Classic Movies/Sky Arts
This series, presented by Ian Nathan, has returned.
No Dr Bonnie Greer, but instead a young American critic and film historian Christina Newland. Neil Norman is also a regular but Steven Armstrong, the Sunday Times film critic, features only occasionally.
The choice of movies is odd.
The first was Brief Encounter – a British weepie with Celia Johnson and a young dashing Trevor Howard as the doctor in a tale of doomed love. Noel Coward cooperated with David Lean on the film. The team were perceptive on its legacy. The lending of his flat by Trevor Howard’s superior had echoes of the Walter Matthau/Jack Lemmon classic The Apartment and – though no one ever mentioned this – when Celia Johnson wakes from a troubled sleep at the end – it reminded me of Catherine Deneuve in the Bunuel masterpiece on a woman’s erotic fantasies Belle de Jour.
Next up came Whisky Galore – a story based upon Compton McKenzie’s novel of the same name – about a Scottish island during World War Two on which, due to rationing, supplies of whisky have run out but then a ship is grounded loaded with 50,000 bottles of whisky on board. In no way do I regard this as a classic.
Mel Brooks’ The Producers does fit the bill – the ingenious story of two chancers (Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel) seeking investors for a sure-fire loser theatre production – a musical about Hitler.
Mel Brooks fought in the Second World War but there were issues of questionable taste explored by the team.
Then came I’m Alright Jack, the Boulting Brothers’ satire upon industrial relations – with a devious factory ownership of Richard Attenborough and the suave Dennis Price on one hand – and the preposterous union leader Fred Kite, played by Peter Sellers, on the other. Ian Carmichael is the patsy and Terry-Thomas the hapless human resources executive. It’s a great comedy with a brilliant cast of English comic actors but I did not care for the anti-Thatcher stance adopted by a comedian contributor. It should be seen in the context of late 1950s/early 1960s gritty social realism like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Angry Silence.
Last night there was another odd choice – Murder on the Orient Express – directed by Sidney Lumet, better known for courtroom dramas like Twelve Angry Men and New York location films like Serpico.
It had a stellar cast of Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Antony Perkins, Richard Widmark, Sean Connery, Martin Balsam and Albert Finney (as Poirot). I can remember it coming out in 1974 to indifferent reviews and watched the DVD again recently. It does not do it for me. Albert Finney’s performance as Poirot drew much praise from the team and won him an Oscar. Several actors have played Poirot – notably Peter Ustinov, Kenneth Branagh and John Malkovich – but none as authentically as David Suchet in the TV series.
