Film

I’ve never been keen on re-makes, so in order to “get my retaliation in first” I’m writing about All Quiet on the Western Front , the 1930 classic Hollywood film directed by Lewis Milestone, not the new German version directed by Edward Berger (which may or may not be good — I haven’t seen it). Along with Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957) and others, it remains one of the classic anti-war films. All Quiet… follows the young German recruit Paul Bäumer, who enthusiastically heads off to the war to fight for country and Kaiser, to be confronted by the horrors of trench warfare: the hunger...

According to a number of sources it was the first British film to use the word “homosexual”. In the US, it was refused approval under the Motion Picture Production Code. Victim , directed by Basil Dearden in 1961, centres on successful lawyer Melville Farr (Dirk Bogarde). He has an affair with working class Jack Barrett (Peter McEnery), who is being blackmailed due to his homosexuality. At the time homosexuality was illegal in the UK. Barrett appeals to Farr for help but he does nothing. Barrett steals money to pay the blackmailers but is arrested by the police. In his cell Barrett hangs...

In Solidarity 657 Sacha Ismail highlighted the plight of young women taken to the Magdalene Laundries in 26-Counties Ireland, where supposedly “fallen” young women, many of them teenagers, were subjected to “spiritual” correction (in other words punishment). A number of films have been made in recent years featuring their plight and that of other young women and children dispatched to orphanages, also run by the Catholic Church. One of the most hard-hitting is The Magdalene Sisters (Peter Mullan, 2002). The film follows the fortunes of four teenage women, one of whom, Crispina, is mentally ill...

One of Costas Gavras’ later films, Eden is West (2009), recounts the journey of Elias (Ricardo Scamarcio), a migrant of unknown origins, through Europe to the streets of Paris. Somewhere in the Mediterranean his crowded boat is chased by the coastguards. In desperation Elias dives overboard and washes up on a Greek beach at what turns out to be a holiday resort cum nudist camp for the rich. Elias adapts to survive, stealing a camp worker’s uniform from a washing line and pretending to be a cleaner. The police begin to look for him and the holiday resort manager even makes this into a “game” —...

Every ten years the great and good around the film magazine Sight and Sound come together to list the one hundred greatest films ever made. Personally, I find this sort of exercise rather pointless. I mention it only because the number one slot has just gone to Chantal Ackerman for her film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce 1080, Bruxelles , made in 1975. Previous winners have all been men. Ackerman, who died in 2015, was a Belgian daughter of Holocaust survivors. She was a feminist whose work never embraced the mainstream, and was influenced early in her career by Jean-Luc Godard. In...

A football film? Not an easy choice: as a critic once put it, you either have footballers who can’t act or actors who can’t play football. The end-product is fairly predictable. A good illustration is the ludicrous Escape to Victory (directed by John Huston, 1981) where a scratch team of World War 2 POWs (which for some inexplicable reason includes Pelé) take on a crack German team and force a draw while managing to escape their captors in the post-match chaos. It’s good for a laugh — and not much else — but was partly inspired by a much better Hungarian film Two Half Times in Hell (1961)...

For 50 years filmmaker Patricio Guzmán has documented Chile and its people, their moments of greatest hope and periods of darkest despair. His most famous work, The Battle of Chile (1975), depicts the movement of Chilean workers with their hopes raised following the election of Salvador Allende’s reformist socialist government and how that ended in the bloody 1973 coup d’état. The dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet that killed or tortured many thousands of socialists, trade unionists and many others. My Imaginary Country , Guzmán's latest documentary, is about the “social outburst”, a...

Which Hollywood film elucidates the labour theory of value? I’m no economist and no doubt someone could punch holes in the explanation, but it can be found in John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). Two Americans in Mexico, Fred Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) and Bob Curtin (Tim Holt) turn their hand to gold prospecting, assisted by a cantankerous veteran gold miner, Howard (Huston’s father, Walter). The trio go through various trials and tribulations and eventually find gold, although their encounter with a group of bandits puts their success in jeopardy. Sitting around their campfire...

Antonio das Mortes (1969) was the Brazilian film-maker Glauber Rocha’s final part in a loose trilogy with Black God, White Devil (see Solidarity 652 ) and Enchanted Earth (1967). The Portuguese title of the film translates as The Dragon of Wickedness Against the Holy Warrior (think St. George and the Dragon, set in Brazil). Antonio das Mortes (who features in Black God… ) is a hired killer whose main targets are the Robin Hood style bandits, the Cangaceiros. As the gangs are steadily eliminated, his “livelihood” begins to disappear. A landowner pays him to kill Coirano, the leader of one of...

In the 1960s a number of South American filmmakers, including Glauber Rocha in Brazil, challenged the domination of Hollywood cinema developing a counter movement known as Cinema Novo. His film Black God, White Devil (1964) is one of the best known examples of Cinema Novo, and considered by many critics to be one of the finest Brazilian films ever made. It is set in the 1940s in the arid, parched landscape of the Sertão. Ranch hand Manoel (Manoel Del Ray) is desperate to escape poverty and the never-ending drought. He attempts to buy some land from a local landowner but is cheated. He then...