Archive for the ‘Film History’ Category

The bald facts are these: no one sees everything. How could they? On average, there are (roughly) ten new films released into cinemas every seven days. Then there’s ‘Direct To DVD’ titles: let’s be conservative and say there are ten of them each week.
If you are prepared to sacrifice your money, your social life and – frankly – your sanity keeping abreast of all these, you’ll basically be watching three films a day. And you’ll still be missing out on festival films which don’t get a regular release. Oh, and I’m sure you don’t need reminding that there’s an awful lot of ‘old’ films to catch up on too. So no. No one sees everything.

Indeed, it can be an amusing parlour game for film buffs to nominate the most celebrated films they haven’t seen. For many years, I took perverse pride in boasting that I had seen not a single film directed by Woody Allen. That has changed but I’m aware that there are still horrible gaps in my viewing history, and not just the contemporary films that hold no interest for me.

I’m weak on Italian neo-realism (this includes the universally lauded The Bicycle Thieves) and huge swathes of Asian film. I’ve seen only one film directed by Yasujiro Ozu (and it wasn’t Tokyo Story) and not a single one by John Cassavetes. (I have, however, seen every Carry On… film at least twice *.)

Here’s the thing. There has never been a better time to watch films. There are DVDs for every niche. Whole new vistas have now opened for us: you can track the tributaries of the French New Wave or soak up Brazilian horror movies (Coffin Joe, if you want to know). Every interest is catered for.

But in these days of near endless choice, how do we decide what to watch? In ye olden dayes, it was easy to gain a broad film education, sampling genres and movements, the bulk of which were always tantalisingly out of reach. Now, however, we can follow our nose and – should we wish it – become experts in our chosen fields.

The consequence of this, of course, is that the stack of unwatched films grows ever larger: if we dedicate ourselves to one aspect of cinema, then we necessarily ignore others. And this has wider implications. There is a greater temptation to remain within our comfort zones, to concentrate on those things we already know we like at the expense of the unknown and the unfamiliar.

The big question is how much guilt we should feel about this. Should we be doing our damnedest to catch up on the films that are agreed, by consensus, to be essential or resign ourselves to the fact that, well, there are just some important movies we’ll never watch?

It’s surely harder to get a handle on film history now than it ever was before. It was always a given that no one could see everything but it was possible to develop a comprehensive understanding of the medium; those days are long gone. It’s basically impossible to see anything other than a fraction of the whole. I’m thrilled at the possibilities but I can’t help feeling just a little sad about all the films I’ll never see.

* I don’t consider Carry On Columbus as part of the series. And even if it is, there’s no way on earth I’m ever sitting through it again.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 perhaps a wee bit early to be talking about the best DVD of the year but if there’s a better release than the BFI’s splendid Land of Promise this year, I’ll be a very happy little chap indeed. As I’m sure you’re aware, it gathers together many British documentaries made between 1930 and 1950, taking us through those years of profound social change.

It’s a vanished world, of course: even the names of the production companies are enough give the modern viewer a jolt (the Empire Marketing Board?) One of the great attractions of this set is surely the time travel it allows, journeying to a country so familiar and yet so different. It’s a country bedevilled by problems of poverty but one filled with optimism and a touching faith in experts to solve the problems. Hindsight adds a poignant patina to many of these films: the optimistic souls who people these films didn’t know there was a war coming, nor what its cost would be.

But if Land of Promise offered nothing but nostalgia and social history then it would outstay its welcome long before the end of the fourth disc. It’s the quality of the filmmaking that makes it so worthwhile. This is the work of real filmmakers – some of Britain’s best – who knew how to compose a shot, edit the footage and structure their material.

These aren’t documentaries as we’d understand the term today, trading in facts and stories. What these films really document is how their creators felt about what they saw. For instance, Shipyard (directed by Paul Rotha) shows us far more than the nuts‘n’bolts of shipbuilding; we get a sense of the politics of the time (a worker ruminates that he’d never get to travel on the ship he helped build) and an insight into the men away from their work, racing their dogs.

Even less self-conscious films, such as Workers And Jobs, do their jobs in a more imaginative way than many of the public information films later generations are familiar with, using non-professional actors in real locations. (Which is not to diss the raw power of those later public information pics: I remain scarred to this day by the one warning children not to go with strangers. Indeed, I vociferously fought my mother’s plans that I open a Post Office Giro Account because the actor who advertised it played The Stranger in that terrifying, white-knuckle production. I still feel a cold stab of fear when I buy stamps, in case the man behind the counter asks if I’d like to see some puppies.)

What this set illustrates is how broad a church the English documentary movement was. They also show how far some of these filmmakers had diverged from the gospel of John Grierson. Grierson was the high-priest of the documentary movement, who did so much to establish its dominance. Grierson preached that ‘Documentary’ (real, honest, intellectual) was somehow superior to ‘studio’ pictures (meretricious melodramatic soufflés). His was a puritanical dogma that maintained that you could do either one or the other and that only a fool would chose to make entertainments.

Inevitably, this colours discussions not just of the films Grierson produced but the entire documentary tradition, usually to its detriment. But while many (most?) documentarians paid lip service to his nostrums, it’s clear from the films themselves that there were few true believers. Look at that most celebrated of British docs, Night Mail (available separately) which used such realist devices as – er – studio reconstructions and lyric verse to tell its story.

Directors like Hitchcock, Powell and Lean believed that ‘the documentary boys’ looked down their nose at the commercial directors, who felt patronised by Grierson’s edicts. Yet those self-same documentary boys often sailed far away from true realism to pursue their visions: few were so dogmatic that they didn’t re-stage shots or even make stuff up.

Land of Promise shows how many of Grierson’s flock had outgrown his narrow strictures and were making films that, yes, were broadly realist but also personal, artistic and imaginative. Most famously, of course, there’s Humphrey Jennings, whose poetic sensibility profoundly annoyed Grierson. He felt Jennings was an apostate from the true religion but he’s arguably the finest of all British filmmakers.

So if they were willing to create their own realities, why not go the whole hog and add a beginning-middle-and-end story? Why didn’t they extend their critique of British feature films to showing how it should be done? Looking back with the same hindsight that makes films like Housing Problems so poignant, I can’t help but wonder what might have been if the rigid bifurcation between the two disciplines – this artistic sectarianism – hadn’t been so ideologically charged.

Some directors jumped between the trenches, notably Alberto Cavalcanti (who supervised Night Mail and directed Went the Day Well?; we shall return to him in forthcoming weeks.) And Jennings’ Fires Were Started (which, again, you’ll have to buy separately – like that’s a chore) is, basically, a fiction feature film, no matter what its genealogy. Both men validated the documentary tradition and showed how it could enrich other formats. As an enthusiast for British fiction films, I wish more had followed, not least because it would have made it a lot easier for me to see their work.

There’s no use carping over what never was or re-fighting ideological battles long after the generals are dead and gone. There are some remarkable films here, from some of our finest filmmakers. If you have any interest in British filmmaking then Land of Promise is a mandatory release. There’s loads more in the archives too: let’s hope that Volume Two is forthcoming.

One of the more depressing bits of news to filter out of Hollywood in 2007 was that our friends the studios have decided not to make any more dramas with female leads. This has been on the cards for a while, after a string of underperforming films starring the likes of Nicole Kidman, but after seeing the box-office returns for a Jodie Foster film called The Brave One, the moguls decided to call time on female leads.

Now, I don’t know a great deal about The Brave One. I know it’s directed by Neil Jordan, stars the redoubtable Ms. Foster and has been described as ‘a female Death Wish’ (wasn’t that Ms.45?) But I haven’t seen it and I’d rather talk about the decision it has occasioned rather than its merits as a film.

Unsurprisingly, women’s groups are outraged: “Roll up! Roll up!,” they cry. “Come see the institutional sexism of tinsel town!” They’re spot on of course (on your side, sisters), but it’s got nothing to do with patriarchal phallocracy and everything to do with the bottom line. Hollywood would quite happily embrace radical cutting-edge feminism if it turned a buck. The reason no-one will pony up the bread for Andrea Dworkin: The Musical is because it wouldn’t shift enough popcorn.

But I find this new announcement is especially depressing because, if you’re asking me, women make much more involving protagonists than the chaps. Female leads tend to be more interesting characters, with a greater emotional life and more compelling motivations.

Jean-Luc Godard famously said that ‘all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun’ but there are some cracking movies where the ladies don’t have sidearms in their handbags: I’m thinking of films by Max Ophuls (Letter From An Unknown Woman), by von Sternberg (The Scarlet Empress), by Howard Hawks (Bringing Up Baby), by Douglas Sirk (Imitation of Life).

I’m even thinking Hitchcock. He made some great films with female leads, notably The Lady Vanishes and Rebecca, which updated the basic woman-in-peril formula of Victorian melodrama and Notorious, in which Ingrid Bergman plays a character with more depth and shading than most of Hitch’s heroes.

In the hands of a sympathetic director, a rounded female lead can guide a film into fascinating territory.

Let’s not pretend that Hollywood has anything other than a lamentable record with female characters. The above are the exceptions, directed by people who actually seem to like women. I’m well aware that rounded female characters are a rarity in mainstream movies, that most are either saints or whores (often literally) Oh, and it hadn’t escaped my attention that the above examples were all directed by men.

But God, when they got it right – weren’t the results electric? From the super-confident Dietrich, walking over men to get what she wants (and maybe – maybe – letting you come along for the ride) to the haunted heroines of Max Ophuls, who make the mistakes we all make and show the same vulnerabilities.

These are characters with rich inner lives, with emotional complexity and who seem all too human. Whatever external artifice might be going on, these films are emotionally true in ways they wouldn’t be if their main character had been a man. They are compelling and utterly involving as only the best movies are.

I repeat: women are badly served by Hollywood and I’m not trying to pretend that a female lead guarantees a film will be emotionally sophisticated: I’ve seen Titanic. And I’m really not too gone on your actual chick flicks. But I am saying that the law of averages means that the more films get made, the more masterpieces we’ll get.

I hope that there’s a new generation of female writers and directors who’ll challenge this ludicrous studio decision not to make dramas with female leads. And I’m looking forward to the results.

As for The Brave One, why pick on Jodie Foster? I’d blame the marketing department myself. If ‘the female Death Wish’ is the best they can do, perhaps they deserve a little vigilante style justice themselves.

A month or so back, appalled by the profoundly conservative ‘Summer of British Film’, I wrote a piece championing the films that had slipped through the cracks: British masterpieces that were just as good as (and in some cases better than) the establishment history. You’ll find it here.

It climaxed with a rousing exhortation to readers to respond with their own favourites. It seems only fair that I respond to those of you who took me at my word. As you’d expect from the MovieMail customer, the responses are intelligent, informed and well argued. Although I was disappointed that there weren’t any outraged Dam Busters fans braying for my scalp or calling my patriotism into question.

Anyway, to the results. There obviously was a little confusion: I quite agree with those writers who said that The Lady Vanishes, Peeping Tom and Listen To Britain are deeply wonderful films. And we’re in good company, since the people who compiled the various lists I was reacting against included all three. That’s why I didn’t feature them.

For the most part, however, the responses were just what I wanted. I’ve never seen It Always Rains on Sunday but it was a popular recommendation and, after a brief consultation with my elderly copy of Halliwell’s Film Guide, I realise it’s imperative I catch up with it as soon as possible, not least because it’s directed by Robert Hamer – a great director in anyone’s language.

I’ll also keep an eye out for three films with animal related titles: The Goose Steps Out (with Will Hay), Bronco Bullfrog and Tawny Pipit. I’ve not heard of any of them, so I don’t know what to expect but – hey – I trust your judgement.

A couple of people nominated films by the great Cavalcanti: Dead of Night and They Made Me a Fugitive (probably the film I most want to see). Does this mean a Cavalcanti revival is on the cards? Shall we get a petition up to demand a Cavalcanti season at the NFT? I was also pleased to see Val Guest getting a lot of love, with Jigsaw copping a couple of mentions. He’s one of those directors who deserves to be better known. Not an auteur, perhaps, but a craftsman who made some solid films: even The Boys in Blue is better than any film featuring Cannon and Ball has any right to be.

There were a couple of films I desperately wanted to include on the original list but couldn’t because they weren’t available, so I’ll mention them here. Chiefly, Deep End, which was one of the many excellent suggestions by Frank Flood. Man, that’s some kind of masterpiece and its absence from DVD is both baffling and annoying. I also wanted to included Death Line (which turns out to be on DVD after all). If you haven’t seen it and have a strong-ish stomach, get it now. Both of these are great movies that show how cosmetic ‘swinging London’ really was, revelling in the filth and the decay. Significantly, both were directed by foreign-born directors.

A thank you to all who joined in, especially to Lawrence Freiesleben, who instantly gets into my good books by mentioning Fritz Lang’s Moonfleet (yeah, I know it’s not British but I think we’ve already established I have a fairly elastic interpretation of ‘rules’), which is one of my faves. So is Night of the Demon, come to that. Oh, and A Canterbury Tale, which I love. I hope you enjoy House of Whipcord.

As I mentioned in the original article, I love British film and I’m upset to see it served so badly by its official guardians. I want to keep this debate alive in future posts, so keep those neglected gems coming and let’s show what British cinema is really made of…