Archive for the ‘British Film’ Category

So. Farewell then Ken Russell, senescent enfant terrible of the British film industry. He will be missed; although I was never much of a fan of his film work, he himself was terrific value, a cheerfully vulgar antidote to the insufferable self-congratulatory politeness of the British film establishment.

While he was hardly cut off in his prime, it’s hard not to rue the timing of his demise. In March, the BFI finally releases the long-awaited DVD of The Devils; it’s a shame the old goat won’t be around to savour the reaction.

There’s no-one in British film history like Ken Russell. British films are supposed to be restrained and tasteful. Even when they get down and dirty, it’s usually for respectable, political reasons (to lay bare the miseries of the lower orders and so forth). Ken Russell stuck two fingers up at all that.

For many years, his films were regarded as something of an aberration in British film, an indication of how standards in British film had plummeted in the early 1970s – a sort-of cultural equivalent of the malaise that gripped Britain during Heath’s Britain.

The official line had it that, after the ‘swinging sixties’, British film collapsed twice in the 1970s – first symbolically, when Ken Russell and his ilk were calling the shots and then (at least partly in consequence) literally; about half way through the decade, the American studios pulled out of the UK, leaving British film in the hands of exploitation merchants who steered it into the gutter – until the clean-cut likes of Chariots Of Fire, with their crinolines and well-pressed blazers, made cinemas safe for ‘nice’ people again.

And yet, start watching the films made in this country during the 1970s and a different story emerges. Dig into British film of this decade and you’ll uncover any number of good, very good and authentically great films made during this supposedly stagnant period.

Don’t Look Now, Gumshoe and O Lucky Man! suggested new horizons for British film. The Wicker Man, Death Line and Sir Henry at Rawlinson End skewer British self-image. In this context, Russell looks not like an anomaly but part of an authentic movement.

Part of the reason this decade has been so traduced is that it has been hard to see the films. With the rise of DVD, however, many neglected titles are finally getting their due. The BFI have released Radio On, Winstanley and Bill Douglas’s Trilogy; their essential Flipside imprint has revived forgotten titles like Little Malcolm, Requiem for a Village and the remarkable Deep End.

There is more. Later this year sees the publication of Offbeat, edited by Julian Upton (of this parish). It looks at overlooked British films from the 1960s onward but it is the surveys of the 1970s that are most interesting, shining a spotlight on genuinely great (if somewhat sleazy) films like The Squeeze, Sitting Target and The Black Panther.

The revival of The Devils, then, comes at a time when the films of this reviled decade are finally getting something like the acclaim they deserve. They might not have made an impact on original release but British film of the 1970s looks, in hindsight, like a time of great experimentation and excitement. Something of a golden age, then – albeit a slightly shabby one.

It’s said that pub landlords hated the Quatermass TV serial back in the 1950s. When the BBC first broadcast his adventures in those pre-iPlayer days, hostelries would empty as drinkers hurried home to catch the latest instalment, leaving no-one for barmen to pull pints for.

Professor Bernard Quatermass was the first great icon of British television. The creation of writer Nigel Kneale (himself the first great British TV dramatist), Quatermass has influenced the entire science fiction genre, from Doctor Who to John Carpenter and beyond. Perhaps more importantly, he keeps finding fans in each successive generation: the first three film adaptations have just been re-released, and since they’re on DVD you can enjoy them in your own time – no need to hurry your drinking.

In Kneale’s world, Quatermass was the head of the ‘British Rocket Group’ (oh, for the days when spacecraft boasted a Union Jack on their nose cones!). His position led him to encounter the dregs of the universe: Starting with BBC series The Quatermass Experiment in 1953 and continuing in Quatermass II (1955) and Quatermass and the Pit (1959), the professor battled with extraterrestrial invasion and, perhaps even worse, intransigent civil service bureaucracy.

Intrigued by the character’s TV success, a small film studio called Hammer Films chanced their arm with a film adaptation of the first story (which they audaciously renamed The Quatermass Xperiment to emphasise its shocking content and capitalise on the decision of the then British Board of Film Censors to award it an X certificate). It was a huge hit in 1955, establishing Hammer as the serious film-biz players they would remain for the next two decades.

Hammer eventually filmed all three serials (Quatermass 2 came in 1957, while his adventures In the Pit had to wait until 1967) and it’s these versions which are most familiar to modern viewers. All three are stories of alien invasion, in which the (largely unseen) enemy first possesses and then transforms their earthling victims so they lose their fundamental humanity.

This being the 1950s there are subtexts galore. We can view the aliens as a manifestation of the existential threat of communism, although this is a very reductive interpretation. Nigel Kneale was a more acute writer than that: the main tension in the film is not between mankind and the aliens but between this planet’s inhabitants – Quatermass is appalled how his inventions are co-opted by the military, who plan to use them to slaughter their enemies.

As with all successes, Quatermass inspired imitations. Hammer’s own (tremendously entertaining) X: The Unknown was even set to feature Quatermass until Kneale – unhappy at the Studio’s use of American tough-guy actor Brian Donlevy in the role in The Quatermass Xperiment – protested. It didn’t dissuade him from letting Hammer make The Abominable Snowman, adapted from another of his teleplays. Maybe the best of the Kneale / Hammer films, it concerns the hunt for the yeti and the terrible consequences for those who find it.

This boom was short lived. Soon after, Hammer discovered tacky Gothic Horror and changed course: apart from one-off efforts like Quatermass and the Pit and The Damned, Hammer steered clear of science fiction.

This is a shame, because they were amongst the best films the company made: mature, sophisticated and still thought-provoking.

Attentive MovieMail customers will have noticed that a number of films with a pastoral theme have made their appearance on DVD these past few months. Last month’s cover girl Tamara Drewe joins F.W. Murnau’s beautiful City Girl and Alexander Dovzhenko’s rapturous Soviet silent, Earth.

It’s hardly a trend but it’s enough to justify a further excursion into the countryside because there’s another side to rural films. Movies don’t always portray the countryside as a bucolic idyll; there are pictures that use those elysian fields as a backdrop for something altogether darker. It’s those that are our subject for today.

More specifically, it’s the domestic variety; British filmmakers seem to excel at pastoral horror films. Most famously, there’s The Wicker Man. Set on the remote Scottish isle of ‘Summerisle’, it’s a grand and disturbing union of the ancient and modern. What’s interesting is how it subverts the usual narrative of pastoral films.

Most rural movies revere tradition and present the countryside as a place of spiritual rebirth (the townie who’s lost their way in the metropolis re-connects with something more meaningful). Not on Summerisle though: there’s no sense in the old ways but they are followed blindly, whatever the cost.

At the other end of the country, Michael Reeves set Witchfinder General in the Suffolk countryside, filming at many of the actual locations where odious sadist Matthew Hopkins – whose life the film dramatises – plied his trade. The beauty of the scenery is a counterpoint to Hopkins’ barbarism. It’s not really a horror film at all: its use of landscape is closer to American westerns rather than British gothics.

The best of the crop, however, might be Blood on Satan’s Claw. Pay no heed to that sensationalist title. This is a remarkable, richly atmospheric work, constructed around a series of set pieces: a ploughman uncovers something ancient and evil; a man is terrorised by something and ends up hacking off his own hand; a children’s game develops into something more malicious. Director Piers Haggard makes brilliant use of his locations; it’s at once beautiful and unnerving. If they’d given it a better title, it would be as well regarded as The Wicker Man.

The British Pastoral Horror as been in eclipse for some years now but there are signs that something is budding. Christopher Smith’s recent film Black Death draws deeply but imaginatively on The Wicker Man and Witchfinder General (as well as Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God) to create the most effective British horror film since 28 Days Later. Set in medieval times, it tells of a band of warriors and an unwitting monk who journey into the wilds to find a village that has supposedly been spared the plague because of a pact they’ve made with the devil.

Although filmed in Germany, it’s a film well attuned to the savagery of the countryside and the dark things that crawl out once you lift up the rocks. It’s a film that every fan of British horror should support.

The countryside isn’t all rolling fields and rosy-cheeked yokels. There’s a darkness in the soil and things with a nasty bite. Let us cherish those films that remind us that escaping to the country isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be.

The Battle of Britain and the Blitz were, for the British at least, two of the episodes that define the Second World War. It’s no surprise, then, that their seventieth anniversary is being celebrated at some length, reminding us of that dark time when Britain stood alone.

The films made in that period – indeed, those made in the first half of the war – make fascinating viewing today and not simply for their quality. The film industry took it upon itself to rally the home front with stirring exhortations. They were, in other words, making propaganda; watched today, they reveal the attitudes and temper of those times.

According to the traditional rules of propaganda, however, wartime filmmakers failed miserably. Back in The Great War, Britain led the world in the black arts, happily painting the Boche as beastly subhumans, glorifying the Empire, boasting how Britannia’s dad was bigger than your dad etc.

There was none of that second time out. Consider Humphrey Jennings, leading documentarian of those times. His idea of bellicosity was juxtaposing images of bombed-out streets with lines from Kipling (Words for Battle). Nor was he unique: almost to a man, the British documentary movement avoided crass triumphalism and sneering at the enemy.

There was more license in fiction films, more contact with adversaries and a reminder of the danger Britain faced (Cottage To Let is a fine, underrated example of this). And yet, even here, British filmmakers changed the rules of engagement.

Take 49th Parallel for instance. Charged with making a film to encourage America to abandon its isolationism, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger came up with a story of a pack of Nazis rampaging through Canada. But in a move that’s still arresting today, they went to great lengths to distinguish between the Nazis and ordinary Germans.

In recent years it has become fashionable to state the bleedin’ obvious, that real life was nothing like the films; once the bombs started to fall, the nation’s collective upper lip wasn’t as stiff as the myths suggest. But such revisionism misses the point: propaganda is about perception, not truth.

It’s precisely because that they don’t paint their subjects as superhuman that makes them so special; they celebrate the familiar and the mundane. Britain might have had the largest Empire in the world (we’ll discuss hypocrisy some other time, thanks) but they focussed on ordinary men and women.

It’s a dashed queer sort of propaganda that values humour, fair play and modesty over tub-thumping and nationalism. That Britain looked to those qualities in its darkest hour offers a valuable insight into national character and lessons we can learn from today.

I’m not sure there’s a more moving war film than Let George Do It, in which George Formby foils a spy ring in Norway. Seriously. The Nazis were sweeping through Europe. Many wise heads reckoned the war was lost. At a time when Britain was besieged, her citizens looked not to a strong man or zealot but to a buck-toothed half-wit. George wasn’t a professional – he wasn’t even very brave, but he wanted to do the right thing and was ready to give Adolf a blooming good kick up the posterior if the chance arose.

I don’t think that there’s anything that makes me prouder to be British.

View MovieMail’s Classic War films section

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?

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.

You may have heard already that next month sees the welcome DVD release of Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s Winstanley. It’s not the best known of films but it’s a significant and worthwhile release. Made, essentially, as a community project, it’s one of the most vivid recreations of the past that I know of. It’s not perfect: although I admire it tremendously, I admit I find it sometimes frustrating: the ambition of the filmmakers outstrips their resources by some distance, but it remains a singular – maybe even unique – vision.

It isn’t just set in the civil wars, it feels as though it could have been made then. It’s populated not with ‘characters’ but with authentic people and it deals with their concerns, not those of our age. This astonishing verisimilitude was, I imagine, the work of its co-director Andrew Mollo. The rest I’ll attribute to his partner in crime Kevin Brownlow. It is he that is our subject today.

It’s only when you cast an eye over the breadth of Brownlow’s achievements, as I did before I started writing this, that you realise how extensive they are. He started as a film enthusiast, scouring junk shops for battered prints that no-one else was interested in. From there, he developed ambitions to become a director and started shooting his first film at some terrifyingly young age.

Needing a military adviser, he discovered the even younger Mollo, who offered robust criticism of the footage Brownlow had shot. So, they started again from scratch, with Mollo sharing the director’s chair. The resultant film was It Happened Here, a portrait of life in Nazi-occupied Britain. Quite apart from its considerable merits as a film, it is a remarkable achievement from a technical point of view – filmed over a period of years for virtually no money.

For that alone, Brownlow & Mollo should be heroes in the world of independent production. That their film was also so good – a stark, uncomfortable picture of compromise and collaboration – should only add to our admiration. It should have presaged a lengthy run of features. As it happened they made only one more film (Winstanley) before going their separate ways.

Here’s where it gets really interesting: Brownlow developed into perhaps the greatest living film historian. No one has done more to champion the silent film era (in his wonderful book The Parade’s Gone By, in his equally wonderful TV series Hollywood); his restoration of Abel Gance’s Napoléon re-wrote film history and his definitive life of David Lean is a model for film biographers to follow.

For all that, it’s one of the great tragedies of cinema that he never made more feature films. Nothing, I think, redounds on the British film industry as badly as its failure to make better use of Brownlow & Mollo’s remarkable talents. Grateful though I am to Brownlow the historian, every time I see the two films he co-directed, I find myself wondering what might have been if they’d been created in a culture that appreciated visionaries.

Kevin Brownlow is my hero. As a film historian, he’s not only had a disproportionate influence on the films I watch, he’s also shown me what it means to be passionate about the medium: I’m not sure that there is anyone who loves film more.

One of the great problems of being an admirer of the ‘Old Hollywood’ directors is that they were so prolific. The likes of Hitchcock, Lang or John Ford cranked at least a film a year and frequently more. No problem if you were around to see them at the time, but something of a headache for those of us trying to catch up fifty-odd years after the event.

Thank heaven for DVD. Films that were screened infrequently – if at all – are now available at the flick of a mouse. The situation still isn’t perfect – I’m not holding my breath for a UK edition of Hitchcock’s Waltzes From Vienna (his only musical!) – but compared to what it was, this sure looks like a golden age to me.

Every month brings fresh obscurities: this month, for instance, sees the release of two films directed by Otto Preminger: The Fan and Rosebud. Neither enjoys a reputation as one of his major works but it’s worth asking whether that’s actually a reason not to seek them out. Because one of the consequences of actually being able to see all these films that conventional wisdom dismisses as ‘minor’ is that I increasingly question conventional wisdom.

For many years, the only way most of us could experience these films was at second hand: to absorb the opinions of those few people who’d actually had the opportunity to catch them. And since they were broadly right about those films we had been able to see, we trusted their judgement. Now that DVD has given me the chance to make up my own mind, the picture looks rather different.

For example, the consensus on Hitchcock was that, of his early work, only The Lodger, The Ring and Blackmail mattered. Yet I’d happily trade all three for The Manxman (pictured above), a beautiful melodrama and (arguably) his first masterpiece. I’m not sure if I should be angry that the film was ignored for so long or delighted that it’s freely available.

John Ford was even more prolific than Hitch, so its perhaps understandable that some of his work has slipped through the cracks. One such is Wagon Master. In fairness, it was always well liked but never got much attention. Now it’s as easy to see as The Searchers or Stagecoach, it seems at least their equal.

We can broaden this out beyond Hollywood. If you avail yourself of the Kenji Mizoguchi films released by Masters of Cinema (and I hope you don’t need my prompting for that), you’ll find they’ve double-billed each ‘major’ film with a lesser-known effort of similar vintage. These second films are no mere added value: Uwasa No Onna and Gion Bayashi happily hold their own against their better-known brethren.

Not every film can be a revelation, of course and sometimes conventional wisdom is bang on the money (or understates the case: if you’ve yet to endure Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder!, take a tip from a friend – life’s too short.) And maybe most film fans aren’t such trainspotters that they need to see every last frame by a favourite director – if you’re not, good for you.

Personally, I’d say it’s less about completeness than it is about finding great movies. And DVD has shown us that there are more of those than we even suspected.

It’s not often that we raise a glass to state-funded cultural commissariats on this page but this year is the 75th birthday of the British Film Institute (BFI to its friends) and the now-venerable organisation is encouraging us to join in the celebrations.

Founded in 1933 – the year in which, Wikipedia tells me, Kim Novak and Michael Caine were born, King Kong was released and the chocolate chip cookie was invented – the BFI has encouraged successive governments to value film as highly as they do more established art forms and provided inspiration to similar organisations around the world.

Over the years, it’s got a lot of people hot under the collar. Some critics wanted to know whether the initials actually stood for ‘British Films Ignored’ – domestic product was either neglected or patronised, especially if it didn’t conform to current fashions.

The Institute also gained a not-entirely-unfair reputation for pretension over the years, the sort of place where everyone wore black polo-neck sweaters and talked about structuralism over filtered coffee. These eggheads were frequently attacked for elitism, most notably by Raymond Durgnat, this country’s greatest writer on cinema and a tireless warrior against the sort of cant that passed for film criticism back in the day.

It couldn’t last. The short version is that New Labour wanted the BFI to be more accessible to The Taxpayer, whose largesse funded it. The black polo neck sweaters were consigned to the back of the wardrobe and the bloodletting began. The biggest casualty was the BFI’s production arm. Over the years they supported some of Britain’s most innovative directors – Terence Davies, Peter Greenaway, Bill Douglas, Derek Jarman, Chris Petit and Kevin Brownlow. Not all the films were good but they were seldom less than interesting. Trouble is, ‘interesting’ didn’t cut it for the government. They wanted ‘accessibility’, which for them, meant a crackdown on la-di-da arthouse stuff that no-one wanted to see. And to make sure they got the picture, Alan Parker – a vigorous hammerer of intellectuals – was installed as chairman of the BFI. A discreet veil should be draped over the painful period of readjustment that followed.

The main thing we should celebrate this year is that we still have a BFI and that it still has responsibilities which haven’t been appropriated by the UK Film Council. Indeed, there’s a renewed confidence about the organisation, with a commitment to education and some ambitious projects, like Screenonline, which show it in rude health. The DVD label is flourishing: they’ve owned 2008 with releases like Land of Promise and Cluny Brown.

It was inevitable that the BFI had to change. It could be a hermetic organisation, speaking only to itself and failing in its basic responsibilities to promote cinema as an art form. The transition has been abrupt and the new order has its critics, who have attacked it as anti-intellectual. Certainly, the new regime sometimes has difficulty distinguishing between ‘popular’ and ‘populist’. It’s a distinction they must learn if the BFI is to have any relevance in the future.

But let’s not spoil the party. Happy birthday, BFI. You look good for your age.

It’s David Lean’s centenary this year and although the anniversary itself was in March, the BFI are celebrating with a jamboree of revivals and retrospectives. What better time to consider his career?

But then I realised I had nothing new to say. The standard critical line on Sir David is that the early films were wonderful, the later work bloated and self-important; “when a director dies, he becomes a cameraman”, as Pauline Kael had it. Oh, I can refine it slightly (my rule of thumb is: ignore Lean’s colour films, although I’ve a fondness for Summer Madness) and I can mount a spirited defence of Ryan’s Daughter (horribly miscast, madly overblown yet brilliantly written by Robert Bolt, and concluded beautifully). Those aside, my opinions are entirely orthodox.

What I’m more interested in is what those opinions say about the critical caste. Because for most folks, it’s the later Lean they love. To use a personal example: my Dad loves Bridge on the River Kwai. Doctor Zhivago might be his favourite film. I’ve watched both with him and in both cases there were two different films playing: I couldn’t see the stirring masterpieces he was watching, he couldn’t see the pomposity that irritated me.

This division between popular taste and critical values is most regularly glimpsed in the foul reviews most Hollywood films attract in the daily press but these are bad examples: it’s surely inevitable that a film aimed at teenagers will attract a frosty response from the curmudgeons who write movie reviews. Lean is a much better case study; the enduring popularity of his ‘big’ films exposes the gulf between mainstream opinion and the critics.

It’s worth pondering why there can be such divergence between those who write about films and those who are content just to enjoy them. My suspicion is that the two sides watch films in different ways. When you’re obliged to write even a short review of a film, you have to consider how you’re going to fill the blank page that’s waiting for you after the end credits. Saying that it was ‘cool’ or it ‘sucked’ won’t cut the mustard: you need to explain why.

Inevitably, this means you’re more aware of your relationship to what’s on screen. Far from taking you out of a film, I find it makes the experience much more intense. But it means you’re more aware of empty spectacle and sensation, hallmarks of the later work of David Lean.

Of course, that’s only my opinion. It’s not holy writ. No need to get steamed up about it if you don’t agree. That’s the point of criticism: it’s subjective. Crucially, however, criticism explains how it reached its conclusions. When you start having to do that, you start thinking a lot harder about what you’re watching and you’ll be judging movies by a different standard.

Having concentrated on division, let us end with harmony. For this is the centenary of that great director David Lean. Not that we need excuses to revisit Brief Encounter, Great Expectations or Oliver Twist, one of the greatest of all films. But it’s an ideal prompt to watch lesser-known work like The Passionate Friends or Madeleine. They remind us how wonderful movies can be – and on that, I hope we can all agree.