Vale Richard Corliss

The fine film critic Richard Corliss died recently. I just found out about this from David Bordwell's blog

David has written a wonderful appreciation of someone who made a great contribution to the cultural life of the cinema.

After posting this link above Don Groves sent in this link with another heartfelt tribute from critical legend Peter Cowie. It's posted on the Criterion website http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3540-flashback-richard-corliss-1944-2015

There has also been a three page tribute in Time magazine for which Richard wrote. Thanks to Adrienne McKibbins for sending in the link here

Deadline Gallipoli - Max Berghouse reviews the recent Showcase two-part series

Deadline Gallipoli. Directed by Michael Rymer ,  Writer Hannah Carroll Chapman, two part series screening on Foxtel’s Showcase on 19 & 20 April.

I recorded this two part TV movie for watching subsequently. As I grow older, the knowledge of the carnage of this the first major engagement Australian troops becomes more onerous. I'm sure this is the way history should affect us but this aspect of my "interest" in the history and the film, affects my judgement to the specific filmic qualities. In short I am becoming much more aware as a critic that interest or disinterest can severely affect one's appreciation of a film. In the background I was hoping that there would not be, in this the 100th anniversary of the landings, another superficial diatribe of the brave bronzed Aussies led by supercilious and incompetent British superiors.

First, by way of "back story", some history. By the close of 1914, the Western front was already in stalemate and losses were at an unprecedented level. Russia, Britain's ally, was reeling under offences by Germany and Austria Hungary. If the "Allies" (Britain, the Commonwealth and Empire and France) could find a means to resupply Russia from the south through the Caucasus, it might possibly relieve pressure on the Western front. This meant capturing Constantinople (now Istanbul) and forcing Turkey out of the war. The attack at Gallipoli was designed as the first step although the ultimate aim was incapable of achievement because Britain in 1915 simply did not have sufficient spare armaments and munitions to supply its own forces much less those of Russia. The Greek government gave advice to Britain that a landing could only be successful with approximately 170,000 men. The Allies could only muster 70,000 because of commitments to the Western front.

A very experienced senior British officer, Sir Ian Hamilton, an officer of great physical bravery, distinguished record and considered highly intellectual, was chosen as commander-in-chief. He was not however involved in planning which was rushed in a period of approximately 6 weeks because of fears that if action was not taken very quickly, Turkey would reinforce the peninsula. In 1913 as part of a project by Britain to keep Turkey out of any future war, the Admiralty sent a naval mission to assist Turkey in mining the Straits along which is the Gallipoli Peninsula. They did a very good job such that the Royal Navy could not "force the narrows" in either 1914 or immediately prior to the landings in April 1915. The Navy unilaterally backed out of assisting the landing forces to any particular degree whereas Hamilton was expecting continued assistance.

There were not enough men and they could not be landed sufficiently quickly. Multiple ships' lifeboats carrying several dozen men and pulled by a small steam powered tugboat, were too slow and inadequate in number. The reality is that the campaign at Gallipoli was lost on the first day, quite probably before lunchtime on the first day. Numerous senior officers, British as well as Australian, urged immediate withdrawal. Hamilton was under instructions to hold on – to "dig in" but it is also true that he was fearful of confronting Lord Kitchener, the War minister. Quite some months later Kitchener made a personal visit to the campaign front and recognised that withdrawal was the only option. That withdrawal was completely successful. The net loss of troops, British, Commonwealth, Empire and French (including its colonials) was acute. It is not the case that British commanders were generally incompetent and they certainly did not use Australian troops as cannon fodder. The truth is that  landings of significant numbers of troops was virtually technically impossible until much later and indeed the spectre of Gallipoli hung very heavily over the planners for D Day in 1944. Even then it was thought that the chances of a successful landing were low!

Now to the film. I recognise completely the imperative of dramatic narrative including the arc of development, characterisation which preferably involves suitably opposite protagonist and antagonist, et cetera. That can involve to some extent the distortion of history for the purposes of narrative/drama. Such practices go back as far as Homer and possibly beyond. At the same time an historical narrative must recognise the exceptional power of film to create the impression of accuracy by virtue of the power of visual impressions. In this year, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Orson Welles, it is well to remember that the picture practically all of us have of William Randolph Hearst is of a tormented and fundamentally unhappy and unfulfilled life. This is the picture from Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, USA, 1941). But it is by no means the truth. Hearst was a profoundly optimistic and happy man, throughout a very fulfilled and long life which included significant financial reversals. Yet this "factual" history is ignored or regarded as inaccurate. Such is the power of film.

The present film involves the exposition of the roles of the significant war correspondents in the campaign. Ellis Ashmead Bartlett (English), C W Bean (Australian), Keith Murdoch and Philip Shuler (Australian) are the correspondents who deal at an exceptionally personal level (almost certainly inaccurate) with such principal characters as the commander-in-chief (Charles Dance in a very solid performance), General Bridges (a totally miscast Bryan Brown, an actor with a very intense but extremely limited range) and sundry others of the great and good. Those at the top have dialogue which consists significantly in "back story" to enliven the interests of those viewers who have little historic knowledge. Things like "we have so many thousand troops to do this that or whatever, and our job is to take X, Y and Z which have the following features......". In short there are too many principal characters. Ashmead Bartlett (Hugh Dancy) who seems to have, at least for the first third of the film, an extremely campy manner despite being vigourously and excessively heterosexual, turns out to be the writer who effectively lionises the brave sunburnt Aussies. This significantly undercuts the apparent hero Bean (Joel Jackson an actor of whom I know nothing but who performs very creditably in a significantly thankless role) who seems to capture the pedantry of the real man. Unfortunately Bean's lifelong commitment to accuracy and the memorialising of Australia's commitment in the First World War, is reflected accurately I imagine in the film in that he appears desperately boring and uninteresting.

Philip Schuler, about whom I know nothing is played by Sam Worthington in a style I found excessively demotic. In this he takes over from Bryan Brown, as General Bridges, who is soon deceased, as effectively the "larrikin". I thought both performances too broad so that they appeared more like buffoons.

There is a great deal to like in much of the construction of the film. Obviously there are limitations in budget so that one could not get a cast of thousands like Ben Hur but scenes on the beaches (South Australia I imagine doing extra duty as Gallipoli) have the same painterly quality as many significant portraits in the National War Memorial. The same for the trenches and the like, where limited numbers of actors and extras are put to very good use. There is no sense of wave upon wave of thousands of troops but there is a strong sense of the immediacy and intensity of battle between enemies who are often just a couple of hundred yards apart from each other. CGI while not extensively used, presumably because of the expense, is nonetheless expertly applied and used to enhanced dramatic effect.

Much of the second half of the film is taken up with the machinations of opposition to the continuation of the campaign and the final resolution by withdrawal. It appears to me to be desperately undramatic and the final decision appears to materialise without specific cause. Was it the correspondents, Bean and Ashmead Bartlett, who turned against the campaign? Was it the senior officers who realised that the game was up? Was it delayed because politicians like the now disgraced Winston Churchill, opposed withdrawal? To me this would have been the heart of the drama: the almost universal challenge to resile from a bad position once taken. However that does not appear to be the intention of the writer and director who appear to be much more concerned with linear storytelling and as such the last quarter of the film struck me as very limp.

There is one I think telling event only half told in this film and also in the competing film shown at the same time on a competing network, Gallipoli . Both start with the disembarkation of the troops in the lifeboats previously mentioned. As it happened, the entire class of 15-year-old midshipmen at the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth were immediately brought into active service so that when the land troops climbed down the ropes into the lifeboats, they were met by, essentially boys, who were in command, until the water' s edge and disembarkation onto the beaches, of many young men, perhaps only three or four years older. The fact that so many of these boys and young men died dispels any notion that Australia alone suffered. One hundred years later, to reflect that any nation could send so many untried men into such calamity, is the ultimate poignancy.

I am increasingly of the view that commitment to historical accuracy in terms of the mise-en-scene, even when not appreciated at a conscious level, is very important in establishing an unconscious acceptance of the disposition of events. So although never having dinner service person myself I note the following egregious errors: in the early part of the film: Constantinople is referred to as not having been captured for 800 years. In fact it was captured by the Turks in 1453 or somewhat more than 500 years from the date of the events depicted. In another scene General Bridges at the dinner table wears his full uniform together with his Sam Browne belt. Officers always take this off at table. Sam Worthington appears in a similar scene without his coat and showing his braces. That would have been regarded as grossly improper. In another scene at a quayside, a sergeant wearing his Sam Browne belt crossed from left to right rather than from right-to-left which is improper, intercepts Shuler. Sergeants only wear a Sam Browne belt on parade.

Latterly a "Colonel White" remonstrates with his senior officer, presumably Brigadier General, about White's decision to go "over the top" with the men. Neither of these officers is properly dressed because officers of the rank of Colonel and upwards wear distinctive red patches on their lapels and a red felt surround to their forage caps. Indeed it is a matter of folklore that the red trimmings obtained when reaching the rank of Colonel are referred to as "getting felt". Equally the troops are referred to in a further scene as "gentlemen". Listed men are never gentlemen, only officers. Perhaps all this is arcane but would be readily known to a military adviser.

More to the point is that Keith Murdoch refers to reporting to the Australian ambassador to London. The Australian "ambassador" was then, and is now, a "High Commissioner". That is a real blooper especially as this film can have little relevance outside a traditional "British" market.

Very careless.

Michael Rowe's The Well - Local talent barely above the radar

Two years in a row, an Australian won the Camera d'Or at Cannes, in 2009 and 2010. Warwick Thornton gave the world his Samson and Delilah in 2009 and has made only a very small movie since. That was The Darkside released to very scant attention late in 2013.   Michael Rowe,  seemingly from out of nowhere won the Camera d'Or in 2010 for Ano Bisiesto (Leap Year) a film made on a low budget in Mexico. Rowe has also made one very low budget feature since, Manto Acuifero (The Well) in Mexico. This film premiered at the Rome Film Festival in 2013, the Sargasso Sea of international events, directed that year by the remarkable Marco Muller. It got a little bit of attention most notably a moderately favourable review by Jay Weissberg in Variety

Over the course of 2014 none of the local festivals either wanted to or were able to show The Well (we never know why films don't arrive at these events) so the film finally got here for its Australian premiere at the just concluded Spanish Film Festival. So there it was listed on the very last page of the little booklet produced for the SpFF, modest information as usual suggesting a masterpiece, with as we shall reveal one huge information black hole. An “Australian Premiere”. 

I have to confess that I normally dont take much notice of anything with Gary Maddox's by-line attached to it in the SMH but somehow or other there was a tiny mention of the film by Maddox in last Friday's entertainment guide which reminded me that Michael Rowe was a name to conjure with. It was screening at the same time as North Melbourne was playing Richmond in an AFL match in Hobart, a good reason to find a movie to attend. About twenty punters were in attendance by the time it all got started. 

Rowe has a classicist's approach to filming. One sequence, one shot, the camera motionless, the shot often lasting for quite some time as a long conversation takes place frequently off screen. Everything is designed to show events from the central child’s point of view. It’s a film which whispers its message but does so quite brilliantly. The film is about Caro,  small and uncommunicative,  and her adjustment to life with step-father. The large house she enters contains no magical mystery secret garden, just a riot of colour, movement, overgrown greenery,  hidden places with much animal behaviour to be observed. Most notably, over the course of the movie, a hen starts laying eggs and eventually a crop of chickens are produced. Needless to say its Caro's observation of the new parental tensions, conversations, and sex, overheard, memories flooding back via a book of family photos which eventually build up  to, well,  a just slightly violent conclusion. It’s all over in 78 minutes. 

Goodness knows how many people saw it during the time that the SpFF rolled around. It certainly did not get any pride of place screenings.  And the cheapest admission price was an off-putting $15. What the little program booklet didn't tell, nor did Gary Maddox, was a factor that might have got a lot more bums on seats. Only during the end credits does the information come up that the film is adapted from a short story titled "Secrets" by Tim Winton. I can tell you that for the mostly aging punters left in the theatre when that info come up there was an audible all round gasp "What! Tim Winton". There you are. People in the suburbs will be dining out on that info.

Rowe is supposed to be making a film in Canada with some Australian investment. As for Thornton, who knows... But both should be working full bore, both should be on maximum life support, both should have a Screen Australia minder ringing them up every week just to say let's get on with it or where do I send the money.

Gadfly Richard Ackland kicks George Brandis around - more AFTRS CEO comment

The Saturday Paper’s Gadfly, Richard Ackland, follows up Paddy Gourley’s story in The Canberra Times with his own thoughts about George Brandis inserting himself into the process of selecting, or as his Department spokesperson put it, ‘approving’ the appointment of the next head of AFTRS. Read it in the paper, a great read each week or go online here. For my own earlier take on how all this matter got going and what it ‘means’ you can click here

On DVD (5) Ordeal by Innocence - Golan & Globus can surprise you sometimes

It’s been thirty years since  The Cannon Group,  headed up by the cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, those daring entrepreneurs who gave us a lot of fun back in the 80s, produced Ordeal by Innocence.  Having recently acquired a copy for $5 at  Lawsons  (Sydney's best second hand collection) I sat down to watch it. I wondered whether in fact the film was ever released but since this note was published I have been advised by Australia's pre-eminent cinephile that he saw it at a screening at the then Hoyts Cinema in George Street in April 1985. I had no advance knowledge beyond what was on the cover. As usual with anything put out by Shock Video, there are errors everywhere on the cover, including the specs which say it is 16:9. Instead there is this shrivelled image occupying about two thirds of the available screen. Oh well, for $5.

Then the credits roll. "Agatha Christie's Ordeal by Innocence" says the main title and we get the cast - Donald Sutherland, (hair dyed a nice reddish tinge), Sarah Miles, Christopher Plummer, old reliables all and etc etc, "and Faye Dunaway" (who appears only in black and white flashback footage for she is the hapless victim who causes all this kerfuffle). The director is the estimable Desmond Davis. He tries to keep some sort of control over a script that races through lashings of plot, misdirects, flashbacks, heavy-handed coppers interfering for reasons that escape you and large numbers of shots of small boats crossing Dartmouth harbour. Here its renamed Drymouth. Ho ho. There are other ho ho moments as well.A bookmaker is called Archie Leach and a couple of film titles are listed as runners in one of the horse races seen in the background in one scene when Donald Sutherland is tracking down 'evidence' at a race track. Ho ho.

But two other credits are interesting.  The script credit goes to Alexander Stuart who later wrote the most intense novel The War Zone which Tim Roth filmed and the music credit goes to Dave Brubeck for a tinkly score with many drum flourishes especially created by Brubeck and played by his then Quartet which included his son and not Paul Desmond. From the moment it starts, you wonder how on earth this contribution came about except that you only have to think for a moment about the ambitions of the Go-Glo cousins to know that they would have thought this to be the major cultural coup that it was and so they went for it big time.

Orson Welles - Cinephiles Julie Rigg, Scott Murray, Noel Bjorndahl, Ken Wallin & Max Berghouse (so far) remember his centenary

My request for birthday wishes and any other thoughts that you might put to the Great Man on his hundredth birthday has thus far produced some fine responses:

Julie Rigg writes:I'd ask him for one of his cigars, hope we could adjourn to enjoy it, and have a conversation in which, I hope, he could tell me what he thought of continuous travelling shots ( a la Sokurov - Russian Ark, slow cinema a la Kiarostami)  and at the other extreme ,whirling wobblecam a la Von Trier. I'm assuming he's slowed down since becoming a ghost, and has had time to study some of his successors.

Scott Murray writes: I remembered Geoff. I am on my bed reading Orson’s Welles’ Last Movie: The Making of The Other Side of the Wind!

Noel Bjorndahl writes: (phew, a labour of deep, devoted and long -lasting love coming folks): I love Orson Welles for his largeness in all senses-the extravagance that cost him his career also left us a handful of energetic, bizarre, baroque theatrical masterpieces that display his acting and film making skills and present his fascinating humanity warts and all. Several parts genius and some parts charlatan he was irrepressible and irresistible, Falstaff reincarnated in a range of unlikely 20^th century guises (and finally Falstaff himself in his own film); a man of the theatre, he slipped effortlessly into film and with Citizen Kane brought a new intellectualism and realism to the essentially visceral and melodramatic American cinema. The movies would have been the poorer without Xanadu, Rosebud, depth of field and the first-if not the best-of Welles’ ruminations on the uses and abuses of power and power mongers. In the age of Rupert Murdoch’s global empire, the rise and influence of Hearst’s newspaper kingdom is if anything as relevant now as it was in 1941. Welles’ manipulation of narrative structure and viewpoint and control of image motif remains powerful to modern audiences and Kane would be a towering achievement from a mature artist at the height of their powers let alone a jumped-up upstart of a mere 25 years. 

Welles was always presumptuous. He has since proved a man of many parts-actor, conjuror, raconteur, writer/director extraordinaire, master of cinematic and theatrical mise-en-scene and legerdemain. He might well have been a Renaissance artist in a previous life; as a conversationalist alone he is his own greatest creation- witness the volume of recorded interviews with people like Peter Bogdanovich where his sense of mischief is given full play and his teeming anecdotal/narrative gifts weave their enchanting spell. He was a mesmerising, charming, witty talk show guest and could have made a career out of television appearances had he submitted more to quick fixes for his financial problems. But Welles remained the maverick, globe-trotting and jet-setting to drum up patronage and cash to finish his long list of truncated projects and works in progress.

Welles had a deep affinity for that other brilliant theatre luminary William Shakespeare and although his film versions of Othello somewhat (in its various versions) and especially Macbeth are marred by obvious production difficulties and budgetary limitations-the recurring leitmotifs of Welles’ blighted career trajectory-he finally came up with Chimes at Midnight, arguably the most successful attempt to bring the spirit of the Bard to celluloid. This beautiful elegy for Merrie England is several parts high spirits and several parts melancholy. A compendium of various Shakesperian texts, The Merry Wives of Windsor and both parts of Henry IV among them, along with Holinshed’s Chronicles, Welles’ Falstaff film gives him the part he was born to play (or at least literally grew into). Falstaff in this expressive incarnation becomes  a swaggering human mountain full of the spirit of play, a kind of Loki writ large, egging young Prince Hal to sow his oats in grand style across his future kingdom knowing well that the brevity of a  youthful prince’s spring will soon be overtaken by the long winter of a king’s destiny. The tragedy for Falstaff is that while Prince Hal may share the “chimes at midnight” with the riff-raff, King Henry V may not. The King’s rejection of Falstaff as King inspires some of the most melancholy moments ever committed to film.  Falstaff’s swift decline and demise is deeply impactful due to Welles’ rueful but humane and philosophical acceptance of the way things are. Welles’ idol John Ford in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance roots for Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), all that’s symbolised in the cactus rose and “printing the legend” rather than the reality of the traditional West so often celebrated by that great Irish-American film/poet. Similarly, Welles’ heart and soul is with Merrie England and everything embodied in the friendship between Falstaff and Hal and the “times that they have seen”.

The tavern scenes are therefore full of very funny slapstick which Welles clearly relishes. Rarely has he let his hair down and his sense of humour to flow so naturally into the fabric of one of his films. The darker  hints of mortality and the precariousness of patronage are always lurking in the background and the film is essentially  another of Welles’ perceptive and penetrating studies of power, but never before have the surfaces of a Welles film been so enjoyable as in the sequences of carousing and highway robbery. Falstaff plays to the hilt his version of the Lord of Misrule, kettle on head holding forth to his “subjects”(cronies) in an unforgettable vignette.

The medieval battle scenes on the other hand  bring together the light and dark poles of this extraordinary work; visual gags of Falstaff trying to mount a horse and running through the mayhem like a beheaded peacock are followed by a stylised combat sequence that captures all the barbaric atrocity and terrible beauty of pre-modern technological warfare.

The performances are dominated by the almost surreally outsize figure of Welles (even upstaging the landscape) but they are uniformly excellent. Keith Baxter brings to life Prince Hal’s uneasy combination of virility and reflectiveness; John Gielgud in a telling cameo shows us just how “uneasy lies the head that wears the crown”; Jeanne Moreau’s world-weary Doll Tearsheet carries conviction and poignancy and body language to match; surprisingly Margaret Rutherford’s Mistress Quickly almost steals the film in her “cold as any stone” set-piece. I’m so used to Rutherford as a slightly dotty old mammoth that the melancholy atmospherics conjured up in her speech and performance took me by surprise and left an enormous lump in my throat. I’m quite as blown away by what Welles has done with this impressive ensemble cast as I am with his predictably brilliant mise-en-scene.

My other favourite Welles film is The Magnificent Ambersons. This emasculated masterpiece (RKO cut it by about 40 minutes and tacked on a ridiculous ending shot by Robert Wise) is impressive even in its butchered state. Along with Chimes at Midnight it’s the most emotionally involving of his films. I deeply admire Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil but I love Ambersons. Impeccably reconstructing its turn of the century period, the film immediately adopts an affectionately ambivalent tone as it catalogues changing fashions and the fortunes of the proud Amberson family (through whose deterioration some major turning points in the social and economic fabric of twentieth century American life are observed). The Amberson mansion is dominated by the self-important snobbery of Tim Holt (surprisingly carrying the pivotal role of the spoiled scion) but Welles imbues Georgie’s carryings on  with a degree of tolerance and compassion as the quality of his life flails under the onslaughts of the brave new industrial times, epitomised by Eugene Morgan’s (Joseph Cotten’s) motor car. Welles is partly nostalgic for the strengths of the pre-industrial era (the strong sense of community and more leisurely pace of life) while gently exposing its shortcomings.

As a piece of cinema, it carries consistently superb performances from its costumed cast who are shot in long, aesthetically beautiful takes that make the most out of the awesome (in size and grandeur) central set (the mansion itself); its visual economy takes your breath away-the death of Minafer Senior, for example, is conveyed in a single  terse, brief image and the whole town is exposed in one long tracking shot as lovers Tim Holt and Anne Baxter break up their relationship. The entire cast wrings the emotions dry. Agnes Moorehead’s shrillness is countered by scenes exposing her loneliness and vulnerability as she gets swallowed up in the shadows of the intimidating domestic set; Joseph Cotten’s gentle Eugene is never allowed to consummate his romantic longings for the exquisitely frail Isobel Amberson (Dolores Costello) through the interventions of mother-fixated George (Tim Holt); and Holt himself, in the film’s most unsympathetic role, finally receives his “comeuppance” in unbearably bleak surroundings, his exalted status having been reduced to an historical footnote .

Ken Wallin writes: Well, I remembered. I was reminded a few days ago by David Bordwell's blog which has a lot of interesting comments to make, and steered me to watch the 35 minute edited Too Much Johnson footage today for first time, in celebration. Exuberant and inventive!

What would I say to Orson today? Gee Mr Welles, I'd love to see you follow up the Immortal Story with more  Karen Blixen tales. Will you finish The Dreamers for starters?   (Baroness Blixen pen name Isak Dinesen is a favourite author we have in common).

Max Berghouse writes: Assuming the "great man" were 100 and more or less compus, I doubt there is anything I would have to discuss with him as opposed to being spoken down to from on high. Raddled and senile though he would be, he would still be possessed by overwhelming egocentricity and narcissism.

I'm a classicist when it comes to Welles, namely that his career was one of irretrievable decline from his 1st film, even though many of the subsequent films have "touches", possibly even broad strokes of creative genius. In the latter category I include Touch of Evil.

Had he been able to secure editorial control over his 2nd film The Magnificent Ambersons I believe this would have been his greatest film and I think his greatest success, because, even in truncated form, it shows a warmth and some degree of compassion for frail humanity which most of his work does not have. Perhaps my solitary question would be along the lines of "Do you think any or all of the footage of this film has survived, and what would you do with it had you the chance?".

Happy Birthday to Orson Welles - May 6 1915

Who remembered? The Great Man turned a hundred yesterday, or today Hollywood time. Hollywood time being a concept he found difficult to handle. Too impatient to get going, too impatient to move on to the next project light shining just over the hill... Along with Chaplin one of the two genuine geniuses of the cinema in its short history. Happy Birthday Orson, you continue to give much pleasure. The New York Review   has put some pieces up on line but I'm going to ask a few people to send me a couple of dozen words that they might say if perchance Orson were to suddenly be back, looking them in the eye, rolling that cigar around in his fingertips. If I get any answers I'll post them up.