Straw Dogs (Peckinpah, 1971)

In 1971, Mary Whitehouse appeared at the Nationwide Festival of Light, speaking out against the commercial exploitation of sex and violence in Britain.

Over in the US, a storm was brewing, that would hit these shores in the coming months, and provide plenty of extra work for Mary and her mission. Four films were released that would blow the debate wide open, split opinion, appall and enthrall in equal measure, and change the face of cinema forever.

The gentlest of the explosions was Dirty Harry, which you can see reviewed in an earlier post. Then came The French Connection, the first 'R' rated film to win the Oscar for Best Film. Then, two films so controversial they spent most of the next three decades banned in Britain. The first was Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. The second was Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs.

Dustin Hoffman plays David Sumner, a mousy American mathematician setting up home in Cornwall, where his new English wife grew up. They're supposedly there to escape the noise and violence of 'America', but their rural idyll feels distinctly queasy from the off. Filled with staring yokels, the village is like Royston Vasey with shades of that island in The Wicker Man (another Whitehouse-baiter that would appear on the scene two years later). There's the local paedo-mentalist, who hasn't been locked up because 'they deal with him their own way here', so spends his days playing football with minors. There's the belligerent, drunken village patriarch who literally seems to be the father or grandfather of most of the younger characters. There are the children - a bunch of manipulative creepy little shit-stirrers, and then there are the young men - ogling, threatening and decidedly more sinister as the film progresses. So far so creepy.

I should point out here that Hoffman's wife, played by Susan George, is well fit, and my gosh don't she know it. Flouncing around smuggling peanuts around the village, she instantly attracts the attention of the yokel lads tired of shagging their sisters, one of whom it seems she had a rather ambiguous childhood relationship with. To make matters worse, they're all working on the house where Hoffman and George are living, so spend most of their time staring at her tits through the window, and laughing at the rather pathetic, toothless Hoffman for not standing up to them.

The events that follow are to be watched on screen rather than read on a blog. I will say though that a key scene, the key scene for the censors, centres around an horrific act of violence towards Susan George, and the most shocking aspect is George's reaction to her treatment. Critics accused Peckinpah of sadism, misogyny and chauvinism in his direction, but the scene and the events that follow spark, in my view, a debate worth having. As for the film being a 'celebration of violence', that's just plain wrong. All the violence in the film is sickening, the clear and overriding message is that violence begets more violence, and the ending is bleak. There is little enjoyment and satisfaction from Hoffman's ultimate violent revenge spree, unlike so many Hollywood blockbusters that would have the audience whooping and cheering at similar scenes.

As a footnote, I've always thought Home Alone 2: Lost in New York was an incredibly violent film - if Kevin actually did all those things to Harry and Marv, he would have killed them both many times over. Well there's a large chunk of Straw Dogs that's a lot like the Home Alone films, except Hoffman uses a mantrap where Culkin used Micro Machines, and, when the invaders get beaten or stabbed or burnt or shot, in Straw Dogs, they actually die.

The Last King Of Scotland

The Last King Of Scotland paints a vivid picture of Uganda under the rule of Idi Amin, through the eyes of a young Scottish doctor, fresh-faced and over-sexed, on a post-graduation journey of self-discovery.

James MacAvoy plays Nicholas Garragan, who arrives in the country unaware of Amin's recent rise to power. He rather conveniently bumps into the up and coming dictator and there begins an unlikely friendship, based largely on the fact that they both hate the English.

Forest Whitaker throws himself body and soul into the role of the larger than life despot - the film lives or dies on his performance, and it is remarkable. For a Western audience at least, he becomes Idi Amin and captures the humour and the horror of the infamous eccentric, believably yo-yoing between quirky comedy and horrific brutality.

If the film has any flaws, they're down to Garragan. Not in McAvoy's admirable performance but in the character itself, an awkward composite created to make the story neater and easier to tell, but uncomfortable in its fiction, and the historically questionable effect it has on wider events.

Also, as we discover, along with Garragan, the true nature of Amin's agenda, our sympathy seems to be provoked when he threatens the Scot, rather than by the massacre of his own countrymen. Lest we forget - the true crimes here were committed against hundreds of thousands of Africans, not one puny Scottish bloke that didn't even exist.

But all in all it's an explosive, colourful and gripping account of Uganda's dark past, directed and performed with serious flair.

Classic Films, Part I : The Ipcress File, Dirty Harry

I’m currently working through a list of films I really ‘should’ have seen. The kind of films that when people ask me if I’ve seen them I say things like "Well I’ve seen bits of it" or "Yeah, but ages ago" or my favourite "Yeah, but I was incredibly tired and, if I'm honest, really quite drunk". Well, now’s the time for actual honesty, for coming clean. To all the people I’ve said those things to, I lied. I haven’t seen those films, I was just too embarrassed to say so. I feel better already.

It also gives me a list of amazing films to watch, which frankly is an added bonus. I say I’m ‘working’ through the list, as if it were a chore, but there does indeed seem to be a reason why people are always banging on about these.

I started with The Ipcress File (1965), Michael Caine playing an anti-Bond in the adaptation of a Len Deighton spy thriller. An odd choice, you might think (I’ve never had to lie, and indeed wouldn’t lie about not having seen it) but I felt like a bit of old-school British espionage with umbrellas, meetings in parks and Albanian master criminals.

Caine plays Harry Palmer, a Cockney ‘insubordinate with criminal tendencies’ recruited by the British Secret Service, but more concerned with his pay packet than Her Majesty. He’s taken off bog-standard surveillance to find the abductor of a renowned British scientist. In fact, it seems a lot of renowned scientists are suddenly retiring or going out of action in a mysterious British ‘brain drain’. And sure enough, when this scientist is retrieved in exchange for quite a few shillings and farthings and guineas (that’s a lot in today’s money), the man is now rubbish at science. He can barely fire up the overhead projector. So the Secret Service are pretty narked that they’ve been sold defective goods, quite apart from the fact that somebody clearly seems to be taking the piss with our best science graduates (which we all know are a rare enough breed as it is). Caine takes the case and soon becomes personally involved, web of intrigue, murder, treason, mind-altering machines etc. etc.

Yes, the plot is slightly absurd, but the film is wonderfully enjoyable. It looks fantastic, with so much interest and excitement in every shot. Bizarre camera angles and crash zooms appear out of nowhere, and the perfectly pitched score by John Barry (our answer to Lalo Schifrin) tweaks the tension and complements the visuals and dialogue.

Caine is never better as the hard-edged spy with his own rulebook and a complete disregard for authority. He loves ‘birds’ too, there’s plenty of Alfie here, but he really comes across as a very British Dirty Harry (1971), which, wouldn’t you know, is the film I watched next.



I fell for it hook, line and sinker. It’s a beautifully made film, brilliantly acted and hugely watchable. It’s not a million miles from Ipcress, only this is America baby, and don’t you forget it. So we’re talking Lalo Schifrin at the musical helm, underpinning the whole shebang with peerless skill, whipping up tension, surprise and intrigue like Delia whipping up a nice omelette.

But first, the story. There’s a serial killer on the loose in San Francisco. A really nasty piece of work with a lust for killing and a penchant for icing kids, ‘n****rs’ and priests. He laughs too, and it’s an all-round winning psycho turn from Andy Robinson, chosen by director Don Siegel because he had the ‘face of a choirboy’.

The officer they put on his case is the man they call Dirty Harry. It is, of course, Clint Eastwood as the seething, hard-boiled, take-no-shit (but wouldn’t mind a pay rise) cop Harry Callahan. He cares little for the law of the land, and a lot for the law he’s come up with himself. He’s a vigilante cop of the old school, and you screaming paedo racist psychos better watch out.

Then there’s the dialogue. Of course everyone remembers the "do you feel lucky, punk?" scene which, at the film’s climax, is an awesome moment, clinically delivered by the increasingly nihilistic Harry. But the rest of the film is superbly scripted, and often laugh-out-loud funny, as with my favourite exchange:

Harry Callahan: Well, when an adult male is chasing a female with intent to commit rape, I shoot the bastard. That's my policy.

The Mayor: Intent? How did you establish that?

Harry Callahan: When a naked man is chasing a woman through an alley with a butcher's knife and a hard-on, I figure he isn't out collecting for the Red Cross. [walks out of the room]

The Mayor: He's got a point.

After two of these films, I’m really getting a taste for this little trip down the celluloid hall of fame. Only about 150 to go…

être et avoir, at home on DVD

The premise of this French documentary is simple and the execution masterful. Filmmaker Nicolas Philibert follows life at a rural French primary school for a year. He focuses on one teacher, M. Lopez, and a handful of kids, following them home to see their families struggle with their homework, giving us brief glimpses into their difficult extra-curricular existence. School is a safe haven for them and M. Lopez a surrogate father, instilling discipline and patiently educating each young tyke until they’re ready to fly the nest and move on to secondary school.

The pace trundles rather than zooms, much like the pace of life in the film. But unlike other French auteurs, Philibert doesn’t patronise, baffle or bore the audience. It’s always entertaining, often hilarious and never boring. There’s no sanctimonious voiceover, he lets the characters tell their own story. After a year following these fascinating subjects, he’s managed to construct a coherent and extremely watchable window into their lives.

And maybe it’s too much living in the city, but this came as a welcome break from the frantic pace and worries of life. It has a quiet power and refreshing calm that makes you forget everything else, if only for an hour and a half.

Little Miss Sunshine, Curzon cinema, Soho

"Life is just one beauty contest after another". Continually trying to impress, continually being judged.

Well, in America at least. And Little Miss Sunshine works well as a parody of the nation's stereotypes. There’s the father obsessed with life’s ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ who tours a lecture of his ‘9 steps to success’. There’s the heroin-snorting nymphomaniac Grandpa, who although maybe not a stereotype himself, serves his satirical purpose. "Fuck as many women as you can kid" he tells his grandson "before it’s too late". The grandson in question is the angst-ridden, Nietszche-reading spoilt brat, who comes to his senses in perhaps the film’s most poignant scene, when his uncle (a suicidal, gay Proust scholar) convinces him that suffering is the most enjoyable part of life. Or, as the teenager translates it, "do what you enjoy, and fuck the rest". And of course there are countless pre-teen beauty queens, the apotheosis of everything that is hateful about America.

As a comedy, the film works less well. It’s too busy, too ‘wacky’. There’s no need for the farcical plot twists and turns, the constant buffoonery and slapstick episodes. It works best when relying on sharp, understated dialogue and the performances of the incredible cast (a ‘Who’s Who’ of indie actors we’ve got used to seeing in the mainstream). The young girl, too, is remarkable.

The message of the film is simple: Fuck Beauty Contests. And it’s pretty much drilled into us by the end. But it’s an important point and an enjoyable denunciation of an American obsession.

Snakes On A Plane, Orange Wednesday @ vue cinema, Finchley Road

It’s an awful film, and I loved it. No plot to speak of, of course - the title’s about as exhaustive a synopsis as you’re going to get. But it’s no straight-to-DVD, it has its place in cinema history.

First off, all the hype about the title and Sam Jackson saying he’s gonna execute every last motherfucking snake on this motherfucking motherfucker of a plane.

Also it does for ophidiophobes what arachnophobia did for arachnophobes. Scares the motherfucking shit out of them.

Download wrap – Friday, Layer Cake, Little Black Book

I’m working nights at the moment, so my days pass in a dreamy daze, and the bleary-eyed void is neatly filled with the odd downloaded film watched in bed with my headphones on followed by a walk in the rain around Queen’s Park.

This week, I have been mostly watching:

Friday (the film, not the day) – Presumably they issued cinemagoers with blunts and a lighter before entering the cinema. I made the mistake of watching this sober and didn’t understand a thing.

Little Black Book - Dire.

Layer Cake – Pointless.

Successful little trio then.

Miami Vice, Vue cinema, Portsmouth.

"Probability", Colin Farrell tells us, "is like gravity."

Just one of the many fascinating and completely baffling insights that pepper the ‘script’ of Michael Mann’s cinematic adaptation of his ’70s TV series. I put script in inverted commas for a reason. It is completely irrelevant in this film, they might as well have been speaking Swahili. The hispanic baddies whisper everything in a drug-dealer drawl that’s either inaudible, incomprehensible, or both ("Zay recover our low" = "They recovered our load"). Jamie Foxxxx speaks in abbreviations (‘OpSec’ = Operational Security, ‘Counter-Intell’ etc. etc.) while Colin Farrell just shouts things or stays quiet looking moody and perplexed. ‘Perploody’ as Jamie might say.

The film is ridiculous. The outfits are ridiculous, the plot is ridiculous, the guns, girls and the dance moves are ridiculous. The fact that the weird quiet guy from Vera Drake turns up as a Miami crimelord is ridiculous. And yet.

It looks fantastic (if a little ridiculous). It’s pacy, gripping and frankly very sexy. Miami sizzles and titillates under Mann’s inventive direction, bullets bang and whizz, drug barons menace, white supremacists get caps in their asses. It’s a summer popcorn blockbuster that shouldn’t leave you feeling short-changed. Foxx and Farrell aren’t as tight as Gibson as Glover, nor as funny as Smith and Lawrence, but Mann achieves what he sets out to do. No credits, just action – sex, drugs and death – from start to finish.

A big-budget, blockbusting brainless treat.

The Squid And The Whale, Prince Charles Cinema

Going to the cinema on my own is one of my guilty pleasures. But it’s got to be the right film, and it’s got to be the right cinema. For me, they don’t come much better than the Prince Charles.
Tucked off Leicester Square, it shows a selection of recent and not so recent films, from mainstream romantic comedies to obscure Asian horror flicks. And on Friday, everything’s a pound. So there I was, on my own near the back, with my popcorn and Haagen-Dazs.
The film was first class. Some nice Brooklyn Jewish angst and profound tragicomedy, neatly written with fantastic performances all round. Yes, well done everyone on that one.