Moviedrome

Sam Raimi was also the director of The Evil Dead - you probably recall the controversy surrounding that low-budget 1980 horror picture. In the cold light of day it’s hard to see what all the posturing was about - Evil Dead was a good, competent, cabin-in-the-woods horror flick, certainly not a cause célèbre worthy of all the anguish and outrage that surrounded its release on video. Raimi’s bigger-budget Crimewave (1985), was considerably less successful, but Evil Dead 2 (1987) was a tremendous film, full of all sorts of manic originality. Manic originality is less in evidence in Sam Raimi’s first studio picture, Darkman.

House of Games is a tale of confidence tricksters. It’s the first feature directed by David Mamet, the noted playwright and screenwriter who wrote Duck Variations and Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and penned the screenplay for de Palma’s The Untouchables. It’s a complex story, involving a series of consecutive and concurrent scams which I will not ruin by relating to you here. Certain parts of the plot, if you think about them, don’t entirely convince - but why think? It’s a movie that’s cleverly constructed and very well acted. Joe Mantegna is outstanding as the principle conman. The dialogue is great and the tension winds down only in the slightly stagy action scenes.

Since we’ve already exhausted the standard reference works and databases, to say nothing of your gentle ears, with information about Siegel and Eastwood, I propose instead to talk about the second feature player of this almost all-male cast, Patrick McGoohan.

Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped is based on the true story of André Devigny, a French officer who was imprisoned by the Germans and the Vichy collaboration government at Montluc jail in 1943. Bresson is a former painter and scriptwriter who was himself a prisoner of war from June 1940 to April 1941. Perhaps for that reason A Man Escaped is quite unlike Escape from Alcatraz or any other film in this familiar genre.

The Hill is a rarely seen drama set during World War II. Sidney Lumet is an American director, most famous for his urban dramas like Network and Dog day Afternoon. It was made in 1964, the year after Lumet’s tense nuclear war drama Failsafe, the year before he made the sensational Pawnbroker.

Cry-Baby is the eighth film of John Waters, the cult director from Baltimore. Waters once said, according to the Virgin International Encyclopaedia of Film that having someone vomit while watching one of his movies was like getting a standing ovation.

Lenny is the story of the comedian Lenny Bruce. The director, Bob Fosse, was a dancer and a choreographer who began his directorial career with the 1969 musical Sweet Charity. Thereafter he directed Cabaret, which made his reputation; Lenny; All that Jazz, a quasi-autobiography which prefigured his own death; and Star 80, the story of the murdered Playboy bunny Dorothy Stratten. No other short career, except perhaps Terence Malick’s, has produced so many outstanding films.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is that rare thing, a remake that is as good as the original. There have been countless lousy and incompetent remakes - Stagecoach, for instance, or Father of the Bride. Sometimes they are so bad they have to be concealed under a different title: the remake of Out of the Past was called Against All Odds. Off hand, I can think of only one other genuinely good remake, and that was William Friedkin’s Sorcerer, a truly inspired retelling of the French classic Wages of Fear. Sorcerer was a great film based on a great film; it was also a monumental failure at the box office. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a good film based on a good film.

Romance of a Horse Thief is one of the oddest films we’ve screened on Moviedrome. It’s not really a cult film - there is absolutely no cult of fanatic admirers devotedly following this film around, for reasons which will rapidly become apparent. Nevertheless, it contains certain cult elements that seem to be commendable to your attention, namely Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg. If you’re very, very old you may remember a time called the sixties and outrageous things such as Carnaby Street and the breakdown of the draft system in the United States. One of the cult or iconic items of that bygone decade was a single called ‘Je t'aime, moi non plus’, which got banned by British radio stations because it supposedly featured the sounds of the chanteurs making love. This was long before the similar row occasioned by Donna Summer’s 'Love to Love You Baby’. Aren’t you glad that I’m reminding you of all this important stuff?

Ken Russell is a highly talented and oft-maligned director who, as the Virgin International Encyclopaedia of Film observed, ‘refuses to make movies in the genteel British tradition.’ As such his oeuvre rarely finds favour with the critics, but is often highly popular with the unwashed mob of real people who intermittently attend the cinema. For a while, things got difficult for this original and therefore feared director. It looked as if he was going to get stuck in the United States, waiting years to direct not-good studio potboilers like Altered States and Crimes of Passion. But no! Russell came sailing back to these shores on the wave of video money which erupted in the mid eighties, when new companies - in this instance Lord Branson’s Virgin Vision plc - financed features on the basis of anticipated video and TV sales. This is how many films in the eighties were made, among them Company of Wolves, Empire State, Sid & Nancy and a whole string of madcap low-budget high-energy Ken Rus

The Navigator is a medieval odyssey from New Zealand. Released in 1988, it was apparently four years in the making, and attracted such attention that Moving Pictures made a documentary about the director, Vincent Ward.

Weekend was written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard in 1967. Godard, you may recall, was one of the French New Wave’s enfants terribles. Starting his career as a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, he directed his first and most intelligible feature, Breathless, in 1959. In general, intellgibility is not what Godard’s cinema is all about. Breathless was a relatively straight-ahead thriller about a gangster and his moll. Alphaville, which you may recall seeing on Moviedrome many moons ago, is an indescribable science-fiction film in which lightbulbs and domestic objects take on the same sinister high-tech mystery as the spaceship interiors in the Alien films or the monolith in 2001. His films (they cannot be called ‘movies’) are filled with alienation devices, narrative inconsistencies, loose ends, long monologues in which dustmen talk to the camera about Marxism. His films are usually quite cheaply made, partially because - according to a possibly apocryphal story - it’s hard to raise more t

You know that poster you see all the time? The one that’s a painting of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis, all sitting in a diner? Maybe it’s not Elvis, maybe it’s JFK, but you know the poster that I mean - it has the Edward Hopperesque illumination and it’s called something like ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’?

A 200 per cent cult classic: you must remember 200 Motels. It was always playing at midnight on Saturday at the Scala, back when you were protesting against the Vietnam war and listening to Atom Heart Mother. That’s right - it’s that film. Probably you saw the advert in the paper or the Marquee. Equally probably you didn’t go and see it. Now you can.

Django is a great treat, a long-unseen spaghetti western. Sergio Corbucci also directed The Big Silence, another ‘missing’ film premiered on Moviedrome. This was the first western I ever saw where the bad guys win absolutely. It was so troubling that the producers actually had Corbucci shoot a happy ending too, which played in certain territories where the sad one was perceived as being too much. Django isn’t quite as doom-laden, but it comes close. It also benefits from an even madder plot and some extraordinary sets and costumes by Giancarlo Simi, who designed all of Sergio Leone’s films. The Big Silence took place in the snow; Django is set entirely in a sea of mud.

Grim Prairie Tales was made on a shoestring budget in the Mojave Desert in 1990. The writer/director, Wayne Coe, was an illustrator who designed the American campaigns for Out of Africa, Brazil and Back to the Future before deciding that he wanted to get involved behind the lens. He gives us an excellent example of why writer/directors shouldn’t be allowed to talk about their aspirations or their films.

The renowned cult director Sam Fuller was a former newspaperman and front-line infantryman in World War II - his style is described by the Virgin International Encyclopaedia of Film as characterized by ‘shrill anti-Communism, a protagonist who is a borderline psychopath, film noir sensibilities, bursts of graphic violence, unapologetic sentimentality, and fluid almost athletic camerawork’, along with a 'concern for identity, whether racial or national.’ Phew! O boy!

There’s plenty of moral purpose in Verboten!, which, like another Sam Fuller film shown on Moviedrome - Run of the Arrow - begins with a shot of dead bodies on the battlefield. It is the story of an American GI in World War II, who violates the non-fraternisation rule and falls in love with a German woman, played by one Susan Cummings. She, like Yellow Moccasin in Run of the Arrow, wants to know: ‘What is a honeymoon?’

The Long Riders is an American western about the famous James and Younger gang, as miserable a bunch of dry-gulching, back-shooting, terrorist assassins as ever walked the earth.

The Big Combo, as you will be immediately aware from its low angles, its high contrast, its impenetrable expressionist shadows, is a film noir, and a particularly good one.

Face to Face is one of three ‘political westerns’ by the Italian director Sergio Sollima, who sometimes operates under the pseudonym 'Sterling Simon’. The other two were The Big Gundown, an excellent bounty-hunter movie starring Lee Van Cleef and Tomas Milian, and Run, Man, Run, a rather worse-than-mediocre sequel involving the further adventures of Milian. They were 'political’ in much the same way as all the spaghetti westerns, setting up a rural/urban conflict in which the city dwellers are always insidious degenerates or usurous bankers, and the rural characters innocent exploitees, often championed by a glamorous social bandit. It’s a straightforward, simple-minded view that you can find even in supposedly sophisticated Italian films, the most lumberng example perhaps being 1900.

Sometimes also known as Kill and Say Your Prayers, Requiescant is a spaghetti western directed by Carlo Lizzani in 1968. Lizzani was a journalist and film critic who published a major survey of Italian film, Il Cinema Italiano, in 1953. He has written and directed a number of films, many of them social dramas ‘marred’ (in the words of Ephraim Katz’s Film Encyclopaedia) ‘by the director’s overly dogmatic Marxist ideology on the one hand and by commercial requirements on the other.’ He is also a theatre director.

Pedro Almodovar is the premier director of the New Spain. Obviously I say that with a certain cynicism: being the premier director of the New Spain is rather like being the premier novelist of Milton Keynes. What Have I Done To Deserve This? is actually a pretty good Almodovar film: more slick than some of his other movies, with less plot, it is the everyday story of a dysfunctional family living among the horrible tower blocks of contemporary Madrid. It’s the first Almodovar film I’ve seen that doesn’t open with a scene involving a movie being dubbed. But the characters, as always, are writers and media people, prostitutes and junky kids, burnt-out housewives and funereally clad grandmothers.

The slow-motion, ‘nekked’ schoolgirl shower-room fantasy in this movie is one of the distinctrive hallmarks of the cinema of Brian de Palma, director of Wotan’s Wake, Get to Know Your Rabbit, Phantom of the Paradise, Scarface and The Untouchables. De Palma is often described by film critics as the heir to Hitchcock, but though he may share certain misogynistic traits with the Master, the films that are mostly described as ‘Hitchcockian’ - Body Double, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out - seem to be ripped off not so much from Hitchcock as from Dario Argento.