Square Eyes; Two More Short Film Seasons From The Beeb… June 26, 2008
Posted by John Hodson in : Television, Square Eyes , trackbackFollowing up the Westerns Weekend and the British B Movies Week (more of a long weekend, I suppose, than a week, but let’s not nitpick), BBC 4 continues its summer films season with two more helpings.
This weekend the digital channel plumps for a Courtroom Dramas Weekend, the three - count ‘em - movie showings tethered together with another 90 minute documentary Strictly Courtroom; after Rich Hall’s invigorating look at the western and Matthew Sweet’s entertaining and informative look at the cheap and cheerful, it looks as if we could be in for something a little more mundane with the choice of actor Martin Shaw to present.
Nothing against Mr Shaw per se; I think he’s a fine thesp, but I’ve got a sneaking feeling that he’s been chosen less for his expertise and enthusiasm and more for the fact that he’s TV’s Judge John Deed. Still, you never know; as I discovered with Hall’s How The West Was Lost, these things should not necessarily be prejudged - and some of the interviewees look interesting. The blurb:
Actor Martin Shaw narrates a documentary which looks at how trials have been portrayed on the silver screen in the past century, from 12 Angry Men and Alfred Hitchcock’s [sic] Anatomy of A Murder to A Few Good Men and George Clooney’s Michael Clayton. Contributors include Geoffrey Robertson QC, OJ Simpson’s defence lawyer Alan Dershowitz, author and advocate Scott Turow and death row campaigner Clive Stafford Smith.
The blurb writer has clearly got his directors in a twist; let’s hope the error didn’t originate with Beeb. Alas poor Otto…
The season gets under way this Saturday, June 28, at 7.00pm with Stanley Kramer’s 1960 Oscar-nominated screen adaptation of the notorious 1925 Tennessee ‘Monkey Trial’, Inherit The Wind, in which a young teacher stood accused of violating state law by teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution. A quite fabulous cast including Fredric March, Spencer Tracy, Gene Kelly, Florence Eldridge, Dick York, Donna Anderson and Harry Morgan.
On Sunday Sidney J. Furie’s 1962 courtroom drama The Boys, shown last summer as part of the Beeb’s Festival of British Film, gets another airing. Four youths are accused of murdering a nightwatchman. The defence attempts to persuade the jury that the boys are guilty of a crime of passion and should not be executed - stars Richard Todd, Robert Morley, Felix Alymer, Dudley Sutton, Ronald Lacey & Tony Garnett.
Finally, on Monday night is Sidney Lumet’s wonderful The Verdict, from 1982, with Paul Newman (giving one of his finest performances), James Mason, Charlotte Rampling, Jack Warden and Milo O’Shea. An ambulance-chasing lawyer attempts to regain some integrity from one final case - a medical malpractice suit for a woman who lies in a coma. With his career fading, he has turned to drink for solace and finds himself in court facing one of the toughest lawyers in the country. An adaptation of Barry Reed’s novel, scripted by David Mamet.
As usual, Strictly Courtroom gets several outings; full details here.
The following weekend, and starting Saturday July 5, it’s British War Films - at 9.00pm look out for the documentary War Stories: Uncovering forgotten gems like Frieda and revisiting classics like Ice Cold in Alex, an exploration into how war films have changed with the times. They were a tool of government propaganda during WW2, and while the blockbusters of the1950s were part of national nostalgia, today they have been rediscovered and become celebrated icons of British culture.
No news on the presenter as yet, and it will, again, get several showings. Films in the season are:
We Dive at Dawn (kicking off the season on Saturday, July 5 at 7.30pm). Anthony Asquith’s World War II drama about a mission to hunt and destroy a dangerous German battleship in the Baltic which goes wrong when the British submarine runs short on fuel. Stars John Mills and Eric Portman.
The First of The Few (Saturday, July 5 at 10.35pm). Offered contracts and any number of enticing star roles after Gone with the Wind, Leslie Howard chose to leave Hollywood and return to England to make films designed to boost wartime morale. Here, he directs and stars as visionary aircraft designer R.J. Mitchell, the father of the Spitfire. The fine cast includes Rosamund John as his wife and David Niven as the test pilot, while William Walton’s score sums up an entire era of flying pictures. It was Howard’s final screen performance: his plane was shot down in 1943 on a mission that immediately became shrouded in mystery.
Ill Met By Moonlight (Sunday, July 6, 9.00pm). Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1958 war movie. I quote the Radio Times:Dirk Bogarde is on stirring form as a British officer given the task of working with the partisans in occupied Crete to kidnap the local German commander (Marius Goring), in a tale loosely based on a real operation in the Second World War. Fine acting, rugged scenery and a trenchant score all add to the film’s attractions. The Americans gave it the more prosaic title of Night Ambush.
Not my favourite P&P, but I’ve said it before, even second rate Powell & Pressburger is worth a watch. The RT insist, by the way, that Powell & Pressburger were not famed for their war films. Oh, really..?
Overlord (Monday, July 7, 10.00pm). Made over a period of several years and finally released in 1975; stars Brian Stirner, Davyd Harries, Nicholas Ball and Julie Neesam. The RT doesn’t reckon much to Stuart Cooper’s labour of love: Made with the co-operation of the Imperial War Museum, this account of the D-Day landings attempts to convey the grim reality of the soldier’s lot by combining newsreel footage with dramatic re-enactments. Unfortunately, too much time was spent rooting out clips and not enough on the script, which is a collection of clichéd ideas and utterances. Director Stuart Cooper - who, as an actor, played one of the original Dirty Dozen in the wartime blockbuster of the same name - seems content to allow his cast to remain inanimate, while his presentation of the combat sequences comes dangerously close to suggesting war may be hell, but is also grotesquely beautiful. A bold venture, but poorly executed.
Or as Criterion state: Seamlessly interweaving archival war footage and a fictional narrative, Stuart Cooper’s immersive account of one twenty-year-old’s journey from basic training to the front lines of D-day brings all the terrors and isolation of war to life with jolting authenticity. Overlord, impressionistically shot by Stanley Kubrick’s longtime cinematographer John Alcott, is both a document of World War II and a dreamlike meditation on man’s smallness in a large, incomprehensible machine.
All I can say is that if you haven’t seen it before, make an effort to do so; the Radio Times reviewer may have a point, but it is indeed a bold venture, and it is at times utterly gorgeous, with a climax that’s long telegraphed but still packs a wallop. It’s rarely shown on terrestrial TV; it’s highly recommended, if you not possess either the fine R1 Criterion or R2 Metrodome DVD sets. On that basis alone Overlord must not be dismissed.
The British War Films Weekend is yet to show on the BBC 4 website, but a quick search in a few days will bring you up the full schedule no doubt, should you wish to prepare your recorders.
Comments»
Thanks John. I’m there for Overlord, but instead of Ill met by Moonlight I wish they were showing The 49th Parallel, which I really love for its unrelentingly nasty German officer and a frankly weird turn from Lawrence Olivier.
Did you watch the 90-minute expose on British B-movies? Personally, I would have enjoyed more about Hammer, but at least there was plenty of stuff covered that I knew nothing about. I grew up when b-movies were on their way out, and when the cinema shoved on some 20-minute snoozer about bullfighting or stock cars, which just made me hungry for the main feature, not to mention the interval’s Cornetto. A nice piece of nostalgia from BBC4, I thought.
Indeed; I think the Beeb has learnt a few lessons from their frankly mostly dismal doco efforts during last years Summer of British Film. You’ll never please all the people all the time in 90 short minutes, but, well, so far so good.
I miss double-features, proper cinemas with curtains, decent lighting and music, intervals, usherettes with torches, the occasional programme to take home, the National bloody Anthem and a great sense of occasion…
Thanks for posting Mike.
“Alfred Hitchcock’s Anatomy of A Murder”
Yowza. Is that their mistake? Preminger hardly gets any consideration already. Now they’re giving away one of his best to Hitch!
The Verdict is, of course, excellent, but I’ve always had a fundamental stacked deck problem with Inherit the Wind. A big part of the reason is that people do indeed view that film and its stage source material as being historical record when it’s not at all. March’s Brady completely betrays the real William Jennings Bryan. Cates/Scopes wasn’t a teacher either, but a substitute and a pawn to have the Tennessee law challenged. Kramer’s simplistic treatment doesn’t help matters.
You know I didn’t even notice that - I think I’ll leave it in and poke it with sticks…
Ta clydefro.
However - ‘Is that their mistake?’; how dare you sir!
I think I’ve stated my views on drama not being documentary enough times to bore (anyone seeking facts from the former needs their bumps feeling) but I’ll defend most anything to do with Spencer Tracy unto death (well, maybe ‘unto a Chinese burn…’)
Going to have to fiddle with my aerial to get BBC4.
My only complain with these seasons, the war films in particular, is that all the films they are showing are readily available on DVD. The BBC probably has quite a selection that are not available (like the mentioned ‘Frieda’) and perhaps they should be showing these instead.
Very fair point (though I’m not aware of any region issuing ‘The Boys’?) and you have to wonder why? Last year’s British Films fest on Beeb 2 might have had dreadful docos, but there were some real, and rare, crackers broadcast - for instance, I’d never seen ‘The Whisperers’ before and it was a pure delight.
Still, you can only hope that the showing of films like, say, ‘Anatomy…’ or ‘Overlord’, which will never again be shown at prime time on one of the ‘major’ channels, will garner new fans who may have never dreamt of buying the DVDs.
That’s not the first time Hitchcock’s been misidentified as the director of a courtroom drama — the following Hitchcock quote is from Charlotte Chandler’s “It’s Only a Movie” (http://tinyurl.com/5wf4pb):
“Many times, people have told me how much they enjoyed Witness for the Prosecution. They thought it was my film instead of Billy Wilder’s. And Wilder told me people asked him about The Paradine Case, thinking he had done it. Well, I’d be happy to make an exchange.”
Just realised that “War Stories” has been shown before — last summer on BBC4, I think. It’s 2 hours long, narrated by Anthony Howell, and directed/produced by Francis Welch and David Olusoga.
Although there’s a few celebrity talking heads (such as Dominik Diamond), it’s mostly historians and film historians, and (from memory) it’s much better than the “Summer of British Film” docs.