unkeen on war films unfocussed on people’s inner lives, this is far from uplifting but unforgettable. On A Generation DVD (also shot on 16mm B/W and first of the trilogy), there’s a 40 minute interview with Wajda who notes the American reaction to his films and “Polish cinematography [not] only and strictly condemned to itself because it speaks a language unknown to anybody [and has] something to say to the world.” In turn Wajda acknowledges the influence on his work from Hollywood’s Greg Toland (Citizen Kane). Director Roman Polanski was also a Lodz film school (the style so characteristic of his early work) graduate and has a small acting role in A Generation. And note the lonesome reedy sound of Jan Krenz’s Kanal score heavily influencing Preisner’s scores for later Polish director Kieslowski. It’s a shame very few Wajda films are still yet to surface on DVD e.g. his 1979 The Young Ladies of Wilko is a simple haunting tale of a man revisiting his old village and lost loves.
Wajda's hit war film still resonates
Criterion’s DVD set in the States

[ADDITION......................]

California Dreamin' (Nesfarsit) (Romanian site) (literally unfinished film) was the debut of 27-year-old Romanian director Cristian Nemescu (written with Catherine Linstrum and Tudor Voican) proving also to be his last opus as he prematurely died in a car crash. We’ll never know quite how he wanted his final cut of the film. Distributor Artificial Eye has been a staunch champion of Romanian film lately with A fost sau n-a fost? (12:08 East of Bucharest) and the abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (4 luni, 3 saptamâni si 2 zile) both available now on DVD. California Dreamin' is set late on in the Kosovo War (1999). Stringent and strident NATO US army Captain Doug Jones (Armand Assante) is commanding a train of soldiers but their progress is halted by a tiny village’s petty and corrupt station master Doiaru (Razvan Vasilescu) demanding transit papers. Dying through lack of excitement there, the local mayor (Ion Sapdaru) throws a welcome party for the Americans. Doiaru’s gorgeous daughter Monica (Maria Dinulescu) speaks no English but like most of the other village girls can’t wait to transfer her affections onto one of the handsome Americans. Her catch is Sergeant David McLaren (Jamie Elman) enlivening the ensuing 5-day delay. At 2.5 hours the film is perhaps a little long for its material but we’ll never know under the circumstances. What is obvious in scene after scene, though, is Nemescu’s very low-key command of his actors and script. There’s nothing new here but the humanity Nemescu brings to this material far outweighs that cavil with some particularly beautiful scenes for Armand Assante’s captain who will never see the world at war in quite the same way after his village experiences. And The Beach Boys California Dreamin’ song is so very powerful and potent yet Nemescu never lets it swamp his material; rather he allows it to emerge like a butterfly from its cocoon.

Jollied along a few nights ago at the launch of Ben Lewis’ (now an art critic for The Evening Standard) book Hammer & Tickle: A History of Communism Told Through Communist Jokes.
Times article. Included was some joke raconteuring from Brit artist Doug Fishbone. And a met a very cute girl dressed to the nines like The Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy who does something with her husband on YouTube. Haven’t checked it out yet but I’m sure there must be a deeper meaning :)

Does anyone dream of Southeast Arkansas? Shotgun Stories (Trailer) charts a meditative feud between two sets of half-brothers following the death of their father. It’s American Jeff Nichols debut supported by the team from 2000 indie hit George Washington including awesome wide-screen anamorphic cinematography from Adam Stone.
More blood and dust with the No Country for Old Men DVD and
An American Blu-ray of There Will Be Blood.

And this book sounds interesting:
Alexandra Fuller Remembers a Wyoming 'Legend'
Fuller was a guest on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week (June2).

Even Wyoming sounds like a ‘paradise’ dream compared to London these days. American readers of this site who’ve almost become blasé about shootings and crime in their cities might wonder what all the fuss is about. So let me make clear that the rise of London crime in the past 5 years has indeed been astonishing. It never existed to this extent before. As I’ve always stressed in this blog, people’s problems are relative - so mine seem small compared to the more serious crimes lately:
Adverts to stop knife crime
15 year-old girl stabbed to death in a lift
But solutions start with the detail not the press spin. And if the authority’s reactions to my complaints are anything to go by, these people would seem to have trouble rustling up a lettuce leaf for a tortoise let alone deal with the wounded animals of the inner city jungle.

Even Liza Minnelli got a taste of English salad:
Liza Minnelli starts British tour after visa wrangle

Transport continues to provide hours of fascinating ‘earth reality satellite TV’ for the aliens:
TfL collects £32m in Oyster card penalty fares. Happened to me the other day too. Like most other city dwellers, I still haven’t had the time to sort it out.
MOD releases UFO files (BBC TV's Newsnight)
Examination of the damage done by the boozy party on the tube (“anthropologically misunderstood”) according to Mayor Boris. I quite like listening to him...

Chief officer explains how TFL are going to enforce alcohol ban

Commuters face chaos after bridge scaffolding collapse
Commuters seconds from bridge disaster
Commuting chaos for travellers going into Liverpool Street (TV footage)
Plus ça change.

And don’t you love the nightly TV pundits who only a year ago were saying Britain’s housing market’s problems weren’t that serious? I’m not suggesting it’s Titanic time but we sure ain’t sailing anywhere near the equator.
Housing market slump could be worst since 1970s, lenders warn

And a couple more weeks to vote for your favourite short film on:
ITV London TV

London time is definitely ripe for Tate Modern’s Street and Studio: An Urban History of Photography which is a contrived show but not really contrived enough. And the Tate doesn’t yet have a permanent photography curator. The show follows a rather historical approach to both its known and more obscure 106 photographers – French fin de siècle, through 30’s French and American, to one of Jeff Wall’s large-canvas studio creations and performance artist Laurie Anderson’s 70s Polaroid experiments. For a general ‘street’ public it’s by no means a bore but it never really gets to the heart of the photographic eye. Sarah Jones’ 1995 Actor is prompting us to think more about the triangular relationship between subject, photographer and viewer. But as I mentioned in my recent One Face blog, Russian experimentalist of the 1920s Lev Kuleshov’s famous editing exercises got there first. I would have preferred more a curatorial mish-mash more along the lines of Paris’ Fondation Cartier - shows that though thematic e.g Le Bleu or Le Visage (The Face) nonetheless had ideas bouncing around. Many of the Tate photographs are extraordinary and some, like Arnold Genthe’s very dark 1899 San Francisco gamblers and peasants, are alone worth the effort. But it’s a wasted opportunity for the Tate (who rarely have photography shows) at a time when the proliferation of the digital camera allows everyone to think they are a photographer (how very New Labour), everyone is so used to being snapped, and it all seems so easy. The Tate Modern’s greatest achievement has been to engender a sense of the importance of sight. Of observing not just looking. (One of the most lasting things I take away from classes at New York’s famed Actor’s Studio was actress Ellen Burstyn demanding of us not what we felt but what we actually saw in our colleagues’ exercises). But that takes some energy, and the problem with the London streets is that not enough people have found a way to channel that energy. The ‘graffiti’ art currently on the Tate’s exterior walls is also trying to promote debate but it’s also romanticising what is street ‘reality’ too.

Street & Studio: An Urban History of Photography (Guardian article)
Street & Studio: Sharp photographs and blurred boundaries
Haunch of Venison’s Home Lands Land Marks has some wonderful South African photography including Santu Mofokeng, Guy Tillim and the genius ‘charcoal animator’ William Kentridge’s ‘tondo’ anamorphic drawings.

Uta Barth’s latest series of photographs Sundial paint with the light that enters her own home beginning with Untitled (07.01) and proceeding through points in the day. Both impressionist and expressionist, Barth’s photos are both fact and reverie and will definitely enliven your visit through a dialectic on what and how your eye perceives the eye of each Uta Barth.
Uta Barth interview

Haven’t yet managed to see the photos of Mitra Tabrizian at Tate Britain

“Your documentary, on some level, is going to be a lie...it’s how you wish to represent the truth and how you decided to tell that particular story. It’s not true, there’s no such thing as truth, but we come to like and trust a certain story not necessarily because it’s the most absolutely truthful but it’s the thing we tell ourselves that makes sense of the world at least at this moment,” explains New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman. He’s one of the many fascinating things on the My Kid Could Paint That DVD. Once upon a time there was Marla Olmstead, a 4-year-old American girl from East Coast Binghampton. She liked to paint. A local gallery saw her ‘abstract’ work and decided to mount a show. A local paper did a story then picked up by the New York Times Metro section. Her work started selling for loads of money. Controversial TV show 60 Minutes picked it up too. They invited the little girl and her parents into the big gingerbread house of network TV. But the wolf of commercialism called her a fraud - a concept little Marla of course did not comprehend. But the nice doco film maker huntsman Amir Bar-Lev came to rescue the little girl and her family. And so far they’ve been no more candy totin’ TV networks. “It’s a story about what happens with stories,” says Elizabeth Cohen, the local columnist who first broke the story. This is the sort of DVD that shoppers at the supermarket check-out really should be tempted to buy. On the one hand, Marla’s parents wished their daughter to have a normal childhood while on the other they naturally wanted to encourage her talents in the American way. There’s a revealing out-take extra showing her mother submitting Marla’s work to a local gallery’s feminist Rude and Bold Women show with a yukky cutesy DaDa artist’s statement written by her Mum. In fact, unusually for a DVD, all the 30 minutes of out-takes are fascinating. The commentary by the film’s editor and Anthony the local gallery owner who mounted Marla’s show tends towards the descriptive, though. It’s a shame a social commentator such as Germaine Greer or Susan Faludi couldn’t have been enlisted. That would have made it amazing. But the presence of Kimmelman’s art criticism more than suffices: “the art resides in the declaration [by the critic or galllery] and the ones that get to choose...[the latter] make people feel bitter and resentful...[but] we want to be told what to think and spoon-fed, and most of our culture is about that- making things convenient for us.”

Market exuberance surprises even the professionals

Jake & Dinos Chapman ruffle art feathers again with If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy Would We Be. The title refers to watercolours painted by Adolf Hitler, purchased by the artists in a job lot auction, and ‘coloured’ by them with ‘flowerpower’ zest and zeal. Upstairs, they’ve illuminated Victorian portraits with weeping plasma noses, sewn lips and a red nose cone, nails affixing the face, and bulging eyes like a villian exiled to the harsh Martian atmosphere in Total Recall. On BBC’s Front Row they explained they wanted to “draw attention to the fact that anti-Semitism and Fascism are more connected with social and historical processes than with the pathological sympathies of one individual.” Downstairs in the below ground gallery nine glass display cases are angled to form a swastika within which are minutely detailed ‘war memorial’ panoramas of Fucking Hell. These are a painstaking re-creation of the exhibit burnt in the Momart storage fire of 2004. Here is Dante’s Hell in all its glorious gruesome detail: rivers of blood and corpses, hundreds upon hundreds of tiny figures, scabrous faces, decomposing noses, a blackened church for the baptism into eternal hell, a blackened volcanic mushroom cloud of evil. It’s totally disgusting but probably comes closer to evoking the revulsion of war than any war memorial museum could. If art should make one stand even taller, towering and cowering in childlike inquisitiveness, then the Chapmans succeed.

There’s a few more days to catch John Currin’s show of sexual poses in Mayfair. I’m still not quite sure what to make of Currin. This show was apparently Currin’s reaction to the Danish cartoon religious outrage wanting to see how far he could push the boundaries, and his explicit nudes most certainly celebrate the sacrament of the body. Currin’s past work seems to be involved in a dialectic with the French and Spanish painting of the past. And this show seems to celebrate the luscious Renoir-ness oil of the body – the goings-on in the loges and post-play that Renoir couldn’t possibly unveil. In that Currin succeeds, and he most certainly can paint.
John Currin finds beauty in pert, pink places...
Tracey Emin has curated a room of the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. See for yourself: shadows and love. BBC Radio 4 Front Row interview with Emin.

“For Alan Green abstract painting is the ultimate reality,” is Guggenheim Museum’s Diane Waldman’s quote prefacing the press release of this show at Annely Juda Fine Art. “The more personal the experience, the greater and more universal is the ultimate understanding,” concludes her catalogue essay. Green’s paintings are decpetively simple: rectangular ‘floorboard’ fields of colour or graduated and variegated cross-hatchings and in each, the oil playing in the light of the linen beneath. It makes you think of childrens’ spatial acquisitional skills and those who play musical masterpieces by rote – astonishing but relatively devoid of something stranger, more playful and vulnerable evoked by Green’s paint. Downstairs are bronze sculptures and drawings by Joan Miro equally worth one’s attention.
Alan Green in the Tate collection

Alison Watt’s, the new National Gallery Associate Artist Phantom continues her work in using paint inspired by fabric. “It’s strange, but sometimes you have to make a painting to understand why you wanted to make it,” she’s quoted as saying. I wonder whether subliminally that’s what 4-year old Marla was doing. Watt was most inspired by the National Gallery’s C17th Spanish Zurbarán painting Saint Francis in Meditation of the dark shrouded monk. Her room of enormous canvases flood it with light almost keeping the dark at bay but reluctant in the knowledge that it’s a symbiotic relationship. Playing for two more weeks with an excellent DVD available to watch there or buy.
The Standard’s article on Watt

With the cool Chinese name, Zhang Qikai (Qi=peculiar, Kai=open) opens an exhibition of his Salvador Dali-esque panda paintings at Marlborough Fine Art. Panda reclining on a revolver, panda on knife edge, panda nonchalantly picking his teeth on a rifle, and panda apprehensively climbing a candle-flame. A guilty pleasure maybe but they’re hard not to like even though blatantly unsubtle.

If my kid could paint that, any older kids who are lucky enough to see
Garbage Warrior will be saying ‘my dad could build that’: (YouTube) DVD trailer and loads more videos of Reynolds' work. “If you create your own electricity, heating and water systems you create your own politics. Maybe that’s what they’re afraid of,” says architect Michael Reynolds and “if you want permission to do something different, you first have to prove that it works. To do that you have to break the law. It’s a Catch-22 situation.” Shot over 3 years, Brit and ex-blockbuster movie model maker Oliver Hodge met Reynolds when he visited the English seaside town of Brighton in 2003 to build his prototype ‘Earthship’ house. What’s lacking in an otherwise completely inspiring doco is what the occupants feel about Reynolds homes. He’s spent the last 25 years on his Earthship: an off-grid solar-powered home built from used tyres filled with earth, beer can bricks and recycled rainwater. The occupants of his New Mexico homes spend less than $40 per annum on utility bills. But 7 years ago the State legislature tried forcing him to comply with building regulations so he donned a suit and tie to fight his case. The film is clearly biased against the legislature but the laws were initially made to protect citizens against rogue opportunists as much as one despises the interests of corporate greed. Reynolds finds friendly ears in a stunning, flaming black-haired, black robed female legislator Zee: “If you don’t want to look at the problem why would you want to look at the solution,” she advises encouragingly and pragmatically. Moreover, Reynolds had both his state and national architectural credentials revoked and it wasn’t until the Asian tsunami and his re-housing mission to the Andaman Islands that the powers that be saw his light. On for another week at the ICA. Go be inspired in the London housing gloom. The ICA also have Nought to Sixty (free Monday nights with day membership) to celebrate their 60th anniversary. I was a bit ‘pissed off’ I had to miss the first one this week. Looked great. And ICA DVD have Blame It On Fidel(YouTube) I so warmly recommended (use my search engine!:)


Housing proud, Britain's greenest new homes have just been completed
Opportunity knocks for landlords to help homeless

[addition: the London Spanish Film Festival opens this weekend with many UK premiers and films you're unlikely to see again in the UK for quite some time (if at all!).

Of course you could also be escapist and see the new Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull with Janusz Kaminski’s ever gorgeous photography (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly DVD out this week). Paramount also have a new DVD box set too.
Keeping up with Indiana Jones. Or Ernst Lubitsch’s last romantic comedy set in London Cluny Brown(1946) just out on BFI DVD. Or dance on the bridges of London with Tango Commute.

Or Hopscotch (DVD) will cheer up reality for you. The hang-dog Walter Matthau plays Kendig an ageing CIA field-man demoted to filing. Matthau’s love of Mozart was specially incorporated into the score for him, and the whole film is rather like an operatic espionage caper with all Mozart’s wit and moral weight. Great cast with Sam Waterston and Ned Beatty as the CIA cohorts angry that disgruntled Kendig is sending them chapters of his ‘warts and all’ book on ‘the firm’. Herbert Lom is KGB. CIA Myerson’s expletives, always cut for TV, are now re-instated for the DVD. Lines like “reasons for National Security - that’s a phrase that’s lost a lot of meaning lately,” forever ring true. Remember too that this was released in 1980 long before Brit intelligence Peter Wright’s Spycatcher. Kendig’s ex-lover and former agent Glenda Jackson is sexy as was ever, and lines like my dog “detests the smell of stupidity” still ring true for her in her current role as a Brit Member of Parliament who was staunchly against her own party (Labour) over the Iraq War. Interesting trivia in the interview extra with director Ronald Neame and Brian Garfield (adapter of his own novel with Bryan Forbes).

Or move to a hut in the blue remembered hills or maybe New Mexico with a new life (Matthau’s Kendig couldn’t bear leaving the frying pan), with your own vegetable garden, generator and DVD player and hope Harrison Ford doesn’t come crashing through your window in search of aliens (some might relish such a thought)as you watch the oodles of back catalogue Universal Classics have released on mid-price DVD all with on-screen production notes and some even with extras:
Thrillers – Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear, John Ford’s The Informer, and Hitchcock classics.
Drama - To Kill A Mockingbird, Citizen Kane, Douglas Sirk’s Written On The Wind
Film Noir - Orson Welles’ rarely seen masterpiece A Touch Of Evil, Jacques Tourneur’s Out Of The Past (aka Build My Gallows High) , Don Siegel’s The Big Steal.
Action and Adventure – the 1932 Howard Hawks Scarface, and remember the star studded 1974 Earthquake?
Comedy – James Stewart in Harvey, Marx Brothers classics, and most interesting the underrated underappreciated Preston Sturges with Hail The Conquering Hero, The Great McGinty and Sullivan's Travels, and the 'Road to' films of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby Road to Utopia set in Alaska, Road to Singapore, the first in which they try to forget their previous romances in Singapore, that is until they meet Dorothy Lamour. And the all time classic:

Road To Morocco(1942) in which stowaways Jeff and Turkey wash up in the desert and Bob Hope is sold as a slave to the beautiful Princess Shalmar of Karameesh,
“take them outside and bring me back their ears. No Wait! There must be no shedding of blood on our wedding night,” says an ‘oh jealous’ one. The gags and one-liners really stand the test of time though whether you could get away in a family feature with the “Allah has seen the light to dull his wisdom” sketch about our less fortunate mentally sound mortals nowadays is debatable. Road To Morocco was the WWII troops most popular film.
(largest WWII bomb ever in London being defused). And it was right under the carrots' noses in the neighbours' vegetable gardens.

Road to Morocco also has some wonderfully clever lyrics from Johnny Burke and composer Jimmy van Heusen who later hooked up with Sammy Cahn to win 4 Best Song Oscars. Moonlight Becomes You
is there (the desert mirage reprise is still funny) and so is Crosby’s “There’s nothing quite as grotesque as a man at a desk lookin’ out at the sun/Shirts made of silk and a diet of milk maybe he thinks he has fun/I’ve got the vagabond itch I guess I’ll never get rich/Oh hum/Ho,ho,ho,ho,hum.”