Old Yorker

  • Rose of Nevada

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mark Jenkin (2025)

    Through Bait (2019) and Enys Men (2022), Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin has acquired very high standing in British independent cinema.  His Rose of Nevada is currently 100% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes (from 50 reviews).  Because of the mostly dodgy acting in Bait, I passed on Enys Men but the success of both has enabled Jenkin to attract a much stronger cast to Rose of Nevada.  It includes, in addition to Jenkin regulars Edward Rowe and Mary Woodvine (who is Jenkin’s partner), George MacKay, Callum Turner, Rosalind Eleazar and Adrian Rawlins.  Set in a coastal village in Cornwall, Rose of Nevada features fishermen, ghosts, the distortion and/or erosion of local identity and community; it’s shot on 16mm film, using a hand-cranked Bolex camera to create a distinctive, textured aesthetic.  All these things are trademarks of a writer-director who’s also his own cinematographer, editor and music composer.  You certainly wouldn’t mistake a Mark Jenkin film as the work of anyone else, except perhaps a Mark Jenkin parodist.

    Rose of Nevada takes place in what is a ghost village in more ways than one.  In the present day, the Cornish fishing industry has dwindled and nearly died.  The villagers are thin on the ground and there’s next to no one in the pub.  One morning, the ‘Rose of Nevada’, a fishing vessel lost at sea in the 1990s, appears in the harbour.  ‘She’s back,’ declares the boat’s owner, Mike (Edward Rowe), without much further expression of surprise.  Soon, ‘Rose of Nevada’ is back at sea:  old salt Murgey (Francis Magee) is the skipper; two younger men, Nick (George MacKay) and Liam (Callum Turner), complete the crew.  Both badly need the work.  Nick has a wife (Emily Daglish-Laine), a little daughter and a hole in the roof of the cottage where they live.  Before Mike recruits him, Liam is sleeping rough.  Nick’s next-door neighbours are Billy Richards (Adrian Rawlins) and his ailing wife (Mary Woodvine), who has never recovered from the suicide of their son, Luke:  he should have been part of the crew of the title craft on her ill-fated voyage, didn’t turn up for work that day, and couldn’t live with his guilty conscience.  Before the boat’s return to sea, Liam chats up the pub’s under-employed barmaid (Yana Penrose), whose mother is Tina (Rosalind Eleazar) and whose unreliable father, Alan, drowned when the ‘Rose of Nevada’ went down.

    Murgey, Nick and Liam’s first expedition yields a surprisingly large catch.  When the boat comes back, though, what the two young fishermen find in the village and happening to them there is astonishing and inexplicable.  The pub is packed out.  On the site of what, in the mid-2020s, has become a food bank, stands a post office.  Billy and his wife are thirty years younger, Tina too.  She’s delighted to see Liam, whom she calls Alan.  Mr and Mrs Richards address Nick as Luke.  The cottage next door isn’t occupied by Nick’s wife and child.  To keep assuring himself he’s not losing his mind, Nick keeps taking from his pocket the ‘We love you’ note they gave him before he set sail.

    The images and noises of the fishing village – the barnacled timbers, the clanking harbour – are eye- and ear-catching (where Bait was optically challenging, Rose of Nevada can be sonically tough).  Most of the performances are good, especially those of Callum Turner and Adrian Rawlins, although Edward Rowe remains a primitive performer.  But Jenkin’s supernaturalism and blatant political statement – the use of the former to deliver the latter – is an oppressive combination.  The elderly Mrs Richards may be suffering from continuing grief and increasing dementia but her wild, wraith-like appearance immediately announces the weirdness in store.  It doesn’t take long for the already socially unmoored Liam to accept his Alan identity.  And Nick eventually submits to being Luke:  in sacrificing his wife and child, he somehow becomes a member of the village’s vibrant community of yesteryear.  How differently from the admiring British press I feel about the film is maybe best summed up as follows.  On Rotten Tomatoes, the Radio Times reviewer, James Mottram, commends Rose of Nevada’s ‘political punch … the shot of a local Post Office replaced by a food bank … lands with real power’.  Mark Jenkin describes emphatically the village’s economic and cultural decline.  He stops only just short of putting a ‘DEPRIVED AREA’ notice on the screen.  For me, that shot of the post office where now the food bank is, lands with a resounding clunk.

    28 April 2026

  • The Thomas Crown Affair

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Norman Jewison (1968)

    ‘The Thomas Crown Affair is fundamentally a film about faith between people.  In many ways, it reminds me of a kind of updated old fable, or tale, about an ultimate test of faith … I find The Thomas Crown Affair to be a unique and haunting film, superb in its visual and technical design, and fascinating for the allegorical problem of human faith.’

    This is according to someone whose name’s unknown to me but whose words – the ellipsis above conceals plenty more of them – were immortalised by Pauline Kael’s quoting them in her essay, ‘Trash, Art and the Movies’ (included in her Going Steady collection of film writings).  The admiring summary of Norman Jewison’s heist thriller-romance appeared, says Kael, in ‘a communication from Cambridge to a Boston paper’.  She’s not explicit whether that’s Cambridge, Massachusetts or Cambridge, England, but you assume the latter because Kael responds that:

    ‘The Thomas Crown Affair is pretty good trash, but we shouldn’t convert what we enjoy it for into false terms derived from study of the other arts … it’s … priggish for a new movie generation to be so proud of what they enjoy that they use their education to try to place trash within the acceptable academic tradition.  What the Cambridge boy is doing is a more devious form of that elevating and falsifying of people who talk about [Sophia] Loren as a great actress instead of as a gorgeous funny woman.’

    Kael’s dismissal of ‘the Cambridge boy’’s pretension is fair enough though she begs the question of what ‘we enjoy’ about a film like this.  Returning after many decades to The Thomas Crown Affair, I did enjoy it, but no more as a heist movie than as an exploration of human faith.  At least, I enjoyed the crime plot only in terms of what it demands of, and draws from, the film’s stars, Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, and their versatile director.  Thomas Crown in retrospect is also worth watching as a late-1960s Hollywood period piece.

    The title character is a rich, enigmatic loner who masterminds a Boston bank robbery to alleviate his ennui.  His prospective adversary, Vicki Anderson, is an independent investigator hired by the bank’s insurance company to analyse the crime and work out who was behind it.  In the process of trying to prove his guilt, Vicki becomes romantically infatuated with Crown and he with her.  Crown doesn’t tend to give much away emotionally but, alone in his Beacon Hill mansion, he indulges in a couple of outbursts of full-throated laughter, congratulating himself on his criminal genius.  Steve McQueen isn’t a convincing laugher – not a convincing full-throated laugher, at any rate – but is otherwise very well cast as a charismatic man of mystery.  His effortless cool and reserve are invaluable here:  an actor who revealed more of his thoughts and feelings might more expose the film’s flimsiness.  (The screenplay is by Alan R Trustman, who also shared the writing credit on Bullitt, Steve McQueen’s other big hit in 1968.)

    Whereas McQueen is an instinctive screen actor, Faye Dunaway is self-aware and her playing full of artful touches but, like him, she’s a magnetic camera subject.  Dunaway is an odd kind of actress.  As a substantial character in a good film – in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) or Chinatown (1974) – her artificiality is liable to be too salient.  Yet she can give a semblance of depth to a shallow role like Vicki (or her avidly ambitious TV executive in Network (1976)).  The difference in the pair’s acting styles supplies an extra layer of tension to the Crown-Vicki relationship, never more effectively than in the famous chess game sequence, and in how they place their fingers on their lips – he naturally, she unnaturally – to signal they’re thinking about their next move, in more ways than one.  It must be said that, as foreplay, the chess board doesn’t compare with the pub grub consumed by Albert Finney and Joyce Redman in Tom Jones (1963) – not, at least, until things become so blatant that Dunaway’s hand starts moving up and down her king.  Once McQueen says, ‘Let’s play something else’, their clinch is a bit of an anti-climax, but the leads’ chemistry comes through in subsequent intimate bits like a red-lit sauna sequence.

    Norman Jewison, who made Thomas Crown straight after the previous year’s In the Heat of the Night (which ‘Trash, Arts and the Movies’ underestimates), does an admirable job.  For a while, the pioneering split-screen effects by graphic designer Pablo Ferro look set to overwhelm and distract the narrative but Jewison is canny.  He soon rations the split-screen images.  By doing so, he can get on with the storytelling unimpeded – and even leave the viewer wanting more of the visual trickery.  In the closing stages, Jewison uses a split screen for the different impact of unexpectedness.  Occasional sequences like a cop reading an arrestee his rights without twigging who he is, are, in Jewison’s hands, bracingly realistic amid the prevailing calculated contrivance.  The Thomas Crown Affair plays the audience throughout but so transparently that the audience is aware of – and may well enjoy – being played.

    The two stars shine more brightly thanks not only to their own glamour and talent, but also to some dull, verging on wooden, playing in the supporting cast – for example, from Paul Burke as the main detective.  Honourable exceptions are Jack Weston (as the bank robbers’ getaway driver) and Yaphet Kotto (as one of the robbers).  The fast cars in photogenic locations, Crown’s supply of cognac and cigars – these are standard-issue accoutrements of high life in a Hollywood product of the time, but Haskell Wexler’s camerawork delivers some genuinely entrancing moments, notably the sequence where Crown’s glider gracefully circles before coming in to land.  This is aptly accompanied by a reprise of the film’s Oscar-winning theme song, ‘The Windmills of Your Mind’, first heard during the opening titles and sung by Noel Harrison.  Michel Legrand wrote the absorbing, intricate melody, Marilyn and Alan Bergman the matching lyrics.  Their meaning may not add up to much, which only reinforces the film’s entertaining mystique.

    The Thomas Crown Affair was remade in 1999 (directed by John McTiernan, starring Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo) and is due to return to the screen in a third incarnation in 2027.  For the first time, the director will also be the star.  Michael B Jordan has talked a lot publicly about his determination to make artistically ambitious, independent cinema.  His first directing effort was Creed III (2023), next up is Thomas Crown III …  But maybe Jordan sees it as an allegory about human faith.

    26 April 2026

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