Monthly Archives: May 2026

  • The Devil Wears Prada 2

    Old YorkerFilm review

    David Frankel (2026)

    In the 2010 edition of David Thomson’s revered The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, a recurring theme of Thomson’s entry for Meryl Streep is the gap between the esteem and the affection in which she’s held.  He notes at an early point that ‘The distinguished are sometimes those the public does not love’, then goes on to list nearly every one of Streep’s films to date, except The Devil Wears Prada (2006).  ‘Finding Herself’, a piece on Streep by Molly Haskell in the March-April 2008 issue of Film Comment[1], is more acute.  The article appeared shortly before Mamma Mia! hit cinemas but Haskell recognises that David Frankel’s fashionista comedy two years earlier had already made a difference to its star’s image.  The opening sentence of ‘Finding Herself’ is ‘After years of respecting the work of Meryl Streep, what was it that made audiences suddenly fall in love with her in The Devil Wears Prada?’  Molly Haskell goes on to answer that question humorously and persuasively.

    Twenty years on – just when it seemed Streep had almost retired from cinema (she hadn’t appeared in a film since Don’t Look Up (2021)) – she returns in The Devil Wears Prada 2.  The rest of the main cast from the first Prada – Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci – and the main contributors behind the camera, Frankel and screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna, are also back for more.  According to an article on the BBC news website, Streep and her co-stars agreed to do the sequel on the condition that it ‘speak to the moment’ and that ‘the storyline reflected the dramatic changes in the real-life media and magazine industry’.  This speaking-to-the-moment is the new film’s phoniest aspect.  Unlike its predecessor, it’s also very sentimental and feels interminable (though the actual difference in running time between the two films is only ten minutes).  Despite all this, Prada 2 provides a good few things to enjoy.

    At the end of the first film, Andrea ‘Andy’ Sachs (Hathaway) quits her job as assistant to Miranda Priestly (Streep), the dragon-lady editor-in-chief of New York City-based fashion magazine ‘Runway’ (aka Vogue), to pursue the career that Andy really wants as a ‘serious’ journalist.  Two decades later, Andy is a highly successful feature writer at ‘Vanguard’, a hard-news organ in NYC, respected for fearless investigative journalism.  Prada 2 starts with Andy at a press awards ceremony.  Just before her name is called as the winner in her category, her phone pings – ditto the phones of her colleagues:  every member of the Vanguard editorial team has received a text informing them they’ve been laid off with immediate effect.  Andy’s acceptance speech becomes an impromptu rant on the theme that ‘journalism still f***ing matters’ and it goes viral.  At the same time, Miranda Priestly, still in charge at Runway, is under fire from Irv Ravitz (Tibor Feldman), owner of the magazine‘s parent company, the publishing house Elias-Clarke.  Miranda failed to vet a Runway piece promoting a brand that relies on sweatshop labour – result:  terrible publicity all over social media.  Ravitz tells Miranda he’s putting on hold her appointment as Elias-Clarke’s ‘global head of content’.  To make matters worse for her, in the space of a few screen minutes Andy has a new job – back at Runway as features editor, without Miranda’s knowledge or consent.

    Skewering an impoverished media culture where the bottom line is all that counts, David Frankel and Aline Brosh McKenna make heavy weather of conveying the shift towards short-form journalism, clickbait, AI.  The film also tries to have things both ways.  The notoriously meticulous, gimlet-eyed Miranda of the original Prada wouldn’t have let that offending article slip through – so is she losing her edge?  Either that or her patience.  In the early stages, she’s shown as adrift in a 2020s world where Runway’s HR department constrains Miranda’s high-handed management style and politically incorrect remarks.  Yet the whole narrative tends towards giving her a happy ending – and the filmmakers can only imagine that to be her getting the big promotion, never mind that Miranda is now supposedly a misfit/anachronism.  As for Andy:  it would be easier to accept what happens at Vanguard as a tragic sign of the times if she showed the slightest regret for the journalism world she’s exiled from, but she doesn’t.  She eventually decides to write a no-punches-pulled biography of Miranda Priestly (with Miranda’s encouragement).  But the ending of Prada 2 sees Andy thriving and staying on at Runway.  She now, courtesy of Miranda, has a larger office than before.

    There are many more costume changes this time around.  Thanks to the first film’s huge success, international fashion houses were clearly queuing up for coverage on the clothes racks and catwalks of Prada 2:  costumer Molly Rogers has curated outfits from Armani, Balenciaga, Chanel, Dior, Tom Ford, Paco Rabanne, Schiaparelli, Valentino, Versace ….   There’s a cast-of-thousands in as-themselves cameos, among whom I’d both heard of and recognised only Naomi Campbell and Donatella Versace (I would have recognised Rory McIlroy if I’d spotted him).  Lady Gaga is a rather different matter:  she is herself, headlining the Runway gala at Milan Fashion Week, but the script invents a bit of supposed bad blood between her and Miranda, and Lady Gaga’s gala number does give proceedings a lift.  The opulence and A-list overload on display are amusing enough, but they make it hard for your heart to bleed for the characters in the story.  The sad feelings generated by the film relate not to decaying media culture but to its two lead actresses – though for rather different reasons.

    Anne Hathaway was riding very high in the early 2010s.  After winning an Oscar for performing a single number in Les Misérables (2012), she chose some films that didn’t fare well, critically or commercially, and her stock has fallen in recent years.  As it happens, Prada 2 arrives on the screen just a few weeks after David Lowery’s Mother Mary, in which Hathaway has her most remarked-on role in some time (though the reviews have been mixed and the film doesn’t appear to be making money).  You can’t help wondering if Hathaway would have signed up for a Prada sequel if her career had progressed according to plan during the last decade.  She has the most difficult of Prada 2’s main roles – Andy was more plausibly conflicted in the first film than she is here – but Hathaway is very competent.  Even so, there’s an overeagerness not only in the character but also in the woman playing her.  This can be a bit uncomfortable to watch.

    The sadness with Meryl Streep comes simply from wondering, especially after that five-year hiatus, if this will be her last cinema appearance (she is voicing Aslan in Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew, scheduled for release next year).  Prada 2’s Miranda is a confused character compared with before.  In one sense, she’s a reversal of who she was in the first Prada.  There, Miranda was exposed (briefly) as vulnerable only in her private life.  This time, she’s in a happy second marriage, to a musician (Kenneth Branagh, with next to nothing to do), and professionally vulnerable instead.  It’s a bit disorienting at the start to see Miranda on the receiving end of a boss’s ire – and a relief when, on their first office (re)encounter, she cuts Andy dead, turns to her loyal adjutant Nigel Kipling (Stanley Tucci) and asks, sotto voce but scathing, ‘Who is this person?’

    As Molly Haskell pointed out in the Film Comment profile, Miranda ‘is a role that Streep could do in her sleep’.  Her reputation for mimicry means there are times in Prada 2 when Meryl Streep seems, weirdly, to be imitating Meryl Streep in the first film.  She might as well, though, especially when this new Miranda doesn’t add up:  Streep is aware of the audience goodwill towards outrageous Miranda, and the other Prada principals – that plenty of fans wanted to see these characters back and enjoy them all over again.  A month away from her seventy-seventh birthday, Meryl Streep looks great.  Her breath control and vocal projection are still top-class, notably when Miranda informs Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt), who is on the point of taking over Runway and firing her former boss, ‘You’re not a visionary – you’re a vendor’.

    Miranda’s promotion keeps getting derailed.  Irv Ravitz, about to announce it at his seventy-fifth birthday party, suddenly drops down dead.  His mercenary son Jay (B J Novak) inherits Elias-Clarke and brings in management consultants to identify cuts, before selling Runway to Silicon Valley billionaire Benji Barnes (Justin Theroux), currently in a relationship with Emily.  On her return to Runway, Andy goes up in Miranda’s estimation by securing an interview with reclusive celeb Sasha Barnes (Lucy Liu), also vastly wealthy and Benji’s ex-wife.  In due course, Andy convinces Sasha to buy the whole of Elias-Clarke from Jay Ravitz, who’s happy to sell and pulls out of his deal with Benji.  Miranda is finally confirmed as Elias-Clarke’s head of global brand – for what that’s worth.  She has already acknowledged to Andy that ‘Elias-Clarke is just the last piece of wood floating next to the Titanic’ (digital media is the iceberg).  But ‘there’s still room on the raft’ for Miranda and Andy, at least.  As in the previous film, they join forces to ensure that everything comes good for them both.  When Miranda finally confides in Andy that she’s grateful for ‘a couple more years’ because ‘boy, I love working.  I really do, I just love it’, the change in Meryl Streep’s voice leaves no doubt that it’s she, rather than Miranda Priestly, who’s saying and feeling those words.  Which makes the audience – this member of it anyway – feel grateful, too.

    All roads led to Paris in the first Prada; this time, it’s Milan that’s the venue for resolving the plot and showcasing the clothes.  Even though he’s coasting here, it’s nice to see Stanley Tucci more comfortable at this Italian summit than he was in Conclave (2024).  I wouldn’t have guessed from the 2006 film that Emily Blunt would enjoy more sustained success than Anne Hathaway in the twenty years to follow, but Blunt has chosen well and built up a strong body of work.  It comes as a surprise, too, that her Prada namesake turns up in this sequel as a senior Dior executive, but the ascent of Emily Charlton, as desperately self-assertive as ever, makes a kind of comic sense.  It seems a bit much when she also starts shaping up as the film’s arch villain, but Blunt is very coherent:  you never forget that Emily, though endlessly bossy, is doomed to failure.  The Milan episode goes on much too long; so does a succession of tying-things-up exchanges between pairs of the main quartet once the action returns to New York.  But the lunchtime reconciliation of vindicated Andy and vanquished Emily is a high point.

    Even though Andy’s personal life is more attenuated than in the first film, it’s a real plus that her new man, Peter, is played by Patrick Brammall, best known for the very engaging Australian TV comedy Colin from Accounts.  (He and his wife, Harriet Dyer, created and co-star in Colin from Accounts, and take turns writing the scripts.)  Brammall as Peter is witty and charming.  What’s more, he’s such a different type – physically and temperamentally – from the rest of the cast that his presence is refreshing.  In The Devil Wears Prada 2’s relentlessly glossy milieu, Patrick Brammall seems like a visitor from another planet – that’s to say, from a real world.

    6 May 2026

    [1] https://www.filmcomment.com/article/finding-herself-the-prime-of-meryl-streep/

     

  • The Fallen Idol

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Carol Reed (1948)

    Carol Reed made some good films before and during the Second World War (Bank Holiday (1938), Kipps (1941)) but the early post-war years were his heyday.  Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol and The Third Man arrived in consecutive years (1947-49), The Man Between just a few years later (1953).  (I’ve not seen Reed’s only intervening film, the 1952 adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s An Outcast of the Islands.)  He worked twice running with Graham Greene as screenwriter.  Although The Third Man is their more famous collaboration, I prefer The Fallen Idol – the standout in BFI’s selection for this month’s ‘Great Expectations: British Post-War Cinema 1945-1960’ season.

    The action takes place, over the course of one weekend, in and around an embassy in London’s Belgravia (the French embassy in all but name, certainly the embassy of a French-speaking country).  At the start of the film, the ambassador (Gerard Heinz) is about to leave for the airport, hoping to bring back to London his wife, who has been having hospital treatment abroad for several months.  The couple have an eight-year-old son, Philippe (Bobby Henrey), known as Phile, who is left for the weekend in the care of the embassy’s butler and housekeeper, a married couple.  Phile likes and admires affable, entertaining Baines (Ralph Richardson), loathes his killjoy wife (Sonia Dresdel).  Shortly after his father’s departure, and despite being confined to the nursery after incurring the wrath of Mrs Baines, Phile slips out of the embassy via the fire escape.  In a nearby street, he stops outside a teashop.  He sees through the window that Baines is inside, in urgent conversation with a young woman.  Phile calls out the butler’s name.  Startled, Baines hastily explains that his companion, Julie (Michèle Morgan), is his niece.

    Phile recognises Julie from the embassy, where she works as a typist.  He doesn’t know that she isn’t Baines’ niece or the real nature of their relationship.  Baines asks Phile not to mention the teashop meeting to Mrs Baines.  These are early instances of what will be The Fallen Idol‘s central pattern – of things the boy doesn’t understand, of lies the grown-ups tell him and secrets they urge him to keep.  The film’s audience can see immediately that Baines and Julie are having an affair:  a scene between them, just after Phile has taken them by surprise, makes clear that Julie has regretfully decided their relationship has no future, and is planning to sail abroad before the weekend’s out.  To try and change Julie’s mind, Baines that evening tells his wife he wants to end their marriage, but to no avail.  Soon afterwards, Mrs Baines prises out of Phile the information that her husband was in a teashop with his ‘niece’ – but Phile mustn’t let Baines know that she knows.  If he keeps this secret between them, says the housekeeper, she’ll buy Phile the new Meccano set he has his eye on.

    By next morning, Mrs Baines has left the embassy, supposedly to visit a relative, and Phile spends the day with Baines and Julie at London Zoo.  On their return home, a telegram is waiting:  Mrs Baines will be staying two more days with her ailing aunt.  In fact, she’s secretly in the embassy, where she spies on the trio’s ‘picnic’ evening meal, and game of hide-and-seek.  She first appears to Phile, waking him up in the nursery.  Once the boy alerts Baines, the latter tries to calm his furious wife, telling her to go downstairs so that they can talk.  Mrs Baines demands to know, from Phile then from her husband, where Julie is.  Getting no answer, she steps onto a ledge above the embassy staircase, to peer over a terrace and into the guest room she suspects Julie is sharing with her husband.  Mrs Baines leans against a window, which opens outwards at the top, taking her off her feet:  she plunges to her death, at the foot of the staircase.  Phile, who witnessed the couple’s argument on the landing, sees the result of the fall, but not how it happened.

    Graham Greene’s screenplay is a masterly construction, in which nothing goes to waste.  Phile adores hearing Baines’ stories of his days in Africa, where he shot elephants, even once shot a man dead, in self-defence:  putting two and two together, Phile thinks that Baines pushed his wife down the stairs, also in self-defence.  Yet the stories of Africa are just that – fictions, part of The Fallen Idol’s tissue of lies.  Once Scotland Yard officers arrive at the embassy to investigate Mrs Baines’ death, it’s revealed that Baines has never been further abroad than Ostend.  His tales of Africa, a big part of why Phile heroises Baines, will also be part of how the child, finding out that the tales are inventions, discovers Baines’ feet of clay.  One of the three Scotland Yard men – along with Chief Inspector Crowe (Denis O’Dea) and Inspector Ames (Jack Hawkins) – is Inspector Hart (Bernard Lee), whose main job is to act as French interpreter in interviews with Phile and Julie.  Although Hart’s basic, schoolboy French is played for comedy at first, it’s no laughing matter when, in the drama’s climax, Phile desperately blurts out to him what really happened.  (Hart, who has already complained that the French speakers are speaking too quickly, hasn’t a clue what Phile is saying.)

    Falsehoods and obfuscations abound during the police investigation.  At first, Baines omits any mention of Julie in his account of the previous evening – as does Phile, though Julie, when she hears the boy’s lies, begs him to tell the truth.  By the time Phile does so in English, Chief Inspector Crowe, with a weary sigh, dismisses his latest account as more of Phile’s fibs.  Crowe then says, more kindly, to him, ‘Shall I tell you a secret?’  Phile’s instant, impassioned ‘No!’ in response is funny and poignant.  Bobby Henrey’s Phile is among the most memorable of all screen children – Henrey’s highly individual, eccentric delivery and movement are magnetic, yet completely natural (not least in the London Zoo episode, where the child keeps interrupting Baines and Julie’s private moments together but they of course can’t object).  Carol Reed directs him with great skill and sensitivity.  Henrey, who really was only eight years old at the time, has the main part – certainly the main point of view – in The Fallen Idol, but seems wonderfully oblivious to the weight he’s being asked to carry.

    It helps, of course, that there are substantial adult characters, too, and gifted actors playing them – especially Ralph Richardson.  In the early stages, he invests Baines’ formal carriage and gestures, and his confidential glances at Phile, with a lovely humour that makes it easy to see why the boy is entranced by the butler – and that these gestures and glances, like the Africa memories, have become part of a mutually enjoyed routine.  (Richardson gave his two finest cinema performances in the space of little more than a year in The Fallen Idol and William Wyler’s The Heiress.)  Playing malignant Mrs Baines was an unenviable task, and Sonia Dresdel occasionally seems too much – excessively crafty in her keeping-a-secret scene with Phile.  It’s an impressive performance, even so:  when her husband tells Mrs Baines he wants out, her shock that her life, unhappy as it makes her, is about to fall apart, is powerfully conveyed.  Dresdel’s final desperation is in two ways frightening.

    Michèle Morgan and the three detectives all do well but an array of British character actors in cameos make a stronger impact.  Bewildered and frightened when he sees what has happened to Mrs Baines, Phil, in his pyjamas, heads back to the fire escape and down into the street:  in the dead of night and pouring rain, he keeps running until he runs into a bobby on the beat, who takes Phile to the nearest police station.  George Woodbridge is the sergeant on duty there and Dora Bryan does a splendid turn as a local lady of the night, evidently a station regular.  Dandy Nichols and Joan Young, two cleaners at the embassy, who hated Mrs Baines, enjoy a gruesome exchange the morning after the night before:  ‘Poor Mrs Baines.  Down these very stairs.  I can almost see her.  Can’t you?’  ‘Yes, I expect her neck was snapped like a matchstick.’  ‘D’you see any blood?’ ‘There wouldn’t be any blood if her neck was broken, would there?’ ‘Might be a little if the bone came through …’   Another good bit of macabre humour comes in an exchange between Phile and Baines after the boy discovers that cruel Mrs Baines has incinerated his pet snake, Macgregor.   When Baines tries to console him – ‘Well, tomorrow we’ll – we’ll put up a little stone in the garden …’, Phile replies ‘And we’ll write his name on it:  “Macgregor, killed by Mrs. Baines”.  And the date …’  (Lesley Storm and William Templeton received an additional dialogue credit on the script.)

    There’s a visual highlight so exceedingly suspenseful that it’s nearly a comic highlight, too.  Soon after the arrival of Scotland Yard, Phile is playing with the paper plane that he’s made of Mrs Baines’ cunning telegram and launches it from the top of the staircase.  It loops the loop endlessly before landing at Jack Hawkins’ feet.  There’s so much more to admire than this, though, in Georges Périnal’s black-and-white cinematography, and Carol Reed’s overall visual scheme.  Phile repeatedly watches what’s going on from high on the staircase or through windows of upstairs rooms – Périnal makes the embassy’s entrance hall and the street outside, seem miles below Phile’s viewpoint.  The Fallen Idol isn’t usually termed a film noir, yet its distorted camera angles are an excellent expression of the secrets-and-lies texture.

    The source material is a short story by Graham Greene, first published in 1936.  He supposedly hated the change in its title, though you can see why London Films thought The Basement Room unappealing.  Greene’s script itself makes huge changes to the short story, in which Baines does kill his wife and is convicted of her murder.  Philip Kemp’s Sight and Sound (August 2006) piece, which BFI used as their handout for The Fallen Idol, points out that Greene misremembered his original when he wrote, presumably in retrospect, that:

    ‘The [film’s] subject no longer concerned a small boy who unwittingly betrayed his best friend to the police, but dealt instead with a small boy who believed that his friend was a murderer and nearly procured his arrest by telling lies in his defence.’

    According to Kemp, the boy in The Basement Room ‘tired of all the lies and secrets, deliberately betrays his friend. … By doing so, Greene implies, he blights his own life for ever, “extricat[ing] himself from life, from love, from Baines with a merciless egotism” ’.  (That ‘blights his own life for ever’, in combination with the theme of a boy’s disillusionment, seems to anticipate L P Hartley’s The Go-Between, first published in 1953.  By the way, The Fallen Idol makes a bit too much use of Richard Addinsell’s music but it’s not as intrusive as Michel Legrand’s for Joseph Losey’s 1971 film of The Go-Between!)  Philip Kemp nevertheless thinks ‘the alternative tragic irony towards which the film’s narrative logic seems to be heading – Baines arrested for murder as a result of the boy’s well-meant lies – would surely have worked better than the fudge we get’.

    The film’s closing stages – or, at least, the detectives’ conclusion that Mrs Baines’ death was, as Baines has claimed, an accident – are too hurried.  Despite his African inventions, Baines does have a gun, which he keeps with other effects in the basement room that is his private domain.  As he contemplates suicide there, police investigators find a woman’s footprint in soil on the window ledge – soil that, earlier in the weekend, was spilt from a potted plant, knocked over on the landing above the staircase when Mrs Baines was remonstrating with Phile.  Hey presto:  Baines is cleared (even though DI Crowe disbelieves Phile when he confirms that he argued with Mrs Baines and upset the plant).  Yet Carol Reed redeems Baines’ rushed redemption in the closing scene, thanks to his young lead.  Phile is in his usual place on the staircase when his parents arrive home.  The boy hasn’t seen his mother for what, in eight-year-old’s time, must seem ages.  Bobby Henrey’s face makes you wonder for a moment if Phile doesn’t even recognise her then shifts into a kind of affectionate, eager curiosity about this quasi-stranger.  The Fallen Idol‘s ending represents, to be sure, a softening of Graham Greene’s original (no doubt with an eye to the box office, where the film, in Britain anyway, fared very well).  But it’s emotionally expressive and effective, too.

    4 May 2026

     

     

     

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