gratia artis

Here’s another old quiz, this time all about Mr Maurice Micklewhite himself, Michael Caine.

A: Colleagues

1. Michael Caine’s British contemporaries include his old friends Sean Connery, Roger Moore and Terence Stamp.
   • Put this quartet in the right order by age, oldest first.
   • He has made films with two of them: which two, and what are the films?
   • What is his connection with the third?
2. Caine has made five (some might say six) films with Bob Hoskins. Name as many of them as you can.
3. Caine has had some interesting co-stars over the years. In which film does he appear with:
   • Mickey Rooney
   • Billy Connolly
   • Henry Fonda
   • Peter Cook and Dudley Moore
   • John Gielgud
   • his own wife?
4. Caine appears with two distinguished British playwrights in two of his most popular films. Name the playwrights and the films.
5. Play a version of ‘Six degrees of Michael Caine’ with the following films: Quills, Gladiator, LA Confidential, Seven, Emma, Little Voice.

B: Names

1. In which films does Caine play the following oddly-named characters:
   • Gonville Bromhead
   • Peachy Carnehan
   • Milo Tindle
   • Wilbur Larch
   • Hoagy Newcombe?
2. In addition to the Harry Palmer films, name a film in which Caine has played a character called Harry.
3. In both Caine’s outings as characters called Jack, he has ended up dead. What are the films?
4. In which two films, based on stage plays, has Caine played against type as a character called Sidney? What links the two characters?
5. In what way could Caine claim to be a gypsy?

C: Connections

1. Which of the following World War Two films starring Caine is the most odd-one-out: Battle of Britain, A Bridge Too Far, The Eagle has Landed, Escape to Victory, Play Dirty, Too Late the Hero? Why?
2. Which film united Caine with Glenda Jackson, Tom Stoppard and Joseph Losey?
3. Who connects Joseph Losey with Caine’s first starring role in Zulu?
4. Which Caine film is a remake of Bedtime Story, starring Marlon Brando and David Niven?
5. What links Caine with British actors Alan Napier and Michael Gough?

D: Oscars

1. Caine won his second Oscar in 2000 for his New England doctor in Cider House Rules. In what previous films had he played an American, accent and all?
2. Caine’s first Oscar was for Elliott in the 1986 film Hannah and her Sisters. In which other film of 1986 did Caine play a character called Elliott?
3. For which of the following four films was Caine NOT nominated for best actor: Alfie, The Honorary Consul, Educating Rita, The Quiet American?

Many years ago I used to take part in my local cinema’s monthly film quiz. I wasn’t too bad at it (even won it a couple of times, when I was in a team with people who could supplement my deplorably shaky knowledge of the films of Steve Guttenberg), but thought it was a bit narrow – mostly post-1977 stuff, with hardly a non-Hollywood film in sight. So I put together a couple of quizzes of my own, pitching them at the same sort of level (but with a wider spread) and sent them off to the relevant official at the cinema.

Naturally, he or she did not even deign to reply.

So I thought I might as well put this first one out onto the internet (slightly updated), to see if anyone bites. The questions were originally designed to be read out and answered without help from reference books, IMDB, Google, etc. (It goes without saying, of course, that these are a doddle if you look them up on the internet, so it’s more fun if you don’t.)

A. Variants on ‘Six degrees of Kevin Bacon’

The rules of this circular variant of ‘Six degrees of Kevin Bacon’ are simple. You start with a film starring Kevin Bacon, then choose a film that stars one of his co-stars from that first film. The next film stars a co-star from that second film, and so on, ending after another three or four films with a film starring Kevin Bacon again. A fairly straightforward example would be: Apollo 13 (Bacon with Bill Paxton), A Simple Plan (Paxton with Billy Bob Thornton), Primary Colors (Thornton with John Travolta), Blow Out (Travolta with John Lithgow), Footloose (Lithgow with Bacon).

1. All the Kevins: Which Kevins connect the following films?
   • JFK
   • Silverado
   • Consenting Adults
   • The Usual Suspects
   • A Few Good Men
2. Spacemen: Kevin famously played an astronaut in Apollo 13. The following films are connected by which actors, and in which films do they play astronauts/men in space?
   • Tremors
   • The Player
   • The Truth about Charlie
   • Three Kings
   • Ocean’s Eleven
   • Devil in a Blue Dress
   • Natural Born Killers
   • JFK
3. Six of one: The following films are connected by people who have worked with Kevin themselves. Who are they, and in which films do they appear with him?
   • The Mexican
   • Stepmom
   • The Hours
   • Deer Hunter
   • We’re no Angels
   • Disclosure

B. Names

Who is the odd one out?

1. Cyd Charisse, Elizabeth Taylor, Raquel Welch, Susan Sarandon
2. Tuesday Weld, Stockard Channing, Sigourney Weaver, Susan Sarandon
3. Anemone, Anne Shirley, Gig Young, Mickey Rooney

C. Historical characters

Which actor has played these real-life figures?

1. Marcus Aurelius and Richard the Lionheart
2. Elvis Presley and Wyatt Earp
3. Louis XIV and Arthur Rimbaud
4. Richard Wagner and Alexander the Great
5. Michelangelo Buonarotti and Cardinal Richelieu
6. Emma Hamilton and Cleopatra
7. Al Capone and W C Fields
8. Pablo Picasso and David Lloyd George
9. Francisco Pizarro and Henry VIII
10. Dashiell Hammett and Howard Hughes
11. D W Griffiths and Robert Flaherty

D. Criminal quotations

All these quotations are from crime films. Name the films and the actors who say the line(s) and/or about whom they are said. (I ought to say that these are almost all from memory, so may not be exact!)

1. ‘Mother of mine, is this the end of Rico?’
2. ‘He used to be a big shot.’
3. ‘He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?’
4. ‘You are a very bad man!’ – ‘I just want my money.’
5. ‘Made it, Ma! Top of the world!’
6. ‘All I have in this world is my balls and my word.’
7. ‘He’s so cool, when he goes to sleep, the sheep count him.’
8. ‘We was with you at Rigoletto’s.’
9. ‘They put one of ours in the hospital, we put one of theirs in the morgue.’
10. ‘I’ve got this little man inside of me…’

E. Not a remake…

The following pairs of brief synopses describe films with the same title (but not remakes). What is the shared title in each case?

1. – An ambitious TV presenter has her husband murdered.
   – A gay man is haunted by his recently deceased lover.
2. – Two mismatched scholars look into the private life of a 19th century poet.
   – An errant husband discovers that his wife’s lover is literally a monster.
3. – The biopic of a crippled painter.
   – The love affair between a writer and a prostitute in 19th century Paris.
4. – A French woman remembers her childhood in Africa.
   – A newcomer opens a shop in a small French village, to some resistance.
5. – A respectable man loses control when he falls for a younger woman.
   – A bullied girl takes revenge on her tormentors.
6. – A group of teenage boys try to survive after the American Civil War.
   – A feckless man takes the place of his dead twin, a secret agent.
7. – The story of three sisters in London.
   – A porn star is involved in a botched robbery.
8. – A cop and a glamorous lawyer are chased by the KGB.
   – A woman’s double life as a spy is revealed by the government.

I went to see this now-notorious film on its first showing in the UK, as part of the Curzon Soho’s ‘Midnight Movie’ strand on 10 July. This would-be club of bright and brash semi-demi-mondaines seemed a slightly odd choice as the first spectators of what was already billed, since its divisive Cannes premiere, as strong meat: before the film started a couple of pleasant characters turned up to tell us that the club’s next cinematic extravaganza would be some sort of mash-up of the films Blue Velvet and Pretty in Pink (and we were all expected to come in our best eighties finery).

Antichrist began with a massive turn-off, as far as I was concerned: a section billed as the ‘Prologue’, in slow-motion, super-detailed, high-contrast black and white (or silver, even), with a counter-tenor singing a melancholy Handel aria on the soundtrack. Pure late-80s advert territory, in other words. A couple have a shower, then sex in the shower, then sex in a bed: there’s a momentary hardcore insert of a rod-like penis getting up close and personal between a pair of thighs. (Don’t remember that bit from the adverts.) In a room in the same flat a small boy ponderously gets out of bed and takes a tumble out of a bedroom window with his teddy bear. Not sure if the teddy survives; the little boy evidently does not, and seeps black blood all over the pavement. Then we’re into Part One (as the home-made-looking titles inform us), and colour, and the amorous gentleman from the Prologue, none other than Willem Dafoe, is looking in on the boy’s coffin as the hearse it is in moves slowly towards the cemetery. Dafoe seems tremendously upset, as why would he not be, while his wife, Charlotte Gainsbourg, is more impassive; but it is she who faints dead away, to awaken in a hospital bed, a month later, accused by her doctor of grieving inappropriately. Dafoe, a therapist of some kind, is impatient with the (unseen) doctor, thinks he can do better, and whisks Gainsbourg back home. Once there she bangs her head against the toilet bowl (eliciting the first of many groans from the audience) and rubs her bare arse against Dafoe until he is forced to have sex with her, after which he exclaims, with some annoyance, ‘This won’t do’ (which elicited the first guffaw of the evening). As the film’s rather striking poster image – the couple having sex (again) against a massive tree, with arms coming out of holes in the trunk – suggests that we will eventually find ourselves in the countryside, this enforced period in their flat goes on a bit. Finally Dafoe reckons that he has discovered the thing that most frightens Gainsbourg – their country cottage, unpretentiously named Eden – so off they go. Now we’re into Part Two, and the cinematography, which has never been less than impressive, becomes remarkable. (The film is technically very admirable throughout, even in the black and white bits I couldn’t stand.) Gainsbourg, though still suffering, seems more at home in the woods than Dafoe, who is troubled by images both of nature and unnature: these reach their climax with a fox, apparently gnawing at its own innards, who turns to Dafoe and out of the blue says ‘Chaos reigns’. (Fewer people laughed at this than might have been expected.) At this point von Trier and his director of photography have established the sort of atmosphere that makes it possible to believe exactly that (although by the most unchaotic of means, naturally enough). As Part Three arrives Gainsbourg, who has occasionally been very affecting in her grief, seems to have recovered, but her sorrow is replaced by something else: a guilt (the reason for which is revealed very late in the film, with a rerun of that black and white nonsense from the start) which feeds into work she was doing for a thesis on the punishment of women in the middle ages. She begins to feel that women, in fact, should be punished, and by her extreme actions makes it impossible for Dafoe to prevent himself punishing her. These actions involve the various assaults on genitals both male and female which have given the film its notoriety, and which were responsible for numerous groans and a few walk-outs at this showing. In the end there is a death, and a curious coda in which the earth seems literally alive with women.

Although the film has caught the imagination of our tremendously smug and lazy cultural commentators, to the extent that it has almost become a water-cooler subject amongst certain media types, it’s not so different from a number of grisly-but-arty horror films that the French, in particular, have recently taken delight in inflicting on us: Haute Tension, Calvaire, Inside, Martyres, all played with commendable poker faces by actors known (Béatrice Dalle, Cécile de France, Laurent Lucas) and unknown (the unfortunate young women of Martyres). To some extent the film also feels like that virtuosic joke in very bad taste, Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible (another hyped-up scandal of its time). von Trier gets his usual committed performances from his two actors – though, curiously, while part of what they do requires them (especially Gainsbourg) to be physically very exposed, he makes use of their shared capacity, seen in many of their other performances, for shutting themselves off emotionally. Or perhaps they just have rather unreadable faces. Whatever, we never get inside their heads, and that may well be von Trier’s point. After all, if this is a horror film (and I suspect it is), how much internalising do you want?

Finally…!

Not a reference to how long it’s been since my last entry, long though it certainly has been. Instead, I cheer at today’s long-awaited arrival from the US of  Negative Space, Manny Farber’s book of film criticism. The book had been in my Amazon cart for ages, at the price of about £9, though for some reason I never got round to buying it; then, after Farber’s death last summer, the book suddenly went out of print and the second-hand price shot up to £35, £40 or more. Same story on abebooks. A month or so ago a copy turned up on eBay for about $11 (though the shipping from the States cost almost as much as the book), and I leapt on it.

I borrowed a copy from the library a few years ago and was, of course, immensely impressed - above all by Farber’s preternatural recall of the geometry of a particular shot in a film. And he’s so right about so much. But even at the time it felt as if he was being a little unfair on some of the ‘big beasts’ of Hollywood - the purveyors of what he termed, in a celebrated phrase, ‘white elephants’: grand, would-be significant but, he thought, rather empty prestige pictures. Having now read what later critics like Andrew Sarris and the great David Thomson have to say on the subject of such 1940s/1950s directors as William Wyler (one of Sarris’ ‘less than meets the eye’ directors), Joseph Mankiewicz and Fred Zinnemann, I can see just how influential Farber has been. And the current high critical standing of a super-efficient, unpretentious director like Don Siegel owes much to Farber’s early advocacy of what he called ‘termite art’. (There’s a fantastic, and much-quoted, remark about Farber to the effect that he used to play both brows against the middle.) Farber was obviously reacting against the stifling orthodoxy of his time - the sort of claims to significance that we can perhaps guess at when we see how biggish-budget Hollywood dramas like The Reader and Revolutionary Road (now something of a dying breed) are marketed - but I wonder whether this prevented him from seeing that Wyler and co were just as craftsmanlike as his low-budget exemplars like Siegel. It seems to me that these tasteful, ’steady’ films - to take two examples starring Audrey Hepburn, The Nun’s Story (Zinnemann) and Roman Holiday (Wyler) - give cinema its bearings, in a sense: perhaps it’s because you know where you are with films like this that more exciting and excitable films can do what they do. (It’s the same with acting: somewhere in Negative Space Farber gives Henry Fonda a hard time for not being the tremendous force of nature that his co-star Eugene Pallette is in a particular film, conveniently forgetting that as the star Fonda has to carry the picture, and that a film with Pallette being larger than life at its centre would quickly become wearisome.)

Anyway, it’s been quite a while since I read the book, so I imagine I’ll take a look and find that Farber, clever fellow that he was, already has an answer to all my caveats.

At the heart of The Prestige’s narrative are three mysteries: what is the secret behind the famous ‘Transported Man’ trick by the brilliant young magician Alfred Borden (aka ‘The Professor’); how did Borden’s flamboyant rival Robert Angier (‘The Great Danton’) achieve his second, impossible-seeming version of the same trick; and who was responsible for Angier’s death, which takes place at the beginning of the film? To this trio might be added a fourth mystery, concerning the nature of the film itself: how did so expensive and handsomely-mounted a film, made by smart and talented – in a word, prestigious – people behind and in front of the camera, end up so lifeless and unconvincing?

The publicity for this film has made much of the plot twists, for instance asking reviewers not to give them away, but the film-makers are perhaps hedging their bets by giving us no fewer than three to worry about, so that even if we worked out one or even two of them, we’d have trouble with all three. It’s certainly true that one of the twists, which finally solves two of the mysteries described above, could easily avoid detection because it takes the film into the realms of science fiction – or, if you like, of real magic. Without this development – which feels like something of a betrayal in a piece otherwise so concerned with explaining the magicians’ extraordinary feats – the film might have worked better as a conventional murder mystery, perhaps with Michael Caine’s ingeneur (trick designer) Cutter investigating the death of his boss Angier for himself and acting as the narrator (which is the job the first words of the film set him up to do, before finding a tricksier method to move forward, and back). The outlandish but just-about-feasible deceptions Borden and Angier perform on each other (and everyone else) resemble nothing so much as the fiendish complications one finds in Agatha Christie, and are on a similar level of believability. (There are certainly enough verbal and visual clues throughout the film to engage any budding Poirots in the audience – unless, of course, they guess the truth within the first five minutes.)

The film is constructed as three timelines. A fairly straightforward flashback structure – moving between the events surrounding Borden’s trial for Angier’s murder (poorly-handled in every sense) and a chronological narrative of the previous ten or so years – is intercut with the story of Angier’s stay in Colorado Springs, where he has gone to discover the mystery of Borden’s trick. (In this way, the film The Prestige most resembles is not one of the usual suspects commentators have cited, like Iñarritu’s Amores Perros or 21 Grams, or indeed director Christopher Nolan’s own time-bending efforts (Memento or Following), but rather Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America.) The Colorado Springs strand of the film perhaps betrays too much of the story’s literary origins (it is based on a novel by Christopher Priest): the imprisoned Borden is conveniently handed the diary Angier wrote in Colorado, during which time Angier himself is reading Borden’s own diary which he has had stolen. The symmetry of the two diaries – which, indeed, extends to the final words written in them – no doubt works very well on the page (as do so many of the plot devices and the film’s more grandiose themes), but is much less impressive in the cinema, where it seems little more than a useful means of jumping between the film’s different periods. The words of a diary can be set down directly in a novel, which can make good use of the form’s potential for ambiguity – for instance, that the whole diary or just individual entries may be forgeries, or deliberately misleading. This ambiguity doesn’t necessarily come across when interpreted dramatically on screen. The Colorado episode also introduces us to a commonplace of modern novels: including historical figures as supporting characters. In this case we have the great engineer, electrical pioneer and rival of Thomas Edison (himself an unseen eminence in the film), Nikola Tesla – incarnated, complete with vague Eastern European accent, by the film’s most obvious example of ‘stunt casting’, David Bowie – whose presence provides many of the film’s most startling images, such as a wood full of magicians’ top hats (the very first thing we see) and a field ‘planted’ with illuminated light bulbs.

Of course, the whole film is as elegantly shot and production- & art-designed as one would expect (despite some occasionally unhelpful editing) and the story given its due by a talented cast. The rather interesting pairing of Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman (respectively playing Borden and Angier) might raise the hope of an Astaire-&-Rogers-like transference of talents – Bale giving Jackman some of his furious intensity, and getting some of Jackman’s formidable charm in return – but in fact the two of them largely keep to their established screen personas. It does not help that the plot (sometimes literally) boxes them in and limits their effectiveness. Michael Caine, already working in a broad Cockney comfort zone, has much more leeway and occasionally manages to give this very schematic film a bit of heart – as does Rebecca Hall, nervily touching as Borden’s justifiably confused wife. Coincidentally, perhaps, these are the only two main actors who speak in something approaching their own voices: poor Scarlett Johansson, her customary naturalness hampered by an effortful Cockney accent, is unable to bring much more than a certain fleshy appeal to the role of the magician’s assistant who moves between Angier and Borden. Despite the care lavished on design, the lengthy discussions and depictions of individual tricks and the participation of a professional magician like Ricky Jay (a performer much used by David Mamet, whose double- and triple-crossing plots this film sometimes evoked), there was surprisingly little sense of a love for stage magic itself – representative, perhaps, of much of the cut-and-dried, rootless nature of the film.

Worth seeing? Well, it looks good and sounds good, and is full of accomplished actors adopting striking attitudes. And that goes a surprisingly long way. But with plot holes you could drive a coach-and-horses through, and an abiding sense that something vital has been squashed flatter than a canary in a birdcage trick, The Prestige will probably disappoint at least as many people as it delights.

Largely as a delaying tactic, I compiled an unnecessarily comprehensive list of film-based blogs and sites to accompany this new blog before actually writing anything down, and fortuitously enough one of these has relieved me of the effort of generating a first subject of my own. The latest issue of the rather wonderful American journal Film Comment has an exclusively online section on a favourite hobby-horse of mine, the ‘film canon’. In the previous printed issue, the director Paul Schrader umm’d and ahh’d for several pages before finally giving us a long list of films he considers the greatest ever made. Now the Film Comment site publishes a sample of the responses to his article, along with Schrader’s reply and a list of directors that his readers considered he’d omitted.

This distinction between films – which is what the canon consists of – and directors – whom the readers want to see represented – is an interesting, and perpetual, feature of these lists, or at any rate the more ‘serious’ ones. (Presumably few of the people who voted for Channel 4’s ‘100 Greatest Films’ can be expected to know who directed The Shawshank Redemption (no 3) or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (no 14).) Some directors – eg Hitchcock and Buñuel – have such a store of first-rate films that it’s difficult choosing between them; and I’ve been wondering for some time whether the gradual elevation of Vertigo to become Hitchcock’s ‘greatest’ film tells us less about the qualities of the film itself and more about the pressing need to have so virtuoso and influential a film-maker represented in the lists. (Buñuel hasn’t entered this phase yet, so that his representation is usually dissipated through some half-dozen films.) The great beneficiary of this need to choose one particular film – and it’s interesting that individuals making these lists tend to limit themselves to one film per director (cf Schrader himself and Derek Malcolm, in his ‘Century of Films’ for the Guardian in 1999–2001) – is Orson Welles, whose Citizen Kane is not only a marvellous piece of work in its own right, but is also the only one of his films which was not in some way hobbled, whether by studio interference (Magnificent Ambersons, Touch of Evil) or by lack of funds (Othello, Chimes at Midnight). I have to say that, fond as I am of Kane, I’ve always admired Welles more for the imperfect but sporadically impressive films he made under difficult circumstances, and I suspect that the pleasure I take in a film’s rough edges and/or accidental felicities derives from this original preference. (One result of the primacy of Kane in Welles’ output is that critics who want to show off occasionally choose another of his films. Ambersons and Touch of Evil seem to be the most popular alternatives, though I’m seeing more and more references, alarmingly enough, to that rather peculiar film Confidential Report. I suppose it’s the Vertigo-like self-referentiality that people are going for.)

I might have a go at Vertigo on a later occasion, but I do wonder in any case what the point is of bringing together such mismatched films. To use that tired old analogy from school, it‘s a bit like comparing apples and oranges. Before the most recent Sight and Sound poll in 2002, the two top films on their list were Kane and La Règle du jeu, which made me wonder whether it was worth thinking of the films as either ‘spectacle’ or ‘meditation’ – Kane being very much the former, and on some levels ‘inferior’ to more ‘meditative’ works on the list. That’s an unnecessarily black and white view, of course, though I do think it’s nice to use the terms to tweak Stanley Kubrick’s tail (eg ‘2001 is spectacle masquerading as meditation’) and consider whether the combination of the two is what makes Tarkovsky such an interesting figure…