Film

It is November 1923, Munich. Germany is still recovering from the trauma of defeat in World War One and lurches from one crisis to another. The demagogue Adolf Hitler rallies his motley band of supporters for an attempted take-over of power. The putsch fails miserably: Hitler ends up in prison (with a lenient sentence) and writes Mein Kampf … the rest, as they say, is history. There are some documentaries of the event. The only fiction film I know of is a two-part 2003 Canadian TV drama Hitler: The Rise of Evil , directed by Christian Duguay, which has been screened in the UK and is available...

Night Mail is said to be one of the most popular British documentaries ever made. With lyrics by W H Auden, music by Benjamin Britten, produced and directed by Basil Wright and Harry Watt, this story of the night mail train’s journey from Euston station to Glasgow (and onward) was part of what was broadly known as the British documentary movement. It was shot by the General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit in 1936. In the 1920s and 30s there was a sense, among some, that society might be improved if people were better informed as to how society “worked”. It was a vague notion, partly inspired by...

It’s no surprise that the first film to be screened featured a train. Think of the number of films that include train journeys: The General (Buster Keaton), The Lady Vanishes (Hitchcock), Shanghai Express (von Sternberg)… and many more. Night Train (1959) by Polish director Jerzy Kawalerowicz does have resemblances to a Hitchcock thriller, but there is more to the film than that. There is a killer on the Łodz-Hel train (Hel is a resort on the Baltic coast). The murder occurs before the journey starts and the director seems more interested in exploring the personas of nine particular passengers...

Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, Horace Ové grew up loving film after frequenting the cinema on a nearby US military base. Later, he became deeply influenced by Italian Realism. He was one of the first black filmmakers to make his mark after he moved to England in 1960, directing his first film, a short documentary, in 1966. He went on to make a number of documentaries, one of which featured the Black American writer James Baldwin. After numerous difficulties finding funds he directed his best known film, Pressure , in 1975. Co-written with Samuel Selvon, it centres on the life of a 16 year...

One of the greatest of British film directors, Terence Davies, died on 7 October. He grew up in a working-class Catholic family in Liverpool, the youngest child in a family of ten. His father died when Terence was only six and a half but left a legacy from his violent behaviour. All Davies’s films are well-worth seeing, but I would particularly single out Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), which begins in the Second World War with bombs falling on Liverpool. Peter Postlethwaite features as the abusive father figure. The documentary Of Time and the City (2008) follows the ups and downs of a...

The film 20 Days In Mariupol confirms many times over the essential truth of the old saying, “war is hell”. At times so grim as to be unwatchable, the film, produced by a small team of Ukrainian journalists working for Associated Press (AP), documents the first days of the siege of Mariupol, (24 February-20 May 2022). The port and industrial city was an important target of the initial Russian invasion. Its capture was key to providing Russia with a land route to Russia-controlled Crimea (to the west of the city). Russian-speaking Mariupol was a city that was largely and traditionally Russian...

Listing all the books, documentaries etc. about the Kennedy assassination would be impossible, as the pile continues to mount. Expect more to come: 22 November is the sixtieth anniversary of the events in Dallas. One film absolutely stands out, whatever its faults: Oliver Stone’s JFK , released in 1991, with Kevin Costner as New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison and Gary Oldman as the “not-so-lone” gunman Lee Harvey Oswald. Criticism of the film has ranged far and wide but, I suspect, for many people JFK is the version of events which still carries most resonance. The film focuses on the...

It is something like160 years since the citizens of Boston watched the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment march through the town on their way to fight for the Union in the American Civil War. There was something very special about the event: the six hundred strong 54th was one of the first all-Black regiments in the Union army. Glory (directed by Edwar Zwick, 1989) follows the 54th through its training period, its first combat experience at the battle of Antietam to the bloody assault on Fort Wagner, a Confederate stronghold at the mouth of Charleston harbour. Colonel Robert Gould Shaw...

There is much talk at the moment about Oppenheimer . Let’s rewind some 30 years to a previous film about the Manhattan Project (the development of the atomic bomb): Fat Man and Little Boy (Roland Joffe, 1989). In the 1980s Ronald Reagan was increasing the US nuclear stockpile and the Cold War was at a new height. The film pits a gung-ho military establishment, personified by the Project supremo, the loudmouthed barrel-of-lard “Fat Man”, General Leslie Groves (Paul Newman minus the girth) against the skinny, “head-in-the-clouds” intellectual, “Little Boy”, J. Robert Oppenheimer (Dwight Schultz)...

The article by Barrie Hardy on Chile 1970-73 in Solidarity 682 brought to mind Missing , directed by Costas Gavras, released in 1982, and based on real events. Charles Harman (John Shea) is a US journalist based in Chile in the days of Salvador Allende’s left reformist government. He and his wife Beth (Sissy Spacek) are enthusiastic supporters of Allende. When the Pinochet military coup occurs, Charles is taken by troops and not seen again. His father Ed (Jack Lemon) flies down from the USA to assist in the search for his son. Attempting to enlist the services of the US Embassy he is fobbed...