Monthly Archives: December 2018

  • Hell Is a City

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Val Guest (1960)

    This British crime thriller is an interesting hybrid and, at this distance in time, period piece.  It’s a Hammer Films production whose style and content are far removed from gothic horror.  The title isn’t the only hint of Hollywood-derived noir aspiration.  Val Guest’s film has a flavour too of the nascent British New Wave (Look Back in Anger and Room at the Top had appeared the previous year).  The titular city is Manchester, the film was shot on location there and the police investigation occasionally takes the action up into the moors above the metropolis.   It’s startling to see this landscape a few years before the Moors Murders made it notorious and familiar on television news.  (Guest’s film is in black-and-white, which reinforces the link with one’s memory of that TV footage.)  The year of Hell Is a City’s release also saw the passing of the Betting and Gambling Act that legalised off-course bookmakers, and gambling, on the cusp of that change, features strongly in the story.  The two elements combine in a remarkable scene, out on moorland, where a traditional reguonal form of gaming takes place.  This ‘tossing school’, in which money from the street robbery that sets the film’s main plot in motion changes hands, brings to mind the gambling episode in Ted Kotcheff’s later Wake in Fright (1971).  Val Guest’s is visually more powerful, though, not least because groups of figures in this particular terrain evoke police teams combing Saddleworth Moor.

    The source material is a 1954 novel by Maurice Procter, one of a series of police procedurals he wrote featuring the detective Harry Martineau.  (Procter was himself a serving police officer when he started his writing career.)  Val Guest did the adaptation and it’s a neatly constructed screenplay.   After escaping from prison, recidivist criminal Don Starling (John Crawford), with the help of his sidekicks (Joby Blanshard and Charles Morgan), robs a bookmaker (Donald Pleasence) by ambushing two of his employees en route to the bank with the bookie’s winnings.  The gang abducts the girl employee (Lois Daine); in the getaway car, Starling hits her with a cosh to keep her quiet and inadvertently kills her.  The highly experienced Martineau (Stanley Baker) makes use of his various local contacts to help track the gang down.  Starling is eventually arrested, after a climactic showdown between him and Martineau.  In a virtual postscript to the main action, the latter watches people gathered outside the prison where Starling is hanged for murder – another reminder of exactly when this film was made (a few years before the suspension of capital punishment that preceded its formal abolition with effect from 1970).

    Compact and well paced, Hell Is a City has good cops-and-robbers action sequences supplemented by scenes that offer a sometimes strikingly frank illustration of relations between police and those on the wrong side of the law – eapecially an interview between Martineau and a dodgy publican (George A Cooper).  The edgy, jazzy music by Stanley Black is a creditable attempt to import music typical of contemporary American urban dramas.  The personnel, for the most part, impart a more homely quality to proceedings:  the film is stocked with character actors familiar from British films and television of the era.  They include, as well as some of those already mentioned, Vanda Godsell, Peter Madden and Russell Napier.  Doris Speed pops up briefly as a hospital sister – perhaps the last time she appeared on screen before she became Annie Walker (Coronation Street started in December 1960).  Billie Whitelaw, in an early role as the bookie’s wife, hardly comes into this category of actor but she makes a strong impression.  The villain of the piece is a different matter and unsatisfactory.  As Starling, John Crawford gives a wooden performance.  His accent is stuck somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean.

    Stanley Baker, charismatic but always credible, holds everything together.  The cynical but still committed Harry Martineau makes a better job of his professional life than his private one.  Although Val Guest’s direction is less assured in the marital misery bits and Maxine Audley awkwardly overwrought as Martineau’s wife, Baker is so thoroughly inside his character that he seems to carry the residue of domestic rows into the office with him.  The spectacular but protracted rooftop climax reminded me of the church steeple finale of John Guillermin’s Town on Trial (1957), another film that strained for Hollywood dynamism.  But Stanley Baker makes it matter that Martineau comes out on top.  In the closing sequences, he walks through Manchester streets at night and exchanges a few words with the prostitute who approaches him.  It’s a nicely diminuendo ending – one that returns Martineau and his heroism to a convincing reality.

    2 December 2018

  • Shoplifters

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Manbiki Kazoku

    Hirokazu Kore-eda (2018)

    The Japanese title of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner translates literally as ‘Shoplifting Family’ and the second word is at least as important as the first.  Family life and dynamics have been Kore-eda’s priority since Still Walking (2008).  (Perhaps for even longer – I don’t yet know his earlier films.)  By the time he made Our Little Sister (2015), his oeuvre was becoming a series of permutations on the ties and tensions between kin or in extended families.  The stories were consistently engaging but the approach was repetitive, verging on mechanical.  In his next two films, After the Storm (2016) and especially The Third Murder (2017), Kore-eda, while continuing to explore parent-child bonds, was pushing to move beyond the largely domestic settings of his previous work.  Shoplifters is his most successful attempt yet to integrate an abiding interest in personal relationships with appraisal of the outside world that influences his characters’ lives.

    In Like Father, Like Son (2013), Kore-eda considered the relative strength of links between children and their biological versus their de facto parents.  Shoplifters dramatises a similar theme more subtly.  The group at the centre of the story live as a family but are not blood relations.  Osamu (Lily Franky) and his partner Nobuyo (Sakura Ando) live in a poky, frowsty shack in a rundown area of present-day Tokyo, along with twentyish Aki (Mayu Matsuoka) and pre-adolescent Shota (Kairi Jō).  The shack is the property of the elderly Hatsue (Kirin Kiki).  At the start of the story, all the other adults are in work but it’s ‘grandmother’ Hatsue who in effect supports the household through her pension.  It’s not clear when Aki, who works at a hostess club, joined the ménage but Hatsue regularly visits the young woman’s comfortably off parents, to obtain money from them:  Aki’s father is the son of Hatsue’s late ex-husband and his second wife.  It emerges that Osamu and Nobuyo took in Shota as a child when they found him alone in his parents’ car.  Osamu is a part-time construction worker until an ankle injury puts him out of action; Nobuyo has a job in an industrial laundry, until she loses it.  Even before they stop earning, however, they need to find other ways to make ends meet.  So Nobuyo picks pockets at the laundry and Osamu shoplifts.  He has taught Shota his technique and the film opens with the pair of them stealing food from a local store on a winter’s night.  On their way home, they come upon a young girl, freezing cold and apparently hiding.  This is Yuri (Miyu Sasaki), who becomes the latest addition to the unusual family.

    The film moves slowly in its early stages and the shoplifting goes undiscovered for a surprisingly long time.  But Shoplifters builds, through three key events, to potent drama.  Yuri’s disappearance becomes a news story; a work colleague at the laundry recognises the child and in effect blackmails Nobuyo into quitting her job (the colleague gets extra working hours as a result).  When Hatsue dies in her sleep, Osamu and Nobuyo secretly bury her body under the shack:  by not reporting her death, they can continue to draw her pension.  After stealing oranges from a grocery, Shota is pursued by staff from the shop.  The chase ends when he jumps from a bridge, breaks his leg and is taken to hospital.  Subsequent police inquiries bring about the end to Osamu’s and Nobuyo’s household.  Hatsue’s death comes to light.  Yuri is returned to her birth mother.  Shota is taken into care.  To allow Osamu the chance to work, Nobuyo takes the blame for their wrongdoings and goes to prison.  Their offences turn out to be even more serious than we had realised:  years ago, the couple were also responsible for the death of Nobuyo’s abusive husband.

    Kore-eda is too interested in the personalities and interactions of the principals to indulge in easy judgments of them.  Osamu and Nobuyo have abducted youngsters yet raised them in a loving, secure environment that the birth parents of these ‘adopted’ children variously failed to provide.  Neither Shota nor Yuri goes to school; other than giving the boy a few words of sex education, Osamu, as he eventually and ashamedly admits to the authorities, is ill equipped to teach the kids anything but shoplifting.  His moral justification for stealing from stores is that an article on sale doesn’t, until it’s purchased, belong to anyone.  Nobuyo assures Shota that the thefts are harmless so long as shops don’t go out of business as a result.  When one of their usual haunts does just that, it’s an important stage in Shota’s enlightenment and growing misgivings about the life he’s part of, and especially the responsibility he’s given to teach Yuri how to steal.

    Those misgivings are conveyed without undue stress but incisively.  The boy uneasily resists Osamu’s encouragement to see him as his father and Yuri as his sister.  When Osamu breaks into a vehicle in a car park, it not only alarms Shota that this is a different level of theft but also gives him an idea of how Osamu and Nobuyo might have ‘rescued’ him from his parents’ car in the first place.  When he and Osamu visit her in jail, Nobuyo gives Shota the make and registration of the car from which he was taken so that Shota can if he wants try to trace his birth parents.  In the last part of the film, Shota, against the rules of his new, institutional home, extends a day visit to Osamu to an overnight stay.  During the visit, Osamu admits that, when Shota was in hospital, the rest of the family tried but failed to make a quick getaway from Hatsue’s shack in the hope of evading justice:  in other words, the social services officers weren’t wrong when they told Shota that Osamu and Nobuyo were prepared to abandon him.  Just before they part company, Shota tells Osamu that, when he stole the oranges, he wanted to be caught in order to bring things to a head.

    Kore-eda’s clear-eyed but sympathetic attitude towards his main characters extends to minor ones too, although he draws the line at child abuse.  When they take Yuri in, Nobuyo and Hatsue see that the little girl has scars on her body.  (So has Nobuyo herself – one reason why Yuri bonds with her.)  A scene between Yuri and her birth mother, after the child has returned to her, is uncharacteristically harsh and narrow – the mother is emphatically a nasty piece of work.  The film doesn’t, however, have it in for those who mean well even though their actions may cause distress.  The social services people, for example, aren’t presented as rule-bound or inhumane.  Kore-eda achieves something unusual in Shoplifters.  He manages to critique contemporary Japan, specifically the consequences of an unusually prolonged period of economic stagnation, without attaching the blame (as Ken Loach often does) to individual human representatives of social or political malaise.

    As in Like Father, Like Son, Lily Franky is wonderful with the children in the cast.  A difference between Shoplifters and Kore-eda’s other recent films comes in the displays of physical intimacy between Osamu and Nobuyo, achieved remarkably easily and convincingly by Franky and Sakura Ando.   (As might be expected on their low income, the household’s diet consists largely of noodles and they make plenty of noise sucking them from plate to mouth:  in one scene, Osamu and Nobuyo turn this into a kind of comic foreplay.)  Sakura Ando is very affecting when Nobuyo, under police questioning, quietly weeps.  On a rare family day trip, to the seaside, Hatsue has a few moments alone.  She contemplates her aged legs, looks out towards the sea and mouths ‘thank you’ – to the rest of her ‘family’ at the edge of the water, and for her life.  When she next appears on screen, she’s dead.  Though her character is feisty, there are moments in Shoplifters when Kirin Kiki has a soft, almost childlike look.  She died in September 2018, after years of ill health, at the age of seventy-five.  I’m not sure if Kore-eda knew during shooting this would be be Kiki’s swansong.  In retrospect anyway, that seashore moment comes across as the writer-director too saying thanks, to a fine actress who has regularly graced his movies.  The simple dignity of this farewell – a moment in and out of the film – is almost too perfect.  But this viewer shares Kore-eda’s gratitude to Kirin Kiki, and feels grateful to him for expressing it.

    28 November 2018

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