Film Reviews

  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...

  Dir: Philip Kaufman/USA/1978/115 mins/Dolby stereo Lps: Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Leonard Nimoy, Jeff Goldblum It has always been a basic fact of the film business that remakes of classic films always tend to be a disappointment. Nevertheless every year the hope for an exception keeps them coming out. Don Siegel's 1955 B-movie  Invasion of the Body Snatchers almost immediately became a classic science fiction movie of the 50s, picking up on the mood of the Cold War and Joe McCarthy's anti-Communist witch-trials; however its economy and insidious sense of paranoia are almost totally lost in Philip Kaufman's 70's remake. Whereas the original film made a virtue out of the claustrophobia of close-knit small-town community, accentuating the fear of conspiracy, the update moves the action to the bustle of San Francisco. Nevertheless the basic idea is still there, as two people notice how all their friends and relatives begin to change, somehow losing emotions and ex...

Dir: Wolfgang Petersen/USA/1985/108 mins/Dolby stereo  Lps: Dennis Quaid, Louis Gosset Jr, Bumper Robinson It is the 21st century. Mankind is travelling and colonising space, and has come into contact, and predictably conflict, with an alien life-form, the hermaphrodite reptiles from the planet Dracon. As a consequence of an aerial battle over Fyrine IV, a human and a Drac find themselves marooned on this wild and inhospitable planet. Traditionally enemies, they realise that their only hope of survival is to overcome their inbred hostility and help each other. The original concept of filming on a natural earthly barren waste was abandoned because of production difficulties, and transferred to a German studio under Wolfgang Petersen, who made his name as director of The Neverending Story . His artistry becomes apparent right from the opening sequence, and the film is full of spectacular and extremely realistic special effects - none of the Star Trek cardboard cutouts here! All of th...

Dir: Steven Spielberg/USA/154 mins/Dolby stereo Lps: Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover, Margaret Avery Adapting for the screen a novel as powerful as Alice Walker's Pulitzer prize-winning 'The Color Purple' lays a director open to all sorts of criticisms of trivialisation, especially when that director is Steven Spielberg. No doubt it was partly his reputation as well as the film's subject matter which caused it not to win any of its 11 Oscar nominations in 1986. The harsh conditions of life for a black family in   Georgia during the first half of the century form the backdrop to the story. It centres around Miss Celie who, after her children have been taken away by her 'Pa', is married off at 14 to a brutal and selfish farmer. However it is through her relationship with an old flame of her husband's, Shug Avery, that Celie begins her journey of discovery, from passive submission to proud self-emancipation. Despite the fact that certain elements in the novel are...

Dir: Wim Wenders/W. Germany/France/1984/148 mins/  Dolby stereo Lps: Harry Dean Stanton, Nastassja Kinski, Dean  Stockwell Wim Wenders has long been recognised as the prime exponent of the 'road movie', and in his latest film he has created what must be the ultimate manifestation of that genre. Travis is a lone figure in an alien landscape. He appears to have no memory, and never speaks. After stumbling into an isolated town, his brother Walt collects him. On the road to Los Angeles, Travis's tongue loosens, and the threads of his memory begin to knit together. Reunited with his son after many years, Travis sets off once again to find the boy's mother. This is a densely layered film, adapted from 'Motel  Chronicles' by Sam Shepard. It investigates 'the demonic attachment of a man for his only woman' and, on the surface, that is what the film is about. It is also a touching study of a father- son relationship, the elements of which give the film some of i...

Dir: Joseph Losey/GB/1970/116 mins Lps: Alan Bates, Julie Christie, Dominic Guard, Michael  Redgrave "The past is a foreign country. They may do things differently there" is the resounding line that reverberates throughout The Go-Between , and from the moment it is spoken, the film continues by thrusting the past and present violently together, juxtaposing them with jarring and bitter conclusions. The past is a stately home at the turn of the century. A 12-year-old boy, Leo, innocent and trusting, unwittingly becomes the secret courier of letters between a friend's sister and a local farmer (Julie Christie and Alan Bates), lovers constrained by the strictures of Victorian sensibilities and society. Matters run an inevitable, destructive course, and the present, interspersed with the past, gradually reveals the effects of the sexual laws on all those involved, as well as the changeability of love and human nature over a period of over half a century. As Leo, Dominic Guard ...

A couple of weeks into the Autumn Term a university women's group approached us to ask if we could put on a women-only screening of   Desert Hearts , which had been released a couple of years earlier but not widely shown (this was before the age of the multiplex and even in Manchester there weren't that many screens). We agreed and our Chair, a lovely gentle man who was an expert projectionist after ]years doing the job, went to discuss the screening with them. Except he didn't. Not only was he prohibited from entering the Women's Office in the Union building, he had to stand at the end of the corridor to have the discussion.  The women-only screening, he was told, must have a female projectionist and there were to be no men present in the projection box or the Film Society office behind it. He explained that at the time (only a few weeks into the academic year) the society had no women projectionists, but this was apparently irrelevant. I had done about 2 weeks' tr...

Dir: Carl Reiner/USA/1984/91 mins Lps: Steve Martin, Lily Tomlin, Victoria Tennant Steve Martin plays a 38-year-old frustrated jazz musician, Roger Cobb, who is persuaded to give up his main love, music, in the hope of becoming a partner in the law firm he works for. Setting out to prove himself, he comes up against Lily Tomlin as the permanently crippled, dying and fairly obnoxious Edwina Cutwater. The problems start when Edwina explains that she intends to move her soul into the beautiful, young and healthy body of her stableman's daughter (with the daughter's co-operation) and so gain part of life she has never experienced. However accidents will happen, and Edwina's soul becomes lost in the transfer, eventually ending up as cohabit-er in Cobb's confused body. If this were not a Steve Martin film it probably wouldn't work at all. However it does work, thanks mainly to Martin's wonderful impersonation of the archetypal schizophrenic: a person originally male, ...

Dir: Richard Benjamin/USA/1985/91 mins/Dolby stereo  Lps: Shelley Long, Tom Hanks, Alexander Godunov, Maureen Stapleton Walter Fielding and his girlfriend, Anna Crowley, are contentedly plodding on through life when their peace is shattered by the inconvenience of being evicted from the apartment in which they are living. This is caused by the premature return of its owner who, not by any coincidence, happens to be Anna's ex-husband. Luckily(?) a well-timed opportunity of a 'bargain dreamhouse' arises, which Walter and Anna cannot resist. But the dream soon starts becoming a nightmare, as assorted bits of house fall apart. From this point an hilarious sequence of chaos ensues in a bid to restore the house to its former glory. The storyline of The Money Pit may be a little thin, as it is really no more than an excuse for a farcical series of events; but Richard Benjamin gets away with it, keeping the comedy rolling at such a cracking pace that your ribs will barely have tim...

Dir: James Ivory/GB/1985/117 mins/Dolby stereo Lps: Maggie Smith, Helena Bonham-Carter, Julian Sands, Daniel Day Lewis If you hated A Passage to India forgive E.M. Forster immediately, for the second of his books to be made into a film is a great success. The scene is Florence, 1907. Miss Lucy Honeychurch, with her aunt and chaperone Charlotte, arrive at their hotel and unfortunately find their room unsatisfactory (no view). The problem is solved by the socially inept Mr Emerson and his son George who offer to swap. The story becomes more complicated as love, Victorian social values and interfering relatives make their appearance. The photography throughout is beautiful (definitely a film to make you want to go on holiday) and the acting is superb. The two main actors, Helena Bonham-Carter and Julian Sands, have difficult jobs in not making their characters too stereotypical. Luckily, Lucy and George are just whimsical enough to enjoy without without becoming pathetic. Especially watc...

  Dir: Alex Cox/USA/1984/92 mins Lps: Harry Dean Stanton, Emilio Estevez In an anonymous part of the American desert, a 1964 Chevy Malibu is swerving all over an otherwise deserted road. Deserted, that is, apart from a lone patrolman who pulls the car over and asks what the boot holds. "Oh," replies the driver, a deranged scientist with a shortage of good eyes, "you don't want to look in there." Said patrolman ignores the warning only to discover... This bizarre opening scene sets the tone for this equally bizarre, and stunningly original, film debut of British director Alex Cox. It follows LA punk Otto (Estevez), recruited into the seedy business of car repossession by Bud (Stanton). These two pursue the Malibu for its financial worth, but they are not the only ones with interest in the car, as an assortment of unusual characters have their own intentions for it. Words alone cannot do Repo Man justice, it has to be seen (and heard - there is a wonderful punk s...

Dir: John Hugh/GB/1986/92 mins/Dolby stereo Lps: Neil Dickson, Alex Hyde-White, Peter Cushing, Fiona Hutchinson Forget any notions of W E Johns' famous books. The characters are only loosely based on those in the original books and, with the exception of Biggles himself, are almost totally ignored. The story revolves around Jim Ferguson, ace American advertising man, Biggles 'time twin', and the strange phenomenon that when one is in dire peril, the other is wondrously transported through time to prevent death and disaster befalling the other. During the First World War, the Germans are about to perfect a fantastic new weapon which will ensure their victory. It is left to Jim, very American, very eighties and very out of his depth, to save the world. The mainstay of the storyline revolves around the time transport sequences, which always seem to occur at particularly inopportune moments. The transportee reappears in the same situation as that from which he was removed in hi...