Be sure to check out James Oliver’s entertaining AND informative piece The A to Z of Fritz Lang on the MovieMail website, inspired by the upcoming release of M.

It’s a repeated refrain of this column that the past decade has been a golden age for movie lovers. It’s never been easier to get hold of films – and not just recognised masterpieces: films which once seemed to exist only as entries in Halliwell’s film guide are now readily available on DVD, looking as good as they did on first release.

Do junior cineastes realise how lucky they are not to have to scour the TV schedules for obscurities or freeze their bits off on provincial station platforms after a rare screening (talk about suffering for your art)?

If you want another tangible reminder of how much has changed over the past ten years, check out MovieMail’s typically fine sale of controversial films from the last issue (prices valid till 25th Feb!). Back when it was all fields around here, many of these titles were either denied video certificates or banned outright.

There were ways around this, of course: I sometimes wonder if an enterprising DVD producer has thought of including a tenth generation VHS dupe for a special edition of A Clockwork Orange, so the nostalgically inclined amongst us can recall the first time we watched it.

But here’s the thing. Having welcomed the easing of the censorship restrictions (and yes, I know A Clockwork Orange wasn’t technically ‘censored’ but thanks for your concern), I now wonder if I’m turning into Mary Whitehouse.

The early years of this century have been characterised by extreme cinema, a reaction (no doubt) to the dark times in which we live. The big trend in horror has been the ‘torture porn’ sub-genre (Hostel, Saw, Martyrs); it’s a trend that’s entered the art houses: the American remake of Funny Games is no more comfortable than the Euro original while Antichrist, Lars Von Trier’s wave of mutilation, sent the normally unflappable Cannes audience into a proper tizzy.

Extreme cinema has been with us for a long time of course – at least since 1929, when Bunuel and Dali slashed an eye in Un chien andalou. They, of course, were out to rattle the cages of the middle classes – épater le bourgeois, as the poets had it.

It’s hard not to think that many ‘extreme’ filmmakers are still trying to do the same thing, with ever decreasing results, to a modern bourgeois far more tolerant and less easily outraged than their predecessors. Are they really worthy of any artist’s contemptuous provocation?

No, censorship is not the answer. It never is. There are many fine and worthwhile films that push the boundaries. Man Bites Dog is a powerful study of the relationship between media and violence (and much funnier than Michael Haneke’s meditations on the same theme); The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has a wit and intelligence that belies the sensational title. Best of all is Salo, Pasolini’s nihilistic shriek of disgust: an alarming but necessary exploration of our darkest impulses.

But hanging over this new wave of extreme cinema is an uncomfortable feeling that modern filmmakers are engaged in a sort of arms race. As it’s become harder to shock audiences, so the provocateurs have had to become more provocative to gain a reaction. Now that Antichrist has raised the bar, no doubt someone will try and top it. But how? What fresh atrocities can we look forward to?

I think I’m getting older.

Way back when – 1967, if we’re being specific – the Slade School of Fine Art appointed Britain’s first ever Professor of Film Studies. The new Prof was a chap called Thorold Dickinson, who’d taken to teaching after working in the British film industry as, variously, editor, writer and director.

Dickinson is an obscure figure, even to fans of British cinema. Regardless of the merits of his work, he never established much of an identity as a filmmaker; his versatility is sometimes mistaken for inconsistency.

Recent years, however, have seen something of a reassessment. No less a figure than Martin Scorsese has proclaimed Dickinson a master. Most importantly, it’s becoming easier to actually see his films. Over the next few months, three Dickinson movies find their way onto DVD: one of them is surely a masterpiece.

Dickinson was born in Bristol, son of that city’s Archdeacon, and entered the film industry via Oxford. Like his contemporary David Lean, he apprenticed as an editor before graduating to director with The High Command.

The Arsenal Stadium Mystery was his first major success. To call it the best film about association football is to damn it with faint praise: it’s better than that. It’s a charming, breezy romp – entertaining even for those of us utterly indifferent to the beautiful game. Graham Greene declared it preferable to the similarly spry Thin Man series.

Dickinson’s best known film is Gaslight. Whereas The Arsenal Stadium Mystery is goofy fun, Gaslight is an all-out melodrama, with Anton Walbrook as a smooth-talking murderer preying on his unsuspecting wife. It was good enough for David O Selznick to offer Dickinson a Hollywood contract, just as he’d done for Hitchcock. Unlike Hitch, however, Dickinson didn’t feel able to leave his country when it was at war.

Worse was to come: since Selznick planned his own remake, he wanted to suppress Dickinson’s version. The director struck a surreptitious print before the negative was destroyed but, because of Selznick’s restrictions, couldn’t show it and was thus unable to use it as a calling card once the war was over.

Still, at least Anton Walbrook hadn’t forgotten and, after an altercation with another director, he called upon Dickinson to take the helm of The Queen of Spades. With only five days of preparation, Dickinson might have been expected to keep it simple, with lots of nice, easy set-ups to cover the script. Instead, he really goes for it. The resultant film is a masterpiece.

The camerawork (always a Dickinson strength) is flamboyant, the décor baroque and the emotions outsized. It is hard to imagine a less ‘British’ British film this side of Ken Russell. It’s one of the greatest films made in this country during the 1940s – easily equal to the best work of Carol Reed, David Lean or Powell and Pressburger.

By all accounts a kindly, decent chap, Dickinson was perhaps temperamentally unsuited to the film business and, after a stint working for UNESCO, he retired to academia, where his first students were critic Raymond Durgnat and director Don Levy (Herostratus).

What’s dispiriting is the the thought Dickinson is not an isolated case. There must be hundreds of similar stories. Who knows how many other masterpieces are waiting to be brought to light?

Has there been a more influential British TV programme than Doctor Who? Not the modern version, you understand, with its CGI, top-line talent and generous budget but the spit ‘n’ sawdust original.

That might sound like a stupid question. After all, Doctor Who – in its ‘classic’ form – was a tacky science fiction show whereas, say, Cathy Come Home changed policy. But consider the millions of imaginations fired by ‘classic’ Doctor Who and the question seems less absurd.

Consider the many people who have cited it as an influence on their lives. They include scientists, writers, musicians (that theme tune was a pioneering piece of electronica) and many more besides. Not bad for a tacky sci-fi show.

It has become fashionable of late to sneer at ‘classic’ Who for its perceived deficiencies. Sadly, many of the charges hold water. The scripts were indeed sometimes silly. Many of the monsters were risible. But such criticism ignores the fact that, at its best, Doctor Who was pretty damned good. Take The Talons of Weng-Chiang, for example: a mash-up of Victorian music hall, giant rats and fake Chinese Gods. It’s a brilliant piece of pulp storytelling, featuring the peerless Tom Baker on top form.

Baker’s reign was the golden age – the body-horror of The Ark in Space (a plausible influence on the rather more expensive Alien), the genuinely terrifying Pyramids of Mars and the cod Frankenstein story, The Brain of Morbius. Perhaps his finest hour (and-a-half), however, was City of Death, a wonderful comedy co-written by Douglas Adams and featuring a cameo by John Cleese.

Very nearly as good is Inferno, in which Jon Pertwee gets blasted into an alternative universe. In addition to dealing with big philosophical issues of free will, it throws in green slime that turns people into monsters. The ultimate green slime adventure, though, is surely The Green Death aka ‘the one with the maggots’.

One of the constant complaints of Doctor Who fans is the shabby treatment accorded to the first decade of the Doctor’s travels. In its wisdom, the BBC destroyed many episodes starring the first Doctor, William Hartnell and his successor, Patrick Troughton (although fortunately the archivists carefully preserved every Trooping the Colour, in case you were worried).

The DVD releases go some way to rescuing the afflicted stories. For The Invasion (in which the Cybermen try to take over swinging London), the two missing episodes have been replaced by animated recreations.

The best release (so far, of course), is Lost in Time, gathering together the 18 ‘orphan’ episodes, the only surviving representations of their respective stories. The casual viewer might be better advised to start elsewhere – these are incomplete stories – but there’s a poignant magic to these episodes, at once a reminder of what we’ve lost and a celebration of what we have.

We shouldn’t deny the power of nostalgia in all this: it exerts a powerful gravitational pull that makes some of us more willing to overlook certain faults. Yes, Old Skool Who was cheap, silly and anything else you want to throw at it. But at its best, it gave us some of the finest TV ever. And that’s why it keeps drawing us back.

This month brings forth the long overdue release of three rarities from the archives of Hammer films. Two of the these three – The Camp on Blood Island and Yesterday’s Enemy – have never before appeared on any home video format while the third – that’s The Damned, directed by Joseph Losey – has been frustratingly difficult to see for many years.

Excellent stuff, then. Not just because these are worthwhile films in themselves (see reviews for proof of that): they also show us a very different side to one of the great institutions of British cinema.

Far more than a production company, Hammer represents a style, a genre even. Specifically, the Hammer brand is synonymous with a certain type of Gothic horror film. Dracula and Frankenstein provided the template but Hammer developed it into something characteristic and instantly recognisable, all fake blood and heaving bosoms (if we’re lucky, sometimes in the same shot.)

And yet… Despite a certain nostalgia for Hammer product, I find most of their horror films close to unwatchable. There are exceptions, notably some of the late-period pictures, principally those directed by Peter Sasdy (Countess Dracula and Taste the Blood of Dracula being especially worthwhile). And Christopher – sorry, Sir Christopher – Lee and Peter Cushing are always good value. Cushing in particular was one of the greatest screen actors this country ever produced: it’s a tragedy he played in so few films worthy of his talents.

But compare Hammer’s Gothics to the films created to cash in on their undeniable popularity, Roger Corman’s cycle of Edgar Allen Poe adaptations or Mario Bava’s psychedelic fairy tales. By contrast, Hammer’s efforts look dull and stolid, deficient not just in budget but also in atmosphere and ideas.

That’s why it’s exciting to see the Hammer vaults being prised open and their contents arrive onto DVD. Because amidst all the Gothics the studio churned out by the yard, they also found time to make rather more worthwhile films that have stood up surprisingly well.

Hammer were a prolific bunch – not for nothing awarded The Queen’s Award for Industry – and they produced films in many other genres beyond the one they’re celebrated for. Both Yesterday’s Enemy and Camp on Blood Island are war films and they made some useful crime pictures, notably the excellent Hell is a City.

Viewed today, however, it’s Hammer’s adventure films that stand up best of all. Most of these are still waiting to appear on DVD but at least we have The Sword of Sherwood Forest to be going on with. It’s amongst the best Robin Hood films – not quite in the Errol Flynn league but sprightly and well-paced, with the blessed Cushing on great form as the detestable Sheriff of Nottingham.

Hammer’s adventure yarns are unpretentious fun, walloping through their fights and derring-do with brio enough to satisfy anyone who’s ever been nine years old. It’s to be hoped that these new releases herald the forthcoming appearance of films like Captain Clegg and (let’s hope) Terror of the Tongs.

These ‘other’ Hammer films have been ignored for too long, overlooked for the more famous horrors. Now that they are finally available, perhaps its time to reappraise the studio’s achievements – for the better.

Goodness: what a month for DVD releases. Two F.W. Murnau films, a brace of Frank Borzage sets and much else besides. Phew! But if you’re asking me, one release stands towering above them all.

Masters of Cinema’s Dr. Mabuse box set is a wonderful thing indeed, worthwhile even for those who own some of its contents already: the two previously available titles have been spruced up and embellished with fresh extras, while the inclusion of The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse – Fritz Lang’s final film, never previously available for domestic viewing in the UK – seals the deal.

If any films deserve such treatment, it’s these. It’s hard to exaggerate their importance – their influence touches everything from Hitchcock to James Bond and even The Dark Knight. And they remain vital: the most important reason to seek them out is not because they’re historically significant but because their entertainment value is undiminished by age. The first film, Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, is 87 years old but few allowances are necessary: it’s as exciting, involving and incisive as it ever was.

Although the films carry his name, Mabuse is in no way a hero. Rather, he is a super-villain, in the grand tradition of Fu Manchu or Fantômas. More than this, he is an agent of chaos: not simply killing and stealing but wilfully creating pandemonium. His reign of terror coincided with Germany’s most turbulent years.

The first part of Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler is subtitled ‘A Portrait of Our Time’ and indeed it was. In 1922, Germany was in a bad way, broken by defeat in war and crippled by hyper-inflation. Lang’s film creates a fictionalised history of these times: Mabuse causes a run on the stock exchange that virtually destroys the economy.

Ten years on and Germany faced a new menace, this time from its newly elected chancellor. By chance – or was it? – Lang had decided to revisit Mabuse. The resultant film was, famously, banned by the Nazi administration who perhaps sensed that Lang was drawing an equivalence between them and the criminal kingpin. It’s a film set in a lunatic asylum: the implication is surely that the inmates have taken over and that authority is insane.

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse was the last film Lang made in Germany for nearly thirty years. He fled the Nazis, settled in America and turned out some of the most brilliant films of the Hollywood system. But in the twilight of his career, he was tempted back and returned, one last time, for Mabuse. The Thousand Eyes… doesn’t quite match the heights of the earlier instalments, but it has aged well, not least because of its percipient depiction of a surveillance society.

The success of this film ensured that Mabuse would be revived for further misadventures, but it was to be without Lang: he retired after The Thousand Eyes… The subsequent episodes need not detain us: solid commercial thrillers from other directors, lacking in Lang’s mad insight.

But the three films collected here burn as brightly as ever. Although made in a very different era, they are films which resonate in our paranoid times. There isn’t sufficient space here to thank Masters of Cinema for the superlative job they’ve done on the set but they have presented the films as they deserve, no, demand, to be seen.

The bald facts run something like this: even after four decades of equal opportunities legislation, of recruitment drives and culture shifts, the movie business remains immune to the concept of gender parity. Of the many thousands of movies that get released each year, a mere seven percent are directed by women.

Indeed, this very column functions as proof of the parlous state of female filmmaking: would I be writing about women directors if they weren’t rare enough to be worthy of comment?

With that in mind, let’s move from the general to the specific. After all, my interest in this topic was prompted by two recent releases from that increasingly essential label Second Run.

The first is Daisies, directed by Vera Chytilová. It’s a classic of the Czech New Wave and the subject of much critical pontification over the tears. But no matter how much you’ve read about it, it’s something else to see it in action – a plotless, oestrogen-drenched riot in which two young women decide to turn the world upside down for 75 minutes. It is utterly ace.

Ann Turner’s film Celia is ace too, albeit for different reasons. It’s most easily described as a coming-of-age tale but there’s so much more to it than that. There are fairy tale monsters and real life equivalents; there are also communists, rabbits and death. Most of all, there is Celia herself, one of the most remarkable children in the movies: a little girl with a highly developed imagination and some alarming tendencies.

There are precious few points of comparison between the two (beyond their quality, of course) but here’s one: both have a way of seeing the world that is fresh and unfamiliar. The emphasis their directors give, the framing of their shots and the way they cut reflect a compelling perspective on the world. We might, to customise a key term of feminist film theory, call it ‘the female gaze.’

This strikes me as one of the best arguments for supporting and fostering female directors: women bring different angles to their films. Recent movies like Sofia Coppola’s Lost In Translation, Lexi Alexanders Green Street and Julie Delpy’s Two Days In Paris reflect concerns not found in films directed by men. At a time when many of us think cinema is stuck in a holding pattern, new ways of seeing should not simply be encouraged but cherished.

Let’s not pretend women automatically make great films. We should be in no doubt that if equality were achieved, ladies would churn out as much dross as the boys. It could be argued that the high quality of female filmmaking is because only the truly exceptional are able to attract funding in a film culture that is at best indifferent and at worst openly hostile to women directors.

At Cannes this year, Jane Campion exhorted women to ‘put on their coats of armour’ and make movies. Certainly, this is something of a banner year for female directors: Campion has her Keats biopic Bright Star, Andrea Arnold follows her outstanding debut – the Cannes Jury Prize winner Red Road – with Fish Tank and Kathryn Bigelow (who, let’s not forget, gave us both Near Dark and Strange Days) releases The Hurt Locker.

We owe them our support. Not because they are women but because they are great filmmakers. We need many more like them.

This month brings the long awaited release of Lola Montès, the final film directed by Max Ophuls. I’m sure it’s quite unnecessary to add to the small mountain of praise already piled up, but if you are hesitating about ordering then consider this a nudge. You’ll never regret a masterpiece: they’re good for the soul.

Ophuls is one of those directors always discussed in hushed, reverent tones. There are those who make a convincing case for his 1948 film Letter From An Unknown Woman as the greatest film of them all, while others favour his penultimate film Madame De… He was the primary influence on Stanley Kubrick, who admitted the celebrated tracking shots in Paths Of Glory and The Shining were inspired directly by him.

No one moved the camera like Ophuls. His films are symphonies of movement, with the camera circling the actors or sweeping airily across the set. James Mason, who worked with Ophuls twice, wrote a verse celebrating his friend’s love of motion:

A shot that does not call for tracks / Is agony for poor old Max / Who, separated from his dolly / Is wrapped in deepest melancholy.

But while Ophuls was a stylist without peer, it is the substance of his films that makes them so great. These are films filled with passion, heartbreak and unrequited desire. He identified with tragic heroines punished for transgressing the prevailing social order, such as the notorious courtesan Lola Montez, reduced to trading on her notoriety in a circus show. Love, the source of happiness in other films, can be destructive in Ophuls’ world, with many affairs of the heart ending in tragedy.

(A brief digression: it’s tempting to draw comparisons between Ophuls and his near contemporary, the great Japanese filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi. Both are celebrated for their facility with the camera, both showed enormous sympathy for the travails of women. Were they are aware of each other’s work? One could construct a fascinating parallel retrospective… End digression.)

No matter how lionised Ophuls is today, however, it was a very different story while he was alive. The reason we’ve had to wait so long for Lola Montès was because it needed to be restored: it was recut after a disastrous preview. Preservation was an afterthought. And that is hardly an isolated example. His Hollywood films, now considered amongst his finest, were often ignored: Letter From An Unknown Woman was only released in Britain after a vigourous campaign by Gavin Lambent and Lindsay Anderson of Sequence magazine. It still flopped.

In his lifetime, Ophuls was regarded as a mere decorator of films: good with the camera, yes, but a maker of melodrama rather than the proper, serious films that won awards and acclaim. That changed with the young critics of Cahiers du Cinéma, with Jean-Luc Godard especially vocal in his admiration.

Ophuls, then, should stand as a cautionary tale of how genius is not recognised in its own lifetime. (And before we start smugly tutting at our blinkered forebears, let’s be aware that future generations will surely shiver at some of our decisions.) We might wonder how such beauty could be overlooked, but let us be grateful it exists, then embrace it as it deserves.

It’s the nature of the movies that the backroom boys seldom get the credit they deserve from the wider media. Film might be a collaborative medium but some collaborators are more prominent than others; it’s these public faces – the actors, the director – that soak up the acclaim, often at the expense of vital-but-obscure colleagues.
So when a cameraman gets eulogised by the press, you know he was something special. And special Jack Cardiff most certainly was. He was (arguably) the greatest ever colour cinematographer; it’s a measure of his achievement that it wasn’t just the film buff faithful who mourned him.

Rather than offer a tribute of my own, I’ll recommend you watch Black Narcissus again or Under Capricorn or… take your pick. I’m inclined to think that words can’t do justice to the achievements of such a visual artist. Instead, let us consider the profession that he mastered.

Of course, it must be acknowledged that whatever contributions a cameraman makes, they do not operate in a vacuum. Cinematography cultists often overlook the vital role played by other technicians, especially the production designer and editor. Their contributions are, however, more discreet, sometimes invisible; cameramen, by contrast, are all about what’s on screen.

The minimum responsibility of a Director of Photography (DoP) is lighting the picture but can also encompass designing camera moves or even compositions (many directors are less pictorially minded than is commonly supposed.) The best of them have styles so characteristic, it’s like signing their name on every frame. This delicate balance of craft and art is explored in the excellent documentary Visions of Light, a celebration of the cinematographer’s trade.

In the earliest days of cinema, the greatest challenge was getting an image to register on film. Lighting was done by the sun; artificial lights were nowhere near powerful enough. As the equipment evolved, so cameramen were able to create more elaborate images on film – ‘painting with light’, as later master John Alton had it. DoPs were constantly pushing their kit as hard as it would go. For Der Letze Mann, Karl Freund invented cranes, dollies and harnesses so that the camera could dance about the set.

The toys improved: film stocks got faster, lenses got wider and cameramen started playing with all sorts of new tricks. James Wong Howe, for instance, developed the ‘deep focus’ techniques that Greg Toland would use so successfully on Citizen Kane, the most influential job of photography there’s ever been.

In cinematography, technology has always facilitated art. The revolution of the French New Wave was enabled by smaller cameras which allowed Raoul Coutard, the movement’s great cameraman, to escape the studio and shoot on location, creating a new filmic style.

We’re in the middle of another revolution right now, as celluloid is subsumed by digital. Digital is still in its infancy but it’s already produced its first genius: Anthony Dod Mantle, who won a deserved Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire. His work doesn’t try to replicate the analogue experience but rather, creates images that could only be produced digitally.

Radical changes are surely afoot, new techniques will be developed and new adepts emerge. Whether any will prove worthy of comparison to Jack Cardiff, however, remains to be seen.

After several months dedicated to writing about old and extremely old films, I resolved to dedicate this month’s column to something more contemporary: there are, after all, many outstanding new films that deserve to be discussed with the same enthusiasm as established classics. Sadly, my worthy resolution has just flown out of the window: I’m going to be talking about Charlie Chaplin. Sorry.

At least this time I don’t need to re-cap his career or provide context. Everyone knows Chaplin, the most famous icon in cinema, the most popular performer there has ever been, perhaps the only star who deserves to be called a legend. Today, he is held in less regard. His work is generally dismissed (often with a sneering reference to its ‘sentimentality’) and unfavourably compared to rival comics of the same period. Chaplin might have been more popular, so they say, but Buster Keaton was funnier.

When the Chaplin estate released his features on DVD, I dutifully worked my way through them, hoping to love them. I wish I could say I was converted – and if life were like a Chaplin film, I would have been. As it was, I enjoyed them well enough but was baffled that such modest works induced such frenzy amongst their first audiences.
Well, maybe life is more like a Chaplin film than I realised. Prompted by some capricious whim – and the favourable notices for Simon Louvish’s new book about the little tramp – I dug out City Lights for the first time in years. And – er – promptly fell in love: it easily surmounted my lowered expectations, then knocked me for six.

The problem with poor Charlie is that we expect too much of him. In his heyday, he was the most famous man alive: such popularity was considered to carry responsibilities back then. Chaplin became not merely an an entertainer but a sort-of spokesman for the human race. No wonder there was a backlash: even Gandhi didn’t merit the sort of acclamation accorded to Chaplin.

Make no mistake though: Chaplin was a genius. For a start, he was very funny. As funny as Buster? Certainly. Watch The Circus and you won’t need to ask again. Chaplin and Keaton inspired each other: we can (and should) revere both.
But Chaplin was more than a clown. He’s often criticised for trying to tug at our heartstrings, and it’s true that the later films (basically everything after City Lights) are weighted down by a certain earnestness. When he succeeds, however, the effect is magnificent. The Kid is simple, direct and quite beautiful. And the closing scene of City Lights really is as good as they say.

Chaplin was sometimes naïve but always optimistic. It’s no wonder his work fell from favour in a more jaundiced age. But right now, as the world stares down the barrel of a gun and tempers fray, the irony and cynicism of recent years seems much less appealing; the little fella with the bowler hat and stupid moustache could find himself in favour once more.

That’s not to say he’ll regain even a fraction of his former popularity – how can he? Rather it’s a hope that his tremendous achievements will be recognised and (even more) that his films will be enjoyed as the glorious unspoilt entertainments that they are.