Monthly Archives: April 2016

  • The Dam Busters

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Anderson (1955)

    On the Time Out website, there’s a short, snotty piece about The Dam Busters in which the reviewer, Derek Adams, scoffs that ‘you can just imagine audiences back then cheering the screen at the sight of the first dam blowing, and being wholly impressed by the hilariously elementary special effects’.  A comment on Rotten Tomatoes – an ‘audience review’ rather than a critic’s – reckons ‘This isn’t a bad movie, it’s just boring, it would work better as a documentary or something because as a narrative film it’s too boring’.  This latter opinion deserves more attention than Derek Adams’s but it ignores the picture’s context.  It was important in the aftermath of World War II for people to be able to celebrate what the armed forces did to win it.  Cinema-goers in 1955 would mostly have been too impressed by the heroism of the RAF’s 617 Squadron to pay much attention to special effects, hilarious or otherwise.  I’d guess those behind The Dam Busters intended to create, at least as much as a drama, an admiring historical record of the attacks on the Ruhr Valley dams – recognising and probably sharing the prospective audience’s desire not to be distracted by, for example, concentration on individual character or romantic sub-plots.  The list of credits includes what look to be scrupulously correct details of the various military initials of the men portrayed in the film or who advised on its production.  Yet if The Dam Busters had been a straightforward documentary, it wouldn’t have sold as many tickets as it did.  This was the most popular picture of its year at British box offices.

    The screenplay by R C Sherriff, drawn from the books The Dam Busters by Paul Brickhill and Guy Gibson’s autobiographical Enemy Coast Ahead, is functional and it’s quite possible that, if Sherriff and Michael Anderson had set out to make a dramatically more complex and nuanced movie, they would have struggled to do so.  Sherriff’s script is creaky when he attempts conventional theatrical dialogue:  this is particularly noticeable in a sequence in which the exasperated Barnes Wallis runs through the various powers-that-be that he’s tried to persuade to support experiments with his bouncing bomb.  In the early stages, the perfunctory characterisation of government and military top brass seems merely a shortcoming and Michael Redgrave’s richer portrait of Barnes Wallis is a godsend.  But Anderson’s taut direction enables the film’s impersonal tone to become more expressive.  It goes beyond stiff upper lip cliché and connects with the necessary attitude of the RAF pilots:  to shut feelings out and treat the daring bombing raids as a job to be done.  Anderson’s description of the restless boredom of the pilots in the hours leading up to the first raids is economical and eloquent.  Once this momentum has developed, Redgrave threatens to become too actorish but he comes good again in the scenes in the control room, as Wallis and others anxiously await news from the pilots.  Anderson’s cross-cutting between the control room and the exciting flying sequences is very effective.

    Richard Todd was no great shakes as an actor but the modesty of his talent is fused here with a modest approach to playing – and commemorating – Guy Gibson, which works well.  The cast also includes, among many others, Basil Sydney (as Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris), Ursula Jeans (Mrs Wallis), Patrick Barr, Ernest Clark, Derek Farr, John Fraser, Harold Goodwin, Raymond Huntley, Bill Kerr, Richard Leech and Robert Shaw.  The relatively few moments of personal emotion in The Dam Busters are powerful:  Wallis’s tetchiness and his outbursts of quickly mastered excitement in the control room; Guy Gibson noticing the scratch marks on his office door made by his dog, which has just been killed by a car; Gibson’s calm final words to Wallis that he has ‘a few letters to write’ – to the relatives of the men who’ve died in the Ruhr or on their return home – and his walk away from the camera.  The poignancy of this is greater because Gibson himself was killed, at the age of twenty-six, in 1944.  Also more rationed than you’d expect, so famous has it become, is Eric Coates’s ‘Dam Busters March’.

    The one obvious emotional bond in the film is between Gibson and his black labrador retriever.  My (early teenage?) memory of The Dam Busters was that it was a sad story because the dog was killed on the afternoon before the night of the raids, and Gibson, although of course he isn’t upset in a tearful way when his batman tells him the bad news, clearly takes it hard.   The dog’s name, ‘Nigger’ (also the codename for one of the dams being targeted), has, to put it mildly, aged badly.  Derek Adams ‘can’t help but notice … how the word … could be bandied about with such jaw-dropping nonchalance’.  Autres temps, autres moeurs, Derek.  Press coverage a few years ago of the planned (still awaited) remake of The Dam Busters under the auspices of Peter Jackson, and with a screenplay by Stephen Fry, focused on the renaming of Gibson’s dog as ‘Digger’.  A new name will certainly be required but Jackson and Fry had better take note that, according to the online Free Dictionary, ‘digger’ has been used not only as a nickname for Australasian soldiers but ‘as a disparaging term, especially in the 19th century, for a member of any of various Native American peoples of the Great Basin, such as the Utes, Paiutes, and Western Shoshones’.

    1 January 2014

  • Midnight Special

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jeff Nichols (2016)

    Spoiler warning:  This note reveals plot details which I may have got entirely wrong …

    In this, his fourth, feature, Jeff Nichols seems to be trying to fuse ESP/ET elements and believable familial drama.  He attempted something similar in his second feature, Take Shelter, but the troubled state of mind of that film’s protagonist kept the audience uncertain as to whether his visions amounted to clairvoyance or paranoid fantasies.  In Midnight Special, the supernatural abilities of Alden, the eight-year-old boy at the centre of the story, are experienced by other people:  the beams of piercing blue light that his eyes keep emitting appear to be an objective reality.   An investigating officer from the National Security Agency, initially sceptical, is convinced that Alden is (as the boy says he is) from another, superior world – to which the child eventually returns.

    Nichols’s ambition is admirable and I’m loth to admit how disappointed I was by Midnight Special.  It’s almost a relief that part of that disappointment comes from failing to get the film at the most basic level.  The migraine-threatening flashing lights forced me to keep closing my eyes.  I doubt I could make out a tenth of what was being said – a real regret, given the usual quality of Nichols’s dialogue.  However, these sensory obstacles, because they mean that I can’t do justice to the movie, also allow me to hope that it’s better than it seemed.  This could be a vain hope, though.  The $18m production budget for Midnight Special is greater than the aggregate costs of Nichols’s three other films – and it shows, not always in a good way.  A vast CGI landscape of the super-terrestrial plane, which eventually appears, has a mainstream science-fiction expectedness.  This ensures a finale that’s anti-climactic as well as protracted.  I got the sense that the sci-fi and chase-movie genre trappings of the piece were increasingly obstructing what Jeff Nichols has previously done well.  The film has naturally been compared with Close Encounters of the Third Kind and ET but Steven Spielberg, for all his technical skills, has always been relatively simple-minded in dealing with human relationships.  It was this, in combination with Spielberg’s visual imagination, which helped Close Encounters and ET to work so well.  They came over as single-minded too.

    There are good things in Midnight Special.   The film begins with Texas television news reports of Alton’s disappearance.   A man called Roy Tomlin is wanted by the police in connection with this.  The TV news is being watched by two men, one of them Roy (Michael Shannon).  His accomplice (Joel Edgerton) is called Lucas – a state trooper and a friend of Roy since childhood.   The boy Alden (Jaeden Lieberher) is with the pair.  Our expectations of the behaviour of child abductors and their victims are quickly confounded:  Roy, in particular, is kindly protective of the boy.  It transpires that Alden is his son and that they’ve been living as part of a religious cult in rural Texas.  The cult leader Calvin Meyer (Sam Shepard), who has recognised Alden’s out-of-this-world powers, wants him back, and quickly.  An early sequence in Meyer’s office captures nicely the blurred line between running a religion and running a business.

    Roy’s first destination with Alden is the home of the boy’s mother, Sarah (Kirsten Dunst), who hasn’t seen her child in years – it seems Sarah has never been a member of the cult.  Roy (who shares his name with the Richard Dreyfuss character in Close Encounters) and Lucas (who shares his name with George) intend then to get Alton to an as yet unknown location by a specific date.  Cult members believe that, on this fast approaching day, a supernatural event will occur.   In the course of their search for Alton, the FBI also do some investigating of the cult.  The NSA man Paul Sevier (Adam Driver) explains that Meyer’s sermons and the dates on which they were delivered, according to Alton’s prophecies, are encoded with secret government information, communicated by satellite.  Shared concerns about Alton on the part of agencies both secular and non-secular, a possible connection between the Bible Belt mindset and a capacity to believe in (in Jung’s phrase) ‘things seen in the sky’ – these themes give Midnight Special a promising dramatic basis.  But things either don’t come to fruition or I couldn’t follow how they came to fruition.

    The actors’ skills and Nichols’s skill in directing actors aren’t wholly submerged.   He gets a good performance from Jaeden Lieberher as the pale, worried-looking Alton.  Lieberher’s naturalness gives the extraordinary boy an appealing vulnerability.  Kirsten Dunst plays Alton’s mother straightforwardly and well, although the narrowness of the role means that Dunst inevitably has to do brave-faced melancholy over and over.  Joel Edgerton’s face is more expressive than usual but he’s the hardest of all to hear (it’s particularly frustrating that he drops his voice midway through a line so you never get the end).  As the dapper cult leader, Sam Shepard is, as usual, quietly compelling – too quietly on this occasion, though:  he runs Edgerton a close second in the inaudibility stakes.  Adam Driver gives Paul Sevier a good balance of awkward wit and contained astonishment.  (I didn’t understand, when an army of FBI men and other officials want to interview Alden and he insists on talking to Sevier alone, how the latter then managed to smuggle the boy out of the building without any of these others noticing.)  Since Midnight Special is, for this Jeff Nichols fan, a change for the worse in several ways, it’s fortunate that the director still has Michael Shannon as his main man.  He has one of the most remarkable, emotionally eloquent faces in contemporary American cinema[1].  Eloquence is badly needed here.

    13 April 2016

    [1] For an excellent description of Shannon’s face (and head), see Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review of Midnight Special – http://tinyurl.com/zq5w4ea.

     

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