Postscript

The British media report the Oscar results purely in terms of how British nominees fared. Well done, Helen, nonetheless. Perhaps I'll make the effort to see the film now.

So who followed which rule?

• O'Toole was hoping that rule 3 would see him home, but Whittaker trumped him with rule 8, a role so loud that it appeared leading when in reality it was support. Incidentally, Walter Matthau did it the other way round with his Oscar for The Fortune Cookie.
• Mirren's win is a definite 10. Streep's use of 8, with a touch of 5, for once didn't work, because Helen was in a classy British film, about a real-life classy British drama, playing a real-life classy British queen. The Yanks love that are willing to overlook the fact that Helen's well-known to be a dame.
• Arkin played card 3 successfully (as did Scorsese in direction). All the more reason why O'Toole failed. Hollywood likes to balance things out.
• Jennifer Hudson appears to have benefited from 7. They had to give Dreamgirls something.

So, bad luck, Peter. 45 years of playing outsize characters, desperately seeking to out-Newton Robert, except for once in Goodbye Mr Chips when he had a go at an introvert role. Good try, but no cigar.

But the biggest injustice this year is that Leslie Philips wasn't even nominated.

How to win an Oscar

TV and radio are doing what they do before any ‘big’ event, whether it be England versus Ireland, the Budget or, as today, the Oscars. They predict what’s going to happen, spend hours broadcasting the show, and then spend the next day talking about it.

Of course, all they’ll talk about are the so-called major awards and then only if they’ve gone to British winners. Silly, twittering reporters in long frocks will be hanging about outside post-Oscar parties, hoping some vain, self-obsessed, insecure, silicone-implanted, face-lifted, botoxed, coked-up, arrogant star will deign to mouth a few clichés into the microphone.

Hitchcock was taken to task once for saying actors were cattle. Hitch denied it. ‘I merely said was that they should be treated like cattle.’ All this interest in their private lives, their fashions, and why they think their latest film is so important is like seeing inside an abattoir. It’s best avoided if you want to carry on enjoying sausages.

But that’s all by the way. I started this with the intention of listing ten rules for actors to follow if they want to win an Oscar. I’m sure someone’s done a thorough study of winners – and losers – over the last eighty years, but here are my superficial thoughts.

1. Play a loser

It’s always good to play a drunk, for example. Ray Milland did it in The Lost Weekend. Or a whore, like Jane Fonda in Klute. Clare Trevor did both in Key Largo. Frank Sinatra was nominated for playing a drug addict in The Man with the Golden Arm, but Nick Cage took the prize with Leaving Las Vegas. Let’s not forget the Duke in True Grit.

2. Play a ‘differently-abled’ person

Jon Voight won as a paraplegic in Coming Home and Daniel Day-Lewis wasn’t at his most healthy in My Left Foot, and Cliff Robertson was a right Charly. I don’t think Robert Newton was even nominated as Long John Silver – a travesty – but the Duke didn’t do badly with one eye.

It’s obviously better actually to be disabled, but I don’t think even the most dedicated of Method actors would go that far. But amputee Harold Russell won best supporting actor for the Best Years of Our Lives and deaf Marlee Matlin was best actress in Children of a Lesser God.

Peter Finch outdid them all. He was dead when he won for Network.

3. Be old

This works in two ways. You’re coming to the end of your career/life and Hollywood has neglected you in the past. It remembers with embarrassment how it overlooked the likes of Cary Grant, Kirk Douglas and Bob Mitchum. It was fortunate for the Duke that he had little competition in 1969, although Dustin Hoffman was following Rule 2 in Midnight Cowboy.

Like disability, old age can also help attract sentimental votes. And there’s the wonder not that’s done well, but that it’s done at all. Art Carney, for example, in Harry and Tonto. And George Burns in The Sunshine Boys.

4. Be young

Not as helpful as being old, but at least it means you’ve got time on your side. Jodie Foster missed out for Taxi Driver, but came back for The Accused, where she used variations of rules 1 and 2. Tatum O’Neal got a statuette for Paper Moon, but it wasn’t the beginning of a glittering career. Jack Wild was only nominated for Oliver, and look what happened to him. Best avoided.

It’s supposed to be an actor’s nightmare to work with children, but it didn’t too the Duke any harm in True Grit, nor Greg in To Kill Mockingbird, nor Jack Nicholson in As Good as it Gets. And that last film even had a dog as well. Nobody can upstage Jack. That reminds me –

5. Be popular with your peers

In other words be Jack Nicholson.

6. Be black (obsolete rule)

Once Sidney Poitier (Lilies of the Field) and Halle Berry (Monster’s Ball) had got their Oscars, not to mention Denzel (Glory), the pressure to award something to a person of colour was no longer an issue. After all, I think it’s fair to say that the Academy was merely making a point in 1963 with Poitier, when his performance bore no comparison to Richard Harris’ (in This Sporting Life) or Newman’s in Hud in the same year.

I wonder what the Duke made of it. Which oppressed group is next, I wonder. ‘Native Americans?’ Come to think of it, people with Indian blood have won. Ben Johnson in The Last Picture Show, James Garner in Murphy’s Romance, and Cher in Moonstruck.

7. Be in the right place at the right time

If you’re lucky you can get swept up in the enthusiasm for a film. Paltrow, for example, in Shakespeare in Love (what an aberration!). And there was Russell Crowe’s win in Gladiator, Donna Reed’s supporting award for From Here to Eternity. I’ve a feeling that’s why Hattie McDaniel won in 1939. GWTW was so popular that even a black woman could get an honour. Mind you, she was playing a Mammy (no threat there).

Handing a support actor award can be useful where a worthy film is otherwise unacknowledged. Lust for Life, perhaps, and Twelve o’clock High.

8. Do something showy

Chew the scenery, be larger than life, ham it up, play against type, show you can ACT.

Examples: Walter Huston, in Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs, Hoffman in Rain Man, Pacino in Scent of a Woman, the Duke in True Grit, Bogart in The African Queen, Lancaster in Elmer Gantry, Marvin in Cat Ballou, Charlize Theron in Monster, Kingsley in Gandhi, Tom Hanks in Philadelphia, Borgnine in Marty, Roberts in Erin Brockovich and Broderick Crawford in All the King’s Men.

Anthony Quinn should have tried it the other way round. He might have won even more.

10. Give Hollywood a touch of class.

Not too often, but once in a while, Hollywood likes to allow itself a little prestige. Be there at the time. The film might soon be forgotten or disparaged, but you’ll have your Oscar, like Olivier for Hamlet, F Murray Abraham for Amadeus, Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire, Max Schell in Judgement at Nuremburg, Schofield in A Man for All Seasons, etc . . .etc. Oh, recently there was that bloke who won for Capote.

11. Take a tip from George C Scott (who followed rule 8): Who needs an Oscar, anyway?

Noir?

I’ve set myself the task of writing a review of all ten films in the DVD set, The Ultimate Film Noir Collection.
Click here


For anyone contemplating buying it, it’s excellent value, despite some dodgy transfer quality at time and an absence of commentaries or extras. Also, if you’re like me you won’t have heard of half of the films in the collection, but that is probably the main attraction, because they so rarely turn up on TV.

The ten films are listed on the link, by the way.

Before I get down to the individual films, I want to ponder on this term ‘film noir’, which I don’t like. For a start, it is a merely a phrase invented by French critics retrospectively to label crime films that shared a cinematic style and a few common themes. Second, it is prodigally over-used, usually to give some critical class to cheap (though hardly cheerful) B-movies.

I’ve seen Orson Welles’ Macbeth described as ‘noirish’ and read message board discussions arguing the toss about whether Leave Her to Heaven is a noir film. And is there any review of Chinatown which doesn’t describe it as ‘modern noir’ or ‘hommage to noir’. All of which begs the question I posed above.

Now a critical label doesn’t appear out of nowhere. It has to be based on certain definable criteria which are genuinely shared by a number of films, intentionally or otherwise. I would say that there is a consensus that a ‘film noir’ should have these three elements:

Style: monochrome; shadows, bars of light through blinds; expressionistic camera angles; flashbacks; narration, etc.
Theme: Life’s a bitch, and then the hero dies. ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods – they kill us for their sport.’
Elements: the femme fatale; the hero’s fatal flaw; crime; violence; corruption; the contrast between the fruits of crime and the poverty of honesty, etc.

Off hand I can’t think of many films that fit even those rather loose criteria, but the following are usually cited as leading examples:

Out of the Past (aka Build My Gallows High), although it has a lot of light and outdoor locations.
Double Indemnity
High Sierra – no femme, but a chienne fatale.
Detour – archetypal, with the added advantage of being a real Poverty Row product.
The Killers (1946).
Scarlet Street
Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (only joking).

I would dispute that the following are ‘noir’:

The Maltese Falcon and all the Chandler/Marlowe films. They may have the style, but they don’t have the content.
White Heat – the lead is psychotic, not a tragic hero.
He Walked by Night – police procedural.

I suppose what I’m saying is that if you try and define ‘noir’ you end up with a definition so narrow that it excludes most films, or so wide that it becomes meaningless. I am certainly saying that such labels are unnecessary and a recipe for critical laziness.

And who cares? If a film is good, why does it matter how we label it? After all, I won’t accept Treasure of the Sierra Madre or North-West Passage as Westerns, but that doesn’t stop them being great films.

Best Director, Best Picture?

When the first Oscars were presented, for the year 1927/28, the Best Picture was announced as Wings, a war film directed by William Wellman.

In those days there were two best direction awards, one for comedy and one for drama. This year the former went to Lewis Milestone, for Two Arabian Knights; and the latter to Frank Borzage for Seventh Heaven. William Wellman was not nominated for either.

I may be mistaken, but I believe that only once more was the director of a ‘Best Picture’ not even nominated for his contribution. That was in 1931/32 when Grand Hotel won and Edmund Goulding was completely overlooked. However, on a significant number of occasions, directors of ‘Best Picture’ have been nominated without winning

John Ford, for example, was nominated nine times, and won the award an impressive four times, but only once for a best picture, and that was How Green was my Valley, of all things.

Earlier this month IMDb conducted a poll to discover a consensus on which film to receive a Best Director award in the last two decades had most deserved to have been elected Best Picture. The films concerned were:

1989 Born on the Fourth of July (Oliver Stone) lost to Driving Miss Daisy
1998 Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg) lost to Shakespeare in Love
2000 Traffic (Steven Soderbergh) lost to Gladiator
2002 The Pianist (Ramon Polanski) lost to Chicago
2005 Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee) lost to Crash

Why does this happen? Does it matter?

The simple reason for the discrepancy is the nomination process. The director nominations are decided by members of the directors' guild, about 200 of them; whereas the best picture choices are produced by polling the whole Academy (5000?).

I suppose it only matters if you have an auteurist approach to movies. After all, if Great Expectations is better-written than Dracula, then it’s a better book, isn’t it? So, if The Pianist is better-directed, it must be a better film than Chicago, mustn’t it?

Not necessarily. For a start, analogies are not arguments. In any case, what does ‘better-written’ mean? Are we talking about style, judicious choice of vocabulary, characterisation, plotting, philosophical depth, innovatory technique?

But I don’t want to get into this old argument. Just one or two points.

A film, unlike a book, is always a collaborative effort, no matter how dominant the director or how much creative freedom he has gained. It seems that every movie these days has the director’s name above the title, but that is usually a mere vanity. Kubricks and Von Sternbergs are rare.

It’s true that the days of the old studio hack director are over, where a director was handed a script, a crew and a roster of stars and told he’d got six weeks in which to shoot enough footage for the editor to weld into a finished movie. That was the era when Sam Goldwyn would insist that Wuthering Heights was ‘his’ film, not William Wyler’s.

I may have started by asking why directors are not honoured when ‘their’ movie is named Best Picture, but it is just as valid reverse the question. Why, for example, did Victor Fleming get the award for Gone with the Wind, when he was only one of three directors who worked on it, and when the whole project was tightly controlled by David O Selznick, the producer.

Mankiewicz won for All about Eve, and I wonder why, when all he did was competently manage an expert cast performing an excellent script.

Wyler’s direction of Ben-Hur was clunky at best, but won for overseeing an impressive and successful epic. And for having the sense to hand over the chariot race to Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt.

In the sixties four musicals won best picture and their directors were handed the accolade, when all they did was supervisea series of good song and dance numbers, now doubt choreographed by someone else. These were Oliver – was this the same Carol Reed who made The Third Man. Come to think of it, did he direct The Third Man, or was it Orson Welles? George Cukor stood back and let Rex Harrison perform, Audrey Hepburn be beautiful and Lerner and Loewe’s music for My Fair Lady flow. Robert Wise won with The Sound of Music (there we are, then) and shared his Oscar with his choreographer on West Side Story.

Now here’s a thought. Why spend all this time trying to correlate Best Picture and Best Director, when we should be comparing Best Director with Best Acting Performances? That, after all, is the director’s first responsibility: ‘to direct the actors on the studio floor.’ That’s for another time, but it might be relevant in the award to Franklin Schaffner for Patton, where he coached George C Scott to a well-deserved Oscar.

Back to the original question. Here are a few possible reasons why a director might be overlooked when his film is singled out as the best.

The winning film was a big, successful entertainment, the director made no significant personal contribution. Mutiny on the Bounty, for example, in 1935. It was more of an all-round Hollywood production than The Informer, a personal, ‘arty’ film, for which Ford won Best Director in the same year.

Around the World in Eighty Days and The Greatest Show on Earth are similar cases.

In 1940 Ford won for The Grapes of Wrath but the Best Picture was Rebecca. Again a straightforward entertainment (if that description can ever be applied to Hitchcock) against a serious, rather leftish film, with ‘director’ written all over it. Or maybe, the Academy just couldn’t make up its mind between the two.

Oddly, it seems to have worked the other way round when Mankiewicz won for A Letter to Three Wives, and All the King’s Men was Best Picture.

In 1948, Hollywood congratulated itself on its artistic leanings by honouring Hamlet, but maintained a balance by naming John Huston Best Director.

Driving Miss Daisy and Chariots of Fire were small gems, efficient and cost-effective, but didn’t have the directorial flash that gained the honour for Oliver Stone and Warren Beatty in the same years. It seems to be the case that ‘good’ directing has to draw attention to itself.

The more recent mis-matches follow the same pattern. Gladiator and Shakespeare in Love and Chicago were good old-fashioned Hollywood product, always more likely to win out over the war films with which they were competing, whether realistic and patriotic (Saving Private Ryan) or cynical and bitter (Born on the Fourth of July) or harrowing (The Pianist).

And then there’s the politics, the envy and feuds, the feeling that it’s somebody’s turn. What’s the betting that Scorsese will finally win this year, while The Departed won’t? If Letters from Iwo Jima wins, it will of course counter what I said in my last paragraph.

Because there is no pattern, no sense to it at all. George C Scott was right – there’s no place for competition in the arts.

Update

I haven't posted for a while. It's not that I've nothing to say, more that I've got too much. I plan to write a review of all 'The Ultimate Film Noir Collection', which I've been watching since Christmas. This means watching them all twice. And writing reviews is not as easy as I thought, not if you're going to be fair to the film.

I've also been wasting a lot of time trying to get links to work. I want to do that highlighting of text, which hides a link, but I'm getting all this HTML stuff round my neck.

My new wide-screen TV is driving me mad. I never know when I've got the right ratio. It seems these old films have to be watched with a black band on each side, unless you want to cut off the top of people's heads or stretch them sideways. Then you feel you're missing out. Odd, because I always wanted black lines showing when I was watching wide-screen on the old TV.

I've almost finished the novel on which The Last King of Scotland was based. I'll have to write something on that. It will fit in with earlier stuff on adaptation (which I haven't forgotten).

I saw a good old B-movie yesterday - Terror in a Texas Town. Silly title for an excellent film. Something else on the list.

The Last King of Scotland (2006)

Directed by Kevin MacDonald
Starring Forest Whittaker (Idi Amin) and James McAvoy (as Nicholas Garrigan)

After watching this film I left the cinema with a sense of disappointment, and as I walked to the pub I wondered why.

It wasn't just because it was too long, although I thought that the opening scenes could have been telescoped and wondered what exactly was the point of Gillian Anderson’s role.

It wasn’t the final violence, disgusting as it was. In fact I thought it was long overdue, considering the subject matter.

The editing style was a bit flashy for my taste at times and I would like to have seen some of the minor roles fleshed out more. The British diplomat perhaps, the other Ugandan doctor certainly.

I realised my problem was with the lead characters.

Forest Whitaker has been praised and honoured for his performance, justly so, for he is magnificent. But it upsets the balance of the film, which is not ‘The Life of Idi Amin’, (along the lines of All the King’s Men) but ‘The early life of Dr Nicholas Garrigan’ (along the lines of Moby Dick).

And I simply didn’t care for or about Nicholas Garrigan. As written, the character is feckless, superficial, mouthy and naïve (read ‘stupid’) and there is nothing James McAvoy can do to make him sympathetic.

I found it difficult to believe that Nicholas would have informed on the Minister of Health, having watched the violent mood swings and incipient paranoia of Amin. He is a doctor after all, and apparently quite a good one. And his affair with the dictator’s wife beggar’s belief, unless I’ve grown too old to remember the power of youthful hormones.

Whatever his motives, his behaviour overall leads to the torture and death of at least three innocent, even good, people. And yet there is no sense of Nicholas’ story being a tragic one, merely that a silly boy is lucky to get away free from the consequences of his actions.

But the film is worth seeing for Forest Whitaker, amiable buffoon and paranoid monster, moving from charm to bonhomie to suspicion to rage and back again with bewildering and terrifying ease.

I think the producers made the wrong film.

The Long Goodbye (1973)

Directed by Robert Altman. Starring Elliott Gould, Nina van Pallandt and Sterling Hayden.

Chandler purists don't like this film. And you can't blame them because Gould's Marlowe is a chain-smoking slob, forever muttering to himself, and who finally blows what little of the original's integrity he manages to display throughout the movie.

Let's ask a few questions:

Is this movie a typical example of Altman's cinematic flair?

Sure is. It's as flashy as hell. There's the usual overlapping, aimless dialogue; a scene involving reflections in a window; also great ensemble acting. Credit where it's due.

What about the acting?

Pretty good. Hayden's good, though his character is an irritating bore. Mark Rydell is not bad as a gangster boss, although probably he was just playing himself. He is a director after all. Nina is pretty pretty, for a skinny bird. Elliott is just brilliant. Never better. In every scene. He carries the film, such as it is.

Comedy?

It has moments: the thing with the cat; the thing with the trainee hood; the thing with the guard who likes to do impersonations (I liked his Walter Brennan, but Cary Grant was poor). Elliott was hilarious throughout.

Drama, intrigue, suspense?

Not a lot.

Does it reflect the era when it was made?

Definitely. The half-naked tarts in the neighbouring apartment, doing yoga and making candles, the 'aren't we so cool' condescension to the bourgeoisie, the occasional existential violence.

Character development?

Don't be silly.

Judgement?

I enjoyed it but mostly for Gould's performance and because it was a diverting new take on an old character. But it didn't work for me, and I just want to go back and watch Bogie in The Big Sleep or Dick Powell in Farewell, My Lovely (Mitchum , come to that).

But suit yourself. Makes no difference to me.

Shane (1953)

Directed by George Stevens. Starring Alan Ladd, Van Heflin, Jean Arthur, Brandon de Wilde.


SPOILER ALERT


Story

Shane rides into the Starret homestead, heading north. The purpose of this journey, if such there be, is not revealed. Joe Starrett is suspicious of what is obviously a gunman, especially when Ryker, the local big rancher simultaneously arrives with yet another demand that Starrett and the other homesteaders get out. It becomes clear that Ryker is conducting a campaign of harassment against the squatters in order to maintain the open range for his cattle.

When it becomes clear that Shane is not involved, he and Starrett become friends and this is symbolised by their joint effort to uproot a tree-stump, the scene portentously shot, edited and scored for maximum emotional impact. It's clear also that Starrett's wife, Marion, is drawn to the handsome, soft-spoken but dangerous stranger; and that their son, Joey, from whose point of view much of the drama is seen, already hero-worships him.

Shane interrupts his journey, takes off his gun and sets to work for Starrett. When Ryker loses patience and hires the black-clad, snake -like killer, Wilson, to root out the settlers at whatever cost, the crisis comes to a head. One of the farmers is murdered, 'legally', and Ryker hatches a plot to kill Starrett, a natural community leader, at a 'peace conference'. Shane intervenes and in a fight shot to parallel the earlier stump-pulling prevents the other man from attending the meeting.

He challenges Wilson in professional style and kills him, as well as Ryker. Joey, as ever observing, watches Shane re-holster with a memorable flourish, a flashy hint of pride in a job well done, then shouts out a warning that Ryker's brother has the drop on him. Shane is wounded but still kills the other man.

Then, following a little moral lecture to Joey, he rides away, heedless of the boy's pleas: 'Shane, come back . . .I love you . . .Mother loves you!'

Style

With Shane George Stevens wanted, it seems, to take a routine story and present it with fresh depth, with a combination of realism and cinematic beauty. In telling it through the eyes of a child he can merge reality into legend.

The film is set in a valley, not just beautiful but obviously fertile, the kind of place for which men would kill and die, but the small town in it and the the settlers' homes are makeshift at best, squalid at worst.

Stevens emphasises the terrifying loudness of Shane's initial display of gunfire and the brutality of Stonewall's death in a muddy street, but he also achieves the effect of Wilson's effortless and graceful mounting of his horse by running backwards film of him dismounting. The deer's antlers' framing of Shane when he first rides in is well-known, but Stevens uses the same trick when Stonewall storms out through the saloon door, smashing a hole through which we see Ryker, his brother and Wilson, silent and malevolent.

Such things draw attention to themselves and are, to my mind, a flaw to which Stevens was prone.

Themes

For all that the film ends withe defeat and the death of 'bad guys', we nonetheless leave it with a feeling of melancholy. The victory of the settlers is tempered by the departure of their glamorous champion, the fracture of a family and the passing of an heroic way of life.

The friendship of Starrett and Shane is close. Forget homosexuality, but watch their shared pleasure in uprooting the stump together and taking on a bunch of cowboys in the saloon. Starrett is a man shackled to the treadmill of his farm, with just a woman and boy for company. His other acquaintances are a group of timorous neighbours, who have no strength but what he gives them. Only Shane shares his resolution, but complements his stolidity with style and deadly skill.

But it is a doomed friendship. One is a settler, one a wanderer. And there is Marion. Their last meeting is a vicious fight for the right to face Ryker and Wilson. Shane's motive is to save Starrett's life, for the sake of Marion; Joe's to prove himself a man in her eyes. Shane, fighting unfairly for once, uses his gun to knock out his opponent before taking his gun, with obvious phallic symbolism.

Marion's contentment with life is shattered. From now on, she will know that there is a man she prefers to her husband, and whom she has now lost forever. Moreover she has blurted out her frustration with the grinding toil of her daily life. If that has improved, now that Ryker is dead, that improved has been achieved by the use of guns, something she has opposed. She knows too that Joey's fascination with guns has been reinforced by the role model of Shane.

Joey has lost his surrogate father and senses the estrangement between his parents.

Ryker is no typical villain. He is even given the opportunity to put his case, the case of all conservatives who see a world they love passing. His methods are violent, but not murderous at first. In turning to Wilson, he is betraying what moral code he has. Compare him with Ben Johnson's Calloway, a bullying cowboy eventually repelled by the murder of Stonewall.

Ryker is proud of opening up the territory, defeating Indians and rustlers and imposing his own law for want of any other. Now he sees all he has done is clear the way for others with alien values. Not only is official law approaching, with a marshal a hundred miles away, but it is brought to his doorstep by 'squatters' bearing bits of legal paper.

Shane is like Ryker, a man whose days are past, although 'not quite yet' as he says, contemplating one last job to be performed in the old-fashioned way.

We know nothing of Shane's past, but we note his lightning reaction to the cocking of a gun. He remarks with disapproval on the number of fences near Starrett's land. He says he is heading North. Where? Perhaps he is another Wilson, on his way to work for another Ryker. If he helps Starrett, it is for personal reasons, but not because of self-interest.

If John Wayne had played the part - and it has affinities with Ethan Edwards and Hondo - instead of Alan Ladd, I doubt that we would have perceived the inner sadness of the man, as he contemplates the the woman he can never have, the son who will never be born to him, the friend he must hurt, the open land he must watch carved up and the life he must lose.

Some say he is dead at the end of the film. I cannot say, but he is a dead man riding.

Conclusion

So are there any winners? As the old guy says at the end of The Magnificent Seven, 'Only the farmers have won.' Who are these farmers who have replaced the pioneering Ryker and the heroic Shane?

They are a pusillanimous crowd, only able to survive if they find a strong leader and someone not afraid to fight their fights for them. These are the men who despise Shane for initially refusing to fight, then worrying about the consequences for them when he does, who call his profession 'murder'. One is a comic Swede, one a boastful old soldier, another lazy drunk, their women plain and dowdy. Only the Starretts have class. And even they will help turn the wide open spaces into little parcels of suburbia, happily growing their 'taters' and rearing their hogs.

The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)

Directed by and starring Clint Eastwood

Clint Eastwood carries his stardom easily and confidently. Throughout this film he wears a scruffy beard, bisected by a long scar from a sabre slash, and spits streams of tobacco juice at anything that moves. But none of this can prevent his genuine charisma shining through.

He's not afraid of competition either, happy in the past to cede the screen to a scenery-chewing Eli Wallach, an orang-utan or, here, a loquacious old Indian offering periodic morsels of off-the-wall wisdom.

An exchange, one of the best jokes, shared between Josey and Lone Watie, played by Chief Dan George, encapsulates the film's theme. Josey bemoans the fact that, ' When I get to likin' someone, they ain't around long.'

'I notice,' replies Lone, 'when you get to dislikin' someone they ain't around long neither.'

Josey Wales is a variation on The Man with No Name Character and we get more than our fair share of superhuman gunplay. In fact, for students of Western gunfights, this film provides some of the best. Look out for 'The Missouri Roll', 'the Missouri Boatride' and the strangely thoughtful scene where a young bounty-hunter is forced to back down by Josey. Rather than breathe a sigh of relief, Josey waits, knowing that pride will bring the man back. He does indeed return, to certain death.

Unlike Clint's heroes for Leone, we are given some motivation for Josey's character. Forced to watch the murder by pro-Union guerrillas of his wife and son, he arms himself with a burning hatred and a deadly skill with firearms, and sets off on a quest for vengeance.

And we see his gradual and reluctant re-integration into society. A motley band of outsiders coalesce around Josey, drawn to his strength and diverting him from his vengeance. The little community, populated by familiar Western types is both a re-creation of his own lost innocence and a restoration of a society fractured by war.

Perhaps the film is too optimistic - Josey's love for the sister of a 'Redleg', conceivably one of those who murdered his family, the pact with the Comanche chief - but interestingly this all happens outside of established society, where government is seen as a malevolent force. And amongst the spirit of reconciliation, Josey's revenge must proceed.

An episodic film, a succession of quirky characters, miniature dramas, and punctuated by well-staged gunfights. Clint's best Western, in my opinion, a fine film in the twilight of the genre's life.

Waterloo (1970)

Directed by Sergei Bondarchuk and starring Rod Steiger as Napoleon and Christopher Plummer as Wellington.

So often a war film does not give any idea of the scale of a battle. I remember watching Cromwell's recreation of the Battle of Naseby, and seeing what appeared to be a minor skirmish between a few cavalrymen, with the outcome hingeing on one simple ruse.

The logistics of creating a major battle between armies are so great, even with the assistance of CGI, that very often the film chooses to focus on the contribution of one unit. This technique also has the benefit of emphasising character and concentrates the drama. On reflection, Saving Private Ryan, for all its power and pyrotechnics, adopts this approach.

The Longest Day's huge scale is in fact a patchwork of individual human stories from all ranks of the military and civilian participants.

Movies which have made a serious effort to stage a realistic battle include Paths of Glory, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Alamo, Patton and Midway. But the best of the lot is Waterloo.

Forget character. Steiger is hammy, Plummer so understated as to be a caricature of the stiff-upper-lipped, haughty English aristocrat. There's a nod to the other ranks involved and one simple soldier is allowed to voice the one anti-war remark. Otherwise the dialogue is made up of carefully selected 'famous quotations' or vague, simplistic indications of what the hell is going on. 'He who wins the farmhouse,wins the battle.' Don't ask why.

But as a spectacle it is unsurpassed. Amid great columns of smoke, we see from a helicopter huge British squares attacked by hundreds of French cavalry, massive batteries of cannon, the sieges of Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte. Bondarchuk re-stages the famous charge of the Royal Scots Greys -'the finest cavalry in Europe, and the worst-led' - in the style of the paintings produced later, and likes it so much he lets us see it it slow motion. Napoleon staggers blindly though black smoke as the battle slips away from him.

Although the scale is huge, you won't come away from this film with much insight into how the Waterloo was won and lost. The absence of Grouchy, the arrival of Blucher, the impetuosity of Ney, the illness of Bonaparte all seem to be significant, but do not expect to know the strategies of the commanders, to understand the on-field tactics, or see individual initiative, heroics and blunders.

Nonetheless, Waterloo is magnificent. But, as they say, 'C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre' - nor a great film.

Christmas Films

As a rule I avoid Christmas films, that is films with a Christmas theme. You look forward to a week of wall-to-wall movies on TV and you get all this treacly, sentimental, optimistic, life-affirming, lets-all-love-each-other mush. Family films! But let me not be Scrooge-like. Here's a few that can seduce even me into a tearful desire to embrace humanity, plus one or two antidotes to philanthropy.

Mind you, I'm a sucker for the usual Christmas perennials, like The Great Escape and The Wizard of Oz, and I have my own personal treats, like my Laurel and Hardy compilation or their Way Out West. Or an old Bogart or Cagney. Doesn't The Roaring Twenties end at Chrstmastime? Back to the theme:

Three Godfathers is a greatly under-rated film. It has all the hallmarks of a John ford film - John Wayne, eccentric supports, comedy, amazing location photography, beautifully composed. What some would call sentimentality I call real emotion. In any case, it's Christmas! And why shouldn't there be a allegorically religious Western? This tale of redemption carries its message lightly and is rooted in deep humanity. The more I see it, the more it rises in my estimation.

Gremlins. Bedford Falls is invaded by malevolent cuddly dolls. Great fun, shot through with a dark, nasty streak, and full of little jokes for film buffs. Worth seeing, if only for the cinema full of entranced gremlins watching Snow White and the Seven Dwarf's. I like the one who puts a crisp packet over each ear. As the man said, 'We all dream of being a child again, even the worst of us. Maybe the worst of us most of all.'

A Christmas Carol, the one with Alastair Sim, the only one. Alastair was an actor with a face that could be jovial or unpleasant, with a delivery that could be very - I'm looking for a word here that means humorous with an edge - sardonic, that's it. He's the perfect Scrooge.

Holiday Inn. What more could you want? Bing and Fred. Irving Berlin songs. Bugger the plot.

Meet Me in St Louis. I don't like Judy Garland much. She wasn't pretty and I hated her self-indulgent, self-pitying, prima donna final years, but in her youth she had a certain charm when she sang. Somewhere Over the Rainbow always moves me, as does Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas in this film. Not only that, but it's a perfectly realised piece of turn-of-the-century Americana . . .(yawn).

There are a lot of Christmas films I need to see. I'm told Miracle on 34th Street (1947) is pretty good. The Bishop's Wife, with Cary Grant, is another.

If you need a corrective, how about Die Hard? I don't care what anyone says, I love it. Old Bruce undercuts all the impossible heroics with his little quips and Alan Rickman is the kind of villain that villains should be. British, for a start. All he lacks is a moustache to twirl.

But the greatest anti-Christmas film of all is It's a Wonderful Life. Oh yes it is. It is one of the best films ever made. Direction, acting, photography, editing are all impeccable. This is a dark story, a scream of despair, that ends in suicide. For George Bailey really does kill himself. All that stuff with the angel is a dream, that flashes through his brain as he drowns. There is no angel, only a good man who is ground down not only by the stupidity and the corruption and the small-mindedness of others but also by the crushing of his own dreams. Only the miracle of an angel can remedy this situation, and, as we know, there is no such thing.

I see there was an IMDb poll on this subject.

A conversation

- Hi, Dad. Wanna drink?
- I'm fine, thanks. Sorry, I forgot to bring your DVD back.
- Get Carter? What did you think? I assume you listened to the commentary.
- Yeah, watched it twice , once with, once without. I got a bit irritated by that cameraman. He seemed to do nothing but moan and go on about all the problems. I hadn't realised that Hendry and Caine didn't get on.
- Mm, Hendry was a drunk. I read he wanted the lead for himself and resented Caine getting it. By the way, did you know that hitman was on the train at the beginning?
- No, I'd never noticed that before someone said it on the commentary. It's a good film, though. A bit like a Jacobean tragedy, everyone dead at the end, no real good guys. Where were the police while all this was going on? I suppose that's the point. A self-contained world for scrotes and arseholes. Did you ever see Stallone's version?

- Crap.

- Exactly. You know, when I watched it I thought, 'Forget Michael Caine. Just watch it as if it were a new film and treat it on its merits.' It hadn't got any. I did the same thing with The Jackal. Same thing. They just can't seem to realise that you've got to tell a story simply and not substitute flash for style. Unless you're Orson Welles, of course. By the way, I saw Red Dragon the other day.

- What, you mean Manhunter?

- No, the new one. Antony Hopkins. A bit odd, seeing him older and fatter when it's supposed to be set years earlier. I can't remember Manhunter very well, but it seemed to have more impact, more style. Mind you, this one had a twist in the tail which took me by surprise. I'd almost turned it off before I realised it wasn't finished. I think Ralph Fiennes was a disappointment, compared with the bloke who played the killer in the other one. He was really weird. They tried for a bit more realism, I think, more motivation.

- I saw Tombstone again the other night. Didn't get to bed till after one. Val Kilmer's great, isn't he?

- 'I'm your huckleberry.'

- It's full of quotes. Ringo's good. Love that bit at the end when he suddenly sees he's got Doc to fight, not Wyatt.

- 'Why, Johnny, looks like someone just walked over your grave. You're no daisy at all.'

- Is it in your top ten Westerns? We all know what number one is.

- The Wild Bunch? It might be The Searchers, you know. Then there's Red River, Yellow Ribbon.

- High Noon, Shane?

- I'm dubious about them. Too self-consciously classic. There's My Darling Clementine.

- I remember that. You sat me down to watch it once. I wanted to go out and play football, but you said, 'No, you've got to watch this.' By the way, wasn't Billy Bob Thornton in Tombstone? Wasn't he that gambler Wyatt beats up at the beginning?

- No, that wasn't Billy Bob. Definitely. I've got a feeling he was in it though. Or was it Wyatt Earp? Have you seen The Alamo yet? Not John Wayne's, the new one. Billy Bob's brilliant as Davy Crockett. I know it got a lot of bad press, but I thought it was pretty good. And what about Oh, Brother Where art Thou? Thoroughly recommended. What are you watching tonight.

- Speed.

- Me too.

- See you. Merry Christmas. When are you going to watch It's a Wonderful Life?

- When there's nobody else at home. You know that I always cry.

The films you're supposed to like

In his article on Howard Hawks in his Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema, David Thomson imagines himself on a sinking ship with the opportunity to save from oblivion the ten best films of all time. He muses on how most critics would react - one Welles, one Hitchcock, one Mizoguchi, one Renoir, etc. He claims that he would choose ten Hawks films, but he does have a few funny ideas. He's not keen on Ford and Capra for a start.

It's a game we all play, choosing the ten best, and can be a lot of fun. Taken seriously, the choice will avoid most of the selection criteria I am returning to here from time to time, and has many other factors to consider - script, acting, direction, camerawork, insight, overall artistry, etc.

But there several films which recur frequently on these 'official' lists and these are the films which we might feel we 'ought' to like. I've been having a look at how 'official', intellectual opinion has changed in Sight and Sound's ten-yearly best films poll of critics (and now film-makers). This is found at http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/topten

As a matter of interest, David Thomson contributed to this poll and, being serious, limited himself to one Hawks, His Girl Friday.

I'll concentrate on critics for the moment, although I've got my reservations about them. For example, critics (at least according to my prejudice) are too concerned with the script and the themes of a film rather than the the craft and the visual. The also have a tendency to be arty and pretentious. And rather too inclined to look for innovation or, conversely, trends and patterns. However.

The link leads to several articles on the polls, but these are my immediate thoughts:

The most consistent appearances in the top ten are Potemkin and La Regle du Jeu, featured every 10 years since 1952.

The most successful is Kane.

There are still two silent films there: Potemkin and Sunrise (Murnau). Greed and Intolerance have slipped.

The most recent is Godfather I and II (cheating her because they've added the votes for the two films together). Otherwise, the most recent would probably be 2001. I suppose it is understandable that we need time to allow the 'greatest' films to emerge from the stew of passing enthusiasm, not to mention rediscovery (this applies to Vertigo, Sunrise and Kane itself).

Surprises: Singin' in the Rain and the Searchers. I suppose I consider myself so resolutely middle-brow that I don't expect to find these serious-minded men and women choosing, a musical and a Western, two of my favourites.

Incidentally there are three Westerns in the top sixty or so, the other two being The Man who Shot Liberty Valance and Rio Bravo. Where the hell is The Wild Bunch? Moreover I can't find any other films by Ford or Hawks in the full list, which is strange. What about The Grapes of Wrath or To Have and Have Not?

Those that have fallen out of favour over the years include Chaplin, who was represented by both City Lights and The Gold Rush in 1952. Also, thank God, there are fewer arty films of the Antonioni, Bergman, Godard variety, but they are still bubbling under.

Japanese cinema is well-represented. Ozu's Tokyo Story is in the top ten and the old favourite Kurosawa is still high with Seven Samurai and Rashomon. Mizoguchi's Ugetsu is still highly regarded.

Time for some nominations (a few from each of these categories and my choice in bold):

Citizen Kane. It's like the Bible and Shakespeare on your desert island. It's the sine qua non of cinema.

Silent cinema: The General, Potemkin, Sunrise. I'd like to add Gance's Napoleon.

Asian: I'll have to stick with Kurosawa, because I haven't seen anything else. Seven Samurai. Perhaps Ray should be here too (not Nick, the other one).

European: obviously La Regle du Jeu. I notice, by the way, that Renoir's other masterpiece, La Grande Illusion is now down at 35. I'd better mention Fellini's 8 1/2, although I haven't seen it, not do I intend to. What kind of director puts his own name in the title of his film? There are a few French films I want to see, which appear on these polls, such as Le Jour se Leve and La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc. Le Salaire de la Peur

Art-house (same as above really): take your pick from any already mentioned, plus Bunuel. As a matter of fact I can't find Bunuel on the latest list. Perhaps people have finally twigged that all that time he was taking the piss. I'll pass on this.

Hollywood (classic): The Searchers, Some Like It Hot, Vertigo, 2001, Singin' in the Rain, My Darling Clementine, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, It's a Wonderful Life.

British: Lawrence of Arabia, The Third Man, and there ought to be a Powell and Pressburger film here. A Matter of Life and Death, possibly, or Black Narcissus.

Recent films: There aren't any in the poll. What, from the last 10 years will make it into the Hall of Fame? A Scorsese or Spielberg? Their best work is already more than 10 years old. Is Clint Eastwood's Letter from Iwo Jima going to put the seal on his incredible career?

My personal top ten of all-time greats:

Citizen Kane, plus

Potemkin

The Wild Bunch

The Searchers

Twelve o'clock High

The Scarlet Empress

Way Out West (Laurel & Hardy)

The General

Schindlers List

The Bride of Frankenstein

It's a Wonderful Life

Peter Boyle

Peter Boyle has died.

I suppose most people remember his turn as the monster in Young Frankenstein, especially his song-and-dance routine with Puttin' on the Ritz. OK, that was good fun, but for real class acting you have to go back to The Friends of Eddie Coyle, where he played a shady character called Dillon.

Friends, directed by Peter Yates, is based on the novel by former Boston DA, George V Higgins, and incidentally provides Bob Mitchum with one of his finest roles. It's a fine, but forgotten film. I'm not sure it's even available on DVD.

Higgin's novels are unusual in that they are composed almost entirely of dialogue, rather like those of Ivy Compton-Burnett. It's no mean trick to advance the plot of a thriller purely with conversations but Higgins pulls it off in highly readable fashion. The film is also heavy on dialogue and remains thoughtful and downbeat throughout. Nonetheless it is absorbing and for my money one of the best gangster films ever made.

The 'friends' of the title is highly ironic, for no-one is to be trusted, least of all the cops, who conduct a favour-for-favour relationship with the various hoods involved.

Boyle's Dillon is a bartender, with fingers in many criminal pies. One of his 'friends' is Mitchum's small-timer, Eddie, trying to avoid prison and tempted to shop one of his other 'friends' in exchange for leniency. Dillon also is receiving his $50 a week from the cops. He is greasy, slippery, humourless and menacing, with his great bulk and slow, padding walk. He is also totally without scruple, and by the end of the film we find he is probably the most evil of all the dodgy characters involved.

It's a memorable performance, but Boyle's potential as a heavy - he was never going to be a romantic lead -was never realised. A lot of TV work came to him as the years passed and he seems to have retired into the sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond.

Getting sorted

Today I get my desk organised, sort all those bits of paper with notes on them, bring my database of videos and DVDs up to date, renew my library books, send out my Christmas cards and buy my Christmas presents.

I need to review this blog too, because I have got various series on the go and am getting a bit confused.

I've got the adaptation series. Story to screen. I've done why adapt and what is adapted. Next, I plan to do the refining process between the first treatment through the screenplay to the shooting script. After that I shall look at the changes that can occur during filming. And finally, the post -production alterations that might be deemed necessary.

Then I have my list of criteria for lists. Put like that it sounds a bit daft, which it no doubt is. Anyway, coming up are canonical, prejudice, snobbery, familiarity, sentimentality, the herd-like mentality, cultishness, genre, star, iconoclasm, politics, innovation. It's going to keep me busy all year.

I also want to do more reviews. I plan to post comments on IMdb - http://www.imdb.com/

and link them here. I want to do The Wild Bunch, the Searchers, High Noon, and The Getaway. If they all seem too obvious, I also have in mind Hell Drivers, Ride Lonesome, Three Godfathers and Written on the Wind. I have already sumbitted my thoughts on Stan (the TV play) and Twelve o'clock High.

I suppose I should write about films I don't like. Perhaps life is too short. On the other hand something needs to be said against over-praised works like The Graduate, Rio Bravo, Klute, The Italian Job, Ben-Hur, Titanic, Gladiator, If, The Wicker Man, Easy Rider and Star Wars in its entirety. Now there's a good series.

John Walsh did it, why not me?

I might one day. That is, write an autobiography of my formative years through the films I saw.

He called his Are you talking to me? I shall call mine I wouldn't have it any other way, or maybe It ain't like it used to be (but it'll do). Here's a few notes.

Early childhood

Well, this is back to ole Davy, Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier.

This Disney film was probably the first Western I ever saw. Except, it wasn't a Western. I'm a bit purist about what I call a Western, and this film is ante-bellum, and therefore too early. Civil War films aren't Westerns either, nor are modern-day films like Hud. I reccognise, of course, that Hud draws on the genre and could have been placed a 100 years earlier in time. I don't really approve of comedy Westerns either, and certainly not musicals.

So why do I break my own rule and call it a Western? Simply because it has a hero who has the Westerner's morality. By 'morality' I mean an outlook on life and way of behaving. Crockett, like Shane or Ethan Edwards, is a loner, an individualist, more concerned with doing what he thinks is right than in conforming. Thus, he has a family, and while he does not neglect them, he's rarely there; he loses them anyway. He joins the army, but for his own reasons, and as a scout or hunter, which makes him semi-detached from the organisation. He respects his enemies, the Creeks, and is not racist. As a politician, he is a maverick and behaves quixotically in rebelling against the President, thereby sacrificing his career.

He was always dissatisfied, constantly on the moving, constantly moving towards an unreachable frontier, physically and intellectually.

I do not know what the real Crockett was like, but no matter. The screen character was a role model, and so were the classic Western heroes who followed, flaws and all. I am not saying that I consciously tried to imitate them in some childish, playful way, but that their take on life gradually seeped into my sub-conscious. And I expect there was always something in my character that responded to their dislike of joining, their questioning, their self-reliance.

There is obviously a strong streak of selfishness in this. It is libertarian, but not always liberal. It can be male chauvinist, if not outright misogynist. It is obviously anti-socialist, but sometimes it can be anti-social also.

But films in the fifties were moral. Heroes did 'the right thing', without needing the law or God to tell them what it was. Life was complicated, a series of choices and mistakes, compromises and conflicts.

In the film we did not see Davey die, just as we did not see Butch and Sundance die fifteen years later. The reason for this wasn't just that this was a film aimed at children and that his death might upset us. It was also pointing out the immediate translation of the man into myth. There's no need for a hope of heaven when a life itself can be celebrated forever on earth.

Pre-adolescence

I decided early that the name 'Walt Disney' on a film was a guarantee of entertainment and, being a completist, I probably carried on going to see anything with that hallmark long after I could use my age as an excuse. It's easy to be snobbish about Disney and forget that he produced Treasure Island, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea and The Great Locomotive Chase. I still remember Tonka and The Nine Lives of Elfego Baca, films which I have never had the opportunity to see again in 45 years. So they must have had something.

Girls didn't feature at this stage. Certainly not in real life and in films they merely delayed the action and generally got in the way. But there was the occasional crush. I shiver with shame now to confess that I had a crush on Hayley Mills and once crept furtively into a cinema to see Pollyanna. I didn't like films with children and I certainly didn't like girls but this one I watched. I even ordered the book and read it.

Actually Pollyanna is not a bad film. Disney again. Efficiently made - I guess it was Robert Stevenson - with an excellent cast, including Wyman, Menjou, Moorehead and Malden. But at the time the only attraction was the safely sexless Hayley.

Adolescence

It may have been the sixties, but I certainly wasn't swinging. In fact I'm not sure many people were, apart from the ones who always had, the aristocrats, the entertainers, the celebrities, etc. I spent the years collecting weekly pop charts and collating them into annual league tables, struggling at school and overcoming a stammer. I did that, by the way, by prefixing difficult dentals with a silent vowel - eg '(er)destination'. By the time I was sixteen I was chairman of the debating society, which proves that it worked.

I was missing out on the cinema. It was years later before I caught up with the British kitchen sink films, or later Hitchcock. I did see Lawrence and Zhivago, but I wasn't a fan, let alone a movie buff at this stage.

Girls, however, were a problem, not one helped by the constant enquiries of adults as to whether or not I was 'courting'. It was the usual angst of a shy teenager and I retreated into religion. If I ask myself now why someone who already considered himself an individualist outsider should sacrifice his reason to a set of unprovable doctrines, I can only reply that I was seduced by a need for certainty. I went through a left-wing socialist stage at the same time.

In both cases I was, however, an extremist. That meant I could still feel different and rebellious. My religion was evangelical, which meant I could condemn Catholics as superstitious, Anglicans as woolly, and the rest of the world as doomed sinners. Great fun!

When I deigned to think about women, my taste showed no signs of improving. The only physical fight I ever got into at school was over the relative merits of Cilla Black and Dionne Warwick. Yes, I was Cilla's champion. For Christ's sake!

Then one day, on TV, I saw Kathy Kirby. At that moment I grew up. Soon I was mourning the death of Marilyn Monroe and singing 'Boo, Boo, Bi-doo' with tears in my eyes. I was going to see Hammer films, especially if they starred Ingrid Pitt. I remember Karen Steele in Corman movies. I rediscovered Shirley Anne Field and Shirley Eaton and Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore (in my innocence I didn't get it).

The first girl I ever invited out -to the pictures of course - was nothing like those goddesses, but she was a couple of years older than I, and therefore reasonably well-developed. Zulu was the chosen film, one of my all-time favourites, so much so that I think I could turn the sound down and quote the dialogue from memory. The loneliness of command, the heroism of the soldiers, the war chant of the Zulus, the competitive singing in return of Men of Harlech, image piled upon image as body is piled upon body. Wonderful stuff. I'm glad the bitch stood me up, because it meant I could watch the film uninterrupted by adolescent fumbling

The Prestige

Yesterday I got our new TV working. More or less. For some reason my DVDs are all in black and white, but no doubt all will be well. It's a 28 inch wide-screen and, as luck would have it, got it's first real test later when TCM showed Lawrence of Arabia. Now that is a test, and it passed with flying colours. Lawrence is a truly wonderful film. The more often I see it the more I admire the dialogue, the wealth of great actors, the music, the photography and Lean's great vision and, most of all, his control of all the elements.

I once read a criticism of the film, namely that for all its scope and scale, there is little at its centre, that we know Lawrence no better at the end of the film than we do at the beginning.

Isn't that the point?

But my raptures over my new TV were soon put into perspective, because I went to the pictures later. I do this rarely and I always realise afresh that no TV, however big and expensive can compare with the wondrous experience of sitting in the dark trying to take in that huge screen, which can with equal ease show you a raging storm at sea or a single drop of water on a woman's cheek.

If only I could pause the film sometimes and go make a cup of tea.

I went to see The Prestige. Good cast, up-and-coming director, intriguing story, technically brilliant. But half an hour too long, and basically a daft story which could not bear the weight of its treatment. Hollywood would have made it with more dash and pace 50 years ago. Maybe Hitchcock. Cagney and Bogart doing the Bale and whatisname roles.

There are no 'revisionist' Westerns

Film critics are so often lazy, or pretentious, which is much the same thing. Reviewers and TV previewers are especially guilty. Working to deadlines, I suppose.

You know the sort of thing: an actor who doesn't do a lot of emoting, like Clint or Greg is called 'wooden' as a matter of course, but if he rolls his eyebrows a bit he's called 'hammy'. If he's in a British war film, then the phrase 'stiff uper lip' has to be dragged out of the locker.

If he or she plays the same sort of role most of the time, they are 'type-cast'. Try something different and they are 'miscast'. If they use a different accent, it's always 'dodgy', even if the critic has never heard the accent itself in his life.

Plots tend to be 'derivative' if you don't like them, an 'hommage' if you do. Themes are 'Manichean' or 'post-ironic' or 'innovative' or 'ground-breaking' or, if the hero has to make a decision, 'existentialist'.

But the one I hate most - at the moment - is 'revisionist', when applied to the Western. What is being revised? Some non-existent standard of Western that has to be updated or undermined or improved?

The western has always been 'revising' itself, re-working stock themes and characters from The Squawman onwards. (All right, I haven't seen it, but I've read all about it). But I have seen these:

Stagecoach (1939): whore doesn't pay for her sins but gets the hero.

The Ox-Bow Incident (1943): tragic ending, where the good guys don't get to save the weak.

The Three Godfathers (1948): the Western as religious parable!

Red River (1948): the hero as drunken, cruel, paranoid, vengeful bastard.

Fort Apache (1948): pre-dates The Man who Shot Liberty Valance in its cynicism about 'printing the legend'.

Broken Arrow (1950): the Western as bleeding heart liberal plea for mutual understanding.

The Gunfighter (1950): ageing gunman wants to hang up his guns and retire, but trapped by his past. Ten years later The Magnificent Seven felt the same way, as did Steve Judd, and a few years later Pike Bishop.

The Furies (1950): the Western as Greek tragedy.

High Noon (1952): Communist propaganda - they say. Actually it's about as non-revisionist as you're going to get, apart from Shane.

The Naked Spur (1953) and all the Stewart/Mann films: 'psychological' Westerns, where the hero is seen as fallible, wrong, neurotic. See Red River.

Johnny Guitar (1954): McCarthyism, sexual frustration, weirdness. Final gunfight between women.

The Searchers (1956): the earliest one I've heard called 'revisionist'. It begins a long line of Westerns given that title, from the spaghettis through The Wild Bunch to Unforgiven.

After those the only revisionism you get is more authentic clothing, more moustaches, more foul language, more whores, even nastier Indians, even nastier cavalrymen, more corporate businessmen from 'back East' or 'up North', more bicycles and machine guns.

So are there any models which have been revised? Well, there are all the old B-westerns, which don't count and which are all that Mel Brooks could find to lampoon in Blazing Saddles. Shane was self-consciously 'classic', as were Duel in the Sun, The Big Country and Lawman.

No. If you want true, pure re-tellings of the classic Western myth, watch The Tall T, Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station. They don't come much better than that.

Recommended books

WALSH, John Are you talking to me? Harper Collins, 2003

I've mentioned this before. Love it. Walsh talks about his formative years in terms of the impact made on him by films. After the early childhood viewings of Lawrence of Arabia, etc, when he would have been about 10, he moves through films like The Innocents, The Enigma of Caspar Hauser and on to Don't Look Now. The last seems to haunt him and he links it with his experiences as a father. The childhood accidents, the times he felt he'd let his children down, a residual guilt.

It's obvious Walsh is a film fan, despite being a critic. Rather like David Thomson, his knowledge does not prevent the child-like wonder and love that the true fan feels for the movies.

As I've said before,it's the book I should have written. Maybe I still could, because the half-dozen films I would choose would quite different. I'll make a start by listing them soon.

By the way, on a similar theme, Alan Bennett talks about the influence on him of 'the pictures'. (Alan, of course, wouldn't talk about 'cinema', let alone 'movies'.) In his book, Untold Stories.

* * * *

COYNE, Michael The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western. Tauris, 1997.

I'm always cautious about books with titles like this. My hackles rise at the smell of anything 'sociological'. I remember being infuriated by Big Bad Wolves, a feminist take on Hollywood. Molly Haskell, I think. It's not that I disagreed with her, just that I didn't care. and why spend years watching films that obviously annoy you in order to write a book that will merely annoy others.

I remember Molly slagging off every male star - she seemed unable to distinguish between character and actor - for being fascist, chauvinist rapists. Every one, except Clark Gable. Apparently he respected women. Well, possibly. My theory is that the dear girl was just in love.

Anyway, back to Mr Coyne. I recommend it because the the theme of the book is just a framework for talking about Westerns, how they've changed, developed and reflect the environment in which they are made. But he doesn't push it and you get some pretty intelligent reviews of Stagecoach, The Wild Bunch, Outlaw Josey Wales,etc. He obviously likes Westerns and does not need a sociological reference to appreciate them.

I don't need to know that The Wild Bunch, Ulzana's Raid and Soldier Blue are 'about' or at least influenced by the Vietnam War to like them (or otherwise). If they were just that they would be as transitory as a newspaper editorial.

I get fed up with arguing on message boards about whether High Noon is 'left-wing'. I know that Foreman was a commie, that Zinnemann was a liberal. Maybe they did think, 'Aren't we clever, getting an anti-McCarthy message through via the most right-wing of genres.' Maybe, but the point is this: how does the film stand up 50 years later? Or with people who've never heard of McCarthy? The answer is - pretty well. And it's a standard right-wing Western: the triumph of law and order; the victory of the upright individual when normal society fails; the need to use violence; the failure of pacifism; the marginalisation of women, etc.