Film Reviews

Blond, blue-eyed Rutger Hauer stars in two films on this season's list. In Bladerunner he steals the show from Harrison Ford as replicant Roy Batty; while in The Hitcher he is the show, a magnificently malevolent performance which led to him being described as 'everybody's favourite psycho'. Not entirely true, perhaps, but that film and those such as Blade Runner and Wanted: Dead Or Alive could have led a lesser actor to being typecast as menacing villains. Not so Mr Hauer: he claims now to be finished with playing bad guys for a while, a sad loss (if only temporary) of one of cinema's greatest miscreants. However, he has proved himself perfectly capable of handling more elegant rôles: Coco Chanel's lover in Chanel Solitaire , Theresa Russell's husband in Nic Roeg's Eureka (if that can be described as elegant), the romantic hero in Ladyhawke . With what he will follow his latest film, Wanted: Dead Or Alive , we shall have to wait and see, but his event...

  Dir: Douglas Trumbull/USA/1971/90 mins Lps: Bruce Dern, Cliff Potts, Ron Rifkin, Jesse Vint The year is 2001, and the Earth has been devastated by nuclear war leaving its remaining plant life entrusted to a fleet of spacecraft. Due to cost cuts it is decided to scrap this project to refurbish the earth, by jettisoning the remaining forests. However Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern), convinced of the importance of the mission, disposes of the other three crew members of the spaceship 'Valley Forge' before they manage to jettison the final biosphere. Now alone and with one remaining forest Freeman flees from the rest of the fleet with only the company of the spacecraft's three drones. During this time he trains the drones to tend the forest and, to keep him amused, he teaches them to play cards. The film's director Douglas Trumbull, helped by his experience on Stanley Kubrick's k's 2001: A Space Odyssey , created the special effects but did not over-use them. The soun...

  Dir: Richard Marquand/USA/1985/109 mins/Dolby stereo Lps: Glenn Close, Jeff Bridges, Peter Coyote, Robert Loggia A tense courtroom thriller, with newspaper editor Jack Forrester (Jeff Bridges) on trial for the murder of his rich wife, found knifed to death along with her maid in what appears to be a ritual killing. Glenn Close is Teddy Barnes, the defence attorney who reluctantly takes on the case, and, against her better judgement, becomes emotionally involved with her client. Jagged Edge moves rapidly along, playing with expectations and assumptions. The court scenes, whilst dominating a considerable part of the film, are as exciting and dramatic as the most physical of thrillers, interspersed with Teddy's developing relationship with Jack and her doubts and insecurities about her job. As the story reaches its powerful, tantalising conclusion, the suspense becomes unbearable, the real identity of the murderer remaining undisclosed until the last few seconds of the film. And thr...

  Dir: Alfred Hitchcock/USA/1958/128 mins Lps: James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes In Rear Window James Stewart is the hero, but he is also a voyeur who watches his neighbours through binoculars. In Vertigo his degradation has reached more noticeable depths, as Hitchcock not only unravels a complex murder mystery but also traces the destruction of his hero by sexual obsession. Developing a fear of heights after failing to save a fellow police officer from falling during a rooftop chase, John Ferguson (Stewart), now retired, is asked by a friend to keep an eye on his wife Madeleine, who seems to have developed suicidal obsessions over the death of an ances-tor. When his vertigo prevents him from following her up a tower, he is consumed by guilt on seeing her body fall from the top window. However, only halfway through the film, there is clearly more to the death than meets the eye; and a year later Ferguson glimpses a woman, Judy, who reminds him of Madeleine, and, obsessi...

  Dir: Alfred Hitchcock/USA/1954/112 mins Lps: James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter, Raymond Burr James Stewart plays an adventurous wheelchair-bound news photographer who occupies his time, to avoid discussing marriage with his girlfriend (Grace Kelly), by observing his neighbours across the courtyard. Hitchcock's film magic makes us wonder who's watching us, watching Stewart and Kelly, watching their neighbours! Stewart's maid, played by Thelma Ritter, is our conscience, explaining how "We've become a race of peeping toms." Yet, when she leaves at the end of each day, we continue to peep through Stewart's binoculars at each apartment, seemingly set up like a television showroom, with all 40 sets switched on to a different channel. Hitchcock uses Rear Window to define voyeurism and to make us ponder the morality of looking in on other peoples' lives. Yet, we don't really do this until we (Stewart and the audience) see something that we'r...

Until recently, two of Hitchcock's movies, Rear Window and Vertigo , were unavailable, due to copyright problems. Yet they represent the peak of his career, containing themes and elements recurring throughout his films. From Hitchcock's first movies to his last, he presents characters under crisis, most memorably in the crisis of madness. Back in the 30s and 40s they fit very much into the moulds of totally good, sweet heroes, yet, by the end of his career, they had developed through the ambiguity of Cary Grant in Suspicion to the anti-heroes of his later films, epitomised in Anthony Perkins' murderous schizophrenic in Psycho . In Rear Window and Vertigo James Stewart's characters are still the heroes, rooting out the murderers, yet there is something distinctly dark and almost perverted in their heroism, which arises out of either a voyeuristic or a sexual obsession. The accusation of a particular form of sexual obsession can be thrown at Hitchcock himself. His treat...