2024 - May
Ten Days' Wonder (1971) 3/4
The Promised Land (2023) 3/4
The Last Warning (1928) 3/4
The Promised Land (2023) 3/4
The Last Warning (1928) 3/4
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- DirectorNikolaj ArcelStarsMads MikkelsenAmanda CollinSimon BennebjergThe story of Ludvig Kahlen who pursued his lifelong dream: To make the heath bring him wealth and honor.03-05-2024
It's been a while since we've had a decent "man vs. plot of land" movie. I have fond memories of watching films like "Jean de Florette" and "The Field" many years ago but it seems like agriculture just isn't an exciting enough prospect for filmmakers nowadays.
I suppose director Nikolaj Arcel must have seen many of the same movies as I did because his latest film, "The Promised Land", fits nicely in the agricultural subgenre.
It tells the story of Ludvig Kahlen (Mads Mikkelsen), an 18th-century soldier who decides to turn the barren moorland of Jutland into a farming colony. Armed with nothing but his measly pension and 20 bags of potatoes, he sets about cultivating a plot of land so hard and infertile that it takes him all day to even dig a hole in it.
The film begins with a title card informing us that Ludvig Kahlen was a real person but "The Promised Land" is inspired by true events in much the same way that "Rambo III" was inspired by the plight of the brave Mujahideen fighters. The real Ludvig Kahlen was a fanatic who hired armed guards to keep farmers from escaping his failing colony. He would have made a tremendous protagonist for a Werner Herzog film, probably played by Klaus Kinski.
Instead, "The Promised Land" is more of a romanticised take on Kahlen's mission than a fair depiction of his methods. It plays out more like an adventure film or a bodice-ripping melodrama of determination, perseverance, and wages of bloody revenge.
Written by Arcel and Anders Thomas Jensen, the screenplay is a surprisingly well-balanced mix of all kinds of childhood favourites. It freely borrows elements from Alexandre Dumas, Walter Scott, and John Ford. Its version of Ludvig Kahlen is part Michael Kohlhaas and part Michael Henchard, a headstrong fighter for justice and the law whose stubbornness ends up causing a world of pain for those around him.
There is an intriguing hint early on in the film that Kahlen's motives are not entirely altruistic. He is the bastard son of a nobleman who had raped his mother. Interestingly, all Kahlen asks in return for his Sysiphian endeavours is a noble title. Unfortunately, not much is made of this.
Most of the film comprises of Kahlen's conflict with the wealthy Jutland landowner Frederik de Schinkel (Simon Bennebjerg). De Schinkel is the kind of villain we rarely see in movies anymore. A cartoonishly evil psychopath who delights in torturing his servants at garden parties, murdering people while a children's choir sings in the background, and trying to get his beautiful cousin to marry him for her money. Simon Bennebjerg's performance is one of the most purely enjoyable aspects of this film. He is gleefully hammy and resembles a bizarre mixture of Lord Farquaad and Lord Bullingdon.
Indeed, "The Promised Land" is at its best when it isn't trying to be taken seriously. I had a great deal of fun watching Mikkelsen and Bennebjerg engage in a petty war which quickly escalates to violence. There is even a sequence, late in the film, in which Kahlen leads a group of German settlers in a surprise attack on Schinkel's men which wouldn't feel out of place in a James Bond movie.
It's far less effective, however, when it goes for soppy melodrama. Unfortunately, Arcel piles on the misfortune and misery liberally especially in the film's many subplots. One of these subplots follows the fates of two married servants who escape Schinkel's household of terror and hide out on Kahlen's land.
Another, by far the film's worst, focuses on an adorable homeless girl the cold-hearted Kahlen takes in. Despite a fine performance from the child actress Melina Hagberg, this storyline was already corny when Chaplin did it almost a hundred years ago. Predictably plotted and melodramatically saccharine, I assume their story was meant to engender sympathy but all it got from me were eye-rolls.
Another clumsy subplot involves a highly unbelievable love triangle which develops between Kahlen, his housekeeper Ann (Amanda Collin), and De Schinkel's cousin Edel (Kristine Kujath Thorp). First, the idea that the aristocratic Edel would give the gruff, working-class Kahlen the time of day is ridiculous in itself but once established, the storyline goes nowhere and ends rather abruptly as if Arcel didn't really know how to untangle it in a sensible manner.
This myriad of subplots produces a meandering storyline but "The Promised Land" is a surprisingly well-balanced and paced film which manages to dose all of its many stories in such a way that we never lose sight of any of them. The result is perhaps uneven but it is never boring or messy.
The movie is also a technically top-notch piece of filmmaking. Rasmus Videbaek's stark photography does a great job of establishing the cold, unforgiving nature of the Jutland moors as does Dan Romer's stark, atmospheric score. Also great are Kicki Ilander's costumes which do a great job of delineating every character's position in the 18th century class structure.
Finally, the performances are superb, especially the one from Amanda Collin who turns out to be the film's heart and soul. These aspects are the saving grace which turns the frequently derivative and melodramatic screenplay into a fairly entertaining period piece of the kind we rarely get to see anymore.
3/4 - DirectorRoy William NeillStarsBasil RathboneNigel BruceAubrey MatherSherlock Holmes investigates a series of deaths at a castle with each foretold by the delivery of orange pips to the victims.09-05-2024
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https://www.imdb.com/list/ls540648511/ - DirectorRoy William NeillStarsBasil RathboneNigel BruceHillary BrookeSherlock Holmes investigates when young women around London turn up murdered, each with a finger severed. Scotland Yard suspects a madman, but Holmes believes the killings to be part of a diabolical plot.10-05-2024
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https://www.imdb.com/list/ls540648511/ - DirectorRoy William NeillStarsBasil RathboneNigel BruceMarjorie RiordanHolmes is recruited to escort the heir to a European throne safely back to his homeland after his father's assassination.10-05-2024
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https://www.imdb.com/list/ls540648511/ - DirectorRoy William NeillStarsBasil RathboneNigel BruceAlan MowbrayWhen the fabled Star of Rhodesia diamond is stolen on a London to Edinburgh train and the son of its owner is murdered, Sherlock Holmes must discover which of his suspicious fellow passengers is responsible.10-05-2024
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https://www.imdb.com/list/ls540648511/ - DirectorRoy William NeillStarsBasil RathboneNigel BrucePatricia MorisonSherlock Holmes sets out to discover why a trio of murderous villains, including a dangerously attractive female, are desperate to obtain three unassuming and inexpensive little music boxes.10-05-2024
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https://www.imdb.com/list/ls540648511/ - DirectorPaul LeniStarsLaura La PlanteMontagu LoveRoy D'ArcyA producer decides to reopen a theater, that had been closed five years previously when one of the actors was murdered during a performance, by staging a production of the same play with the remaining members of the original cast.11-05-2024
Five years after the tragic and mysterious death of actor John Woodford (D'Arcy Corrigan), the cast and crew of the play he was performing the night he died reunite at his old Broadway theatre. They have been hired by the thuggish producer Arthur McHugh (Montagu Love) to restage the production and reopen the theatre. Anyone who's ever seen a horror film can tell you this is a horrible idea and indeed, before the rehearsals even begin, potentially deadly accidents begin plaguing the theatre. Each incident is accompanied by a note reading "I warn you: Do not attempt to open my theatre. Signed: John Woodford".
Based on a novel by Wadsworth Camp, "The Last Warning" is a quintessential old dark house thriller with the sole exception that it is set in an old dark theatre! Otherwise, it follows the formula with slavish exactitude as its cast of quirky characters gather and a series of terrifying occurrences befall them. Like pretty much every old dark house film made in the 1920s and 30s, there is no real sense of progression or logic in the narrative. Instead, mysterious things keep happening like clockwork every five minutes or so regardless of whether they fit in with the villain's plan or not. Poison gas is siphoned into the director's office, a piece of the set almost falls on the lead actress' head, someone cuts the power etc. etc.
As a mystery, "The Last Warning" is pretty much a complete dud. There are no clues to the villains' identity and none of the characters truly attempt to deduce what is going on. The characters themselves are colourful and quirky but none of them even resembles a convincing human being. It is thus rather difficult to care whether they live or die or truly attempt to figure out which one of them is the bad guy.
And yet, the film is irresistibly charming mainly because its talented director Paul Leni manages to seemingly effortlessly balance its comedic elements with an effectively spooky horror atmosphere.
Whenever I watch silent films from the late 1920s, I feel a twinge of sadness that sound was invented. In the words of Peter Bogdanovich, 1928 was the year when Hollywood learned how to get silent films right and hadn't yet begun to get sound films wrong. Once the talkie era started, however, it took a very long time (at least two decades) for filmmakers to reach the levels of technical dexterity and inventiveness exhibited by silent film directors like Paul Leni.
Just look at the unbound way his camera moves around the set. It flies under the curtain to reveal the audience, it glides across the stage into a close-up of a screaming woman, at one point it swings on a rope with the villain as a gaggle of cops attempt to grab him. The film is also full of beautifully designed montage sequences introducing us to the world of Broadway - "the electric highway of happiness" as the title cards call it.
Filmed by DP Hal Mohr, "The Last Warning" is a consistently visually impressive experience. Shooting on the sets from 1925's "The Phantom of the Opera", Mohr and Leni give the film an atmospherically expressionistic feel much more in line with films coming out of Germany. There are quite a few wonderfully creepy moments in the film, my favourite being the shot of an old woman covered in cobwebs slowly climbing the steps which seem to rise out of pure darkness.
But "The Last Warning" is much more of a comedy than a horror film filled as it is with sight gags, pratfalls, and over-the-top cartoonish performances. The cast is comprised of comedic stereotypes such as a pair of brothers one of whom is fat while the other is thin and a pair of stagehands one of whom is tall while the other is short. There is also a hysterical old woman who jumps out of her skin at the sight of her own shadow who is an absolute mainstay in old dark house thrillers.
The funniest performance in the film is certainly that of Chaplin's buddy Mack Swain who plays the fat brother. However, there are also some rather neat turns from other recognisable faces such as Slim Summerville and Fred Kelsey.
To my great surprise, Paul Leni balances comedy and horror with supreme success and as a result "The Last Warning" works in both genres. It is also a remarkably dynamic film which packs an incredible amount of twists, occurrences, and characters in its sprightly 78-minute runtime. Leni never lets the pace slow down for a second and even the intertitles are cleverly designed in such a way that they enhance the action rather than stop it. They're frequently animated crashing towards the screen in moments of terror. They also often underline the humour. For example, in one scene, a character's distant voice is represented by writing their dialogue in a smaller font on the title cards. In another scene, a pair of characters speaking in unison make the title cards undulate and duplicate replicating the cacophony they are producing.
"The Last Warning" is not particularly well written nor does it ever work as a compelling mystery but it does showcase the wonderful talent of Paul Leni, one of the many great silent film directors who died before they had a chance to leave their mark on the talkies. His other two surviving American films, "The Man Who Laughed" and "The Cat and the Canary" are certainly more memorable and better films than this but "The Last Warning" is a charming and relentlessly dynamic take on the old dark house genre well worth seeing.
3/4 - DirectorClaude ChabrolStarsAnthony PerkinsMichel PiccoliMarlène JobertAnthony Perkins, a young sculptor with a weird penchant for waking up in strange hotels with his memory wiped clean and bloodied hands, invites a former professor (Michel Piccoli) to the Gatsby-like provincial manor presided over by his powerful tycoon father (Orson Welles). Welcomed by Welles' young wife (Marlene Jobert), Piccoli soon finds a nest of rats beneath the bourgeoisie voluptuousness -- a clan bound in a circle of illicit romance, blackmail, faked burglaries and, of course, murder.11-05-2024
Claude Chabrol's "Ten Days' Wonder" is a fascinating yet profoundly flawed picture. It throws all kinds of intriguing ideas, themes, plotlines, and characters at the audience without ever putting them to any kind of sensible use or making much of anything with them. It is consistently engaging yet never rewarding. It is intellectually stimulating but emotionally frigid. It promises all kinds of revelations yet remains frustratingly oblique. And yet, I often find those are exactly the kinds of films that linger in my mind the longest. Perhaps it is better to suggest greatness than to actually reach it. I feel I will certainly spend the next week mulling over this, one of Chabrol's most obscure films, trying to figure out what exactly it is all about and how it might have turned out even better.
The film stars Orson Welles as Theo Van Horn, a multimillionaire who has achieved all of his Earthly goals and is now determined to prove himself a god. To achieve that goal he buys a remote estate in Alsace which he turns into his Garden of Eden. He moves there with his surly brother Ludovic (Guido Alberti) and his witch-like mother (Tsilla Chelton) whom he locks away in the attic. He then decides to form his perfect family and adopts a boy and a girl. He raises the boy to be his son Charles (Anthony Perkins) and the girl to be his wife Helene (Marlene Jobert). Once Theo's Eden is complete he decrees that everyone who lives there must behave and dress as if it were always 1925 - the year when he was at his happiest.
Over the years, he buys his wife's love with pretty dresses and turns his son into a kind of prisoner by convincing him to become an artist and then offering to become his patron. And yet, as time passes, Theo's grip on his Eden loosens. When the film begins, we learn that Charles and Helene have become lovers and are plotting behind Theo's back but someone has learned their secret and is blackmailing them. Scared that Theo will find out as well, Charles asks his friend and mentor Paul Regis (Michel Piccoli), a noted philosophy professor, to visit Theo's Eden and find the blackmailer.
I can see why Chabrol was drawn to "Ten Days' Wonder". In fact, it is a critic's dream. An intertextual detective story which combines theology, sex, murder, and Freud. Staying true to the nature of the story, Chabrol constructs this film out of a series of homages and references. The opening scene in which Charles wakes up covered in blood in a strange hotel room is shot like a sequence straight out of Orson Welles' "The Trial" with his signature low-angle shots and staccato editing.
The dreamlike, psychosexual scenes at Theo's Eden, on the other hand, feel like they're lifted straight out of Alain Robbe-Grillet's films complete with ethereal narrations and illogical geography. Characters often seem to teleport from one side of the shot to the other without any cuts. In one shot, Marlene Jobert kisses Orson Welles' hand on the left side of the screen after which the camera pulls back to reveal him standing with Michel Piccoli on the right side of the screen.
Meanwhile, the film's more conventional detective scenes are chock full of references to Hitchcock and other greats of the genre. Chabrol even does a shot-for-shot remake of the car chase from Jean Renoir's overlooked "Night at the Crossroads".
The Cambridge Dictionary defines phantasmagorical as being "full of different images, like something in a confused dream". This describes "Ten Days' Wonder" perfectly. It is a film which changes from one scene to the next, constantly slipping through our fingers just when we begin to think we've grasped its meaning. On the one hand, it is frustratingly vague, on the other, it is admirably ambitious. I suppose its effect on you will depend on what kind of a viewer you are.
The film is at its best when it is teasingly surreal. When it's trying to confuse and intrigue. It's at its worst when it is a realistic detective story. When it's bending over backwards trying to explain its mysteries in banal terms. The ending is particularly bad with Michel Piccoli being tasked to deliver pages of exposition which frequently sound like the psychiatrist speech from the end of "Psycho".
Ultimately, as tiresome as the film sometimes is, I found it utterly fascinating. It is a strange project altogether being an English-language film directed by a French director for an Italian production company. Two dubs of it exist, one French and one English, neither of which is exactly definitive. The French dub feels odd because it replaces the iconic voices of Welles and Perkins. The English dub, on the other hand, retains the voice of Michel Piccoli whose broken English is frequently impenetrable. Of course, he is the character with the most lines.
The film is quite strangely cast. The nearly 40-year-old Anthony Perkins, for example, doesn't quite work in the role of a struggling artist under the thumb of his tyrannical father. Michel Piccoli, on the other hand, is frightfully bland as the film's detective. He often feels like an afterthought, a function rather than a character.
The best performance comes from Orson Welles who is uncharacteristically subdued and introspective here. Of course, he brings his usual commanding presence but his thunderous voice is frequently reduced to a mournful whisper and there is no evidence of his hammier tendencies. Theo is, of course, a monstrous character, a manipulator and a child abuser but Welles manages to humanize him and turn him into a kind of Prospero-like figure - a man who set out to be a creator only to be betrayed by his own creation. The sole misstep in Welles' portrayal is a false nose he is wearing for some reason. The nose is so obviously fake and is even a different colour from his face that I kept expecting him to whip it off halfway through the film.
"Ten Days' Wonder" is also interesting because it is one of only two decent films based on the works of Ellery Queen, one of the most influential American writers of detective fiction. Even though Chabrol's film remains extremely faithful to Queen's novel, it feels nothing like it. Instead, it is a uniquely Chabrolian concoction, a bizarre, dreamlike mixture of film homages, literary references, psychobabble, and religious allegory. It never quite works in any conventional sense but I found it consistently gripping. I hope it is rediscovered one of these days if for no other reason then because it would be a marvellous subject for countless academic papers.
3/4