The difficulty of comedy is under-rated. It’s not easy to make people laugh, especially as one person’s definition of “what is funny” is entirely different from another person’s; sometimes they even differ from their own’s, depending on what hour it is. Thus, to create a film which not only is universally declared “hilarious” when released, but still makes people fall of their couches in hysterics, that’s something to be damned proud of.
This is John Cleese’s favourite film of his own¹, and one can see why: it’s a simple, yet very funny, story of a theft in the same tradition of The League of Gentlemen, The Lavender Hill Mob, or that other heist film from Ealing Studios I don’t recall the name of right now. Drat.
A Fish Called Wanda (1988)
Anyway, this similarity isn’t too surprising, given that the film is mostly directed by Charles Crichton, the man responsible for directing The Lavender Hill Mob. I have described Mr. Crichton as having “mostly” directed the film because the studio was worried he wouldn’t be able to handle a comedy assignment, and asked Mr. Cleese to ‘keep an eye on things’²; demonstrating that studio people in positions of influence are frequently idiots and haven’t a clue about anything other than what they have watched in the last minute or three, most likely due to most of their brains have been burned away by cocaine.
But, I digress.
Cleese’s character, the barrister “Archie Leach” (the birth name of Cary Grant³), is possibly the simultaneously stupidest and highly educated individual you’ve ever encountered. Sadly, he’s possibly also the most realistic character you’ve ever seen in a film. That’s what makes not only his character, but all of them in the film work so very well. As absurd as they are, they’re all well within the bounds of reality. We see the events of the tale and the way the characters deal with those challenges causes us to think there, but for the Grace of God, go I. This doesn’t exactly prevent one from considering a life in crime, but it certainly makes for a damned funny movie.
The key to this – or any – type of comedy is best summed-up in a post by Christopher Fowler (which you can read RIGHTHERE), in which he details a conversation he recently had with the writers of the Tony Hancock’s material, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. Hancock’s character (he only had the one, really) could never be mistaken for either a ‘success’ or a ‘bright spark’, and therein the comedy bursts forth, according to the writers. In describing the un-produced Hancock film The Day Off, Mr. Fowler says this:
It’s virtually plotless, sad and very funny indeed. In it, Hancock meets up with another bus driver, and argues about the pointlessness of saving and withdrawing the same amount each week with his bank. He tries to bully a man on a park bench into admitting he feels insignificant, and fails. He loses an argument about wasps and bees. He meets Charlotte, a girl who works in a dress shop, and pretends he’s an architect building a cathedral, while she pretends she’s a model. He forces her to have a dessert she doesn’t want because she needs to stay model-thin. Hancock gets found out just before a touching goodnight kiss, and the romance turns sour. The film ends as it begins, with Hancock going home alone as the weather-girl announces tomorrow will be a sunny day – for those with a day off.
… [Ray Galton and Alan Simpson] agree that the script’s downbeat ending is funnier because ‘failures are funny, successful people are not’.
Thus we can see this film, full of the incredible failures nearly from start to finish, as a classic English comedy in the same tradition as Hancock, Ealing, and so very many others… most of which I can’t remember the names of… Drat.
There’s a further connection to this film for Mr. Fowler: in addition to his award-winning novels, he’s also responsible for co-writing a piece of comedy on the DVD of A Fish Called Wanda with Mr. Cleese. Unfortunately I returned this to the library before I remembered that, and thus I cannot tell you either which bit of “extra material” it is, or how funny I thought it was. Drat.
A Fish Called Wanda (1988) Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Prominent Features Star Partners Limited Partnership
Directed by Charles Crichton and un-credited John Cleese
Writing credits written by John Cleese from a story by John Cleese and Charles Crichton
While it’s not often you get two for the price of one, this wasn’t supposed to be the case with these films. You see, when the two of them were shot simultaneously, there was only supposed to be one film, as that’s all the actors’ contracts stated, and their pay was based upon that. Then, at some point either before, during, or after filming, a decision was made to split the story into two halves, these ‘halves’ typically called “movies” as they were released a year apart (or 18 months apart in the case of the UK). “Let’s not bother telling the actors, as they’re all busy doing other films now, and have enough to worry about already, the poor dears.” It was at this point, according to my dear friend John Llewellyn Probert (who told me that I should see these, as it was his favourite adaptation of the stories), “legal hilarity ensued”, with the result of the actors winning, albeit not receiving as much money as they would have if they were paid separately for both films. The result is that now producers must state in advance how many films are being shot as part of the contract wording, something which is referred to as “the Salkind Clause” in honour of the producing father-and-son team Alexander and Ilya Salkind named in the suit. I know of at least one actor’s contract for The Hobbit which has them contracted for three instalments, probably as a way of “covering all eventualities”, based solely on Peter Jackson’s habit of shooting films of incredible length and making them damned good as well.
The Three Musketeers (1973)
Well, that’s a lot of information to explain why there are two films, isn’t it? Do you need a lie down now? I might, actually. What about a glass of something, or some tea? Can I get you a sandwich perhaps? No? ‘Head straight to the films, please’, you say? Right then!
While I’ve read all of The Count of Monte Cristo, I admit that I’ve not read the source material of The Three Musketeers, or Twenty Years After, or even The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later (which I suspect wasn’t included in the plot of either of these films, although its details seem so similar to some of the first two stories’ it’s tough to tell, really).
These are daft, sillly, and damned fun. Everything you could want from a film about these characters is here: bawdy humour, oodles of swordplay, lovably ill-behaved heroes, and enthusiasm about everything good in life: rescuing people, serving your sworn ruler, romance, food, wine, love, and waving a rapier around as often as possible. If, during the films, you feel like shouting Huzzah! or similar terms, I think that’s just fine as well, if not outright recommended.
The title sequence for the first film is incredible, showing us a swordsman’s moves in a pseudo-stop-motion effect and electric blue colour, predating both The Matrix or Tron. While stylish and magnificent, the tone is far more apt to a film of an art-house than what we get. Both approaches are appropriate to the material, and both are very well done, it’s just a bit of a confusion to the viewer who is now expecting a “Great Work of Serious Art” rather than what they get: a “Great Work of Dedicated Romp”. Again, let me say that both the title sequence and the film are exceedingly good, it’s just they don’t quite match each other.
The Four Musketeers (1974)
The bodies of the two films – or, more appropriately, the “bawdies” of them – are filled to the rim with slapstick fun, much of which involves that wonderful symbolic use of “extra-long loaves of bread and bombs” as representing “phallus and testes” way they do so well. Swashbuckling fun for all! *
The cast is made-up of a “who’s who in early-’70s cinema’, with the evil Rochefort played to ever-so-oily perfection by Christopher Lee; M. Bonacieux, d’Artagnan’s landlord, is performed with energetic glee by Spike Milligan (and we see nothing of him in the second film, which is a damned shame), and his wife Constance de Bonancieux, the Queen’s Seamstress (but who also seems to be her confidant and adviser at times) by Raquel Welch; and the scheming Milady de Winter by an incredibly stunning Faye Dunaway. Rounding out the cast of other characters are a host of others literally too numerous to mention.
One who deserves special note by myself is Charlton Heston as incredibly refined and restrained Cardinal Richelieu, thus proving my point about his work being uncontrollable being ill-considered. Considering the complete lack of restraint by most of the cast when going over-the-top with slapstick a-plenty, it would have been easy for him to fall in line with the others (although I’m not sure how it would have been appropriate to his character, frankly). Thus, my earlier comment about his work being uniformly of the “lookit me! LOOKITME!” sort was obviously too hasty. While I doubt I’ll see much more of his œuvre, I’ll not be approaching it with the same expectation or resistance I might have before finally seeing these films.
There’s some frankly bad sound dubbing in these due to the “shoot pictures first, record audio later” approach to things, but it being the style of the time it’s not too bad in the circumstances. The first film doesn’t allow too much in the way of character development, but there’s an awful lot of characters to simply get introduced here, so there’s little time left to develop any of them as a result; this is left to the intricacies of the second film, which was known as “The Four Musketeers: Milady’s Revenge” in the USA, and variants of it in France, West Germany, Brazil, Italy, Greece, and in Hungary’s ‘long title’. It would seem that the Lady de Winter has a secret and is happy to take revenge upon a few others while she’s keeping the status of that secret. INTRIGUE!
The camera-work for this is uniformly good, if a tad uniformly wide but, given the amount of the sword-waving and running-about going-on inside the frame, it’s certainly justified. The stock used seems a tad grainy but, again, the requirements of detail in night and shadowed scenes, couple with the amount of running around needing some extra depth of field means little else is possible for use.
The story, had it been shoved into one film of about 2/3 the length of the two of these combined, would be too much detail to handle. director Richard Lester was wise to split them into two film, thus allowing the narrative to have sufficient elbow-room for the silliness and action that makes both of the films work so very well. He was, on the other hand, damned stupid on a contractual basis to have done it. Re-negotiating with the cast afterwards would have been not only have been intelligent a choice on a legal standpoint, it would have simply been the right thing to have done.
If you see these available for your viewing pleasure, rest assured it will be one.
Written from the novel by Alexandre Dumas père with a screenplay by George MacDonald Fraser
Trailer for The Three Musketeers (1973)
Trailer for The Four Musketeers (1974)
* NOTE: the author of this post is well aware of what a buckler actually is, and will not be making any jokes based on “buckling a swash”, as this would be wrong. More apt would be to “swash a buckler” which is, in fact, where “swash buckling” comes from. So belt-up. [ RETURN ]
Mood: blah Music: Yusef Lateef, The Man with the Big Front Yard (1967, Savoy Records) Book: Guy Adams, Torchwood: The Men Who Sold the World (BBC Digital Books, ISBN9781446417201)
Every once in a while, something arrives that is not only more interesting than you expected, but is also quite altogether different than you expected. That’s what happened with Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes for me.
It’s the last film he made in England before running off to Hollywood in order to not get caught in the War (although he must have been anticipating doing so, given the release date followed the production itself), and you can see great chunks of the work to come from him: seemingly slow-moving plots, careful examination of characters (often in trains), story-driven narrative with bits of dialogue that mix specific information as well as ‘slice of life’ elements of the moment, and then a bunch of action that stems from a plot that’s actually moved pretty quickly but you didn’t notice that originally. It’s all there, folks.
The Lady Vanishes (1938)
The first reel takes place in a hotel in the middle of a mountainous country of Europe, where – Goodness Gracious! Such a remote and wilderness place – news about what’s happening in England, and specifically the Cricket Tests, cannot be had with any reliability! There is talk of a war, but the Great Decision has not yet been made (but really, it’s the decision of the Bowler that really matters, wot?). There are a number of groups of characters we follow in this chunk of the story, and it’s probable that if it was made today the whole first third of the film would be hacked out because “it’s too confusing. Who’s the hero? What’s the problem that he’s going to solve? Who’s the dame he’s going to win? Who’s he going to have to kill? If it’s not there in the first twenty pages, you’ve lost everything.” Or, at least, so is the wisdom of William Goldman, the man who declared he’s right about everything.
The funny thing is, all of it is there in the first twenty pages or so, but it’s not presented in bullet-list form, nor exclusively so; there’s a whole bunch of extraneous stuff in there to distract you from the ‘essentials’ noted above. That’s what’s called “entertainment” and “colour”, folks. It’s supposed to be “fun” and something you can “enjoy for the sake of”. Remember that? Remember when we had that opportunity for more than the length of one ‘witty’ line about someone’s sexual prowess or reference to a sponsoring corporate product? Not that I’m pooh-poohing the newer films for the sake of that, I’m just acknowledging that things were different back in 1938, and everyone seems to do things the same these days, instead of using as many different styles of story-telling as are available. Nothing is “wrong”, it’s merely “different”, and we need more “different”. As it is, films are so frequently in such a head-long rush to get to the music-swelling ending that we’ve sacrificed the “getting to know you” bit of the stories, it’s refreshing to see one again and it reminds us that we shouldn’t rush to the ends of our lives either.
But back to this film.
Hopefully by the middle of the film you’ve given-up trying to work out where it’s headed in the end, because there’s a great deal to enjoy by simply letting it get there in its own time. This journey is wonderful in its own right as are its the stops along the way as we get to know people, the question of the tale to be answered, and then the matter of how to solve the problem by the end. As with life, it’s not the conclusion that matters, it’s how you get there and the direction in which it takes you that is more appreciable.
Spend some time with this one, and see just how good a smart mystery / thriller can be, and how it can be done with a mixture of people (as opposed to a bunch who are seemingly all equally good-looking and thin). It’s wonderful. You can even watch it for free by heading to THISPAGE on the Internet Movie Archive!
Written by Ethel Lina White (for her story “The Wheel Spins”), screenplay by Sidney Gilliat (credited as ‘Sidney Gilliatt”) and Frank Launder
I’ve been watching DVDs from the library for a number of reasons, mostly to do with a combination of “filling in the gaps in my ‘pop culture’ knowledge”, as well as a concerted effort to better understand story editing by both watching a film and then re-watching listening to people who have studied that particular movie for years in order to better appreciate the themes, plot construction, symbolism, and so on.
The process would be nothing without the secondary audio tracks. Sometimes it’s like having actually been through the film-making process with the people involved.
Mood: satisfied Music: Yusef Lateef & his Detroit All-Stars, Before Dawn (1957, PolyGram #557097) Book: Guy Adams, Torchwood: The Men Who Sold the World (BBC Digital Books, ISBN9781446417201)
The ‘Spy Thriller’ is a tricky thing. You can get it wrong a billion different ways, or you can duplicate a ‘Bond’ film (and be accused of plagiarizing), you can fill a movie with car-chases and shooting but ultimately bore people, or you can actually get it right. There’s little in-between the reaction “YES!!!” and an urging to take your smelly two hours of programming on a 75-foot long tour of the nearest 50-foot pier. Cold? Callous? Un-caring? Oh yeah; t’is the way of the secretive operative of a foreign government.
Gorky Park (1983)
Gorky Park could actually be called a ‘murder mystery’ really, but I’m going to call it a spy thriller because it involves the KGB, plus US citizens, plus a bunch of other things. Also, basically I’m going to call it a ‘Spy Thriller’ for reasons that involve revealing too much of the plot. Besides, I just plain feel like it! So there!
It’s odd in its casting: William Hurt plays a copy who’s equally able to run around and punch people, as he is to contemplate various contradictory and seemingly un-connected evidence. At this point he wasn’t known for anything other than a couple of things on Kojak of all things, as well some work in The Big Chill which only came out two months earlier in the cinemas. Meanwhile, Brian Dennehy plays a more sensitive and analytically-inclined guy than he had up to this point, mostly playing punching / shooting / cussin’ / whoring / neanderthals (or partial ones at the very least). Meanwhile, Alexei Sayle shows-up for the first time, and clearly impressed everyone, including me, because he’s always awesome (but what a waste it was with him in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade… however more on that one in a later post).
I’d really like to examine the plot and its twists and turns in all their surprising detail… but I can’t. Because of spoilers. Which is a shame.
Look, just watch the film. Even if you have seen it before, if it’s been longer than a decade since then, and especially if you saw it in all its dis-jointed glory as a television broadcast, I’m willing to guarantee you’ve forgotten at least one major detail near the end. No, don’t think about it right now, just watch the film and let it wash all over you.
The characters are fully realized, with all of them being complex in a way we’re un-used to typically in a spy thriller. Especially intriguing is the number of sides to the… oh, damn, here we go again. Crap.
It’s really good. Trust me.
[heavy sigh]
Sneakers (1992)
In order to avoid getting a “G-rating”, which was considered to be the surest way to be over-looked by ‘grown-ups’, oddly Sneakers ended up adding some swearing to an other-wide brilliant script. The result is seeing Sidney Poitier call someone a “mother fucker” and David Strathairn mention oral sex. Not their proudest moment, but you do what you have to in order to make things work in the marketing department.
This is much more of a ‘Thriller’ in the ‘Tech’ category, as we’re dealing with a computerized universal decoding / decryption MacGuffin that – unsurprisingly – everyone wants, but telling who actually is who is never something that’s easy. Asking for some ID is never reliable, even if people are co-operative. Those ‘secret guys’ seem to have this aversion to revealing stuff. Funny that.
The characters are less complex here than in the earlier film but, given the complexity of the action involved, it would be pretty difficult to cram that in there as well. They’re still more complicated than you’d expect in a thriller, though, and a fair number of their motivations and decisions are surprising when revealed. Hooray!
I wish Dan Ackroyd got more roles like this, though: “Mother” is a kinda nerdy conspiracy theorist who knows his way around wiring and complicated hardware the same way most people can handle a corkscrew*. “Mother” is ‘thinky’, and funny, and intriguing. He’s a really good actor, and an extremely good writer, and I like his work.
Mildly disturbing to some may be the fact that all of the technology in the film was available to the common man for reasonably low prices before the film came out. Viewed today it looks really tame. Having already read David Gurr’s An American Spy Story, satellite and electronic monitoring potentials were well-known to me when originally seeing this in the cinema, and that was back in the days before these here interweb-tubes.
Sneakers is more light-hearted than Gorky Park, but is just as satisfying over-all, owing to the calibre of the actors and the quality of the writing.
…and I can’t really say much more than that without giving something away again. Blast.
Writing credits written by Phil Alden Robinson and Lawrence Lasker&Walter F. Parkes
This year, I’ve been watching DVDs from the library for a number of reasons, mostly to do with a combination of “filling in the gaps in my ‘pop culture’ knowledge”, as well as a concerted effort to better understand story editing by both watching a film and then re-watching listening to people who have studied that particular movie for years in order to better appreciate the themes, plot construction, symbolism, and so on.
The process would be nothing without the secondary audio tracks. Sometimes it’s like having actually been through the film-making process with the people involved.
* No, I haven’t any idea what that means either. [ RETURN ]
Mood: apathetic Music:CBC Radio1’s On the Coast Book: Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink (The Power of Thinking Without Thinking) (Little Brown, ISBN9780316005043)
Only ten years apart and yet yet both seem to be brilliant, it’s difficult to understand how these two men keep creating such incredible work so consistently. Somehow, they’re able to write, direct, and edit a film nearly every year and make all of them – well, nearly all of them – worth running across the street through heavy on-coming traffic. Plus, during the shooting period, there are no re-writes. None. Zero. Those script pages stay white.
The Big Lebowski (1998)
While this has become a cult classic, I still don’t think it’s that incredible. Yes, it’s fabulous, but I wouldn’t declare it “87 out of ten stars!!!!” as some have. I’m not sure what I would change, but it’s so anarchic that it’s tough to identify anything as either “not sufficiently developed” or “extraneous”. The one section which I wouldn’t remove is the dream sequence, oddly, as it’s such a fabulous reflection of Hollywood’s musical montages, as well as the idyllic nature of The Dude’s notion of life.
I might take out the character Jesus Quintana, as it really has nothing to do with anything in the story, but he acts in the same way as the gravedigger in Hamlet or the Night Porter in “the Scottish Play”. Besides, the basis for taking out that character would then have to equally apply to the character only identified as “The Stranger”, played by Sam Elliott, and he is possibly the only consistently normal person in the entire tale, so we need him. Hmmm… tricky…
Like Fargo, the movie the brother released two years earlier, The Big Lebowski is what may be best described as “minimalist noir™”. Basically, ‘how much can you do with a noir mystery or thriller to follow its rules, yet make it about as non-depressing and cynical as possible?’ Everyone in both of those films, plus Burn After Reading, is entirely out for the betterment of no one but themselves, and are willing to do anything in order to get it. The one individual who is an exception to this is the police officer Marge in the earlier film, but that’s getting a bit away from the two films we’re really examining here.
With The Big Lebowski, the questions are “why is this loser getting confused with someone else?” plus “where’s this ‘Bunny’ Lebowski, and what does Jackie Treehorn have to do with it?” An obvious additional couple of questions are “where’s The Dude going to get a decent run that really pulls the room together?” as well as “how are they going to fare in the league standings after all of this shakes down?” but those are more by the way sorts of things.
Burn After Reading (2008)
In Burn After Reading, however, the questions are more straight-forward: “who’s going to pay the most for these secret files?”, as well as “how did they get those secret files?” Again, everyone is out for their own betterment, whether they’re the author of a memoire, wanting – no, needing, dammit – cosmetic surgery, or simply looking for a bit of sex to warm them up for another run. The number of selfless people in this story are about as many as you would expect to find in Washington, DC: zilch.
The number of excellent performances from people you hadn’t expected to do real solid comedy yet are pretty damned good thank you very much, however, is “all”. There’s a moment when Brad Pitt’s character needs to be ‘sneaky’, and only ends-up looking completely self-conscious instead. And yet, if you really deconstruct what Pitt does, it’s such an incredibly subtle yet entirely clear bit of body language adjustment, but the guy makes it look effortless.
Somehow, the Coen boys get the best performances of their careers out of everyone in their films. In some cases, the actors go on to continue their careers with increased skills in every genre of film, but they never quite match their achievement without a script written by them.
Typically, each of their scripts are filled with excellent dialogue which demonstrates a love of and un-matched facility with language. They also have a love of the movie-making business, as their ability to turn stereotypes and predictable scenarios on their proverbial heads is a high-water mark in cinema.
Damn, they’re awesome!
The Big Lebowski (1998) Polygram Filmed Entertainment Working Title Films
Directed by Joel Coen & an uncredited Ethan Coen
Written by Ethan Coen&Joel Coen
Burn After Reading (2008) Focus Features presents in association with Studio Canal in association with Relativity Media in association with Working Title Films Mike Zoss Productions
Directed by Ethan Coen&Joel Coen
Written by: Joel Coen&Ethan Coen
This year, I’ve been watching DVDs from the library for a number of reasons, mostly to do with a combination of “filling in the gaps in my ‘pop culture’ knowledge”, as well as a concerted effort to better understand story editing by both watching a film and then re-watching listening to people who have studied that particular movie for years in order to better appreciate the themes, plot construction, symbolism, and so on.
The process would be nothing without the secondary audio tracks. Sometimes it’s like having actually been through the film-making process with the people involved.
Mood: struggling to think differently Music:CBC Radio1’s On the Coast Book: Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink (The Power of Thinking Without Thinking) (Little Brown, ISBN9780316005043)
Ian Alexander Martin [IAM] is the Proprietor of Atomic Fez Publishing, as well as formerly being an actor and theatre director based in British Columbia, and also was Founding Editor and Publisher of the theatre magazine The Boards. [read more]
Ian Alexander Martin [
Entries (RSS)