DVD/150: MOVIE STAR: THE SECRET LIVES OF JEAN SEBERG (Garry McKee / Kelly Rundle, 2020)

Garry McKee and film-makers Kelly and Tammy Rundle started MOVIE STAR in 2007, based around McKee's 1991 interview with Seberg's sister Mary Ann. Their 2014 film has now been revised for a DVD release, a definite labour of love.

It easily eclipses the biopic SEBERG which made up it's own lies to show how Jean was ruined by lies.

 

It shows how Jean, aged 17, was chosen by Otto Preminger to star in ST JOAN, and how that instant celebrity backfired when her two Preminger-directed films failed.

 

But after starring in Godard's A BOUT DE SOUFFLE, Jean became sought after in European and American films.

 

 

But in 1970, the FBI started a covert smear operation against her after she financially supported the Black Panthers.  A planted Newsweek story questioning the parentage of her expected baby led to Jean miscarrying.  In 1979, Jean was found dead aged only 40.

Shelf or charity shop? A definite keeper - well I am in the end credits for helping support it.  McKee and the Rundles' tenacity in getting MOVIE STAR made and distributed is to be applauded as the result is visually appealing and stimulating in it's recounting the rollercoaster short life of one of my favourite actresses.  Owing to Jean's instant fame in 1957, the film-makers can tell Jean's story through a wide range of film clips, tv interviews, photographs, and newspaper & magazine cuttings.  They also have the good fortune to have McKee's interviews with Mary Ann Seberg (interviewed only 12 years after Jean's death, Mary Ann's emotions are all too understandable), Marshaltown contemporaries and others including BONJOUR TRISTESSE co-star Mylene Demongeot, Jean's first husband Francois Moreuil and a remarkably frank contribution from former Black Panther leader Elaine Brown.  The constant presence of Jean's Iowa background seems odd at first but it slowly evolves into another fascinating story of how small-town Marshaltown became ambivalent towards her, her European lifestyle and her lifelong activism for disadvantaged people while Jean, in local press interviews when returning to see her family, always talked up her career prospects, even in the late 1970s when her films became more obscure.  If you wish to support the last fundraising appeal to complete the DVD release, please click here - MOVIE STAR deserves to be seen.

 

DVD/150: CASQUE D'OR (Golden Marie) (Jacques Becker, 1952)

Jacques Becker only directed 12 feature films (and two halves - he quit one and was a replacement on another).  Despite this, he made three classics: the gangster film TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI, the prison escape film LE TROU and the Belle Epoque underworld romance CASQUE D'OR.

The film rightly won Simone Signoret her first BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Actress, she would go on to win two more.

She plays free-spirited Marie, whose lover is in a criminal gang run by venal Félix Leca who secretly desires Marie.

When the gang and girlfriends visit an outdoor dance hall, gang member Raymond meets Georges who he was in prison with once but Georges is now going straight working for a carpenter.  Marie and Georges are instantly attracted to each other, triggering a chain of events which brings tragedy to all.

Serge Reggiani and Claude Dauphin lead an excellent supporting cast.

Shelf or charity shop? Now in the limbo of a plastic storage box, CASQUE D'OR is worth keeping.  Jacques Becker had been Jean Renoir's assistant director on nine films in the 1930s including PARTIE DE CAMPAGNE (in which he also briefly appeared) and in CASQUE D'OR's opening scene in the outdoor dance hall and the later rural sequence where Marie and Georges escape Paris for a few days, you can see his influence.  Beautifully invoking Impressionist imagery both in town and country scenes, the film failed at the French box-office but was one of the main reasons why Becker was championed by the later French New Wave directors. One to treasure... especially for the way Becker lifted his grim final sequence with a touching coda.

DVD/150: FRANKENSTEIN (James Whale, 1931)

When DRACULA became a huge hit, Universal Pictures wanted another Gothic horror film so chose Mary Shelley's 1818 novel FRANKENSTEIN, already filmed three times during the silent era.

Universal had the rights to a 1927 stage version which formed the film's basis, only Shelley's premise remains.

 

FRANKENSTEIN's huge success confirmed Universal as *the* horror studio.  It's sequel THE BRIDE OF... is a rare instance of a sequel being better than the original, but susequent films dwindled into tawdry retreads.  After Universal, Hammer had a seven film run which also repeated declining quality.

 

 

Actor Bela Lugosi and director Robert Florey were first choices but after some make-up tests they were ousted when Univeral offered it to British director James Whale for only his third film.

Despite creakiness and Colin Clive's over-wrought Victor Frankenstein, Whale's influential film still delivers. with unsettling imagery that continues to haunt us down the decades.

Shelf or charity shop? A re-animated keeper.  If ever a performance can be said to have been iconic it's Boris Karloff's Creature: thanks to Jack Pierce's extraordinary make-up Karloff gave us a timeless Creature. Despite the diluting of the image down the years, his actual performance is still fantastic. Scenes that have stayed with me down the years: the tilted perspective of the opening graveyard scene, Karloff's first appearance walking backwards towards us, the fizzes and crackles of the laboratory equipment during the re-animation, the towering film sets, the knife-edge tension of the Creature playing with Little Maria by the lake, Mae Clarke's Elizabeth draped across her bed echoing Fuseli's "The Nightmare" and the moment in the mill where Victor and the Creature's faces are seen together through the spinning machinary.

DVD/150: SPITE MARRIAGE (Edward Sedgwick / Buster Keaton (uncredited), 1929)

It is sadly ironic that Buster Keaton's THE GENERAL is now considered his greatest film but in 1926 it's box-office failure meant his following films saw his creative imput restricted by greater studio interference.

SPITE MARRIAGE was his last silent film and the second under a new MGM contract.  Buster wanted it to have sound but MGM didn't want to pay for the expensive new process just for a Keaton film.

 

It's frustrating to see him so constrained but every so often, genius breaks through.

 

Dry-cleaner Elmer borrows his customers' suits to be in the front-row every night to see the actress Trilby Drew, who he adores but she loves her leading man.

 

 

But when he rejects her, Trilby proposes to Elmer to spite the actor.

 

 

After a disasterous wedding night, her manager insists she leave Elmer - but you never know when you will need a hero...

 

 

Shelf or charity shop? A keeper for Buster even if the film is not worthy of his talents.  The last third of the film where Elmer and Trilby are trapped on a yacht over-run with smugglers harks back to his 1924 classic THE NAVIGATOR but runs out of steam.  Compensations are Buster's sweet performance, his excellent leading lady Dorothy Sebastian (they had a brief affair off-screen) and wonderful set-pieces that hint at possibilities not pursued: Elmer wrecking the play that Trilby stars in after replacing a supporting actor and, the high-point of the film, Elmer attempting to put a drunken Trilby to bed on their wedding night. 

DVD/150: MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (Sidney Lumet, 1974)

The first of four EMI Agatha Christie starry adaptations of the 70s and 80s always brings back the thrill of seeing it on the big screen when first released.

 

Christie's 1934 classic has Hercule Poirot solving the brutal stabbing of a shady businessman on a snowbound train with the usual cross-section of probable and improbable suspects.

Sidney Lumet was always a fine director of actors and here he orchestrates his cast into a wonderful ensemble.

It is almost an anti-thriller: after the murder, there is no feeling of threat to the other characters, just the pleasure of watching Albert Finney's dazzling Poirot question the other passengers one-by-one.

Lumet offered Ingrid Bergman the role of Princess Dragomiroff - after Dietrich said no - but she chose instead the smaller role of the missionary.  He filmed her 5 minute scene in one take - and she won an Oscar for it!

Shelf or charity shop? Total shelf for Lumet's direction, Geoffrey Unsworth's cinematography, Tony Walton's production design and costumes, Richard Rodney Bennett's score and of course that cast!  Pauline Kael, in her New Yorker review, called it a film full of 'turns' which is, of course, the pleasure of watching it.  Personal favourites are Bergman, Finney, John Gielgud's disdainful manservant, and Vanessa Redgrave who has never seemed so relaxed and playful.  Sadly, it would be a lonely cast reunion with only four of the seventeen main cast members still alive at time of writing.  A special mention too for the unnerving montage intro that lingers in the mind as the film progresses and the blue-lit murder scene.