Imagine an act in which the magician pulls a rabbit from a hat, followed by a grand piano, the Eiffel Tower and an undiscovered Van Gogh. This is Sacha Guitry’s picaresque The Story of a Cheat. Guitry plays the eponymous Cheat (we never learn his name) who, well into disreputable middle age, settles down to […]
We’ll Always Have Paris: ‘Casablanca’ (1942)
Occupied French Morocco. Stolen letters of transit. A smoky café. An airport shrouded in fog. Everybody comes to Rick’s. This Valentine’s Day, curl up with Casablanca, one of the most beloved and (mis)quoted films of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Its plot is deceptively simple. Relentlessly cynical Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) presides over ‘Rick’s Café Americain’, Casablanca’s […]
Anything Goes: ‘The Front Page’ on Broadway
As anyone who’s been following the news knows, the fourth estate has taken quite a beating lately: fake news, accusations of bias, trial by Twitter and the arrival of ‘alternative facts’. Seen in this climate, the magnificent Broadway revival of The Front Page, now in its last week at the Broadhurst Theatre, is more than […]
Phantasmagoria: ‘Spirits of the Dead’ (1968)
If you’re obsessed with films and potter about Twitter, you might have seen director Edgar Wright’s list of his 1000 favourite movies, an inventory both admirable in scope and staggering in content. I’ve seen only about 40 percent of the films on the list (predictably, most of them made before 1970) and since I adore […]
The Man in the Purple Suit: ‘The Phantom’ (1996)
This post was written as part of The Spirit of ’96, a yearlong celebration of the 300+ films that were released on American screens in 1996, written by some of the film buffs who love them best. See all the contributions here. Stop me when this sounds too ridiculous. Deep in the jungles of south-east […]
A Spot of Murder: ‘Evil Under the Sun’ (1982)
Take an all-star cast, stick them in an exotic location and have one of them drop dead. Voila, you have the basic ingredients of the Lavish Agatha Christie Production, a peculiarly English brand of murder-mystery that in the seventies and early eighties brought us death on a train in Murder on the Orient Express, death […]
René Clair’s Cloud Cuckoo Land: ‘Le Million’ (1931)
Watching Le Million is like getting pulled into the world’s most enthusiastic chorus line: you don’t know all the steps, but you’re having much too much fun to stop. It’s midnight in Paris and there’s a large party going on in a garret—but why? Flashback to earlier in the day, when penniless painter Michel (René […]
A New York Story: ‘The Clock’ (1945)
Another hundred people just got off of the train And came up through the ground, While another hundred people just got off of the bus And are looking around – ‘Another Hundred People’, Company, Stephen Sondheim The Clock is a New York story, even though the actors never set foot there. Practically everything, from Penn […]
Bread and Circuses: ‘Ben-Hur’ (1925)
No, not that Ben-Hur– the other one. Three decades before MGM’s mighty, Technicolor sword-and-sandal epic starring Charlton Heston, there was MGM’s mighty, black-and-white sword-and-sandal epic starring Ramon Novarro. Both are adaptations of the same novel, Lew Wallace’s 1880 best-seller Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ and, naturally, feature the most magnificent chariot races ever committed […]
Love and Other Drugs: ‘Burton and Taylor’ (2013)
In the final scene of Burton and Taylor, the BBC’s recent television film about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, the pair share a mournful tête-a-tête in Taylor’s dressing room. “We’re addicts Elizabeth, you and I,” he says. “Love is not a drug,” she counters, wearily. “Isn’t it? I don’t know,” he replies. Burton and Taylor […]
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