Films: May 12 - 18

Ohjik Geudaeman (Always) (2011)

Woorideul (The World Of Us) (2016)

Terug naar morgen (Sum Of Histories) (2015)

My Favorite Brunette (1947)

The Naked City (1948)

De helleveeg (The Fury) (2016)

Xia dao lian meng (The Adventurers) (2017)

Freaks (2018) ///

Ohjik Geudaeman (Always) (2011) Lit up by soulful, vital Han Hyo-joo as a blind woman in a relationship with angry boxer seeking redemption, So Ji-sub, persuasive style and integrity keeps melodramatic excess mostly in check. Third Act twists push emotional rawness to the edge.

Woorideul (The World Of Us) (2016) Paced and designed with keen sense of childhood awkwardness, excitement and brittle emotion, an intimate tale told with clean visuals and naturalness. Two 10-year old girls spiral through holiday friendship, family and school bullying with touching resolve.

Terug naar morgen (Sum Of Histories) (2015) Quietly, elliptically effective, twisting time altering narrative remains persuasive as a professor finds a way to send emails to the past and starts changing events. Solid technique, appealing performers, not quite delivering emotional punch.

My Favorite Brunette (1947) Affectionate spoof on noirish private eye intrigue as mistaken identity sees jittery baby photographer Bob Hope hired by Dorothy Lamour and chased by Peter Lorre. Swiftly paced succession of gags, in-jokes and double-takes propel nonsensical narrative. Enduringly daft. 

The Naked City (1948) With cynical narration, gritty locations and punchy police procedural into a brutal killing, alternately gripping and uneven. Unsentimental Barry Fitzgerald is the hard-bitten detective chipping away at clues. Artful docu style makes New York into vital character.

De helleveeg (The Fury) (2016) Powered by a mesmirising, raw Hannah Hoekstra, her contradictory, damaged emotions over the years seen through the years of a young nephew. Fine design and controlled visuals span the decades and illuminate prejudices and desires. Consuming, bracing, dark.

Xia dao lian meng (The Adventurers) (2017) Maximizing rich production values and lush European locations, a series of technically smart set pieces flounder amid loose storytelling and undernourished characters. Andy Lau leads bickering, disparate thieves, facing usual twists and double-crosses.

Freaks (2018) Initially enclosed family drama gradually reveals paranoid, prejudiced worldview is all too physically threatening for 7-year old who learns of her latent 'powers' from edgy father Emile Hirsch and obsessive Bruce Dern. Often gripping and inventive, emotional core doesn't quite deliver.

The Eccentrics (II): Margaret Rutherford

It would be difficult to imagine there was ever a more lovable lady eccentric in fiction or in fact than Margaret Rutherford. She must surely reign supreme as queen of all those dotty upper middle-class women who at once combine impeccable manners with an utterly chaotic lifestyle. She was, in truth, a genuine eccentric.

Margaret Rutherford was born in Balham on 11 May, 1892. The original family name was Benn, but her father decided to change it to Rutherford because he felt it was a more aesthetic name for a writer. The fact that Ernest Rutherford was not a writer but a traveller in silks in India at the time was, to him, immaterial. It does, however, provide a clue to the background of Margaret Rutherford, showing us that if eccentric people are not exactly born, they are shaped very early in life. She lived in India as an infant and was left an orphan at a very young age, until her mother’s sister, Bessie, who lived in Wimbledon, became responsible for bringing little Margaret up. And it was here that the seeds of eccentricities which had been sown in Margaret by her father were given the opportunity to bloom, for ‘Aunt Bessie’ herself was completely unconventional. Margaret was encouraged to live in a world of make-believe, as her aunt was totally besotted with the theatre, and often used to stage what were known as ‘family theatricals’.

When Margaret, who used to suffer from back trouble, complained of pain, Aunt Bessie would take command and insist she should lie quite motionless on the floor while Bessie read to her in French. If there were logic in believing that reading in French would ease the pain of back ache, then perhaps only a Rutherford would understand it. We lesser mortals would remain, as we were with so many of her film and theatre performances, utterly bemused but always fascinated.

Young Margaret Rutherford, having studied piano for many years, became a music teacher, cycling round Wimbledon to give her pupils their hour’s worth of scales and arpeggios. She was, she admitted, not a good teacher, since she remained rather tetchy and impatient. But if none of her pupils ever made the concert platform, Margaret at least became a first-class cyclist, and this skill was put to good effect later on when she played Madame Arcati in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit. She used to come whizzing on to the stage and brake within inches of the footlights. It always got a round of applause. However, that was far into the future, for Margaret started her theatrical career rather late in life, beginning at the age of thirty-three when she auditioned for the Old Vic School. Throughout her prepared piece her new shoes, bought especially for this auspicious occasion, constantly squeaked. Perhaps this amused the great Lilian Bayliss, guiding light of the acting constellations which included Dame Edith Evans, Sir John Gielgud, Lord Olivier and Sir Ralph Richardson, for she took on the very green, but desperately enthusiastic, Rutherford.

After her distinguished career on the stage, Margaret Rutherford ventured into the film world, making her début in Dusty Ermine (1936). Thereafter, films became very much part of her life, and that warm, almost whimsical eccentricity that was so much her off-stage personality was seen by a much wider audience. Indeed, her unique style was appreciated throughout the world, and especially in America.

In 1943 she was cast in an Anthony Asquith production called The Demi Paradise, whose title was changed for the US market to Adventures For Two. For once Margaret, playing the organizer of a village pageant and a general ‘do-gooder’, was nearly overshadowed by a village full of eccentrics - Felix Aylmer, Joyce Grenfell and many others, all bringing to their parts that dreamy, middle-class, absent-minded quality that’s the very essence of British eccentricity. Laurence Olivier, who was playing the role of a visiting, and very bemused, Russian inventor, told her, ‘I’ve been in films for years now, and I’m just getting the knack of it.’ Margaret responded, ’My word, I’ve got a bit of work to do.’

The Demi Paradise contains a scene that takes place during an air raid, which must rate now as one of the funniest shot during the dark days of the World War II. Whilst a bridge game is played in a splendidly designed drawing room of the period, and genteel conversation is in progress, a lady cellist, armed with her bulky instrument, enters. She has arrived to play a musical accompaniment in the back garden of the house to the song of the nightingale, which is to be broadcast live on BBC radio. They ignore the bombs, the enemy planes droning overhead, and the searchlights probing the skies. The only concession the little group make to this air raid is that the drawing-room lights are switched off, before the french windows are opened and curtains parted to allow the lady to take her seat in the garden. With great dignity, the musician bows her way through the strains of a cello classic, whilst the nightingale, obliging little chap that he is, trills away for all he’s worth, much to the delight of the occupants of the drawing room and, presumably, the radio listeners. Olivier, as the visiting Russian guest, surveys the whole scene with barely concealed amazement.

Generally, though, scene-stealing on stage or screen from Margaret Rutherford is rare indeed. She admits to having developed, over the years, the art of underacting, whilst making her eyes expressive, her nose twitch, and her chin tremble. Her brilliance remains on film now for all to see and admire, whether in major or minor roles. Her characters are unforgettable: Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit (1945); the maddening playwright to Robert Morley’s director in Curtain Up (1952) (she always said that Morley understood her more than almost anyone, and was a great friend); the District Nurse in Miranda (1948); the romantic governess, Miss Prism, playing opposite the formidable Edith Evans in The Importance Of Being Earnest (1952); and a cameo role where she broke all the rules, by scene-stealing from animals, as the pet-shop owner in An Alligator Named Daisy (1955). In 1963, again in a smallish role in The V.I.P.s, she won her coveted Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, playing the part of the lovable Lady Brighton.

Margaret Rutherford would never have called herself a star, but the stars she worked with, a list of whom would read like the motion-picture industry’s Who's Who, all felt the same way. To them she was a ‘superstar’.

The Eccentrics (I): A.E. Matthews

‘The eccentricities of genius, Sam,’ said Mr Pickwick.

Mr. Pickwick, Dickens’s great comic creation, was referring to that elusive quality which he himself undoubtedly possessed, and which is common to all genuine eccentrics – there is about them all an air of genius. Theatre and literature are crowded with these ‘special’ people. Long after the heroes, heroines and villains have faded from our thoughts, the eccentrics are still there, firmly implanted in our memory. Shakespeare’s Falstaff, Wilde’s Lady Bracknell, Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster - these are but a few of the characters who have become part of British heritage. They are some of the legends of literature, but it’s clear their characteristics are so well defined, so well-drawn, that they must have surely all been based very closely on real eccentrics. However brilliant the author may be, however powerful the imagination, the creation of classic eccentrics owes more to the skill of observation than any other attribute.

In the world of cinema, there have been equally memorable eccentrics; character actors and actresses who extend their performances way beyond the scope of their roles, adding an extra indefinable dimension to all that they do and say. And British cinema has been rich indeed in such people.

Cinema eccentrics are a breed apart. They do play scripted parts - often with acclaim - but there’s always that essential ingredient, an intangible, unique quality marking them out as ‘different’, which comes shining through. It transcends dialogue, photography or even the most demanding director.

A.E. Mathews, known affectionately as ‘Matty’ to everyone in the entertainment industry, was born in 1869. It’s difficult to believe that when he began his career in films in the early 1920s, he played romantic leads, for his later performances have come to represent the archetypal English eccentric. And he was the real thing – stories of his off-set eccentricities abound.

But many of the tales were initiated by Mathews himself. For example, he was supposed to be very carefree about learning his lines for a play and used to give the impression he was constantly on the brink of ‘drying up’. Yet it’s known he devoted long hours to studying a part, and his relaxed, almost absent-minded, approach to his work was merely a well-calculated pose. It did sometimes backfire: on one occasion when he met George Bernard Shaw, a playwright whom he much admired, he told Shaw that he had never been in one of his plays. ‘Nor will you be,’ Shaw replied acidly, ‘I prefer actors to speak the lines I write. I hear that you prefer your own.’ This remark only momentarily ruffled Mathews, who could probably lay claim to being the oldest working actor of them all.

He made his stage début at the Prince’s Theatre in 1887 in a play called Held by the Energy, in which he played every part but one. Yet to Alfred Edward Mathews (he rarely used his full Christian names), this would have been par for the course. It was part of his stage upbringing to turn his hand to anything and everything theatrical. He was the son of a Christie minstrel and must have watched his father as he was singing, dancing, and playing a variety of musical instruments, engaging in ‘repartee’ - as joke-telling was referred to in those days - and then being a part-time stage manager and set designer. A minstrel had to do the lot, and his son was left in no doubt that he should be able to do the same.

Mathews’ experiences in a long and busy career often read like a catalogue of catastrophes. He was laughed and booed off the stage in Australia. In South Africa, the audience was so critical of his efforts that they fired revolvers at the ceiling. And in New York, during the first of his many Broadway seasons, he was doped and robbed in Chinatown, and sent back to England on a boat, steerage class.

But ‘Matty’ the Unpredictable was also unflappable. He could laugh at all types of misfortune because he never took himself or life too seriously, and this was probably the secret of his success. He claimed to have earned over £1 million, a great deal of money in those days, and blown it all! ‘What I haven’t thrown away, those damned Inland Revenue people have collared,’ he once said.

At the age of eighty, A.E. Mathews made his film début as a ‘star’ in the screen version of William Douglas Home’s comedy about impoverished aristocracy, The Chiltern Hundreds (1949). He was surrounded by a strong cast, including David Tomlinson, Marjorie Fielding, and Cecil Parker. Mathews said of Parker, ‘He acted me off the set.’ But although Parker as the loyal butler was splendid, this was always Matty’s film. He was the personification of all those dotty English peers who ignore the big issues and concentrate on trivia. In The Chiltern Hundreds, it was an obsession with marauding rabbits invading the grounds that seemed to occupy all waking hours. There seemed to be so much of Mathews himself in this role for, in truth, he was straight out of a Wodehousian world of absent-minded Earls and Squires in Bertie Wooster-land. He had made the Douglas Home character fit him like a well-tailored Norfolk Jacket, having been involved with the original stage play from the outset.

On the first night of the stage play The Chiltern Hundreds in 1949, after his first exit the audience rose to give him a tumultuous ovation. A fellow actor standing in the wings turned to say, ‘Congratulations old boy, I’ve never heard such applause on a first act exit.’ Quick as a blast from a double-barrelled shotgun, Mathews replied, ‘Well, you know what that means – they don’t think I'll live till Act II.’ He was at the time seventy-seven.

A.E. Mathews died peacefully in his bed at the age of ninety on 26 July 1960. ‘It was,’ said Robert Morley (by no means a lightweight in the eccentricity stakes himself), ‘the most unlikely thing he ever did.’

The War Game (III): Henry V, The Way To The Stars, The Way Ahead, We Dive at Dawn

When Laurence Olivier went into production in 1944 with Shakespeare’s Henry V, it was, as far as the MOI was concerned, more than simply a cultural exercise; for parallels could be drawn very vividly with the Allied Forces’ invasion of Normandy, on what was known to the British public as the ‘Second Front’, and to the Allied Chiefs of Staff under the code name of ‘Overlord’. In Henry V, the King is seen setting forth for his invasion of Normandy some five hundred years before the Allied attack. With his army of 30,000 men, which includes 2,500 men at arms, 8,000 archers and a fleet of 1,500 ships, he sets off from Southampton. The medieval warriors encounter much the same difficulties as their descendants experienced hundreds of years later – seasickness on the English Channel, being crammed like sardines in tins in their armada of vessels, and the problems of getting weapons ashore when landing. In Henry’s time, it was horses, carts, armour, and food supplies. During the Allied invasion, it was heavy artillery, vehicles, and goods supplies.

Most of the exterior scenes for Henry V were shot in Eire, because the landscape was uncluttered with telegraph poles and other twentieth-century devices; also because the extras in Eire would work for £3.10s.0d a week, and a quid more if they rode and brought their own horse. Olivier, although an officer in the Fleet Air Arm at the time, was not used to commanding such numbers of men, and here he was having to marshal and direct more than seven hundred tough Irishmen. He decided he would show them who was boss from the outset and, addressing them from the top of a beer crate, announced he was going to ask them to perform some tricky stuff, especially during the battle scenes, but nothing that he would not, or could not, do himself. He received a mighty round of applause for this piece of bravado.

The technical expertise in design and Technicolor photography married to expansive physical production that evolves from theatrical intimacy to broad cinematic landscapes proves winning, a film that has lasting appeal beyond wartime popularity. A glittering cast add lyrical humanity while William Walton’s score is beautifully used. Nominated for four Academy Awards, Olivier was given a Honorary Oscar “for his outstanding achievement as actor, producer and director in bringing Henry V to the screen.”

In fact, each of the Armed Services had at least one memorable feature film to represent it in all its glory. In the case of the Air Force, it was The Way To The Stars (1945), the Army had The Way Ahead (1944), whilst the Navy had We Dive at Dawn (1943) and the landmark In Which We Serve (1941).

The Way To The Stars, written by Terrence Rattigan, directed by Anthony Asquith and starring Michael Redgrave, John Mills, Rosamond John, Douglass Montgomery and Renée Asherson, was a sensitive treatment of the delicate relationship between the RAF and the USAF. It went beyond the blood and guts and nerves-of steel dogfight scenes, to examine the far deeper emotional aspects of the lives of these pilots from both sides of the Atlantic: their loves, hopes and dreams at the concluding stages of the War.

The script, as one would expect from Rattigan, made profound statements with which cinema audiences of the period could identify. Making their film débuts were Jean Simmons, as a rather precocious singer, and another young actor, with whom John Mills had been so thrilled at playing a scene with that he rushed home to his wife (playwright Mary Hayley Bell) and told her he was convinced ‘that chap’ would become a big star. ‘That chap’ did not let him – his name was Trevor Howard.

The Way To The Stars also contained two poems specially written for it by John Pudney, which gave the story an additional, mournful quality. One was called ‘Missing’, and the other ‘Johnny in the Sky’, the last poignant verse of which read:

Better by far,
For Johnny – the bright star,
To keep your head
And see his children fed.

Anthony Asquith, who liked to ‘tipple’ sometimes more than was wise, walked alongside the camera as it tracked John Mills, who himself was walking and reciting the verse. While he was keeping his eyes on Mills’s performance all through the shot, Asquith walked straight into a brick wall. He apologised at once to the wall – his manners were always impeccable.

The Way Ahead was directed by Carol Reed, one of Britain’s undisputed greats. It starred David Niven, William Hartnell, Stanley Holloway, and Raymond Huntley – and all of them gave splendid performances. There were certain similarities in the opening storyline to that of The Gentle Sex. We encounter a group of civilians who have been called up as they converge on a railway station, and on the train journey to their destination we observe the widely divergent backgrounds from which the recruits are drawn. We listen to their views on life and the situation they find themselves in – all are late and unwilling conscripts.

Put through rigorous training over a period of several weeks by their drill sergeant (William Hartnell), after a lot of sweat, tears, and heartache, they eventually become a tight, efficient fighting unit – ready to do battle in North Africa, and the pride and joy of their CO, played by David Niven. The script was by a writer who went on to distinguish himself as an expert in spy fiction – Eric Ambler. His co-writer was a young Peter Ustinov, who also played a scene as the French-speaking proprietor of a North African bar. (At the time, he was actually Private Ustinov, batman to David Niven.)

Some two years before directing The Way To The Stars, Anthony Asquith had made another contribution to wartime feature films by plunging to the depths of the sea with We Dive At Dawn (1943), a tribute to the submarine service. Asquith would have seemed a most unlikely candidate for a major film director, having been brought up at No. 10 Downing Street, the son of the Liberal Prime Minister. But he had rejected a political career at an early age, opting instead to become a composer. In the event, he was an extremely unsuccessful composer, and changed his affections from music to cinema. In this field he found his feet. Anthony ‘Puffin’ (the nickname his mother gave him because of his flattish nose) Asquith’s name will always be synonymous in the film industry with ‘style’ – not surprising, really, for he had this in his private and working life in abundance.

In the documentary vein so approved of by the MOI, We Dive At Dawn charts the story of a submarine crew hunting down and attacking a new Nazi battleship. Then – and this is the main thrust of the film – the submarine tries to return through hostile waters to a safe port. John Mills is the submarine commander and did his homework for the part by going out with a submarine and learning how to crash-dive as well as use the periscope. All crews in the submarine service were volunteers during the War, and they were, Mills reflected, the finest and friendliest body of men he ever encountered. He later went on to prove his admiration for them by making two further films about the submarine service.

During the Second World War, the British film industry justified the faith and confidence placed on it by the MOI. Certainly, in terms of raising morale and, for the most part, without being overtly preachy. That artists also provided some lasting and provocative films remains a testament to creativity and integrity even amid the horrors of war.