sir_guinglain

After a very long night last night I'm not able to sleep tonight, so have finished watching Mike Flanagan's Midnight Mass on Netflix. I'm not sure whether it was the towering work of art its admirers have hailed, but I don't think it was the damp squib its detractors have pointed to either. I could sense that it was full of references to other works even if I didn't know the works themselves, as it had the taste of something cooked from cherished ingredients, but suspect it displayed its citations with flair. Its low-key blend of horror strands and likeable performances was winning, dialogue varying the kitchen sink with the prophetic to the deadpan realisation of self-delusion. Satire's claws are out too, for church and congregation and for capitalism and its critics alike and they are cold; though I fear cat-lovers might be the most distressed.

Yes, I should have gone to bed, but I caught up with Star Trek - Into Darkness instead. Several visually impressive moments, but the cast were underused and there isn't as much mileage in immature boy Kirk as they seem to think. I am not a Star Trek expert, but I had the feeling that it didn't mirror the beats of The Wrath of Khan as well as it seemed to believe; and it wore its legacy too heavily too. There were also far too many fisticuffs, and little sense of lessons learned on the part of people or institutions - but that is the mode of action films in our time, I suppose.

Last night's dramatic entertainment was King Arthur the Young Warlord, a TVM assembled in the 1970s from episodes of HTV's Arthur of the Britons (1972-1973). I'd only seen one episode of the latter, when it was repeated on ITV during the 1980s, and not been greatly impressed, as the episode consisted of a series of weapons trials which seemed to show that the cast had enjoyed themselves on a sunny afternoon in the West Country and not a lot else. I bought this compilation from the US several months ago, before I realised that the whole series was being released on DVD by Network this month.

The compilation, despite the lack of a plot (there was a linking narration which fought valiantly to simulate one) was largely watchable, although it could have stood more editing, even though one episode, about a confrontation with Picts, was cut down to about a minute of clips. The series raided the British legendarium freely - Arthur's foster brother is Kai, for example, but their foster-father is not Ector but Llud the Silver-Handed. Arthur's rivals include Ambrose, a Mithras-worshipping tribal chief who wanders around in a simulacrum of Roman dress and is mocked for it; a priest of Nodens; and Mark of Cornwall, played by Brian Blessed and of interest to Blessedologists as an early example of the characterisation brought to Vultan in Flash Gordon, Richard IV in The Black Adder and Yrcanos in Doctor Who's Mindwarp. Early on Blessed is provided with a slightly-built peasant to pat heartily; peasant duly falls over. He still can't remove the stone from the sword, though (yes, stone from the sword, not the other way round) - that takes Arthur's team leadership skills.

The only speaking female character was Rowena, performed by an actress only credited in the titles as 'Gila' but actually Gila von Weitershausen, whom I'd not seen before, but she appears to have been prominent in Germany and was here making a rare foray into English-language work. Rowena works hard, as she represents the Rowena of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Guinevere, and Isolde all at once. She and Arthur have a backstory which contributes to the last-minute failure of her betrothal to Mark, of which we hear little but it involved her fighting alongside Arthur and then taking off her dress so it could be ripped up into bandages to bind his wounds. However, this is a children's series and especially a boys' one, so all Arthur can do is puzzle over why he's so possessive about Rowena, and trot off in denial back to his encampment. It's probably a sign of how online fandom has corrupted me that when Arthur's narration refers to his attempt to "have his way" with Mark, in a later sequence where Mark is tricked into helping with a rescue mission, my eyebrows are raised, though I am sure that there is much in this edited compilation from which others with more, shall we say, creative minds than mine would derive great amusement.

There's no writing credit on the film, which speaks volumes, and no closing scroll of actors other than the so-called leads. Peter Firth as Corin, 'son of Mordor' - someone had been reading their Tolkien - appears in one sequence, while sometime Maigret, Rupert Davies, as Cerdig appears in two and is more relevant to the ongoing series theme, but Firth's star was rising when the compilation was made in 1975, probably explaining why he appears in both the opening and closing titles. The film is valuable mostly as a concise edition of the television series, one of the first of the many in which HTV took their cameras out around their ITV franchise area of Wales and the West, and dramatised the 'identity' of their region by appealing to and embellishing British mythology, all but making legend their property within the bounds of ITV during the 1970s and 1980s. I will see if I can get my hands on the unedited DVDs in some form.

This is a film that, though made in 1938, is at times so self-conscious that this viewer, seventy years on, felt that its makers knew that an audience a couple of generations away would one day watch it and appreciate the jokes from a distance. Its portrayals of a succession of Anglo-British stereotypes: the barrister and his 'wife', actually the wife of a senior colleague with whom he is having an affair and an illicit holiday, the kind but daffy middle-aged governess, the cynical leisure-loving jam factory heiress on her way home to marry a peer because it will please her father, the self-obsessed dilettante musicologist, and above all the cricket-obsessed men of evident but invisible means, are introduced with affection but are also set on trajectories that will either show how misleading our initial impressions are, or leave us uncomfortable as initially sympathetic figures turn out to be obstructive and too focused on their private concerns to notice that something very sinister has happened on board their train taking them across central Europe, despite the protests of pretty heiress Iris (Margaret Lockwood). Only the folk-music collecting Gilbert (Michael Redgrave) believes that there was a Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty) in Iris's compartment, despite the insistence of the nearest medical expert that she was a hallucination brought on by concussion.

The film's mockery of British insularity made a serious point in 1938, and political sensitivity led to the omission of a scripted sequence where goose-stepping soldiers dissolved into a flock of gabbling geese. In the final shoot-out the barrister reveals himself as a pacifist who believes that everything can be settled by negotiation - as already seen, this includes his own word to his lover, Margaret, as he wheedles out of an immediate divorce and remarriage because it will prejudice his career. His waving of a white flag before the nation's security forces ends predictably. While it could be argued that Gilbert ends up representing another British stereotype of the unpredictable outsider as hero, at his first appearance he is a nuisance and even a cad, someone without any respect for his fellow hotel guests; but his overwhelming curiosity about other cultures translates into a sensitivity to the European political situation which too many of his fellow-British passengers regard as a sign of the instability of foreigners which only inconveniences them when travelling abroad and justifies their complacency about the superiority and invulnerability of the British way of life. All helped by a witty script from Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, which surely set a standard for keeping the pace going so quickly that the audience is amused rather than irritated by all the implausibilities; and directed for Gainsborough Pictures with acute judgement by Alfred Hitchcock.

Viewed at the National Film Theatre with gervase_fen and a full house, Sunday 20 January 2008.

Continued from here.

( A patchy comparative review of Stardust )

edit: to acknowledge cealdis's correction.

Spent this evening, first at Almaza at Gloucester Green, where the 'Shef's Special' was fine if not greatly varied in its vegetable selection; and then on, with narahttbbs, shanith, elleblue, e_pepys and louisekdyson to the Odeon George Street, where we were joined by colinbj for the 9.30pm screening of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

( Minor review )

( Additional observation, 10.51am )

I don't think that there has been a film in which, fifty minutes in, I am looking at my watch not because the film is bad, but because its narrative makes such uncomfortable viewing. Notes on a Scandal (adapted from Zoe Heller's novel by Patrick Marber, and directed by Richard Eyre) depicts human weakness and manipulation in so many twists and turns that still ring very true. I didn't like it at first, and was ready to relegate it to the barrel of unconvincing tales of contemporary complicity alongside Michael Frayn's novel Headlong, which I read over six years ago and didn't believe; but this rapidly gained more credibility with me.

Ringing is appropriate because the phone is a motif; characters' lives are altered by information disclosed over the phone, or in meetings arranged by it. Text messaging is the prerogative of youth, specifically Sheba Hart's teenage lover Stephen Connolly (Cate Blanchett and Andrew Simpson). Juxtaposition of dialogue and image is managed skilfully; there's a shot early on where Judi Dench's character, Barbara Covett (the names of the two main characters are not the most subtle in literature or cinema), describes the action but completely misses the importance of the event for her object of study, Sheba Hart; or does she? For the narration is part of Barbara's diary, which is not a masterpiece of self-deception, but seems to do the trick.

There are lots of other touches in the direction and photography, too. Of the schoolteachers, Tom Georgeson's Ted Mawson is always moving through the shot and we never get a firm image of his face. The film starts and ends on Hampstead Heath, Barbara looking over London both solitary and isolated, and a hawk (or perhaps more appropriately a cat) looking for her next prey. There's a pleasing in-joke in the casting of Anne-Marie Duff, a third screen Elizabeth I, as the new object of Barbara's attentions at the end.

I thought Judi Dench just too old to play Barbara, even taking into account Barbara's embittered detachment from her environment and her inner dessication. Her performance is nonetheless excellent. The impression I have of Cate Blanchett's Sheba in this film is one of movement; the camera moves around her, flirting with her as Sheba does with it: Barry, played by Phil Davis in a manner that recalls Timothy Spall's Barry in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, and not at all his King John in Robin of Sherwood, recognises that Sheba's way of relating to people is to flirt with them in such a way that makes her intentions unclear. At times I felt the film was going to conclude that Sheba and Barbara deserved one another, but Sheba is allowed redemption, leaving Barbara looking for mice upon the heath.