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Kelly’s Heroes

Kelly’s Heroes (1970) supports my theory that a war film tells you as much about the time it was made as the time it covers. In 1970 America was involved in Vietnam and the film is less about gung-ho heroism than a buffoon general (Don Rickles), a long-haired hippie soldier (Donald Sutherland) [...]

May 5, 2019 // 0 Comments

That was then but this is now (revisited)

Without doubt a prime candidate as the greatest agent of impetus in human civilisation is the invention of means of ‘recording’ first language (in the form of writing) and then – as regards performing arts – the use of devices capable of recording sound and movement ‘in the moment’. [...]

April 6, 2019 // 0 Comments

A ‘good in parts’ dose of Sunday night TV

Yesterday I had returned home from a demanding weekend in the country, made myself a late lunch and then retired to my pit. As a result I slept for two and a half hours straight, partly because I felt exhausted and partly because it was going to be my only route to staying up long enough to see the [...]

April 1, 2019 // 0 Comments

Fred Zinnemann

Last night the excellent SKY ARTS cinema programme featured one of my favourite directors Fred Zinnemann. It’s a name that the more casual cinema-goer probably knows but perhaps cannot list his films which include From Here to Eternity, High Noon, A Man for all Seasons,  Oklahoma!, The Nun’s [...]

March 15, 2019 // 0 Comments

Dirk Bogarde

We critics are no different from the general audience in our likes and dislikes – worse if anything. I never really liked two of the most talented female Hollywood stars Meryl Streep and Katherine Hepburn, the first for being so pleased with herself and the second lacking the warmth and [...]

March 5, 2019 // 0 Comments

Edwardians In Colour review: 2 stars out of 5

Last night – during a lull in domestic proceedings that coincided with my early evening gin & tonic and a dearth of anything remotely watchable on the box, I managed to negotiate my cable television complexities and thereby play for myself the first episode of a Channel 5 documentary series [...]

March 5, 2019 // 0 Comments

Das Boot

I watched the final 4 episodes of Das Boot. One critic observed that a few years ago you would call it unmissable but such is the improvement in European productions that he down graded this to hugely enjoyable. I would not have gone as far at that. There were 2 parallel stories, one on the U-boat [...]

March 2, 2019 // 0 Comments

Six Degrees of Separation (1993)

Watching the biopic of Donald Sutherland on Sky Arts inspired me to rent one of the more neglected films in his canon of considerable work – Six Degrees of Separation. Sutherland is in every sense a towering actor able to fulfil many roles, the concerned father in Ordinary People, the cop in [...]

February 23, 2019 // 0 Comments

Das Boot and Sky Arts “Discovering”

I watched the next two episodes of Das Boot on catch up. Both engrossed me sufficiently to intend to watch the rest of the series. One of the attractions of modern television is the importing of the European production. These begun with The Killing and followed with other Scanda Noir like The [...]

February 15, 2019 // 0 Comments

Fings don’t always seem what they are, or used ter be …

Having briefly worked in television I’m broadly aware of the ‘tricks of the trade’ – real or imagined – because, of course, in broadcasting (as in every aspect of life) very little is actually what it seems. Or perhaps that should read ‘necessarily what it seems’. Whether it’s a [...]

February 11, 2019 // 0 Comments

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