The Voyage (Il Viaggio, 1974)

Vittorio De Sica’s final film as director is a peculiarly diffident affair. De Sica, best known to popular audiences as a comedic star akin to an Italian Cary Grant, had of course surprisingly established himself at the head of the pack amongst the Italian neo-realists with films like The Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Umberto D (1953). After Two Women (1961) De Sica’s stature began to decline. Most of the directors who had exemplified the Neo-Realist creed had by this time seen dips and crests in their careers and had made various settlements with more commercial cinema. Old comrade and rival Luchino Visconti was on a roll through the ‘60s, whilst Roberto Rossellini was in a kind of exile, immersed in productions for French TV that only emerged later as classics. Tyros like Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Pier Paolo Pasolini had become the hip, fearsome new voices of Italian film. De Sica, with his preference for raw humanistic values and personal drama, over aesthetic questions and ongoing provocation, as well as his ongoing status as a film star, seemed to make him the most amenable of the Neo-Realists for a move into a more mainstream film world, which some critics suggested he hinted at with the magic-realist tendencies of his Cannes prize-winning Miracle in Milan (1951), and had become undeniable with the success of the sexy portmanteau comedy Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (1963). De Sica kept making films at a steady rate, but many were lightweight or disappeared from attention, whilst his forays into broadening the audience for his brand were mixed, like the uneven but occasionally brilliant self-satire After the Fox (1966), and the notorious clunky romantic weepy A Place for Lovers (1968). He resurged in critical estimation with The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1971), but his advancing age and frail health undoubtedly informed the subject of The Voyage, an adaptation of a Luigi Pirandello novel, completed the year of his death.

The Voyage tries to sustain a tone of elegy and grace-note contemplation of inevitable change and mortality, with its theme of coming to terms with the imminence of death and trying to live courageously anyway. But the resulting film feels like a compromise, trying to balance the kind of high-class, melancholic look back to a time of changing mores and the hazy folk-memory of history wielded in Finzi-Continis, and with hints of competition with Visconti’s lucid melding of melodrama and Neo-Realist approaches in films like Senso (1954) and The Leopard (1962), whilst essentially recycling the essential romantic drama trope of A Place for Lovers, where a man falls in love with a beautiful but dying woman. De Sica’s previous work, A Brief Vacation (1973), had also explored the fatalistic bravery engendered by illness, in working class characters there, whilst The Voyage is the tale of a woman, Adriana de Mauro (Sophia Loren), who moves up and down on the social ladder. The daughter of a soldier who was beloved of his aristocratic commander, at the outset she’s working as a seamstress with her mother (Barbara Pilavin) in a small flat in Palermo. Fate comes knocking in the form of the deceased commander’s son, Cesare Braggi (Richard Burton), whom she’s had a crush on since childhood, but in a cruel twist, the dead overlord’s will insists that Cesare’s younger brother Antonio (Ian Bannen) marry Adriana: Cesare demurs from any declarations that might forestall this, and Adriana, in spite of vowing not to go through with the union, nonetheless succumbs to the siren call of affluence.

The sense of human frailty in diastolic relation to its resilience was a constant De Sica theme. In adapting Pirandello, a writer defined by disillusionment and irony and a wry sense of the disparity between roles – both social and theatrical – and individuals, De Sica seems out of his zone, however. Whereas with 1900 (1976) Bernardo Bertolucci would labour excessively to chart an historical course via its main characters’ perspectives, De Sica, who managed the same thing so beautifully in Two Women, doesn’t seem able to make necessary connections between the immediate human drama and the end of an era beyond obvious statements: Antonio dies learning how to drive a car and Adriana expires as the First World War is declared. De Sica seems to be evoking the world of his childhood here, except from the perspective of the opposite end of town to the one he grew up in. Adriana marries Antonio, and finds that she, her husband, and Cesare are all somewhat befuddled by their adherence to convention. Burton, oddly cast as a Sicilian playboy nobleman, nonetheless sells his role in the early moment in which he resists acknowledging Adriana’s imploring to recognise she’d rather marry him: “I don’t – I don’t understand – I don’t – I don’t understand," he stammers in agitated obfuscation before hurrying out: it's a moment of vulnerability that feels rare for Burton. Antonio marries Adriana without complaint, and indeed he has nothing to complain about, in obedience to his father’s last wishes, but needs coaching from Cesare in how to express actual pleasure. Cesare plays man of the world, with his mistress and peripatetic habits, but he only smoulders against propriety rather the properly rebels against it.

The problem with The Voyage is that whilst it offers building blocks for a perfervid romantic tragedy, it never seems to add up to anything. De Sica was working here  for Loren’s husband Carlo Ponti, and the heavy hand of class lies upon the whole affair. The crucial romance of Cesare and Adriana after Antonio’s death and flaring just when they learn Adriana has a mortal heart ailment doesn’t really begin until the last twenty minutes. But everything before it feels like mere set-up: there’s too little penetration into Cesare, Adriana, and Antonio’s headspaces to give them immediacy. There’s a sophomoric quality to the film’s essential irony, in how Antonio dies right after shouting “I am a happy man!” at Cesare’s behest, and later Adriana also expires after Cesare encourages her to seize the day, cutting both lives off at the cusp of fulfilment, as if the point of the film is to say, in extremely elegant terms, life’s a bitch and then you die. Of course, this isn’t actually the thesis here, being more of one about the necessity of bravery to throw off the past and embrace immediacy, but the film never quite finds the focus to realise this. Orson Welles’ influence is discernible: in exploring like The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) the end of a genteel era, De Sica offers up a kind of roving Greek chorus of lower class people spying on the will reading of the Braggis and cheekily meditating on their later predicaments, anticipating the collapse of the upper class and the day of the scurrying proletariat who leave no room for illusions. The Voyage however never comes close to gaining the force of Ambersons, because it feels like all the scenes crucial to the story were included in the final cut, but not the sort of rich or observational incidental material that might have given it the body it lacks. 

Burton and Loren, who the same year also appeared in a TV remake of Brief Encounter, don’t really have much chemistry, and their miscasting in roles that suppress their natural charisma doesn’t help. The hope that casting such grade-A movie stars might give reticent Cesare and repressed Adriana a secret lode of passion to be tapped was justifiable, but came to little. Burton, though subtler in his performance here than usual at this point in his career, looks and sounds clapped-out, and Loren seems too old for her role. The English cut sports an actor who patently isn’t Bannen dubbing in his dialogue, whilst Burton and Loren’s inimitable strains are heard. One lengthy late sequence sees Cesare and Adriana trying to enjoy the highlife, watching a Can-Can kickrow, a sight that reduces the decorous Adriana to utter hilarity: here De Sica does subtly construct a sense of frenetically pointless activity and immobile spectacle, bawdy show turning into try-hard simulacrum of real sensuality, generating the sense of last moments being wasted even as they’re being expended on what passes for living. The eponymous voyage is the one Cesare takes Adriana on once he plies her out of the palace to see doctors to diagnose her ailments and possible future, and of course this idea takes on metaphysical echoes as a voyage of life that inevitably bends back towards the same truths. The photography, by Ennio Guarnieri, has that common quality of a lot of ‘70s European art cinema and already well-worked by Finzi-Continis, slightly smudged light effects redolent of hazy remembrance and muted colour, paying off in one  eye-catching sequence in which Cesare tries to talk Adriana out of her isolation as she enjoys sunlight on a terrace where fresh bright laundry flaps, her black widow’s reed-clad form a blight behind the fiery white cloth, visually encapsulating her subservience to a life-killing edict. Antonio’s death, in his car which runs off a vertiginous road, is filmed in slow motion, the explosion of his car, like the finale of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970) if not as lingeringly or effectively, turned into an ontological statement. Otherwise the film settles for offering one well-decorated room after another. 

Which is not to suggest this is mere nostalgic decor porn, although it comes close: more that De Sica seems to be trying evoke the simultaneously ravishing but also suffocating qualities of the belle epoque’s closing years, all about to be swept away by apocalyptic storms, and along with it the tired morality and hierarchical assumptions Cesare and Adriana find themselves subject to and half-heartedly rebel against. De Sica suggests that great wealth can be as great a block against experience and freedom as great poverty. The privilege of the Braggis, encapsulated in their palace outside Palermo, acts like a trap, reducing Antonio to an alienated, middle-aged but still boyish cipher and Cesare to a sensual but essentially aimless being, whilst Adriana adopts the palace like a crayfish moving into another, bigger shell for protection, within which she subsists after Antonio’s death, neither quite alive nor dead, but held in stasis according to convention. The script, tellingly not penned by De Sica’s usual collaborator Cesare Zavattini, states rather than animates its ideas, and De Sica’s matter-of-fact approach doesn’t evoke the crucial frustration except in certain occasional glimpses. The finale does finally see De Sica deliver a memorable sequence, as he intercuts between Neapolitans receiving the news of the war’s declaration, Cesare desperately arguing with Adriana’s mother that they will be getting married against all protocol over the phone, and Adriana suffering a fatal heart attack, destroyed by anxiety caused by the hope of final fulfilment clashing with fear of the known, a storm of crumbling flesh, securities, and values. Adriana’s final, dumbstruck death mask is the image of an expired era, and De Sica's last image confronts his own impending mortality in the raw.

Beautiful Creatures (2013)

Witches could be the next big thing: Beautiful Creatures follows editions of the necromantic evil Queen in Snow White and The Huntsman and Mirror Mirror (both 2012), the eponymous prey of Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, and the wicked sister act of Oz The Great and Powerful (both 2013). After the recent hordes of vampires and zombies, disturbing and morbid figurations of metaphoric power reprocessed into beings fit for the pop culture mass-market, witches are a logical next subject. Clearly produced with an eye to courting the Twilight market and received by critics with the same general scorn as that series, this version of Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl’s opener to their Caster Chronicles franchise nonetheless feels very different and stirs gentlemanly impulses in me to scrutinise it more fairly. Beautiful Creatures possesses an actual sense of humour and an almost inimical attitude to parochial Americana than that displayed by Twilight, whilst kicking off with many advantages of budget and casting. Doubling up on writing and directing duties is Richard LaGravanese, who once upon a time wrote Terry Gilliam’s great The Fisher King (1991), and moved into directing with the surprising Living Out Loud (1998). Since then LaGravenese has specialised in the genre least likely to bring critical hosannas, the chick flick, and his return to fantastic material comes through a prism of the classic melodrama Hollywood used to make a lot, about and for female audiences, which always assumed that the strife between imperious ladies constituted the true, subterranean social battleground whilst men whistled away in ignorance. Beautiful Creatures only takes this to an extreme. The narrative voice here is male, that of young Ethan Wate (Alden Ehrenreich), but the story is all about the girls.

Ethan is a recently orphaned young Southern gentleman, resident in the town of Gatlin, North Carolina: although a popular member of the football team, he is nonetheless also a voracious reader and wannabe intellectual increasingly alienated from the mores of his locale. His pretensions are signposted by a usual roster of brainy teen author obsessions, particularly Kurt Vonnegut. His eye is captured by new girl in town Lena Duchannes (Alice Englert), who trails mysterious phenomena and is ostracised as a malefic influence by the religious-bitchy complex that dominates the town, with Ethan’s former sweetheart and chief mean girl Emily Asher (Zoey Deutch) a particularly cruel inquisitor. Lena is the niece of the locale’s biggest landowner, the reclusive Macon (Jeremy Irons), and is now living with him after a peripatetic childhood. Sullen and sharp-tongued, sporting a tattoo on her hand that mysteriously counts down each day, Lena fends off Ethan’s advances, but hormonal gravity, a mutual love of transgressive-hued literature – Lena gets Ethan hooked on Charles Bukowski – and a dark, shared historical secret makes attraction inescapable. Ethan soon finds himself up to his neck in a clandestine world: the Duchannes are Casters, witching folk who labour under a peculiar curse. Female Casters are beset by forces almost beyond their control on their sixteenth birthday, forces that determine whether they’ll be good or evil witches, and for the Duchannes femmes, their fate is exclusively wicked, so Lena seems doomed to follow in the footsteps of her malevolent mother, Serafine, and her cousin Ridley (Emmy Rossum), who was as good-natured and fearful of turning as Lena is, but was reborn as a strident bitch-queen.

Beautiful Creatures starts well in conjuring a signposted but winning version of misfit chic, laced with LaGravanese’s humour, in a fashion that tries to escape the atonal, bland fashion of Twilight. Ethan and Lena banter well, testing each-other’s reactions and sensibilities in swapping smart-mouthed quips. Ethan could easily have been played as another dull, perfect himbo avatar for a teen girl audience – he’s sporty! and hot! but also cool and smart and reads and he’s, like, really committed! – but LaGravenese and Ehrenreich, fresh from apprentice work with Francis Coppola on Tetro (2009) and Twixt (2011), make him convincing in his slightly overworked pretensions and ego. Ethan speaks wryly of Gatlin’s seamy institutions, like the local movie theatre, prone to showing films already on DVD and advertising them with misspelt titles: Interception and Finale Destination 6 are seen showing. Whereas Twilight never escaped what was for many the disgrace of being conceived by a Mormon housewife and being crammed full of discomforting metaphors for that worldview, Creatures takes pot-shots at religious oppression, parochial viciousness, and social ostracism of the peculiar, almost to a point that becomes obnoxious for going too far the other way, exploiting a lazy disdain for small towns. On the other hand, the peculiar, half-hidden richness of Gatlin’s underworld provides strong metaphors for the individualism and complexity of such hamlets. The Duchannes own the mansion on the hill, whilst Amma (Viola Davis), local librarian and Ethan’s pseudo-adoptive mother, proves to belong to another Caster clan, sporting a mighty collection of pseudo-tribal tattoos and voodoo chic as she tries to contact her ancestors for some aid for the poor assailed living, rebuking Macon all the time for his imperious incapacity to ask for help rather than demand it.

The story’s coded approach to adolescent drama is likewise intriguing, channelling coming-of-age anxieties into the conceit of the either-or schism that besets the witches, fashioning metaphors for the strange variances genetic inheritance and character moulding can inflict, and foil our pretensions to rectitude and wisdom when facing adulthood’s quagmires. Rossum’s Ridley enters the film like an explosion of charismatic, haute couture evil and strident force, charging into Gatlin in her red sports car, wrapped in black lace that manages to be chic and ruthlessly wanton at the same time, and quickly seducing Ethan’s pal Link (Thomas Mann): the film’s most electric image depicts Ridley screwing Link on a raft in the middle of the bayous with alligators swimming around them, a potent image of sexual evil. Rossum, always a welcome presence in spite of her excruciating career choices, walks into the film and walks off with it, even as the film then essentially sidelines her for the next hour and a half. Irons, who never seems confident with American accents and whose Southern drawl is downright corny, nonetheless invests his part with charisma and a sufficient mix of dark aggression and familial affection to make Macon’s divided character interesting, culminating in a scene where he invades the local church congregation, who have been whipped up into a righteous fury over Lena’s presence in the local school, and efficiently reminds all present that he’s still the silent overlord of the locality. 

Macon finds his sister Serafine has however implanted herself in the body of the Link’s batty mother Mavis Lincoln (Emma Thompson, having fun), thus following on from Dark Shadows’ (2012) making the evil witch also the head of the local witch-burners, an idea replete with satiric value. The film takes an initially pointed stance against the domination of small-town American life by repressive cliques and religious conservatives, but later tries to make peace as Amma affirms a faith in God in spite of her Caster nature, arguing that only humans decide which of the deity’s creations are worthy and normal, a touch that awkwardly suggests the filmmakers want to keep the faithful in the audience on side whilst still arguing for tolerance. Similarly uncomfortable are the film’s attempts to maintain balance between its overt fantasticality and its desire to court the teen romance audience, by having Lena entreat Ethan to give her everyday experiences before her time runs out. This justifies their going on dates to the movies when they’re afraid she might soon morph into a destroyer of worlds. 

At least the film finds some knowing feeling for teen behaviour, entwined at points with a sneaky sense of the detachment of modern youth from the forces that shape their lives: a wry exchange between Ethan and Link, wanting to extract themselves from the tedium of Civil War re-enacting, agree to shoot each-other with their blank-loaded muskets so they can go and watch Aliens on Blu-Ray, only for the shot Link fires at Ethan to prove a real bullet. There’s also a dash of film-buff humour in a sequence where Ridley first seduces Link, distracting him from the cue to see a revival of Gilda (1945) by appearing as Rita Hayworth and glamorously enticing him into her evil embrace, offering possibilities for a layered, sneakily meta-narrative take on the femme fatale as magician of guises designed to ensnare men. Serafine and Ridley try to manipulate Lena’s seemingly inevitable slide towards the dark side, but Amma helps by giving the teen loves access to a library of Caster lore, in search of spells that might dispel the curse. The roots of the curse are hinted at until properly revealed in a sequence set in the local movie theatre, where the lovers clutch a transporting keepsake that unveils their fate like an unreeling film on the screen. The curse proves to have been taken hold in the Civil War, when a battle that engulfed Gatlin, the one which the present-day townsfolk ritually re-enact, claimed the life of Ethan’s ancestor and period avatar, whose fate kicked off the curse. Hysterical with grief, Lena’s ancestor, in love with him, revived Ethan after he was shot, an act the automatically brought the dark curse upon her and her kin, and she promptly killed her revived lover and lots of soldiers too. 

Given the bounty of possibilities and engaging attributes Beautiful Creatures offers, it’s quite genuinely astounding how inarguably the film falls flat on its face by its end credits. Whilst the substance and potential is there, the storytelling is ultimately deeply confused and the narrative development inept. LaGravenese’s direction is a great part of the problem, sloppy and unfocused, allowing scenes to ramble on and repeat. Characters, particularly Macon and Lena’s extended clan including Gramma (Eileen Atkins) and Aunt Del (Margo Martindale), are introduced but then kept to scantly defined, seat-warmer roles, begging many unanswered questions, like why these ladies aren’t afflicted by the Curse. Apart from that scene with Ridley, Link, and the alligators, the film badly lacks Southern Gothic, and cries out for flavour and a sense of immediacy: too much of the film is styled and paced like a bland TV pilot. Considering how this milieu has been engaged by filmmakers over the years – Alan Parker’s Angel Heart, Bill Condon’s Sister Sister ( both 1987), Iain Softley’s The Skeleton Key (2005), and Bertrand Tavernier’s In the Electric Mist (2010) stand amongst many recent films that run the gamut from middling to great but still wring lustrous and lurid energy from such locales – LaGravenese’s evocations of atmosphere, even granting the broad younger audience he’s looking for, are dull and cloddish. Major revelations are delayed far too long, characters disappear for long stretches, and time passages are indiscriminate. 

The special effects are thankfully rather sparse, but the few LaGravenese offers are hackneyed enough to be tedious anyway, including a kind of sticky black goo that envelops Ethan that looks like leftover CGI software from Spider-Man 3 (2007). A would-be set-piece that sees Ethan trapped and unable to speak whilst Ridley and Lena stoke each-other’s rage over the family dinner table, set rotating by the storm of their powers, is a nicely conceived metaphor for the discomfort of all would-be family members confronted by the baggage of the clan, but it’s clumsily staged and finishes merely as risibly comedic. Ehrenreich and Englert are both good but lack chemistry, which makes the film’s excessive emphasis on their repetitive frustration all the more. Particularly problematic is how the film essentially renders Ethan a superfluous character in the last quarter after Lena erases his memory. She does that for the dual purpose of protecting him from her world and also because she finds a spell that demands a love-one be sacrificed to atone for the initial sin, and she attempts to swing a Jesuitical solution. But it also helps render the story build-up an emphasis on Ethan’s reactions to Lena and her world dismayingly inconsequential. Macon pulls a switch that delivers a genuine sacrifice, and the film’s interesting punch-line, which sees Lena claim both her dark and light sides and emerges from trauma and battle as a dichotomous, ambiguous figure of immense power, offers a superb idea that’s fudged badly. A sequel might wrangle something from it, but that seems a doubtful proposition. 

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Iron Man Three (2013)

Here there be spoilers

The wave of action cinema Hollywood produced in the 1980s and early ‘90s finally  retreated thanks to the convergence of decadently self-mocking flops like Hudson Hawk (1991) and The Last Action Hero (1993), the emergence of retro hipster irony in the Tarantino style not long after CGI split the streams with Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), and the emergence of an even flashier brand of director. Michael Bay’s The Rock (1996) marked the transition, quoting the institutional suspicion, unlikely fraternity, and situational intensity of ‘80s action, but realising it all in the most inflated, reality-distorting, fratboy-smug fashion possible. Whilst now nostalgically remembered for their air of unironic purity as engines of entertainment, something like the cine-cultural equivalent of a Detroit muscle car, the ‘80s action genre was at the time decried at the time just as broadly and violently as our contemporary CGI-fied spectacle blockbusters are, as heights of junk culture and deadening of the mass psyche. Shane Black is the fallen angel of ‘80s spec scripting, penner of the vastly overrated but still canonical ‘80s action film Lethal Weapon (1987) and co-star of another, Predator (1986), but ironically more associated with the demise of the style thanks to his overpaid involvement in bombs like The Last Boy Scout (1991) and Last Action Hero. Inviting Black to unite the eras and modes, and loan the personality of the old brand to the drenching spectacle of the new, was nonetheless inspired, but his achievement with Iron Man Three is a peculiar one. Black, who revived his career with the smart-arsed self-critique of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2004), is a weirdly perfect creative simulacrum for Tony Stark, the self-reinvented wunderkind turned armour-plated superhero. Black’s rapid-fire dialogue and witty capacity to unite self-awareness with dramatic immediacy, promises  what Iron Man 2 (2010) failed dismally to achieve, an action-comedy based as much in verbal fireworks as physical, and meshes well – almost too well – with Robert Downey Jr’s gift for machine gun-like patter. 

One problem with the Iron Man branch of the Marvel franchise, which has dominated blockbuster cinema since the first entry in 2008, is that it’s the least imaginative of the Marvel realms, and Stark is essentially a good supporting character awkwardly installed as lead. The simplicity and clarity of the first Iron Man’s narrative proved unable to sustain much superstructure in the sequel, whilst, thanks in part to Hollywood spreading it far too thin with the godawful Sherlock Holmes films, Downey’s shtick grew quickly, irritatingly familiar. The Avengers (2012) seemed to prove it could maintain interest by forcing Stark to face off against figures equal in power but dichotomous in character. Iron Man 2 floundered terribly in its inability to find new levels in Stark’s character. Reverting to solo mode again was then fraught, but Black smartly knocks Stark right out of his comfort zone fairly early on and forces him, and the material, to maintain a more concerted, stoic pitch. Stark is challenged by the simultaneous appearance of two potential enemies who prove, of course, to be two heads of the same dizygotic beast, slicked-up nerd turned rival entrepreneur Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) and mysterious über-villain The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley), given to menacing broadcasts filled with pseudo-political messages, presaging mysterious detonations that do not seem to have been caused by any physical explosive. The roots for the current travails prove linked to Stark’s past as a dismissive libertine, as he once bullshitted Killian into going away whilst he slept with brilliant geneticist Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall), who had found a way to regrow limbs on plants with an odd side-effect of making them explosive. Years later, having taken Hansen under his wing, Killian is now applying the technology to humans, including maimed veterans of recent American wars, giving a domestic blowback angle to the series’ hitherto corny and awkward basis in a geopolitical present-tense.

The early scenes of Iron Man Three are nearly as messy, mistimed, and diffuse as the worst of its predecessor, thanks to the insistence of a maintained style of quick-witted, faux-Hawksian repartee that just won’t come off. But once Black gets his story in motion he transforms common or garden franchise service into a thing of oddball humour, compulsion, and thrust. Where Black might have been expected to pay winking nods to his innate schooling in the ‘80s action style, he turns it here into the whole show, an exercise in ebullient auteurist referencing and redemption. Setting the film in the same mid-winter Yuletide season as many of his scripts, Black nods to the quandary of a tethered hero at the mercy of his enemies as in Lethal Weapon, the toppled cliff-top house and waterfront shootout of the 1989 sequel, trucking in familiar ‘80s genre heavies William Sadler and Miguel Ferrer as President and Vice-President, and even mockingly recasting the central hero and boy fan mystique of Last Action Hero as middle-act buddy comedy. The latter comes as Tony, forced to go on the lam after The Mandarin’s forces pound his beachfront house to rubble, flees to the sticks and hides in a shed, where he’s discovered by a boy, Harley (Ty Simpkins). Black sustains Tony and Harley’s interactions with a blend of mutual sarcasm and knowingness as well as genuine, old-fashioned empathy, so there’s no hint of irony to the payoff where the boy finds his abode filled with the trinkets Tony buys him. Nonetheless Tony and the kid’s shared sense of dark humour allows Tony to be at once paternal without losing his trademark acerbic trait, dissing the lad for pining for his father and telling him to suck it up. 

Black’s most ingenious evocation of and subsequent despoiling of formula, meshing deftly with the insider satire of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, sees Stark following in the footsteps of a hundred predecessors in the shoot-‘em-up genre in storming a Floridian villa and taking out a small army of bodyguards, to locate the debauched bad guy within. Except that The Mandarin turns out to be a vain and licentious actor, happily ensconced with a pair of nubile tarts and enough intoxicating substances to wile away the hours in between fake propaganda broadcasts that both further and conceal Killian’s agenda. Black’s mischievousness here is twofold, disassembling the cliché of the supervillain with nerveless confidence and hilarious result. Also cheekily suggested in The Mandarin’s unmasking is Black’s own interpretation of “false flag” conspiracy theories: Killian’s plot is enabled by the Vice President, who has personal reasons for supporting Killian’s bastard science. This throws the film back more genuinely into the anti-authoritarian realm of much ‘80s genre cinema. Meanwhile Tony’s army buddy and fellow suited warrior James “Rhodey” Rhodes (Don Cheadle) is forcibly rebranded by dipshit government types as “The Iron Patriot”, festooned in red, white, and blue, in a propaganda exercise, but he’s reduced to taking handshakes from gleeful sweatshop workers when he crashes in to their factory in pursuit of another bogus Mandarin lead, one of the best examples of Black’s capacity to marry wit to story. It all feels like Black’s attempt to turn the staid, by-the-numbers story beats and expectations of the superhero genre on their head and transform the whole affair into Black’s malicious assault on the genre that helped displace his own.

Well, to a certain extent, anyway: try as he might Black can’t entirely disassemble the comic-book genre and recast it in his own image, as he can’t include the more adult edge of the old style, the quality that distinguished ‘80s action with its delight in the infernal, forbidden commodification of sex, drugs, and violence, in the context of the smoothly controlled, family branded Marvel stuff. But he gives it a sneaky good try. The action lacks the raw physicality and the superhero gadgetry still tends to take over the material and despoil the emphasis on heroic smarts and skill. As in J.J. Abrams’ first Star Trek (2009), the cliffhanger set-ups devolve anti-climactically when subject to sci-fi deus-ex-machina: when Tony is tied up at the mercy of his enemies, a la Riggs in Lethal Weapon, he’s saved not by peerless, ruthless desperation, but by his remote-controlled armour, a variation on a gimmick the films uses a couple of times too often. Black compensates by keeping Tony out of his suit as much as possible, to the extent that he and Rhodey venture into battle in the finale sans any protection other than guns and their wits, confirming their transformation into Riggs and Murtaugh. Another problem with the Iron Man series has been its pretty boilerplate action sensibility, and it’s in this aspect that Black proves weakest, offering only one strong action set-piece properly involving the suit, as Tony saves staffers from Air Force One in a free-fall plunge over the Florida coast, a sequence in the genuine spirit of the James Bond films it seems inspired by. The clash of impulses, between the expected franchise fan service, and Black’s devil-may-care approach to it, means that in many ways this entry is just as narratively messy as its predecessor: whilst he spurns distracting SHIELD and Avengers material, all dismissed with likeable contempt, Iron Man Three still feels overstuffed. Pepper and Maya, thrown in together after the destruction of the Stark house, disappear from the film seemingly forever before returning to the focus, and Maya’s part in the tale never quite takes on the importance it should.

That said, Hall does well playing a role that’s well-conceived and hits unexpected notes, motivated less by anger against Tony than loyalty to Killian, and facing moral choices that are solved for her in an unexpectedly casual and brutal manner. Pearce makes his villainy so campy in its unabashed enthusiasm that he’s hugely entertaining when on screen, which sadly isn’t enough, whilst Kingsley’s joker-in-the-pack is essentially a throwaway delight. Paltrow gave her career a shot in the arm playing Pepper as a refreshingly grown-up and self-sufficient version of the usually duly passive superhero girlfriend, and whilst Black has trouble incorporating her cleanly into a narrative that depends of Tony’s detachment from his settled life, he does use her to provide a jolt of the genuinely personal urgency that gave life to the best ‘80s action, like Die Hard (1988), as Killian takes her captive and tortures her with Maya’s pyrotechnic formula. The finale, as Tony sees Pepper plunge to a fiery death, spurs one of the neatest I’m-gonna-kick-your-ass preludes to a death-match I’ve seen in a long time in an action flick. The punchline, that Pepper isn’t dead but instead has gained superpowers that allow her to smash Killian and save Tony, is equally neat. The final battle, complete with army of Iron Men remote-controlled by computerised Jeeves Jarvis (Paul Bettany), is staged on a dockside crane system that turns into a multi-levelled Escher-ish tangle of planes and stations: Black handles Tony and Rhodey’s place in the chaos well, but the rest is a rather confused whirlwind of standard-issue A/V crash and bang. The frustration of Iron Man Three is that it ultimately fails to cohere in the fashion of truly great action cinema, with that hard-driving singularity of focus that makes Predator or Die Hard so happily re-watchable, instead proving a big, entertaining but unwieldy machine, more ED-209 than Robocop, resting between genres and creative impulses rather than forcibly redefining anything. The very quality that makes the film amusing to fans of Black’s early work and the others from that milieu, partly conspires against the success of crossbreed. But it’s still more vigorously personal than Joss Whedon managed to make The Avengers, in spite of that film’s manifold pleasures, and a strong capper for the series, one which the executives hopefully won't undercut by demanding another.

Dredd (2012)

The old ultra-violence with colours that viddy right well on the screen, in a world that would make Alex and his Droogies weep for joy. Dredd takes up the coolly wanton, blackly satiric comic book by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra, but strips it of all but the most incidental humour, and reduces narrative to a steely basic structure akin to the impervious, unstoppable chrome skeleton revealed by fire and carnage in The Terminator (1984). The setting is Mega-City, a post-apocalyptic amalgamation of hypertrophied North American urban zones, studded with supersized apartment blocks that have become universes unto themselves, where crime is endemic and the justice process has been conflated into the figure of cold-blooded super-warriors called Judges. Karl Urban is the determined chin under a helmet that’s stupidly designed but too iconic to be altered, with his lips perpetually drawn in into an ideogram of grimly righteous determination, dispensing calamity and judgement like Old Testament wrath of God, punitive, psychopathically violent, and a virtual cipher of character. Dredd is only a hero in the sense that as well as fighting for a very specific idea of moral order, the written code of law rather than a flexible human understanding of a given moment, his unbending adherence makes him incorruptible.

The original creation crossbred a kind of guilty, semi-ironic fetishisation of a specifically American brand of fascist righteousness, as perceived through a fantasy extreme by a British sensibility, and placed it in a milieu informed by British council estate angst and Winter of Discontent-esque crumbling services, adding up to a proto-cyberpunk sensibility that delighted in a grimy, gritty future malformed by human endeavour rather than liberated. Dredd the film annexes a specifically Euro-hued variety of dystopia, as evinced by the visions of Delicatessen (1989), Banlieu 13 (2004), Attack the Block (2011), and the Doctor Who episode “Paradise Towers”, which paint apartment buildings as infernal zones where urban lifestyle becomes survivalist nightmare. Dredd also takes the video game-prescribed levelled narrative structure to a new reductio ad absurdum in cinema shaping. There's a certain kinship, too, to another last year's thrill-machine rides, Frédéric Jardin's Sleepless Night, in placing its hero in a situation defined at once by claustrophobic entrapment and constant kinetic rush. Lena Headey, promoted via her malignant Cersei in TV’s Game of Thrones to gal-you-love-to-hate status, plays Ma-Ma, a former hooker turned scar-faced queenpin running a drug cartel flogging “Slo-Mo” to punters, a drug that slows perception of time to languorous dreaminess, and giving director Pete Travis a chance to extend Wachowski-Snyder ramping effects in action scenes to ever more baroque extremes, complete with bullets exploding from cheeks and the hard end of a two-hundred-storey death plunge depicted in lovingly woozy detail. Dredd and rookie probationary Judge Anderson (Olivia Thirlby), who has telepathic powers as a post-atomic mutant, are called to the Peach Trees tower block, when three flayed victims of Ma-Ma’s regime in the block, seldom visited by the law, are hurled from on high and land in the middle of the courtyard. Dredd and Anderson find themselves trapped as Ma-Ma tries to ensure they can’t escape and uncover evidence about her drug ring.

The utter shamelessness of Dredd is its own justification, its laughing embrace of every insult ever fired at a modern action movie, celebrating the carbolic taste it puts in the mouth. Dredd gives itself over to a pure logic of carnage, providing exposition and developing story stakes only when strictly necessary, reducing the imperatives to the coldest simplicities, as befitting the cop-jury-judge compactness of its heroes’ mission brief. Screenwriter Alex Garland, who’s been doing unlikely but deft service in trash cinema since his early success as a novelist, reduces the comic’s pitch-black take on the bleak fantasia to occasional asides, like an automated cleaning machine casually sweeping up the pools of blood from multiple homicides, and glimpses of a cheapjack, prefab future of compartmentalised retail services and equally compartmentalised human feeling, are not far from Mike Judge’s Idiocracy (2006). The fact that the film was shot in South Africa, quite obviously at points, helps to give the film a subtext that's more immediate than the dated roots of the material in Dirty Harry-era angst over vigilante law enforcement, with the anxiety of stretched resources and cheap humanity nascent. Domhnall Gleeson is the pasty, victimised tech geek who’s become a tortured plaything for Ma-Ma, having had his eyes cut out and replaced by cameras that make him better able to function as her security wizard, and he shuts down Peach Trees to prevent the Judges’ escape. Thirlby dyed her locks blonde to play Anderson, the nervy survivor of a ghetto childhood and fallout-induced genetic happenstance, now trying to become a Judge in hope she can make a difference for the assailed decent folk in the towers. She's  given an immersive survival test by Dredd, who disdains hauling around a candidate who failed her entrance exam and leaves off her helmet because it impedes her gift, but is of course finally impressed with her ingenuity and spirit, and surprising grip on her job's true purpose.

Thirlby, seemingly doomed to hover on the periphery of stardom since Juno (2007) and her terrific turn in The Wackness (2008) and overshadowed by Olivia Wilde as another striking brunette with a Shakespearean first name, gives Dredd its core as a hero who hasn’t yet been processed into stoic omnicompetence: the entirety of the story is essentially a learning experience for her on the road to becoming so. Saddled with Ma-Ma’s lieutenant, and specific murder suspect Kay (Wood Harris), Anderson contends with his obnoxious psychic projections of rape and perversion, and turns the trick about as she rapes his mind. Director Travis, out of British TV with the taciturn realism of The Bill as his first credit and the cod-Kurosawa gamesmanship of Vantage Point (2008) his most notable film work, deploys little real wit or imagination of staging in action scenes – mostly just point gun, bang bang, with Dredd and Anderson pulled a lot too often out of the fire by their gadget-laden guns, and Ma-Ma's gang offering only clobbering force without any spark of parkour or martial artistry to vary the action style. But Travis’s filming is clean and well-paced, his gift for proffering grisly spectacle without belabouring appreciable, and indeed he's able to find visual rhapsody in savagery. The film is filled with framings and shots that authentically recreate not just the colour and clarity but also the specific tension that defines comic-book art, in the dialogue between the frieze-like singularity of the individual image and its place in a constantly onrushing, necessarily descriptive series of illustration. Travis particularly invests a weirdly luscious beauty in his visions of Slo-Mo distorted reality, locating the appeal of the escapist branding of drug use in intolerable environments. Ma-Ma’s comeuppance, a fulfilment of Dredd’s poetic sense of justice, sees her pumped full of her drug and sent for a free-fall down through the block’s two hundred levels, in the midst of a swirl of broken glass that glows like falling stars. She thus passes each stage and scene of slaughter she’s invoked, experienced as a Kubrickian swirl of wonder and horror before the inevitable hard landing, sensitising Ma-Ma and the viewer to the beauty of existence and the wrong of her acts in the most unexpected fashion possible. Dredd should be dreadful, but it is, instead, like this finale, perversely fascinating, disturbing, and transfixing. 

Secret of the Incas (1954)

Jerry Hopper’s Secret of the Incas is today best known, if at all, as one of the progenitors of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). It was shown on the set of the later film to the cast and crew by Spielberg and Lucas, who took powerful licence from both the costuming of hero Harry Steele (Charlton Heston) for the look of Indiana Jones, and his method of finally locating a treasure via artefacts that, pieced together properly, use light beams to pinpoint the hidden riches. The inspiration, whilst specific, can be overstated, insofar as Secret of the Incas is a far more sedately paced affair, and wasn’t particularly original in itself: thirty years’ worth of matinee series and B-movies sporting similar tropes and flourishes already predated Hopper’s film, in stuff like The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), The Mummy’s Hand (1940) and dozens of others. What undoubtedly made Secret of the Incas stick firmly in the minds of the Movie Brats who pieced together Raiders was its methodical, almost realistic approach to this dog-eared fare, and its peculiarly serious tone, combining already-familiar serial shenanigans with a committed approach to character. Raiders suggests the deeper impact of Incas’ approach to its adventurer hero, a morally questionable and expedient figure going through a forced evolution by battling a doppelganger villain for possession of a sought-after totem.

Heston, at his youthful best before his encounter with Cecil B. DeMille shocked him into a frieze of adamantine import, exhibits here, as he did in the equally influential George Pal-Byron Haskin adventure flick The Naked Jungle (1954), neurotic perversity and darkness underlying his titanic physique. Steele is, at the outset, running a two-bit taxi and tour operator service in Cuzco, a remote Peruvian town in the Andes. Whilst the theme of the stranded American soldier-of-fortune in Third World dives was exceedingly common in adventure films of the period, this edition depicts Steele’s life on the fringe of this remote world, scrounging and surviving by honest and dishonest means, with some originality. Steele pretends that his tour operations are sponsored by the airlines, and puts the make on any eligible, or ineligible, women who pass by, which here includes Mrs Winston, the intrigued female half of an American tourist couple. That lady is played by Glenda Farrell, the former fireball of ‘30s flapper feminism here still sparking the screen with her expressive eyes and lusty lilt of the mouth as she still lets her mind wander beyond the parochial confines of ‘50s matron status. Steele is, however, always hoping for the day when someone might fly a private plane into the local airport which he can then steal. Steele’s sleazy aspect as a gigolo, fraudster, and potential thief makes him one of the more refreshingly scruffy heroes of the silver screen, particularly as he finds himself saddled with another, slightly more glamorous but equally determined survivor: Elena Antonescu (Nicole Maurey), a Romanian refugee who’s keeping one step ahead of Eastern bloc authorities in her mission to reach America.

Steele has a rival, Ed Morgan (Thomas Mitchell), heavy-laden with shadowy paternal intimations as he tries to bully Steele into accepting him as a partner in his long-nursed ambitions: a rifle bullet, fired by a desperate would-be assassin (Kurt Katch), sings past Steele’s ear and alerts him to Morgan’s intention to cut himself in on Steele’s dream, largely because his own dreams have added up to nothing and he’s stuck running a seedy pool hall and playing two-bit kingpin. Steele had found part of an Incan relic that can if pieced together properly guide him to the hiding place of a golden sun dial whose disappearance is linked in legend with the decline of the Inca nation. When the remainder of the crucial relic is discovered by American archaeologists and put on display in the local museum, Steele is able to piece the evidence together, whilst Elena’s arrival trails Cold War dangers that provide Steele with the ideal opportunity, and the necessary light aircraft, to snatch the relic. Director Hopper was only a couple of years into his studio career, but as with many jobbing filmmakers of the period, he had already crammed several films into a brief time. Hopper’s direction ambles along without great distinction or inspiration, but the film’s relative placidity helps to exacerbate the peculiar levels to its drama, and Hopper’s early work in documentaries is reflected in the lustrous bursts of location footage, particularly in the climax as columns of Peruvians trek into Machu Picchu for a socio-religious reawakening. The script was provided by two wordsmiths of Hollywood genre film with well-calloused typing fingers, Sidney Boehm and Ranald MacDougall: Boehm was between stints writing noirs like The Big Heat (1953) and the sci-fi spectacle of When Worlds Collide (1951), whilst MacDougall was another noir veteran who nonetheless specialised in literate and well-fleshed adventure movies: having first gained note with the script for Mildred Pierce (1945), MacDougall’s hand would also scribe The Naked Jungle, The Mountain (1956), The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1958), Cleopatra (1963), and Dark of the Sun (1968). The schooling of both writers in noir’s overt linkage of psychological distress with fiscal desire here informs Secret’s balance of pulp necessity and dramatic intimacy.

Secret of the Incas commences in a Clouzot-like style, weirdly close to the early mood of The Wages of Fear (1953), emphasising the down-and-out fetidness of Steele’s subsistence as a First World runaway and presenting him as a pretty unsavoury character with few redeeming features. Steele’s wilful exile sees him hanging on to his own specific brand of capitalist aspiration, to be realised through opportunist treasure hunting, whilst the local Amerindians want the same object but for broader ends. The film’s thematic and visual textures evolve to touch upon the similar note of hazy spirituality and a Hollywood take on the peculiar mystique of South America found in Mel Ferrer’s adaptation of Green Mansions (1958). The high reaches of the Andes become the cradle for rebirth, of Incan greatness and for individual characters, with Machu Picchu depicted in alternations between location shooting and twilight-bound sets that present a ruined arena littered with strange Dali-like monoliths and structures, Fritz Lang-ish tombs, and cubist bathtubs. Hopper evokes the tenor of the exotic and the arcane as much through aural as the visual, and indeed more effectively, by utilising Yma Sumac’s vocal range in repeated performances as Kori-Tica, a keeper of the Incan faith who, along with her brother Pachacutec (Michael Pate) has attached herself as helper and covert overseer of the archaeological dig run by archaeologist Stanley Moorehead (Robert Young). Sumac’s astonishing voice easily embodies simultaneously the earthy and the eerily rapturous and airily spiritual, even if her presence ultimately drags the film too close to a kind of music video for sub-Les Baxter exotica.

Of course, Steele’s dilemma boils down to losing his soul through pursuit of the relic, with Morgan as the dogging familiar of corruption and aged corsair’s dissolution, or to find fulfilment with Elena, whose own obsession, equal to Steele’s, is to reach the US. Steele takes Elena along for the ride as he ventures into the high mountains and heads for Machu Picchu, and she catches the eye of quietly decent if faintly repressed savant Moorehead, who makes her a quick offer of marriage. She’s inclined to accept if Steele won’t deviate from his course. Maurey’s lustreless take on the international woman of mystery merely exacerbates the greater importance and immediacy of the love-hate affair of Steele and Morgan, who pursues the duo to the ruined city. Obtaining Steele’s gun, Morgan lords it over the younger man with a final show of potency, communicating with a mix of smiles and loathing, their words leaping with jarring discursiveness between amity and brutal threat, the two men intimate in their mutual and self-loathing with flickers of both familial and homoerotic feeling too. Morgan’s desperation finally sees his collapse into trigger-happy, self-condemning violence, before Steele catches him on the vertiginous heights of moral judgement. Morgan, cornered and exposed in his emasculated depletion, releases a confession of lacerating pathos: “You get old. You don’t know when it starts but – then one day, when you’re – when you’re not looking, gravity gets you, Harry, it pulls you down! Even your own weight gets too much for ya! Everything you’ve got goes toward the ground. Gravity’s a terrible thing, Harry.” And, of course, Morgan says this immediately before taking a thousand-foot plunge into a dark ravine. Mitchell, excellent in his role, looking slightly unkempt so you can practically smell the desperation coming off Morgan in spite of his smarmy attempts to play ruthless, helps sell this climax, not exactly subtle but fascinatingly substantial, even penetrating as a portrait of the aged thug in a dead-end, and indeed of an aspect of the human condition, as Steele recoils from this vision of his own future, but perhaps cannot avoid it. Whilst Secret of the Incas is ultimately too restrained and programmatic in its handling, and lacks genuine compulsion and excitement, its unexpected depth and the evident sobriety of its creative team makes clear why it stuck so vividly in the memory of many young viewers, and not just those who would later transmute its raw elements into blockbuster material.

Well, relative sobriety:

Cromwell (1970)

The late 1960s and very early 1970s saw a last bloom of a short-lived genre, that of the serious historical epic, with films that tried to combine the traditional wealth of pageantry and expansive action that had long defined Hollywood’s understanding of the past, with the more sober, literate model laid out by the likes of Becket (1964) and A Man for All Seasons (1966). Most of these were flops, and few gained any real critical regard, although some had real worth: either way their number included the likes of Charles Jarrott’s fine Anne of the Thousand Days (1968), Clive Donner’s ill-advised Alfred the Great (1969), Sergei Bondarchuk’s impressive Waterloo, James Clavell’s inquisitive The Last Valley, and Franklin Schaffner’s top-heavy Nicholas and Alexandra (all 1971). The lack of success of these films helped in large part to doom Stanley Kubrick’s storied Napoleon project, and made him turn to a more focused historical canvas with Barry Lyndon (1975). Cromwell, helmed by experienced British craftsman Ken Hughes, was one of the most ambitious entries in this cycle. Hughes’ big previous hit had been the candy-coloured children’s film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968). The journey from celebrating Toot Sweets to exploring the underpinnings of the English Civil War might have seemed a long one, but Hughes’ best-regarded film up until he made this had probably been The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960), and the historical material he tackled here offered an even greater scope of drama invoking questions of the present through the travails of the past: where Trials had been one of battery of combination punches tackling judicial treatment of homosexuality in the early ‘60s along with Victim (1961) and another Wilde biopic, Oscar Wilde (1960), Cromwell embraces the radicalism of the later decade and reflects it through the prism of the Lord Protector’s righteous but pulverising zeal in another time of upheaval and furiously questioned social precepts.

Cromwell is beset by confused approaches to its subject matter however, attempting to present a shaded portrait of its eponymous hero as a conscientious traditionalist pushed first into radicalism and then into repeating the mistakes of his enemies, finally transcending hypocrisy through the ardour of his idealism. But Hughes fudges facts and skews his portrait of Oliver Cromwell, who had elements of the visionary to him but was hardly a prototypical 20th-century liberal, as a man operating according to his period’s prejudices but driven ultimately towards far-sighted, democratising impulses. The best thing that can be said about Cromwell as an historical study is that it does manage, with some art, to explain and encompass so much of an incredibly complex period, and explore the issues that started the war and led to Charles I’s beheading: the central schism between the King and Parliament, the background of war with Scotland and Irish religious rebels, the reasons for Charles’ intransigence, and the acts by the King that provoked his conviction and execution; are all laid out in largely coherent terms. To achieve its wider goals, however, Cromwell takes vast liberties with the historical record, mostly to give Cromwell a larger role in the lead-up to the Civil War than he really had. Such flourishes include making him one of the five members of Parliament Charles tried to have arrested for treason, giving him a higher rank and having him participate in the Battle of Edgehill which he actually didn’t make it to in time, and having him lecture Charles on the idea of introducing democracy into the English political landscape, an idea Charles (Alec Guinness) dismisses here as “a Greek drollery.” Cromwell’s son Oliver II (Richard Cornish) is depicted as dying in the Battle of Naseby when he died of disease a year later, and Hughes is sloppy enough to show Harris standing before Oliver II’s grave with the actual date of his death clearly marked.

One can’t dismiss these distortions too blithely, but the points Hughes tries to make are valid, as is his method of quasi-Shakespearean compression: the war involved a great personal cost for Cromwell, he stood amongst a number of men who took a colossal, risky, and principled step in rebelling against royal authority at a time when the general tide of European government seemed to moving ever more implacably towards absolutism. Hughes also ably attempts to concatenate a vast war’s progress into two representations of battle rather than exact historical recreations. More troubling, however, is the way the film avoids dealing with Cromwell’s infamously brutal repression of the Irish Catholic rebels, and the devolution of England during the Commonwealth into periods of absurd theocracy. The film fades out with Cromwell delivering a stagy tirade about bringing reform to the nation and building new institutions, as the face of what could be called responsible revolution. The slightly hollow final heroic lustre Hughes places around him doesn’t really do him any favours, however. Cromwell was a political warrior who gained victory in a far less preciously humanistic age than ours. The steely, implacable man Patrick Wymark presented in Michael Reeves’ vivid and antipathetic anatomy of the Civil War era, Witchfinder General (1968), is arguably more convincing for all its brevity than Hughes’ and Harris’ windy fanatic. Cromwell is too often reduced to a sanctimonious, sweaty bellower, as Harris gets quite notably hoarse in many scenes from all the shouting, or, alternatively, a declaimer of low and breathily savage resolutions in close shots before dramatic scenes fade out, with lines like, “I will have this King’s head, aye, and the crown upon it!”

It’s not entirely Harris’ fault that the characterisation fails, and whatever else one can say, Harris tackles the role with compelling, bodily force; but Harris’ tendency to shout his way through roles in his more lacklustre late ‘70s and ‘80s films is certainly presaged here. Where a cooler regard for its subject might have benefited the film then, or a more engaged psychological portrait, this Cromwell is never less than adamantine in his iconic bluster. Still, the concept of Cromwell as a battering ram of resolve in an era clogged with feckless privilege, passionless professionalism, and musty self-interest, channelling the latent force of a repressed commonality and the shock of the new into a potent military and political force, retains a certain authority. Early in the film, Cromwell is offended by evidence of the vulgarisation of the English faith, stormily assaulting the altar of his local church when he sees it festooned with golden candlesticks and crucifix, as the King is under the influence of his French Catholic wife Henrietta Maria (Dorothy Tutin), who also preaches the necessity of unyielding royal prerogative to her husband. The source of the elaborate paranoia for Catholicism in the English Protestant mind was indeed closely allied to awareness, as Cromwell states outright in the film, that it was tethered to the phenomenon of absolutism as practised in France. But Hughes stoops a little too close to suggesting that wars can be started by henpecked husbands bossed around by bitchy wives. 

Tutin does a good job nonetheless of portraying her character’s faintly frightening blend of conceit and blind purpose, whilst Charles is stripped bare in his craven nature when he’s forced to execute his own partisan minister, the Earl of Strafford (Wymark) after she’s pushed them to try repressive tactics on the Parliament: “You see?” Charles demands of her, waving the execution warrant for the Earl at her in pathetic displacement of responsibility: “You see what you made me do?” Much like William Dieterle’s Juarez (1938), Cromwell is further destabilised as the narrative becomes dominated by a doomed royal’s journey to destruction. Released from the necessity of playing a heroic icon and allowed free reign in his role, Guinness gives one of his best performances as Charles, a man of firmness and effete sensitivity sadly allied to a complete lack of guile, public charm, political sense, and sensible independent will. Unstoppable force and immovable object meet as Cromwell, having won the war and gained the trust of his soldiers and now determined to foist their will upon the King, is faced with Charles’ quiet refusal to countenance any such thing, even when every barrier between him and a vengeful foe has been flattened. 

Another problem with Cromwell is that, intended as a three-hour film, it was hacked down to just over two including the total removal of Felix Aylmer’s last role, and the gaps are often perceivable. Perhaps the awkwardness of its transitions and finale derive in part from this. On the other hand, the film moves at an admirably fast clip. Hughes uses some familiar devices in tracing Cromwell’s career: in a scene that evokes The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), he intervenes in a dispute between classes, as the Earl of Manchester (Robert Morley) cordons off common land for a sheep pen and has his men arrest protesting yeoman John Carter (Frank Finlay). Carter later wanders into church during Cromwell’s anti-papal hissy fit having had his ear cut off in punishment, sparking Cromwell to an even greater rage: “God damn this King!” he declares, only for Hughes to make a neat jump-cut to Charles, smiling beatifically, praying in chapel. The proximity of the crude device to establish drama, in Carter’s disfigurement and appearance in the church, and the felicity of this cut, which brings to a fine point the violent disparity in world-view held by Cromwell and Charles and the religiously-informed certitude behind them, is indicative of the movie as a whole. Cromwell finds his fate entwined with Manchester who, seemingly a pillar of the Royalist party, sides instead with the Puritans and other Parliamentary adherents, and becomes a leader in the army, whilst Carter becomes a ranking soldier, but gets himself hung, through Cromwell’s procedure of making the men draw lots, when he lends his voice to angry protests against negotiations with the King. Others in the Parliamentary cause include the temperate John Pym (Geoffrey Keen) and the fire-eating, ambitious Henry Ireton (Michael Jayston), who repeatedly presses Cromwell to move to extremes. 

What sustains Cromwell in spite of its shakier dramatic qualities is the solidity of its production, the strength of its cast, and its visually strong storytelling, engaged with a punchy and physically convincing historical milieu. Photographed by the great Geoffrey Unsworth, the film’s pictorial palette strikes a balance between splendour and grit, capturing a society teetering mid-way between Renaissance and Enlightenment as it explores the mismatched architecture of London and the proto-modern apparel and sloganeering of the New Model Army. Whilst hardly as incisive or creative in exploring the rhetorical style of the era as Ken Russell or Tony Richardson would have tried to be, Hughes nonetheless evokes the furore and communal passion of a transformative moment. Particularly effective is a pageant-like scene as the country goes to war and Cromwell beholds preacher Hugh Peters (Patrick Magee), driven aloft a multitude of soldiers, preaching holy war with the aspect of a prophet-warrior out of Old Testament times, surrounded by banners that announce the birth of a new era in how political ideas are expressed and by whom. The scene that pays off with Carter’s hanging likewise offers a hint of the newly empowered underclass gaining its voice in a moment of fractured certainties. It’s a real pity then that Hughes can only really articulate thematic heft in speeches. Similarly strong is a counterbalancing scene depicting the disintegration of patrician self-regard, as Charles mercilessly rebukes his flashy nephew Prince Rupert of the Rhine (Timothy Dalton) for abandoning the besieged city of Bristol, Rupert’s preening self-regard mitigated by genuine physical pain and belief he did the right thing, but wracked by Charles’ peevish contempt and flailing self-pity as he comprehends ultimate defeat and, as he did with Henrietta Maria earlier, taking out his feelings and failings on another. 

Dalton’s Rupert is one of the film’s fleeting pleasures, a showy peacock of a blue-blood, full of all the strutting arrogance and romantic dash one would expect of the exemplar of the Cavalier side in the war, a sneaky relief from the tight-lipped grit of the Roundheads and their starkly serious wardrobe. This is one of those roles that Dalton always seemed to appear in before his impressive but ill-fated stint as James Bond, bringing swashbuckling flash and plummy theatre to cinema screens in an age dominated by squirrely method actors, doomed by his capacity to play anachronistic roles to be second fiddle. The mid-section of Cromwell is buoyed by excellent battle scenes that, whilst not entirely accurate depictions of the specific battles, still capture in detail the tactics of the era, particularly good in visualising Cromwell’s approach to bluffing and trapping his enemy as at Naseby he engages with the cavalry of Prince Rupert, whom he suckers into a pincer move and sends scurrying from the field after close combat. As in his crowd scenes, Hughes displays impressive craft and skill for clear analytical editing as well as forceful staging in the battles, as the close melees and cannon barrages really seem concussively violent, and he gives glimpses of the primitive but lethal duels of matchlock riflemen and pike-wielding infantry. One great shot from a camera slung on the underside of a cavalry horse in a charge captures the pounding force of a charge. 

The last third of film deals, inevitably and in detailed care, with Charles’ trial and execution, and here Guinness’ performance really shines as Charles refuses to be swayed from his imperial self-regard even on the scaffold, and Cromwell becomes all the more remorseless in the face of his fretful fellows, like Sir Thomas Fairfax (Douglas Wilmer), evoking the similar frustration in Marlon Brando for his inability to wipe the smug smile of bully Trevor Howard’s face in Mutiny on the Bounty (1962). Charles goes to his death with enviable grace, whilst Cromwell, turned into a glowering Darth Vader in black cap and hat, can only shout reassurances to his fellow Regicides that they have acted legally whilst treading away in moral and physical exhaustion. Cromwell retreats to sit before his fire with glazed depression before being called back into the political fray as the new Republic proves as corruptible as the old Monarchy. The film ends with its divided spirit again on show, as Cromwell clears out the Parliament, depicted as devolving into corrupt theatre run by oligarchs like Manchester and Fairfax. Cromwell thus assumes the mantle of dictator, tossing the Royal mace off the table, and he's left alone in the Commons, having repeated the King’s crime and gutted the political system of his country, leaving only his own will. Hughes zooms out to show Cromwell alone in the vast and draughty hall, but the voiceover gives a mealy reassurance that Cromwell has helped give birth to modernity. The disparity of message and fundamental point here is deeply ironic, but Hughes exacerbates rather than explores the irony, and the film finally lacks to courage to present a lucid portrait of a tragic hero. Cromwell is an entertaining and substantial ride through a great epoch, but the great film about that epoch is yet to be made. And what Cromwell did at Drogheda, the infamous Mae West camp-fest Sextette (1978) did to Ken Hughes’ directing career.

Hercules vs. Moloch (Ercole contra Molock, 1963)

An eruption of popularity sparked by Pietro Francisi’s Hercules (1959), starring Steve Reeves, helped make the Italian peplum or sword-and-sandal movie into an internationally successful genre, with an air of trashy, semi-illicit appeal, for a short but memorable reign. A similar craze for Asian martial arts movies would be sparked in the west some ten to fifteen years later, and for similar reasons. Such luminaries of Italian genre cinema as Mario Bava and Sergio Leone did apprenticeships in making their compulsory peplum entry. This genre’s essential simplicity was a great part of its appeal, operating, like Shaw Brothers’ wu xia flicks, on a level of rigorously elemental emotional and moral drama, punctuated by fantastic displays of physical prowess. At its worst, the clichés of peplum were amusing, a fresco of ill-dubbed muscle-men in miniskirts throwing about papier-mache boulders.

But at its best the peplum could connect with the bare-boned force of myth and become journeys through the Italian film industry’s straitened but inventive, often eye-gorging beauties, with plots and characterisations thankfully delivered from fashionable complications, all rendered in hyperbolic Technicolor. The highpoint of this glut is probably Bava’s superlative, hallucinogenic cross-breed, Hercules in the Haunted World (1961). Giorgio Ferroni’s career, like many other talented jobbing Italian directors including Sergio Corbucci and Antonio Margheriti, charts the phases of Italian commercial cinema precisely, with stints in neo-realism, peplum, horror, and spaghetti westerns. Ferroni’s most regarded movie today is his 1961 horror film Mill of the Stone Women, although he made several other high-profile historical action flicks like La Guerra de Troia (1961). Not surprisingly, however, for a director who possessed strong affinities with horror, Ferroni’s work on this film is most interesting when it strays close to the gothic. The branding of Hercules vs. Moloch is however misleading, as it doesn’t actually feature the reputable demigod: rather, sometime-Tarzan Gordon Scott plays Glaucus, a prince of Tiryns, who takes on the pseudonym of Hercules when he ventures undercover, in a story that actually plays as semi-realistic rewrite of the Minotaur myth. The opening of Hercules vs. Moloch sees the population of Mycenae forced to relocate after their city is destroyed by natural disaster, and the statue of the patron god Moloch seems to crumble in flames, suggesting the anger of the god at his unruly worshippers. The king dies, leaving behind his young daughter, Medea, and his pregnant second wife, the beautiful but sociopathically narcissistic Demeter (Rosalba Neri). 

The Mycenaeans rebuild their city with impenetrable walls and, with Demeter ruling, aided by the corrupt and vicious general Penthius (Arturo Dominici) and obsessive High Priest Asterion (Nerio Bernardi), they set up a reign of terror with a mix of martial bullying and religious mystique. Claiming her grown son is the earthly vessel of Moloch, whom he’s been named for, Demeter has declared him both holy figure and heir to the city over Medea’s claim. Mycenae forces other cities to pay tribute by sending selected sacrifices, all attractive youths, to satisfy Moloch's blood-lust. Asterion has ignored the Earth Goddess in favour of Moloch, and the population of the city suffers from a famine they believe caused by this neglect. After the city of Argyra is punitively attacked by Mycenae, Glaucus successfully argues to his father, the King of Tiryns, that they must resist, and he hatches a plan to infiltrate Mycenae amongst the next batch of tributes, whilst his father concludes alliances with other cities. Amongst the tributes, Glaucus meets the Princess of Argyra, Deianira (Jany Clair), and lets her in on his plan. He makes contact with the Mycenaean resistance, led by the soldier Euneos (Michel Lemoine), who is ashamed at his inability to stand up to Penthius and his cabal. 

The strong theme of peplum films in this period, of the emergence of individual and communal liberty from dictatorship, subjugation, and superstition, is certainly in evidence throughout Hercules vs. Moloch, with Scott’s Glaucus as its suitably jut-jawed, well-groomed arbiter. The other constant refrain of the genre, that of physical strength as avatar for moral strength, is also dominant: Glaucus earns appreciation and respect through his prowess, for, when ushered into Mycenae, he wrestles and defeats an abusive soldier before Demeter. The Queen, impressed and lustful, pardons him and appoints him Captain of the Guard. An interesting undercurrent therefore inflects Hercules vs. Moloch as most of the unhappy Mycenaeans regard him as a stooge and traitor, even as he tries to use his accidental position of power to quietly leaven their brutal repression. Glaucus quickly uses up his advantage when he stops Penthius from raping Medea (Alessandra Panaro). Penthius gets revenge by reporting the incident with his and Glaucus’ roles reversed, and Glaucus is quickly stripped of rank and imprisoned. He then has to fight through an elaborately tricky gladiatorial match where he and other tribute males are chained to the females. They have to fight off attackers without pulling their chained partners from the small stages on which they’re perched, on pain of the ladies being riddled with arrows. Later, Glaucus manages a cool escape when he’s entrapped in a tiny cell with high walls, so that Penthius can mock him from on high; fortunately the cell proves just wide enough that with arms and legs splayed against the walls, Glaucus can walk his way up to the (fortunately, easily dislodged) bars.

Ferroni’s feel for symbolic intensity isn’t entirely squandered, although for the most part Hercules vs. Moloch is agreeably and functionally one-dimensional, in a fashion that would be forgettable but solid enough for viewing on a dull and rainy eve. Familiar weaknesses of this fare are certainly in evidence: the acting is mostly static and cardboard in declamatory exchanges, not helped by the dubbing, although the major leads are certainly dessert for the eyes. There are some of the worst fake punches in the history of cinema, but generally the interpersonal combat scenes have the familiar, meaty immediacy required of peplum. To the same degree, the waving spears and trundling chariots of the army battles are boring and flatly directed. Combat scenes are augmented with stock footage, hordes of milling extras, and a couple of gleefully awful models, whilst Carlo Rustichelli's uncharacteristically tinny score blares with disregard for intimacy and nuance. But Ferroni’s sense of design and staging, with a constant flow of lovingly arranged, geometrically balanced shots, and the sustained drama of the fairly strong story, keep the film afloat. The script, written by Ferroni, Remigio Del Grosso, and Arrigo Equini, offers a clear and consistent series of narrative doublings, squaring off positive and negative versions of masculine qualities throughout, manifest between the poles of Glaucus and Penthius, with Euneos between as the castrated product of a repressive society trying to man up. Ferroni goes a step further in also mirroring feminine qualities, with Demeter contrasted by Medea and Deianira's regal resistance. Demeter’s desire to exterminate her younger rival evokes variations on the Snow White myth like last year’s Snow White and the Huntsman where this substratum was turned into the central theme, with Ferroni struggling to avoid a mere lapse into matriarchy-as-unnatural-horror refrain like so many ‘50s stories (e.g. Devil Girl From Mars, 1954). Psycho-sexual and political motifs are entwined throughout; the corrupt order is associated with various forms of domination, hierarchical displacement, and the perverted progeny which results.

Ferroni manages to keep in focus the patterns in which Greek mythology often communicated communal values through personal symbolic battles: the successes of Theseus in killing the Minotaur in a victory over sacrificial religion, and Jason over nature worship by thieving the Golden Fleece as a means to dislodge dictatorship, signal in each case the end of an old order and the birth of political government and abstract religious devotion. Here a natural order is restored, as the narrative segues into supernaturalism: although Moloch as a Minotaur variant is specifically demystified, Asterion is struck down by lightning as he moves to sacrifice Medea, the punishment by the Earth Goddess for profaning her servant. This is an ironic pay-off, as Demeter forced Medea to be consecrated as a virgin priestess for the goddess as way of permanently removing Medea as both a political and sexual threat: the blowback is therefore harshly apt, and the cleansing rain that falls hard upon is the signal for the destruction of Demeter’s regime. The association between Demeter’s drive to maintain political control with the aid of her military and priestly collaborators/drones, and clear her immediate space of pulchritudinous rivals, is translated into the misshapen flesh and murderous erotic rage of Moloch, her son, who inhabits labyrinthine caves beneath the city along with his cabal of priestesses: Moloch, grotesquely malformed, wears a dog mask and rules over his personal cultish religion of sadism, twisted offspring of a twisted order. The political power of Mycenae is entirely constructed around pleasing his appetite for destroying physical perfection, for which the tributes sent to Mycenae are destined. In an early scene, Penthius gifts the monster with the most beautiful of his own slave girls, and Moloch rips her face open with his sharp fingernails and pronounces: “Your beauty no longer offends me.” As in several Italian horror films of the period, like Il Boia Scarlatto (1964) and La Vergine di Norimberga (1963), the motif of the masked torturer with a homoerotically perfect body and disfigured face lording over a secret torture chamber where he gets to work out diseased and confused sexuality, is certainly in evidence here.

Whereas the bulk of Hercules vs. Moloch is mild, Ferroni’s direction and the mostly blasé film grammar suddenly gains energy, and the entertainment factor kicks up a notch, whenever Moloch and his bizarre cabal enter the frame. Ferroni stages some fluidic tracking shots that depict Moloch’s victims riddled with arrows in fresco-like scrolls of Sadean delight (echoing the artistic friezes of the victims in Mill of the Stone Women). His camera dashes along tunnels in pursuit of Moloch’s priestesses, after bursts of rhythmic editing and mirroring shots depict the priestesses emerging from their dark abodes to commence their ritual accompaniment to Moloch’s predations. Moloch’s underground grotto is decorated by skeletal trees and sulphurous walls, through which his priestesses, left agreeably free of disfigurement and who enable his cruelties, gyrate and leer with savage delight like satanic groupies, as they pound on bongo drums and dance scantily clad through variegated hues of green and red light, in celebrating carnage as prelude to orgiastic delights. Aptly and deliciously, as Glaucus leads his victorious, ludicrously plumed macho men into the grotto, the priestesses dash about, unleashing fire and brimstone that brings the tacky arbiters of civilisation down around their ears, in a complete dissolution of sense that presages rebirth, a celebration of a descent back into primal irrationality, before the drama can resolve conventionally with Glaucus dully wrestling the unmasked Moloch. There’s still a malefic beauty and wild, disorientating élan to these brief scenes that jolts Hercules vs. Moloch out of the routine and into a realm that suggests Ferroni, if he had, like Bava and Leone, fought for a niche to rule, would have found more opportunities to exercise his weirder, more pungent gifts.