Archive for the ‘Film History’ 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.

It’s often said that Hollywood produces too many sequels. Certainly, the studios seem incapable of getting through a month without itching to return to past glories.
This year, for instance, brought forth the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film. The first (and by some way best) in that series was released in 2003: that’s four films in eight years. But consider this: in the eleven years between 1931 and 1942, Fox studios produced no fewer than twenty-three Charlie Chan films. In sequels, as in so much else, modern Hollywood is but a pale shadow of its forebears.

Chan was by no means unique. Successful series of the 1930s and 40s included Boston Blackie, Sherlock Holmes, The Dead End Kids, Tarzan, Mr Moto, The Whistler and The Thin Man. And that’s just for starters: those years are filled with film series built out of multiple entries, cheap programme fillers for the most part, produced with a frequency that’s bewildering to today’s eyes.

Most of these series are little known today, which is a shame. Watching the Charlie Chan films, recently re-released in two splendid box sets, I was reminded how entertaining they were. True, this is production line cinema. But it’s a production line staffed by skilled artisans.

Indeed, since these series were often the studio’s bread-and butter (it’s said Fox studios wouldn’t have survived the thirties without Charlie Chan), they were usually entrusted to reliable craftsmen. The two directors behind most of Fox’s Chan films, H. Bruce Humberstone and Harry Lachman, handle things adroitly; each would be far better known if they hadn’t worked on ‘production line’ films like this. (See also Roy William Neill, who made Universal’s Sherlock Holmes films much better than they have any right to be.)

As I watched these films, I couldn’t help wondering about how they were perceived on first release. Were they ‘event’ pictures, with audiences queuing around the block for each new instalment? Or were they taken for granted, drawing audiences through familiarity and force of habit?

Such questions make us realise just how much the cinema going experience has changed – these films date from a time when people went to the pictures without knowing what was playing. It’s easy to mythologise that era as a ‘golden age’ based on the number of great films that were produced but audiences then were essentially indiscriminate: the reason that producers made sequels was the same then as it is now. A tried and tested format gives a brand recognition, adding a slight edge at the box-office – something that was even more important in an age of routine cinema going.

I nearly wrote that the old-style movie series died with television, when viewers could enjoy recurrent characters on a weekly basis. Then I realised it wasn’t true: the movie series is still with us, albeit looking very different.

The most obvious example is James Bond but there are others. The Fast and the Furious keeps throwing out follow-ups; the Saw series has become a Halloween staple and I’ve lost track of how many Final Destination films there have been (I’d guess about 208. Am I right, sir?)

Perhaps future generations will watch them as I watch films from long ago. I hope they enjoy them as much as I enjoy the honourable Chan.

Goodness. There’s a right old brouhaha blowing up over newspaper journalism. But it’s beyond the remit of this column to raise comment on such matters: we just natter on about movies. However, since journalism is a subject much beloved of filmmakers, what better way to spend this column than by looking at the lengthy relationship between the press and the picture business?

No matter what the rest of us think about them, the movies just love journalists. Forget All The President’s Men, the golden age of cinematic reporters was the 1930s, when Hollywood made being a news hound look like the best job in the world – short hours, plenty of excitement and an indefinite tab at your favourite bar. What a life! Oh boy, wouldn’t it be something to live like that?

True, there are downsides: a spot of light typing every now and again and the occasional argument with a bull-headed editor, but that aside, movie reporters had it sweet. Take Clark Gable in It Happened One Night, the coolest character ever to have a byline: tall, dashing, cynical-yet- romantic, he makes being a hack seem the sexiest profession on earth.

It’s hardly surprising that Hollywood eulogised the gentlemen of the press since Hollywood was infested with former journalists. After movies switched to sound, the studios discovered that journalists had a better ear for the terse rat-a-tat rhythms of movie dialogue than the playwrights they initially hired. The first (and arguably the best) was Herman J. Mankiewicz.

Mankiewicz’s best-known work was his script for Citizen Kane. It’s famously a portrait of nostalgia, loss and the isolation of power. But it’s also a film for journalists, saluting honest newsmen and sticking two fingers up at execs like Kane who rain on their parade. Stick to the typewriter, it tells us: ignore the politics, the opera houses and compulsive antique collecting – it’s much less fun.

One of the writers brought to Hollywood was Ben Hecht who, with his sometime writing partner and fellow hack Charles MacArthur, helped create the definitive newspaper film: His Girl Friday, taken from their play The Front Page. Howard Hawks claimed to have transformed the play by adding a romance but, in truth, the love affair was always there: it’s a valentine to newspaper life.

Of course, not everyone holds the press in such high esteem. We in Britain have always held a more jaundiced opinion of the fourth estate, even before the present commotion. This view is reflected by (ex-reporter) Billy Wilder in Ace in the Hole. Kirk Douglas plays the sleaziest pressman in history, an utter heel who manipulates an accident to improve his career. Such things might seem tame in this age of ‘blagging’ but the film remains corrosively cynical and thus most apposite, given recent events.
But things change. All the films above date from a time when newspapers were the only game in town. They’ve been eroded since, first by TV (as demonstrated in While The City Sleeps) and now the internet (the movie version of State of Play).

Who knows how long newspapers can last in this digital age? Well, here’s a prediction: they’ve got until the movies can give us a blogger (shudder) as cool as Clark Gable. The wait, I suspect, will be a long one.

Visit MovieMail’s Stop Press! Newspapers and Reporters in Cinema DVD Sale

Cast your mind back to the early days of DVD; no doubt you’ll remember the seductive blandishments of the electronics manufacturers tempting us with their product. They promised this new format would revolutionise film viewing, offering much improved A/V quality and contextualising extras.

True enough, those things are still much appreciated (even if we never quite find the time to listen to all those commentaries or watch every featurette… sorry). But in retrospect, I think the most significant benefit of DVD has been something few predicted: the way it’s broadened our understanding of movies.

Let’s not pretend VHS was a wasteland. There were many fine films available on tape (some of which have yet to show up on disc). But VHS concentrated on the ‘classics’; the economics of DVD allows for many more releases. Coupled with the parallel revolution in retailing – MovieMail offers you many thousands more titles than even the most comprehensive high street shop – this has massively expanded the number of movies that film fans can watch.

This column is preoccupied – unkind souls might even say obsessed – with the deficiencies of orthodox film history. The cinematic canon is, after all, derived from what was available. Now we can easily access so many more films, that canon must be revised, excluding some once-compulsory films and including former obscurities.

But let’s not be complacent. The DVD revolution is far from complete, as a couple of new releases show us. Take Deep End, for example. This is probably the most important title yet released by the BFI’s Flipside imprint (a label dedicated to excavating neglected films).


Although much acclaimed on first release, Deep End has been hard to see since then (which gave bragging rights to those of us who managed to see it). That it’s finally available, restored and lavishly appended with extras, is fantastic news, even if it does mean I can’t swank about having seen it any more.

Deep End, of course, is a British film. The problem becomes even more acute when you consider films made in languages other than English. That’s why we should be grateful to Second Run, the DVD label most committed to expanding our perceptions of cinema.

By happy coincidence, they’re also putting out an essential and much anticipated release this month: Szindbád. Not to be confused with the sailor from the Arabian Nights, this Hungarian classic is eulogised by those who’ve seen it.

A rapturous meditation on life and love (and one of the most ravishing colour films ever made), it’s been hailed as one of the great ‘lost’ masterpieces of world cinema. And because of Second Run, it might now finally penetrate the consciousness of international cineastes in the same way that one of their earlier releases, Marketa Lazarová, did.

So, thanks BFI, thanks Second Run. And thanks DVD. The past ten years or so have been a golden age for those of us who love movies and, as Deep End and Szindbád show, the good times ain’t over yet.

However, these releases should remind us just how incomplete our knowledge of cinema is and how many films are still unavailable. As you enjoy Szindbád and Deep End, consider how such films could go AWOL for so long. How many more masterpieces are there, mouldering in the vaults?

Let us know about your unavailable favourites in the comments below.

BTW There’s a BFI Flipside sale on at the moment.

Cecil B DeMille liked to boast that he made the very first movie in Hollywood: The Squaw Man, in 1914. It was his efforts, he modestly claimed, that established the film colony in Los Angeles.

Like so many stories, it’s baloney – DeMille followed an established trail to California – but there’s a spiritual truth to the idea DeMille founded Hollywood: the brash, bombastic Tinsel Town is just the sort of place that the brash, bombastic DeMille might have imagined.

Always more popular with audiences than with critics, DeMille enjoys little posthumous reputation. Generally he’s only cited as an example of the worst excesses of the film industry (brash, bombastic etc). So why are we talking about him here?

Specifically, it’s because the past few months have seen a trickle of his films appear on DVD. As a fan, I want to promote them. But more generally, I think DeMille has been a little hard done by. True, his early work has its admirers. While he might not have invented Hollywood, he was a pioneer in every sense. He should be rated alongside D.W. Griffith as one of the directors who established the great tradition of American film; moreover, his films of this period are much more watchable than Griffith’s antiques and are still praised for their beauty and restraint.

But while his films were well-received, DeMille wanted more. He wanted huge audiences. So he developed a formula – approximately N x Y = $ (where n = giddy melodrama, y = garish sensation and $ = ker-ching!) – that made him perhaps the most consistently successful filmmaker ever.

How can we embrace such a shameless figure? Surely DeMille is one of the most utterly cynical of filmmakers, a puffing Victorian hypocrite who smuggled his predilection for sin and scandal into the most unimpeachably respectable material (the Bible!).

I gravitated for DeMille first as a guilty pleasure, amused by his cheerfully brazen cynicism. But I’m not sure that’s fair. You see, cynicism suggests that he was making films he didn’t believe in or that he had contempt either for his material or, worse, his audience.

DeMille’s work is so consistent and so unforced, one starts to suspect that it is an authentic projection of his personality: that these films are honest expressions and that he really believed in what he was doing. Viewed this way, the films become not cynical but perversely innocent, the statements of a born entertainer.

Moreover, many of his pictures stand up very well, especially those films he made about American history – Union Pacific, North West Mounted Police and The Plainsman are first rate potboilers, beautifully composed and tremendously invigorating. Unconquered has some questionable moments (a native American tribe led by Big Chief Boris Karloff for example) but zips along with great brio. Reap The Wild Wind might be best of all, not just for its involving love triangle but the climax, where John Wayne battles a giant squid.

These are grand operas, which might not find favour with modern tastes that favour work in minor keys; they might even be laughed at (now who’s being cynical, eh?). But if you want big, bold escapism, then our Cecil remains the benchmark. He was not a great artist. But there’s never been a better showman.

View MovieMail’s Cecil B. DeMille films

Here’s a story, for your consideration. In 1945, in those final few months of war and the beginnings of the uncertain peacetime world, the British people were in the mood for a bit of escapism and romance.

That was the year of David Lean’s Brief Encounter, the most famous romance of all time, and Powell & Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going!, that most beguiling of love stories. But neither of them came even close to the success of that year’s big winner, which was seen (it is estimated) by some seventeen million paying customers.

That film was The Seventh Veil, starring James Mason and Ann Todd. According to the BFI’s Ultimate British Film poll (conducted in 2006) it was the tenth most successful film ever at the British box office and the third most successful indigenous production. And now? It’s largely forgotten.

I offer this by way of an illustration of how film history gives us only a partial, often distorted view of the past. It’s sobering to realise how things that were once so popular can simply slip from the collective memory.

Nowhere is this more poignant than in the case of ‘stars’. Of course, all stardom is perishable: most kids queueing at the multiplexes will no more be able to identify Tony Curtis than their grandchildren will recognise Will Smith. Yet there are some people who enjoyed successful careers who are obscure even amongst those who call themselves film buffs.

Take Jack Holt. Who? My point exactly. I’ll confess I was ignorant of him until watching a film he top-lined. Have I been missing out? Does the rest of the world revere his achievements and cherish his memory? Probably not: at the risk of attracting hate mail from the Jack Holt appreciation society, I’ll wager I am far from alone in my unfamiliarity.

Yet he was a big star back then: you don’t get your name above the title unless serious numbers of people are prepared to fork out good money to see you. He was, I discover, also the model for Dick Tracey. But what happened? Why has his fame simply … dissipated? How many more are there like him?
There’s something desperately sad about all this. Stars who were once immensely famous have faded away. All fame is ephemeral but there are still those of us aware of, say, James Cagney or Marlene Dietrich from the same vintage as Holt. Why do some still sparkle while others go into eclipse?

Perhaps it’s something to do with directors. John Wayne’s most famous films are those he made with John Ford and Howard Hawks; those films keep the legend alive. It’s instructive that Kim Novak – a box office queen in the 1950s – is popularly remembered almost exclusively for Hitchcock’s Vertigo, rather than the films she made with the less-regarded Richard Quine.

But this might be auteurist snobbery. Recently, MovieMail held a sale of films starring Miss Deanna Durbin. The sales chart was dominated by her films: this set me thinking about posterity. After all, she’s rarely mentioned in film histories.

Once upon a time, though, she was the highest-paid female film star in the world. Plainly, she is still remembered with affection. This suggests a definition: the mark of a true star is someone the fans refuse to forget.

At first glance, writing about the history of trains in movies sounds like a distraction – one of those trivial lists film buffs like to amuse themselves with, of no more significance than detailing the films in which Burt Lancaster wears woman’s clothing (which is more than you might think).

But once you get stuck in, you find there’s more to it than that (I’m talking trains here, not Burt in a frock; that can wait for another column). Cars may be sexier and planes more dynamic but the Train is surely the movies’ preferred form of transport. More than just a backdrop or a sub-genre (the railroad movie?), locomotives have helped shape the medium.

The relationship began early; the Lumière brothers startled spectators with one of their first films, L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, which showed a train arriving at a station. In 1903, Edwin S. Porter revolutionised motion pictures with his twelve minute wonder The Great Train Robbery.

Amongst its other accolades, that film is credited as the first Western and from then on, the railroad played a huge part in the genre. In fact, I’d argue that the western can be defined by trains. The ‘iron horse’ is the symbol of progress, taming the frontier (best evidenced in Once Upon A Time In The West). Every western is a battle between freedom / anarchy and civilisation; that boundary is determined by the advance of the railroad.

Looking elsewhere, the career of Alfred Hitchcock is basically inconceivable without trains. Did he make Strangers in a Bus Queue? Or Strangers Who Share a Cab? No sir, he did not. Some of his most famous set-pieces involve choo-choos, from the screaming sound-bridge in The 39 Steps to the visual euphemism that climaxes North by Northwest. His greatest achievement on the tracks was surely The Lady Vanishes, a film that goes some way to explaining why cinema loves trains. It’s pretty obvious that the ‘train’ is a well-crafted set but somehow, the fakery (rear projection, stock footage and sound effects) never matters. It’s about a group of strangers, being transported through an artificial environment…

Let’s stop there, before I find myself claiming cinematic trains are a metaphor for cinema itself. Besides, not every railway film is necessarily set onboard a train, as that beloved family favourite The Railway Children shows. Here’s an idea: what about a double bill about life changing experiences at provincial stations: Jirí Menzel’s Czech new wave classic Closely Observed Trains and the, er, Will Hay ‘classic’ Oh, Mr Porter! (which, to be fair, I quite like)?

All the above named films are from the steam era, a more more romantic time than the age of diesel-and-electric we find ourselves living in. But film has not abandoned trains: Ken Loach made The Navigators about railway workers (on your side, comrades); there’s Runaway Train, a great action film (co-written by Akira Kurosawa, fact fans) and Brad Anderson’s Transsiberian, a really solid thriller that continues the grand tradition of The Tall Target or The Narrow Margin.

Such a subject deserves a book rather than the 550 words I have at my disposal (and I haven’t even mentioned what is possibly the very greatest train film of them all: Buster Keaton’s The General). Trains aren’t some trivial side-show; they’re an integral part of cinema. Unlike Burt Lancaster in drag.

View MovieMail’s Transport Documentary section

All opinions about films are subjective but there’s a type of cinema that provokes more subjective responses than most. Exact definitions are pending but for now, let’s call them ‘Spiritual’ films. For some, this is the highest, most rarified peak of cinema, discussed in hushed, reverential tones.

For others, the solemnity with which filmmakers like Dreyer, Bresson and Tarkovsky (to name three of the most conspicuous purveyors of what we’re calling Spiritual film) are treated is so much hooey. Expressions like ‘emperor’s new clothes’ are not uncommon.

These are not, then, regular films. The pace is contemplative, there is less emphasis on conventional characterisation and the concerns are high-minded: the nature of humanity, mankind’s spiritual yearnings and our relationship to the cosmos. Whew.

That’s not to say these films are opaque and impenetrable: you can dig Bresson’s A Man Escaped as a rock-steady prison break thriller and ignore the sacred stuff; his Pickpocket was inspired by (and is comparable to) Crime and Punishment but it’s also a tense little crime flick.

But, on the whole, these are films concerned more with internal states than external action. Reactions to them are, accordingly, very personal. For all that they get described as ‘cerebral’, films like Ordet, Mirror or L’Argent are profoundly visceral. It can be hard for admirers to articulate the intense reactions they describe.

This, of course, is analogous to a religious experience: those of us who’ve seen the light want to share the Good News. Normal people can’t see what we’re gibbering about, assume we’re barking mad and wish we’d go and bother someone else.

As conventional religious observance declines, these films become, if anything, more important. It’s important that non-believers and agnostics are not discouraged by the ecclesiastical overtones; the filmmakers were not proselytising. Rather, they wished to reflect on issues our species has wrestled with since the dawn of time; their musings are valid for anyone who finds themselves considering the numinous, whether they believe or not.

The best known exponents of this work have passed on but there are still major works being produced in this field. Tarkovsky’s disciple Aleksandr Sokurov makes films work equal to his master (Mother and Son for one) while elsewhere, Terrence Malick is readying a new film. His previous work has been obsessed with metaphysics – the nature of evil, of Eden and those who despoil it. (A brief aside: Malick’s most recent film, The New World, is still bewilderingly underrated. But it’s one of the very best films of the new century.)

Newly released on DVD in the country is The Island, a Russian film concerning a monk with a troubled past who might be able to work miracles. And there’s a welcome re-issue for Carlos Regadas’ remarkable Silent Light (pictured above). True, Reygadas hasn’t quite transcended his influences (chiefly Tarkovsky, although there’s a prominent nod to Dreyer) but there are moments – an immersive sequence in a water hole, a stunning opening and closing shot – as good as anything you’ll ever see and the cumulative effect is overwhelming.

It’s possible to take our devotions too seriously, of course – we should never forget how valuable honest entertainment and escapism is. And some folk need no more. But if they ever do, these films are here for them.

There are many reasons to be grateful to that estimable DVD company Masters of Cinema and each month seems to bring more. This latest laudation is occasioned by their release of Jacques Feyder’s Le Grand Jeu; heaven knows they didn’t have to tackle it – it’s an obscure film, from an obscure director and it’s not as if they’re short of titles to put out.

But now they’ve released it – in a very handsome edition, I might add – we are once again in their debt. Not simply because it’s a good film but because it shines light on one of the most beguiling chapters in film history: the era of poetic realism.

Poetic realism is a mysterious term, applied to a group of films chiefly produced in 1930s France. Like film noir (with which it has much in common), it’s not a genre, defined by external trappings but by tone. As the name suggests, poetic realism is rooted in the everyday but doesn’t aspire to the ‘realism’ of documentaries. Rather, it shows the world as the filmmakers saw it, which was seldom a comfortable place – the pessimism of film noir echoes the fatalism of poetic realism.

That fatalism would darken across the decade; the earliest poetic realist films, like Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante display a joie de vivre that evaporated as war inched nearer. The work of Jean Renoir is a useful barometer – in La Chienne (1931), he treated a potentially dark story lightly; by 1939 an ostensible farce – La Règle du Jeu – develops into tragedy.

Le Grand Jeu was ahead of that game; made in 1934, it exhibits a world weariness other filmmakers wouldn’t catch up with for a couple of years: Duvivier’s wonderful Pépé le Moko – another story of doomed love in the desert colonies – wasn’t released until 1937.

Intriguingly, Feyder’s assistant on Le Grand Jeu was a young chap called Marcel Carné. He obviously took notes; a couple of years later he was sitting in the director’s chair himself. Carné is a neglected figure these days, although his heroic film Les Enfants Du Paradis is still reckoned as one of the finest of all French films.

But many of Carné’s other films deserve equal attention. Often working with writer Jacques Prévert, Carné made a string of masterful films about unfortunate men and women. Le Jour se Lève uses an innovative flashback structure to tell the story of a murderer (driven to kill – but of course – because of une femme) while Hotel Du Nord varies things by introducing a suicide pact alongside the inevitable ill-starred romance.

Best of all is Le Quai des Brumes (Port of Shadows – currently unavailable unfortunately). It’s the quintessential poetic realist film, starring Jean Gabin (the icon of 30s French film) and brimming with over with the good stuff: despair, disappointment and defeatism. It was also the recipient of the single greatest review of all time: as the Nazis breached the Maginot line, a government official, obviously unimpressed by its pessimism, declared, ‘if we have lost the war, it is because of Le Quai des Brumes’.

These days, poetic realist films are no longer capable of sapping the will of an entire nation (if, indeed they ever were). But they remain essential viewing – haunting, lyrical and true.