Black Widow (no spoilers review)

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio Ballarat and South West Victoria on August 6, 2021.

(M) ★★★½

Director: Cate Shortland

Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Rachel Weisz, Ray Winstone, O-T Fagbenle, Olga Kurylenko, William Hurt.

"No. We're not leaving until we hold hands and sing 'Kumbaya'."

It's taken 11 years, but the first female Avenger of the MCU has finally gotten her moment in the sun. Black Widow AKA Natasha Romanoff has been an increasingly integral player in the franchise since her debut in Iron Man 2, but has played second fiddle to Tony Stark, Steve Rogers and even Bruce Banner for much of that time. 

Not anymore. Here we get to see why Romanoff is regarded as a deadly assassin, where she came from, and why she has so much "red in her ledger". It's an origin story without totally playing out like one, but it's also a hard-punching spy thriller with a strong central theme, even if it's much-feted family dynamic feels a likely wonky at times.

Following on from the events of Captain America: Civil War, Romanoff (Johansson) is on the run, having helped Steve Rogers and co make their escapes from Team Iron Man. Black Widow goes into hiding but a mysterious killer named Taskmaster tracks her down, unravelling Romanoff's past in the process and putting her on a collision course with the organisation that created her. It also brings her back into contact with people she cared for but left behind - fellow Black Widow Yelena Belova (Pugh), scientist Melina (Weisz), and Russia's answer to Captain America, The Red Guardian (Harbour). 

 

Aussie indie director Shortland gives the film a feel and look that, for the most part, is unlike any other MCU film - a sizeable feat 24 (!) films into the series She embraces the spy-thriller nature of the story, slinking through back streets and hideouts in between a full-throttle chase and a string of impressive fight sequences worthy of a Bourne film. Her reliance on the shaky shots and quick edits almost strays into "too-much" territory, but Shortland manages to stay largely on the right side of the line.

For someone who had never staged a major action CG-FX set-piece before, Shortland knocks it out of the park. A battle involving a helicopter, Black Widow taking on a room full of adversaries, and a final insane gravity-defying coup de grace are all incredible; an excellent blend of stuntwork, FX, and Shortland keeping everything together.

It's funny then that the parts where the indie director should have excelled, ie. the relationships, is the part where the film is weakest. The family dynamic between Romanoff, Yelena, Melina and The Red Guardian is interesting, but doesn't ring true in places. Betrayal, guilt and hurt are too easily swept aside for the convenience of plot, or forgiveness is found too easily - a cringe-worthy scene involving the song American Pie is a key example. 

But thematically the film is strong. The whole family thing has been done better in a couple of Fast & Furious films, but the movie's ideas around men controlling women are fascinating. It's very easy to view the film as a big-budget take on the #MeToo movement, patriarchy and misogyny, which might have resonated even more strongly had the film been release in May last year, as was initially intended. These themes add a weight to the movie that in many ways is different to anything else in the MCU.

However the big bad, played by Winstone with an horrific Russian accent, will not rank in the annals of great MCU villains. He's highly forgettable, and wouldn't even crack this list of the top 25 MCU baddies, despite the power he wields and the way he fits into the aforementioned theme. At least Taskmaster looks cool and is in some cool fights.

There is much to love about Black Widow. It's weak spots make it fall short of being the full-blooded solo adventure the character so richly deserved, but it's far from disappointing. Stylistically and thematically, it holds its head high.

AFI #38: The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre (1948)

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio Ballarat and South West Victoria on July 23, 2021.

This is part of a series of articles reviewing the American Film Institute's Top 100 Films, as unveiled in 2007. Why am I doing this? Because the damned cinemas are closed (again!) and I have to review something.

(PG) ★★★★★

Director: John Huston

Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, Tim Holt, Bruce Bennett, Barton MacLane, Alfonso Bedoya.

"He who smelt it, dealt it, fella."

"The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit."

So spaketh Gordon Gekko, a snake of a man with a lizard for a surname, in that most '80s of movies, Wall Street. Gekko (as played by Michael Douglas and written by Oliver Stone and Stanley Weiser) obviously hadn't seen The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre. Because the moral of that 1948 classic is that greed, for lack of a better word, is bad.

Of course it's not so clean cut as that, which is part of what makes Huston's gold-fever drama still an embarrassment of riches. Greed has the power to corrupt, yes, but only those who are corruptible. It is an internal war to wage, and this psychological battle of evil is played out to thrilling effect in the hearts and minds of three prospectors in 1920s Mexico.

The story is based on a novel written in 1927 by who the fuck knows (seriously no one knows the real identity of the guy that wrote this book, which is fascinating). John Huston took its story-within-a-story conceit, and extracted an Oscar-winning screenplay out of it, which also won him a best director's Oscar.

Huston knew he had something special from the get-go. He fought with Warner Bros to be allowed to shoot much of the film on location, and indeed the studio-bound stuff looks terrible by comparison, particularly the early scenes in Tampico, where the rear projection just doesn't cut it. But out in the dustbowl outback of Mexico (near Durango allegedly), the film rings true. 

As Philip Kemp put it in 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, "the film's texture exudes the dusty aridity of the Mexican landscape, so that watching it you can almost taste the grit between your teeth; and the actors, exiled from the comfortable environment of the studio and having to contend with the elements, were pushed into giving taut, edgy performances".

John Huston drew one of those very performances out of his dad Walter, earning the old man an Oscar in the process for his turn as Howard, the more experienced of the three gold diggers. Walter Huston helps create the stereotypical "grizzled prospector" with his mile-a-minute dialogue and his struck-it-rich happy dance, but he also serves as the moral compass of the film as much as he's the comedic relief. He brings a vaudevillian effortless to his lengthy monologues (including his asides in Spanish), but also a real heart to the role.

Bogart, who apparently described his character Fred C Dobbs as "the worst shit you ever saw", gives possibly the performance of his career (it's a line ball between this and Casablanca obviously, both of which are just ahead of The Maltese Falcon). "What they expected was Bogart, the movie star; what they got was Bogart, the actor," wrote Barry Norman in his entry on The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre in his book 100 Best Films Of The Century. Bogart chews the scenery, and embraces the madness, diving right off the deep end to give us an unlikely villain who looks like he's being literally consumed by the fires of hell at one point.

Huston and Bogart overshadow Curtin (played by largely forgotten B-Western star Tim Holt), though the third role is no less important in terms of the film's morality play. Dobbs is destined to go off the rails, it's just a matter of when. Howard has seen it all, including his fair share of Dobbses over the years. But Howard was also probably a young Curtin at some point - the man who could go either way. There's a fascinating moment where a mine collapse leaves Dobbs in mortal danger, and Curtin considers walking away and leaving him to die. It's a defining moment for the character, and one that highlights how important Curtin's progression and decisions are in the film, and how nicely Holt handles the role.

The legacy of The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre is strangely enduring, even as its position among the absolute classics seems to have waned. Back in 1976, the sixth edition of Leslie Halliwell's acclaimed Filmgoers Companion dismissed it as having "not worn well", and on the IMDb 250 its dropped from its 2007 peak of #48 to its current listing of #169. In the nine years between AFI lists it fell eight spots, and was a notable omission from Empire Magazine's Top 500 Films special edition of 2013.

But it pops up in interesting ways: Toy Story 2's Stinky Pete is an intriguing mix of Howard and Dobbs, it helped inspire the creation of Indiana Jones and the film There Will Be Blood, the "we don't need no stinking badges" line turns up in everything from kids cartoons to video games, and the film has been cited as a major influence on everything from Breaking Bad to The Stone Roses song Fools Gold. William Friedkin, Spike Lee, Stanley Kubrick, Sam Raimi and Vince Gilligan have all cited as one of their favourite films.

Part of the reason for its endurance is its oddness. As much as it follows expected routes and classic tropes, it's wildly unconventional for its time. It makes its A-list star a villain, there's no happy ending, there's no romantic subplot, and it's far grimmer than most movies of the age.

The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre is one of those films that has quietly seeded its way through pop culture. It wasn't a box office smash, hasn't been rebooted or remade, and doesn't get regularly discussed with the fervour of say Citizen Kane or Casablanca or The Godfather. But much like greed itself, it endures, finding its way into the hearts and minds of those who watch it. But in a good way.

AFI #37: The Best Years Of Our Lives (1946)

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio Ballarat and South West Victoria on July 16, 2021.

This is part of a series of articles reviewing the American Film Institute's Top 100 Films, as unveiled in 2007. Why am I doing this? Because the damned cinemas were closed and I had to review something, and now I can't stop until I finish.

(G) ★★★★

Director: William Wyler.

Cast: Fredric March, Dana Andrews, Myrna Loy, Teresa Wright, Virginia Mayo, Harold Russell, Cathy O'Donnell, Hoagy Carmichael, Ray Collins.

"So strap on that there jammy pac, and get up off my floor..."

It's amazing to think that almost 80 years after its release, this is still widely considered the best film about returning soldiers. "(It's) certainly the most moving and most deeply felt," writes Jonathan Rosenbaum in 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, while The Wordsworth Book of Movie Classics calls it "the most significant fictional account of America's post-WWII homecoming".

What's even more amazing about The Best Years Of Our Lives is that it began shooting less than eight months after WWII ended. That director Wyler and producer Samuel Goldwyn were willing to examine the hardships soldiers faced upon coming home so soon after the soldiers actually came home was admirable. That audiences flocked to see the film in both the US and UK was nothing short of remarkable. 

"It bears witness to its times and contemporaries like few other Hollywood features," writes Rosenbaum.

And until it gets deleted, you can watch the whole thing here:

Though subdued by today's standards and puffed out by a melodramatic romantic subplot that's horribly dated, Wyler's Oscar-winner was ahead of its time in its portrayal of the troubles facing veterans coming home from war. It does this by examining the lives of three soldiers returning to smalltown America. 

Fred Derry (Andrews), the highest ranking of the three, returns to a family home under a railway bridge and a wife who fell in love with a soldier, not the soda jerk with screaming nightmares and no real job prospects. Then there's Al Stephenson (March), who dives headlong into a drinking problem and his old bank job, where he bristles against his bosses' reluctance regarding the "loans for soldiers" program.

And finally there's Homer Parrish (Russell), who lost his hands in a fire and who struggles with the reactions of his parents and his fiancée. Russell's performance is one of the things people remember most about The Best Years Of Our Lives. He won two Oscars for the role - an honorary one because the Academy wanted to acknowledge his performance didn't think he'd win best supporting actor (which he also won).

If we're being honest, Russell's performance is stilted when stacked up against the professionals, particularly March, Andrews and Loy. But what it represents is huge. He lights cigarettes, plays piano, and shoots a gun, all the while showing a deftness with his prosthetic hooks that brought "aid and comfort to disabled veterans through the medium of motion pictures", as the Academy put it. His performance is far from polished, but he holds his head high, and helped open the door for non-professional actors. His presence also adds a reality to proceedings that amps up the emotion. His homecoming in which his parents see his prosthetics for the first time is a heartbreaking high point of the film. 

This is all part of how ahead-of-its-time The Best Years Of Our Lives was. Long before terms like PTSD were coined, it showed the nightmares and substance abuse that would plague many veterans. It pulled apart the disposable nature of service, and the range of public perceptions awaiting them back home. A latter scene where Fred wanders through a field of bombers being scrapped hits hard, and serves as a painful metaphor for the whole story.

Now here's a trailer that mentions none of that stuff:

That trailer sells the film as a romance - if you went and saw the movie on the recommendation of this preview, you'd feel robbed. The romantic subplot is the worst part of the film. The female characters are thinly written - the mother-daughter combo played by Loy and Wright are defined by their men and given little personality of their own, though Loy is so good she hints at unseen depths with the raise of an eyebrow. It's a shame that so much screen time is given over to the will-they-won't-they of Fred and Milly, when the film has more interesting things to say, and clocks in at nearly three hours.

Wyler's direction, aided by Gregg Toland's sharp deep-focus cinematography, is excellent too. There are a couple of great long takes that let the cast shine, and that Wyler gets such a good performance out of Russell is amazing. There's a thoughtfulness that pervades the film, which is typical of Wyler's work.

Wyler would win his second of three best director Oscars for The Best Years Of Our Lives (he was nominated an astounding 12 times). And though he still had the 1959 remake of Ben Hur in front of him, this is greatest work. Very much of its time in some ways, what makes it memorable is how ahead of its time it was in the ways that really mattered. And in that sense, it's never been bettered.

AFI #36: The Bridge On The River Kwai (1957)

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio Ballarat and South West Victoria on July 16, 2021.

This is part of a series of articles reviewing the American Film Institute's Top 100 Films, as unveiled in 2007. Why am I doing this? Because the damned cinemas were closed and I had to review something, and now I can't stop until I finish.

(PG) ★★★★★

Director: David Lean.

Cast: Alec Guinness, William Holden, Jack Hawkins, Sessue Hayakawa, James Donald, Geoffrey Horne, André Morell, Percy Herbert, Ann Sears, Henry Okawa, Keiichiro Katsumoto, M.R.B. Chakrabandhu.

"You call this fishing?"

There are an awful lot of films on this AFI 100 list about a man's downfall. Through The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, we watch Michael Corleone fall further and further as he fights for his family, before losing sight of what he was fighting for. In Citizen Kane, we see the seeds of Charles Foster Kane's undoing planted in his early years, despite his best intentions to be a man of the people. We see the titular Lawrence Of Arabia progressively turn from hero into pompous ass who buy into his own bullshit. And we see Jake LaMotta start out as a shit bloke in Raging Bull and end up as an even shitter bloke, so, like, who cares?

As you might have predicted by that intro, The Bridge On The River Kwai is also about the downfall of a man - or in this case two men, not one. They are British Lieutenant Colonel Nicholson (played with steely grace by Alec Guinness) and Japanese Colonel Saito (played with wonderful empathy by Sessue Hayakawa, who is the star of a fascinating episode of The Dollop).

As head of a POW camp in modern day Myanmar, Saito seeks to use any means necessary to get the prisoners of the camp to build a bridge over the Kwai River, thus connecting the Japanese Imperial army railway between Rangoon and Bangkok. Nicholson, as highest ranking officer of the prisoners, wants to keep morale and military precision up, lest the soldiers lose hope in the face of hopelessness. 

Spoilers ahead. Naturally. 

What ensues is one of the great military battles in cinematic history, although unlike Saving Private Ryan's storming of the beach or Lawrence Of Arabia's raid on Aqaba, this battle is purely psychological - it is the battle between Nicholson and Saito. 

Nicholson endures beatings and long stretches in the "hot box" in order to ensure officers don't have to do manual labour, as per the Geneva Convention. It's a stand based on principles and his ideal that "without law, there's no civilisation", but Nicholson is also aware that if he gives in early, then who knows what else will have to be given up. He eventually backs Saito into a corner. Saito needs his bridge built by a certain date, and finally realises only Nicholson can get it done. Nicholson happily takes over and quickly sacrifices his own principles to get it built.

And thus the bridge becomes a curse for both men. The only way Saito can get it built in time is to let the enemy take total control of the project, thereby diminishing his own status and leadership. Some have interpreted some of his final actions - he writes a letter and includes a lock of hair - as a lead-up to ritual suicide (although this is debated despite it being foreshadowed). Either way, he is a dejected and broken man by film's end. The bridge, meant to be his great success, is in fact his great failure because it wasn't Saito who got it built, but the enemy.

Similarly, Nicholson comes to see the bridge as his legacy and his greatest achievement. It's only in the final moments he realises he has aided the enemy, even going so far as to try and foil an attempt to sabotage his beloved bridge. In a wonderful inversion of Saito's downfall, the bridge that he had come to see as his great success is in fact his great failure. This symbolism sneaks up on you, and it's a huge part of The Bridge On The River Kwai's brilliance.

It's a bold script that switches focus mid-film, but that's exactly what blacklisted screenwriters Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson did in The Bridge On The River Kwai. Saito and Nicholson are sidelined in the latter half of the film once their psychological battle reaches a peace accord of sorts, and the story, in search of new tensions to tease out, focuses on William Holden's reluctant saboteur Shears. This American sailor, played by one of the era's biggest box office drawcards, is obviously shoehorned into the story to get American bums on American seats, but it works in a story sense as well. Shears becomes the audience surrogate to take us from the POW camp to the sabotage attempt, but he also serves as an outsider; the unwilling combatant able to comment on the futility and insanity of it all.

The tension is seriously ramped up in the second half with the scene in which explosives are planted on the bridge's pylons - a cinematic moment that doesn't get talked about enough in terms of the great heist/intense moments in movies. From there, there's not much left to do but blow-up the damned bridge and everything it's come to symbolise about the "madness" of war.

Of course, much is made of how highly fictionalised the film is, reportedly angering some of the poor bastards who had to build the real bridge. They have every right to be angry about that sort of stuff, but to the general populace it doesn't matter and shouldn't. You want the real story? There are countless, docos, YouTube videos and books on the subject.

David Lean wasn't trying to display a truth beyond the maxim "war is madness". The opening shot shows jungle, crosses, a railroad, and more crosses, and that's pretty much everything we need to know about the realities of the film. From there, we witness Lean stepping into his epic era, which would include the remarkable Lawrence Of Arabia and slightly overblown Dr Zhivago. The scale of the film, shot on location in Sri Lanka, is impressive, but Lean's ability to make the POW camp seem small, self-contained and hemmed in by the jungle is just as impressive.

If you didn't watch the above video, the key bit is Steven Spielberg describing the film as "one of the most perfect movies ever made". There are flaws that are of its time - the day-for-night, some of the dubbing and sound mixing - and the middle section involving Shears in Columbo is overly padded, which is thanks to the meddling of producer Sam Spiegel and the studio as opposed to Lean's efforts (Lean confirmed the Columbia Pictures almost shut down production when they found out there wasn't a white woman in the film, forcing the addition of some of the Columbo scenes). But the script, the direction, and the performances remain impeccable.

The esteem in which The Bridge On The River Kwai is held appears to be slipping, perhaps due to the way war films are striving for greater realism, especially post-Saving Private Ryan - the poor treatment of Nicholson is fairly tame and bloodless compared to what we expect in war films today, and all those aforementioned docos, YouTube videos and books have perhaps taken some of the lustre off the film. Film Magazine's list of the 100 greatest movies (2006) didn't include it, neither did The Wordsworth Book of Movie Classics (1992) although it included three other Lean films. Kwai didn't make the cut in Empire Magazine's 2021 readers' poll of the best films, it's slipped to #239 on the IMDb users ratings after being as high as #31 in 1998, and on the AFI list it dropped from #13 to #36 between 1998 and 2007.

Maybe it's not as realistic as modern war films, and maybe it plays too loose with the horrible truth, but The Bridge On The River Kwai still stands up as one of the great examinations of the madness of war. The way it destroys two men by giving them exactly what they want is sublime storytelling. And in this world of CG everything, blowing up that damned bridge remains one of the great set pieces of all time. There's nothing unrealistic about that.