The Danish Girl.

Tom Hooper’s return to form after the dreadfully disappointing film version of Les Miserables (2012) is a fictionalised retelling of the story of a very brave and courageous human being. Based on David Ebershoff's novel of the same name, The Danish Girl (2015) is the story of Lille Elbe who was credited as one of the first identifiable recipients of sex reassignment surgery.

Lilli Elbe.

Born Einar Magnus Andreas Wagener in Venice, Denmark in 1882 as a male, met his future wife at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and married in 1904. Einar specialised in landscape painting while he wife Gerda illustrated books and fashion magazines. Einar love of dressing as a woman started when he was asked to wear stockings and heels so he could fill in for the ‘legs and feet’ of Gerda's absentee model Anna Larssen. Following this one simple incident he stared dressing, and in time identifying as a woman. He became the beautiful female model featured in his wife's best known paintings and accompanied her to many social functions in Paris where they moved in 1912. It was after this period in 1930 that this transgender pioneer Lilli Elbe went to Germany for what was at that time experimental sex reassignment surgery which would involve four operations over two years.

 

Gerda Wegener's portrait of her husband.

Gerda's self portrait.

The film stars Eddie Redmayne as Einar Wegerer/Lilli Elbe who was nominated for Best Actor in the 2016 Academy Awards and Swedish actress Alicia Vikander as Gerda Wegenar/Gottlieb for which she quite rightly won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Also included in the cast is Ben Whishaw as Claude Lejeune Lilli Elbe's lover, Sebastian Koch as Doctor Kurt Warnekros who performed the ground breaking surgery and Amber Heard as Anna Larssen Gerda's model and friend.

 

Alicia Vikander as Gerda Wegenar. 

There was some criticism for casting a cis actor in the main role but I believe Redmayne pulled it off but there certainly more to the story than was portrayed in Ebershoff’s book. Although it has been opined that Lucinda Coxen's screenplay allows a more truthful reflection of the story it still does not tell the whole story including the fact that Gerda Gottlieb had lesbian lovers leading to some critics accusing the film of being LGBT sanitised. A well-intentioned film that in my opinion does not go far enough.

Cat Girl.

In the late 1950's and 1960's London born Barbara Kowin, better known to the film going public as Barbara Shelley, became Hammer Horror's number one female star and there after the leading lady of British Horror. Appearing in such films as Blood of the Vampire (1958), The Gorgon (1964), Dracula Prince of Darkness (1966), Rasputin, the Mad Monk (1966) and Quatermass and the Pit (1967). But before this successful run of horror classics she starred in the remake of the 1942 Jacques Tourneur directed and Val Lewton produced film of the same name Cat People.

 

The wonderful Barbara Shelley (left).

This 1957 update of the supernatural chiller stars Shelley as Leonora Johnson who is instructed to return to her ancestral home by her Uncle (Ernest Milton) where she is informed that she is the heir to the family curse which involves being possessed by the spirit of a leopard! Neither her husband, her friends or her ex lover psychiatrist Dr Brian Marlowe (Robert Ayres) believe in the curse and put her ever increasingly strange behaviour down to her mental state brought on by her husbands unfaithfulness. Dr Marlowe then commits her to a sanatorium, will this incarceration cure her suspected insanity or is there a lot more to the family curse?

 

A cat fight?

Although this low budget B-movie is far from a classic it has as its saving grace a leading lady whose convincing performance is well above the work produced by her co-stars. The Daily Cinema called her performance ‘blood curdling’, with Kinematograph Weekly describing it as ‘A hectic amalgam of savagery and sex’

Best known for being script editor of the 1971 TV drama Upstairs, Downstairs, which was must see viewing in the early part of the 1970's, and the pop revue 6.5 Special (1958) Alfred Shaughnessy directed this grand example of British gothic cinema with ingredients of ‘erotic sex and violent horror combined’[1] – well for 1957 anyway.  

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[1] The British ‘B’ Movie. Steve Chibnall, Brian McFarlane.

Carol.

The American authoress Patricia Highsmith wrote, amongst her other literally works, 22 novels of which around two dozen were adapted for either the TV or the cinema. Cinematic adaptions included several of her five Tom Ripley novels. The best-known adaptations are probable Strangers on a Train (1951), Plein Soleil (1960) its American remake The Talented Mr Ripley (1999), Ripley’s Game (2002) and The Two Faces of January in 2014. The latest of her novels to be served up for the big screen is her only non-crime novel and a landmark in LGBT fiction, The Price of Salt that was published in 1952 under the pseudonym of Clair Morgan. The novel was later republished under the title of Carol (2015). It tells the story of a developing love affair between a young aspiring photographer Therese Belivet and an older privileged housewife Carol Aird who is going through a rather acrimonious divorce that involves the custody of her young daughter.   

 

Carol and Therese develop a relationship.... 

....that makes her divorce more complicated....

Set in New York City in the early 1950’s it stars Cate Blanchett as socialite Carol Aird, Rooney Mara as Therese Belivet a role that raises her above the two dreadful films I had seen her in previously, namely The Social Network (2010) and the lame US remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in 2011.  Also cast in important roles are Sarah Paulson and Kyle Chandler. The movie was directed by Todd Haynes who produced Meeks Cutoff (2010) and Wendy and Lucy (2008), and whose directorial credits include Velvet Goldmine (1998), Far From Heaven (2002) and I’m Not There (2007).

....which in turn bears down on Carol. 

Haynes has elicited exceptional performances from both Blanchett and Mara from whose portrayal’s one can feel the warmth that develops between the women radiating from the screen. This along with the beautiful 1950’s clothes, superb cinematography by Edward Lachman who has previous with Haynes and a soundtrack by prolific film composer Carter Burwell, probable best known for his Coen Brothers scores, makes this a film not to be missed by anyone cinematically turned on by a good well written drama. Its just a shame that the movie was snubbed by the movie establishment and missed out on a Best Picture nomination at the Academy Awards - because of its subject matter?

Bonjour Tristesse.

Describing a film as pish[1] is not very professional I concur, but with Otto Preminger's 1958's Bonjour Tristesse it's the ideal use of the word! In this movie i have a problem finding something positive to say except there are certainly some smart cars, some very nice frocks and of cause the attractive Mylene Demongeot and technically there is some decent cinematography, but even admitting this, bear in mind that the DOP did have the Côte d'Azur and San Tropez to work with! There isn't much of a story to be honest what there is is based on a novel by Francoise Sagan - albeit a thin one – published in 1954 when the author was only 18.

 

"so many awful pretentious snobbish  characters"

What we have is David Niven in his normal toffee nosed twat role as a middle aged wealthy lothario with property in the South of France as well as Paris who has a seriously strange relationship with his daughter played by Jean Seberg. Most of the inaction takes place on the French coast in a large villa which father and daughter share with Daddy's latest squeeze (Demongeot) that is until father invites an old friend of his dead wife played by Deborah Kerr to make it four sharing. Tensions rise, squeeze is jealous because her fun life style and prospective nest egg could evaporate, daughter, a spoilt brat, hates prospective wife because this will come between father and daughter and her free wheeling life style. Even smarmy playboy Niven is not sure if he should marry Kerr, as he will have to stop having sexual affairs with much younger women.  Oh dear I'm not sure how it is possible to have so many awful pretentious snobbish upper class characters in one story line, but credit where credit due this story has achieved just that! Reality is not a word you would use to describe this sluggish melodrama. Believe it or not there were some critics that gave the film a positive review but the BFI’s appraisal did not hold back: "The best performance is David Niven’s; he gives his part a pathetic touch that the writing never attains. Jean Seberg, who speaks rather than acts her lines, turns in the least effective performance. Bonjour Tristesse is an elegant, ice cold, charade of emotions, completely artificial and eventually torpid."[2] I would suggest unless you’re a complete masochist then give this movie a very wide berth.

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[1] Literally means piss urine pee etc. It is not a slang word as so many people assume but an ancient scots word, Scots being the Language of the Lowlanders of Scotland FACT!! Can also be used as a put down.

[2] BFI Monthly Film bulletin May 1958.

Survivor.

Some movies are destined for VOD or the DVD bargain shelf at your local supermarket and the British/American spy thriller Survivor (2015) directed by James McTeigue, best known for V for Vendetta his directorial debut in 2006, is one such movie. The film stars the ex Mrs Luc Besson, Milla Jovovich as Kate Abbott a Diplomatic Security Service Agent working at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square in London. Her job is to vet visa applications for entry into the USA to stop potential terrorist from entering the country. It turns out she is so good at her job that the worlds best freelance assassin known as The Watchmaker, a man who has had plastic surgery to make him look like Pierce Brosnan, is tasked with killing her at all costs which as you’ll see ends up wiping out nearly all her unsuspecting office colleagues in a bomb blast in a busy London restaurant.  Things get far more complicated in this far-fetched ‘thriller by numbers’ as time goes on. Full of plot holes this glossy drama is a Cert 12 that will give you some idea about the level of its content. Clumsily written by first time screenwriter Phillip Shelby it includes some patriotic nonsense inserted for its American market,  where as the blowing up of a large occupied council block of flats killing hundreds of people barely gets a mention!  

The Quiller Memorandum.

How could any one shot a film, albeit in West Berlin, and not show or even mention the physical division that existed in Berlin from 1961 is beyond me. Maybe its because the film depended in part on American finance and that country refused to acknowledge that East Germany was a country in its own right – not unusual if you don’t agree with something ignore it or pretend it doesn’t exist!

Directed by the British film director Michael Anderson, based on the novel The Berlin Memorandum by Elleston Trevor who wrote it under the pen name of Adam Hall, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter The Quiller Memorandum (1966) deals with the upsurge of support for neo-Nazism in post war Germany.  Quiller (George Segal) is brought back from vacation and posted to Berlin to locate the head quarters of Phoenix an underground organization that that still believes in the teachings of one Adolf Hitler and led by Oktober (Max von Sydow). When Quiller meets his controller Pol (Alec Guinness) it’s explained to him that the two previous agents tasked with the job have both met a sticky end. Refusing any assistance he sets out to locate the organization but during his investigations he meets a femme fatal in the shape of Inge Lindt (Senta Berger) who offers to help.

Other than Guinness none of the actors on display are very believable with Segal being the worst culprit enacting an unbelievably hammy performance.  Pinter script is as exciting as a wet week in Halifax and would barely rate as a decent B-movie script with its lack of any real exciting action sequences also unusually for this type of movie completely devoid of any narrative plot twists. To sum up the whole thing is unremarkable, boasting a particularly dull script and some really corny acting. Not a patch on Guy Hamilton’s Funeral in Berlin the same year but lets not forget that was written by Len Deighton and starred Michael Caine as Harry Palmer – now’s there’s a character you can believe in.