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event after event underlined the crisis the paris uprisings grosvenor square the prague spring and its brutal suppression the chicago democratic convention all with vietnam providing the soundtrack and before any of these events happened lindsay anderson was filming if it looks like a school story right up to the shocking climax but it is transparently allegorical a boys public school as a microcosm of british culture of the old order that must now fall and in two parallel stories we follow two of the boys who are formed by their environment first there is jute a naive new boy gradually being assimilated and accepted into the culture and then there s mick travis a sixth former whose non comforming instincts begin with growing a moustache over the summer but keeping it well hidden from authority until he can shave it off and are pushed by oppression and persection into taking a bloody revenge on the school and the establishment figures who run it something was certainly in the air in that turbulent year it was something inextricably linked with youth a generation no longer prepared to sit and watch the follies of its elders being continued into perpetuity and which actively rose against it it was futile of course if total revolution was its aim but nothing would ever be the same again this is a quite magnificent film one that captures the 1968 mood perfectly and it should be ranked up there with the very best the biggest disgrace is that only very recently has it been available on dvd posted by rosalind mitchell filed in film 2 comments film diary the thirty nine steps alfred hitchcock 1935 sunday 5 october 2008 long before there was james bond in an age when the cinema was still a novelty and the enemy was kaiser bill there was richard hannay suave hero of john buchan s riproaring yarns buchan may or may not have realised that his brand of muscular adventure was perfect fodder for the film industry but she sure scored a bullseye all that was needed to make it memorable was the budding talent of alfred hitchcock now why would somebody want to make a film with slippery germans in 1935 of all years just as the year before robert graves had written a roman epic also full of slippery germans was something going on that not everybody was seeing properly it s even updated to the 1930s so a mysterious and very frightened woman takes refuge in hannay s flat before the sun rises she s dead with hannay s breadknife in her back and there the fun begins there are spies and there are establishment figures of decidedly fuzzy loyalty there s a dramatic escape by train including an episode in a compartment with an unknown woman and there s a dramatic confrontation in a wild and lonely place a quarter of a century on hitchcock will do much the same thing again in colour and with the inimitable cary grant in the lead as north by north west it will be a great film but it won t be half as charming as this one posted by rosalind mitchell filed in uncategorized leave a comment film diary watership down martin rosen 1979 monday 22 september 2008 to my shame it s only four years since i read watership down for the first time it was one of the very first books i obtained through bookcrossing for more than a quarter of a century before that the thought of a book or a film about anthropomorphic bunnies made me a bit queasy but i loved the book because it was dark and not in the least sentimental and had a great deal to say about the human condition and the state of the world it took until now to see the film and then only prompted by the fact that tom ewing s excellent popular blog had reached 1979 and art garfunkel s strikingly dark and moving song bright eyes taken from the soundtrack the song is woven into the fabric of the film but i was a little surprised to find that it didn t dominate as i d feared instead there s a score by malcolm williamson that owes a great deal to vaughan williams and that s apt because what this film does most beautifully is to evoke the countryside of he hampshire berkshire borders perfectly so lovingly has the background been created in watercolour that sometimes it was easy to forget that this was an animation nor was it in the least idealised this is a countryside complete with electricity pylons and full of hidden dangers badgers and foxes hawks humans with snares and other rabbits less than cuddly of demeanour a hefty novel 500 pages in this case is always difficult to translate into a manageable film let alone an animation but this film remains remarkably true to teh original some minor things have been changed a lot has been missed out but nothing has been lost it s understandable that the horrors of the efrafa warren are focused on and i thought it was a shame that the effete and over sophisticated rabbits of cowslip s warren were glossed over although i actively disliked this bit of the novel it came across to me as anti intellectual although i did get the point but it keeps the dark flavour of the novel intact it s about as far from disney as you can get but it s none the worse for that posted by rosalind mitchell filed in uncategorized 3 comments film diary guess who s coming to dinner stanley kramer 1967 sunday 14 september 2008 1967 martin luther king is making headlines at the head of the civil rights movement in a third of the states mixed race marriages are illegal vigilantes hunt down voter registration campaigners hell killing a negro doesn t even count as murder and the oscar for best picture goes all right will go to a film in which a black fbi man comes face to face with a rednecked alabama police chief white america is polarised between the old guard bigots and the liberal intelligentsia intent on sweeping them away but what happens when those liberals come under scrutiny what happens when the daughter of a crusading san francisco newspaper proprietor brings home the man she s fallen head over heels in love with and plans to marry come hell or high water and the man concerned is a brilliant doctor and medical academic who just happens to be sidney poitier and what about his parents and er the black skivvy in this exemplary liberal household the racial revolution of the sixties has been the subject of a lot of films but not many of them have turned the spotlight so searchingly on the motives of the white middle class campaigners for all that it had its finger on the zeitgeist as it were it s a curiously old fashioned piece by that i don t mean that its mid sixties ambience seems dated now it s of its time and thet s fair enough but it looks so terribly stagey the most surprising thing about it is that it won the oscar that year for best original screenplay because it looks like a theatrical performace acted out before a painted backdrop of san francisco bay as if it were a piece of early alan ayckbourn there are a couple of moments when the action moves away from the house presumably intended to emphasise the aging spencer tracy s growing estrangement from the bright young world around him and they are gruesomely wince inducingly bad but it would be unfair to judge the whole film on two short scenes it rolls fairly predicatable on to a conclusion in which tracy gathers all the protagonists around him to give a long speech like an avuncular poirot and you want to scream at him to stop wittering and get to the point then you remember that spencer tracy was seriously ill at the time that stanley kramer didn t know if he was going to make it through filming that it was the last scene he would ever record in a long and distinguished career he would be dead in just a few days posted by rosalind mitchell filed in uncategorized 2 comments whittaker prize round 7 entry friday 12 september 2008 schrödinger s cat a nuclear fable erwin that s my human erwin schrödinger is having a dinner party the good news is that because he s a strict theoretician he can t be trusted with anything practical and that includes cooking he s asked his friend nils to do the food and that means there ll be lots of herring mmm i could die for herring and lise s here so it s always worth lurking under the table because her legs are so smooth and soft to rub up against and she s always passing me little bits of this and that under the table the other buggers are too lost in their own world to notice the cat the bad news is that because it s one of nils s danish parties it will go on for hours and they ll all get horribly drunk and i ll have to miaow really loud when it s time to get them out of the way to let me hunt in peace still it s not as bad as when bob oppenheimer does one of his barbecues and they stuff themselves with hamburgers and frankfurters and get drunk very quickly you d think erwin would get upset at the idea of barbecuing his compatriots but he didn t seem to mind even when bob boasted about barbecuing hamburg itself and he got just as drunk as the rest of them no nil s parties are something a cat can understand nibble a bit drink a bit sing a bit play a bit sleep a bit nibble a bit more and so on let s see who s here erwin schrödinger you know about look he s got odd socks on the silly old thing one black one and one blue one i don t know what he d do without me to keep him in order i ve told you about nils bohr who did the food bob oppenheimer s the one with the black leather brogues which would be very elegant except for his sweaty feet phwarr best keep away from him the one with the shorts and the hairy legs is old albert somebody should tell him that shorts just aren t right when you re his age honestly you should see all of him including what s above the tablecloth oh you have already i see yes he s the old guy with the big white hair and the whiskers and the permanently worried look well you d worry if you knew what he knew albert and i go back a long way he once hold on who s this big furry boots that can t be right not in boston in august i ve never seen these before let me have a sniff and rub mmm yes a new one to me but this will be the one they called igor won t it the comrade from russia or the goddamsoviets as bob insists on calling them that s all apart from lise i ve told you about lise already haven t i lise is my favourite wouldn t you know i ve tried to get her and erwin together but she insists they can only have a working relationship whatever that means excuse me a minute while i leap upstairs and renew my own working relationship with the gorgeous lise mmm that gravlax is just divine almost as good as the salted herring and that s about as near perfection as you can get and it s pure silk lise s dress i mean not the gravlax although come to think of it that would be an apt comparison i could have curled up in her lap for hours i wonder where she got that from there s a war on you know even if we re over here in boston and not getting the shit bombed out of us times are still hard it must be a good life being a theoretical physicist in these times or maybe it s just being a very good looking female theoretical physicist none of them are smiling much except bob who always seem to be smiling about something of course they started off talking shop shop in this case being about making the biggest bangs you can bob is pleased with himself about making an exceptionally big bang down in new mexico a couple of weeks ago but i don t think he s being convincing if he s got so much to celebrate why has he given all the roast beef from his smørrebrød to me not that i m complaining mind but there never was such a man for eating beef and now he won t touch the stuff and he kept going on about how lord vishnu had a point don t tell me he s found religion never mind it s amazing what a few beers with akvavit chasers can do to lighten the atmosphere just before they were getting silly over a game of grenzallee don t expect me to explain the details humans can be pretty inscrutable sometimes particularly when they just sit staring out of the window who knows what they might be thinking one might almost imagine that they are contemplating the origin of the universe or trying to work out the fine structure of matter and when they play they seem to get such easy pleasure from the most trivial things in the case of grenzallee they take turns to call out the names of stations on the berlin u bahn and the one who says grenzallee first is the winner erwin says it s a game of great subtlety and complexity and bob claims that even as a senior professor at princeton he can t make head nor tail of it i m not so sure myself i can sort of see it and of course lise has got it sussed but she usually keeps it to herself until tonight because bob was being even more obtuse than usual under the influence of all that akvavit so one game went something like this grenzallee says bob albert puts an avuncular hand on bob s arm and tell bob that that s just not done why the hell not says bob it s in the rules first player can always win by calling grenzallee but then there isn t a game says lise and she looks at him with those big feline eyes in the way she has that always makes bob back down not without a sigh of protest friedrichstrasse says albert onkel toms hütte says nils i love that one i saw bob give him a kick on the shin alexanderplatz igor growled as if defending his territory sophie charlotte platz lise offered a blow for women sullivan square bob says still missing the point erwin told bob gently that he was offside or that he had fouled out if he so preferred but the akvavit had lit a fire in bob s head i never wanted to play this goddamn game he snarled what s the point of it anyway it s dumb yes bob said lise it s dumb war is dumb at least nobody gets killed playing grenzallee but it s just like this war is going to win you have to call grenzallee before your enemies do otherwise you get eliminated but you can t call grenzallee straight away because that would be pre emptive aggression and now we have the trinity device she fixed bob with a frozen stare the room fell into silence even through the akvavit fog all of them knew that she was talking about bob s big bang in new mexico and i think the implications of it weighed heavily on all of them i thought the party was going to break up then it was igor who saved it but now germany has surrendered he growled there is no need to use the trinity he s got a lovely deep voice has igor rich and dark and yummy like yeast extract we should all work for peace now somebody i suspect bob must have gripped the tablecloth because i felt it slide away i braced myself for things falling on the floor ready to fly because things falling on the floor generally mean trouble for the cat in my experience but no such thing happened except for bob who hissed about how you could bet we needed trinity still so long as joe stalin was still alive it s time to drink a toast to absent friends said nils ever the peacemaker is nils must be the scandinavian blood this means they re about to ...