In Conversation with Alberto Mira on LA BOLA NEGRA (Javier Calvo & Javier Ambrossi, 2026)

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LA BOLA NEGRA (Los Javis, 2026) is the most popular film of 2026 in Spain, surpassing SPIDERMAN BRAND NEW DAY  and THE ODYSSSEY in number of tickets sold and is also currently the third-highest grossing Spanish film in Spanish film history. It won Best Director at Cannes, People’s Choice at the Toronto International Film Festival, the audience award at the BFI London Film Festival, and many more prizes. I’ve seen it twice and the majority of the people in the audiences I saw it with here in Birmingham stayed in their seats until the lights came up, when one could see some of them crying. It moved me greatly both times.

 

With all this success, the backlash has been swift and vicious: t’s not radical enough, not queer enough, not very good cinema, too monumental says Justin Chang — as if the film were some version of C.B. De Mille in Stanley Kramer drag. I admire Chang but his review in THE NEW YORKER has something of the imperial it, the dictates from a centre that knows nothing of the periphery but no barrier to its circulation in and throughout Spain; and at the speed of light, as if Chang’s uninformed views on Spanish cinema and culture were proof the film’s success was just marketing and publicity (which Los Javis are indeed superb at).

All of this as prelude and context to my wanting to speak to Alberto Mira on the film. Mira is a Professor in Film Studies at the School of Arts at Oxford Brookes University who has written numerous books on Spanish Cinema (THE CINEMA OF SPAIN AND PORTUGAL, 2005; HISTORICAL DICTIONARY OF SPANISH CINEMA, 2010), LGBTQ+ cinema ( MIRADAS INSUMISAS: GAYS Y LESBIANAS EN EL CINE. 2008; ENTRE LA CÁMARA Y LA CARNE: EL CINE HOMOERÓTICO EN 25 PELICULAS, 2023); queer history (DE SODOMA A CHUECA: UNA HISTORIA CULTURAL DE LA HOMOSEXUALIDAD EN ESPAÑA EN EL SIGLO XX, 2004); and queer theory (CRÓNICA DE UN DEVENIR: SUBJETIVIDAD, TIEMPO Y GENERACIONES, 2021). I can’t think of anyone better informed on this intersection of subjects, which necessarily frame a discussion of this particular film.

 

In the podcast we discuss how LA BOLA NEGRA  is mainstream, not art cinema, inventive without being innovative but very substantial. We talk of its relationship to Lorca and Alberto Conejeros’ play on Lorca (LA PIEDRA OSCURA, 2013); the themes of unfulfilled lives, repression and silence as ways the queer intersects with the national/popular in Spain, particularly in relation to narratives of the Civil War; the importance of the moments with Glenn Close and Penelope Cruz, not just sparkly star cameos, but adding significant thematic richness, the first in relation to pre-Civil War gender and sexual freedoms; the latter in relation to biography; we also talk of the casting of Guitarrica de la Fuente and Miguel Bernardeau; the importance of the last section of the film, with the grandson, Alberto; Lola Dueñas as the mother; the uses of esperpento throughoutLA BOLA NEGRA, and the way the film links the queer and the civil war to silence, inheritances, repressions…and much more. You can listen to the podcast below:

The podcast may be listened to below:

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

After our chat, Alberto wrote me elaborating a bit more about the concentration camps for homosexuals in Francoist Spain,

‘I checked the dates for concentration camps for homosexuals in Spain. Tefia in Fuerteventura opened in 1954 and closed in 1966. The Badajoz one, like the Huelva one, only held homosexuals from around 1968. Essentially what I said, but needed to check further. The legislation was more homophobic in the later years of the regime than in the earlier ones. Maybe because in early Francoism one did not need a legal justification for homophobia. It was all over, in society. The Catholic church enforced homophobia and sexphobia in ways that the legal system did not. It was only when Spain had to pretend they had some kind of stable legislation that homophobia had to be written in stone. Some activists actually claim that the worst period came after 1970, as there was a legal change that made homophobia explicit and also there was more visibility as the church was starting to lose its grip on society’.

An illuminating chat on a wonderful film.

José Arroyo

 

In Conversation with Sergio Angelini on FILM NOIR UK

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I wanted to do a podcast on FILM NOIR UK to draw attention to the extraordinary work James Harrison and everyone involved with the festival are doing. The festival is on its third year now, growing its audience, and itself growing in importance year upon year. It’s an opportunity to be immersed in noir Halloween weekend in a perfect setting (Weston-super-Mare), a perfect cinema (the art-deco Merlin) and get the opportunity of seeing great classics, in brilliant restored versions, on a big screen with an audience, whilst also offered the opportunity of enhancing one’s understanding and knowledge by the screening of more marginal, tangential, lesser known works that are of undoubted interest. One can re-live old pleasures and discover new ones, in a setting that in spite of its success, still feels familial and intimate: one gets endless opportunities to meet, chat, debate, explore, often with a beer in a group at the pub next door. Many congratulations to all involved for another successful festival, one which is sure to grow as more and more people discover it.

I wanted to talk to Sergio Angelini specifically, well….because I like talking to Sergio Angelini. But I wanted to record a podcast with him for you because, as anyone who’s listened to Tipping My Fedora — his brilliant podcast on all things noir — knows, he’s informed, knowledgeable and articulate. He’s also on the advisory board of FILM NOIR UK, the programmer of the Ida Lupino section, and I had a bone to pick with him: while no one can question the importance of Ida Lupino; as an actress; as one of two female directors during the classic sound era; as someone who focussed the films she wrote, produced and/or directed on female centred-subjects often neglected by Hollywood; does one also have to make claims for her as a great director?

I had also appreciated the section on Spanish noir – all UK premieres — more than he, and bridging these differences of opinion are the basic structure of the podcast, though we touch on the festival as a whole: the boxing films programmed by Steve Hunt; the British section, many of the films kindly facilitated by TPTV; the wonderful screening of The Racket with Neil Brand playing his own score for the film live – a highlight amongst highlights; the Supernatural section programmed by Tom Vincent; and of course all the screenings of great classics in superb often restored versions (The Killers, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Notorious, the UK premiere of the restoration of Orson Welles’ The Stranger – a revelation).

A marvellous festival, one already a fixture on my annual calendar.

The podcast may be listened to here:

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

Sergio’s wonderful TIPPING MY FEDORA podcast may be listened to here: 

 

José Arroyo

Body Double (Brian de Palma, 1984)

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A friend was commenting the other day on how good Brian De Palma is with actors to which my response was, ‘is he? He’s certainly great with great actors. But have you seen Craig Wasson in BODY DOUBLE’? Jake Scully is a great role, the cuckolded nebbish wannabee who breaks down in acting class, gets to be a vampire, styles up for an MTV video with Frankie goes to Hollywood, and even goes porno.  And I found him completely charmless throughout, a chore to watch. He certainly didn’t get to do much of note after its release, whereas it re-launched Melanie Griffith’s career, whose performance is what I best remembered from the film, funny and true. The film is about mediated experience, through various media and through different forms of voyeurism. It’s a kind of transmogrification of Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958), but without the emotion, excitement or complexity. It’s got great moments of thrilling filmmaking (the opening and ending, the scenes at the mall, the beach, the burial, the voyeurism across the canyon). It also functions as a kind of metacinema (the uses of rear projection and their revelation, the video shop, the contrast and connection between low-budget slasher and porn, its satire on LA’s surface image culture). One can make a case for it as a great movie, and of course people have. But I do sometimes think that contemporary criticism, with its access to viewing and reviewing, re-winding, the ability to detach scenes from movies, to stop the film’s unfolding of time etc. create different types of experiences, and that critics sometimes can’t see the forest for the trees they so intensely obsess over. I remembered Melanie Griffitsh so vividly that I’d forgotten she only appears almost two thirds into the film, when it all of a sudden comes alive. Also, alongside the dazzling filmmaking, there is something derivative, and by this I mean that the Hitchcockian in BODY DOUBLE achieves only the surface effects without the underlying depth and complexity of sometimes contradictory feeling Hitchcock draws out. There’s something crude, lewd, and sleazy about the whole enterprise here. The power drill scene, a riff on the chainsaw scene in SCARFACE (1983), is milked for all its considerable sexual connotations. It’s funny but only if you put aside the extraordinary misogyny that underpins it. In AMERICAN PSYCHO Brett Easton Ellis makes of BODY DOUBLE serial killer Patrick Bateman’s favourite and most watched movie. It’s not hard to see why.

José Arroyo

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 488 – Primetime

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For a segment on an American news magazine show that had only 20 episodes, To Catch a Predator, which showed sting operations on men trying to abuse children in a twisted combination of reality TV and true crime, retains an outsized cultural reach, both in time – it was on two decades ago – and globally, the show continuing to provide material for memes online, and this film, Primetime, finding a reasonable audience beyond its domestic borders. Unfortunately, while director Lance Oppenheim’s dramatisation of the show’s production and the event that led to its cancellation hopes to explore it as a ne plus ultra of the desire and ability for the media to turn anything, no matter how sordid, into entertainment, it never really gets beyond the banal – if only it were more expressive and horrifying, despite its stylistic flourishes that convey surreal subjectivity to what we’re shown. With such dark and rich subject matter, Primetime held a lot of promise, but sadly, it just isn’t interesting enough.

Listen on the players below, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or YouTube Music.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

 

Dressed to Kill (Brian de Palma, 1980)

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When Dressed to Kill (Brian de Palma) first came out I remember feminists being outraged that a woman was punished for being sexually active, first by being shown to get syphilis from her pick-up and then by being brutally slashed with a razor in a lift. The gay press in turn denounced it because the slasher was a trans person. Representation was then a cornerstone of identity politics. Of the film, I mainly remembered Angie Dickinson looking absolutely gorgeous in that opening scene, and later absolutely glam with that flowing white coat in the brilliant sequence in MOMA, no dialogue, all the suspense created by the use of the room separators in the museum amidst the flowing steadycam shots. Seeing it last night I noted that the blu-ray has two extras praising the treatment of trans people in the film; and undress, ogle and kill has become a cornerstone of De Palman’s cinema (and indeed of entire genres), though the frankness of the opening scene with its frontal nudity and more than a suggestion of masturbation still startled. The film now seems to me a mise-en-scène of an adolescent boy’s fantasies and an exploration of those fantasies through extraordinary mise-en-scène. I bet De Palma dreamt of undressing Anglie Dickinson since she played Feathers in Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959) –Janet Leigh in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) is another clear referent; he’s spoken of how as a teenager he was a science nerd like the one Kieth Gordon plays here; and of course the young boy ends up in bed with the pretty prostitute at the end of the film, a source of male fantasies since the beginnings of literature. Issues of representation still rankle a bit (the above, and the group of black men chasing after Nancy Allen in the subway still make me uneasy) but the film gets to something deep and complex about sexual terror (from women, men, boys; iin relation to others but also fears about themselves. It seems to me a great film. Michael Caine is superb as the analyst who can’t resolve his own mental health issues; and I’m in love with Nacy Allen, seeing her in so many De Palma films recently; her warmth, sexyness, likeability, her ability to suggest an ordinary person. I wish she’d been more and better used in the cinema of that period. The Arrow UHD looked magnificent.

 

José Arroyo

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 487 – Clayface

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Based on a Batman supervillain who, despite making his first comic appearance in 1940, is relatively little-known, Clayface shows us how a handsome, successful movie star becomes a shapeshifting lump of putty that knows how to hold a grudge. Its characterisation is nonexistent and storytelling weak at best, but it’s a ton of fun, with some delicious body horror that makes us both squirm, and an energetic expression of what someone might allow themselves to do if given power and invisibility. Go in with low expectations and it’ll confound them.

Listen on the players below, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or YouTube Music.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

 

SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME (Ridley Scott, 1987)

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Last night’s film was SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME (Ridley Scott, 1987), which I picked up at FILM NOIR UK but hadn’t seen since it first came out; a bomb then but one which has exercised a hold and lingers in the mind. There’s the great Gershwin song the film is named after, and an upper-class Manhattan sumptuously filmed, with Mimi Rogers dressed and made up beautifully, one of the heights of eighties glamour. And Lorraine Bracco, great as an earthy working-class mother, married to a cop (Tom Berenger). The film suffers from a wrong-headed emphasis; the story should really have been about the cop and his family; and how they survive his bewitchment by uber-rich Mimi Rogers, which is what it ultimately returns to, but most of the film focusses on how a working class cop and a super-rich lady fall into an impossible affair when he’s assigned to protect her after witnessing a murder. The characterisation of the killer, out to get her before she can identify him doesn’t make sense either. Why would he insist on chasing after her himself and not just get some lackey to do it? Pauline Kael famously wrote that Ridley Scott has ‘put so much morbid, finicky care into this silly little story that he’s worried the fun out of it,’ but I find the finicky care is the fun. Manhattan is all steam and gleaming lights here, beautiful; the penthouse interiors elegantly arrayed with the too-muchness characteristic of the time, are bliss to see; even Tom Berenger, who seems to walk around with a cloud of depression over his head and never seems like a real person, is strangely magnetic. One of those not-very-good films that I’ll surely watch again, with pleasure.

José Arroyo

JAGGED EDGE (Richard Marquand, 1985)

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JAGGED EDGE (Richard Marquand, 1985) is one of those films that give the impression that Glenn Close’s function in American Cinema of the 80s was to be the target for a crude misogyny before deflecting, redirecting, making the audience feel the pleasure in it whilst being allowed the safety valve of disavowal. The film begins with a brutal scene of a woman being tied up, cut with a hunting knife, raped; with the B word smeared in blood over the bed. Half my students would have walked out before the film even got going, missing out on the revenge part at the end where Glenn kills that man as he tries the same on her. It’s a film without the visual delights of style generally offered by noir but with the not inconsiderable pleasure of watching Glenn Close at her prime, beautiful (the producer was banned from the set because he didn’t think so), emotionally transparent, cooly intense. It’s a vehicle for her and a box office hit before FATAL ATTRACTION (Adrian Lyne, 1987). Jeff Bridges is the sexy husband who might have killed his wife. Robert Loggia is the detective, a father figure for Glenn, and nominated for an Academy Award. It’s written by Joe Esterhaz, in a cruder vein, pulpier, less well-directed but better constructed than BASIC INSTINCTS (Paul Verhoeven, 1992). It’s no masterpiece but does produce the shocks and shakes like the shock mechanism it fundamentally is. It holds up forty years after it was first released. One of the INDICATOR disks I bought at Film Noir UK.

José Arroyo

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 486 – Fatherland

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The third film in Paweł Pawlikowski’s historical trilogy, after Ida (2013) and Cold War (2018), Fatherland follows one of the defining authors of the twentieth century, Thomas Mann, as he returns to Germany in 1949 with his daughter, Erika, after sixteen years away, finding his country effectively under occupation by the two new superpowers: the USA controlling the west, the Soviet Union controlling the east. The Manns encounter former Nazis (and continuing Nazi ideologues) forming the new polite society on one side, enthusiastic adherents to Communism and an alternative type of totalitarianism on the other, all while dealing with an intensely personal tragedy – the suicide of their son and brother, Klaus.

Pawlikowski’s direction is austere, delicate and engrossing, and the film both benefits and suffers from its economical storytelling. Aspects of the characters and societies that are just barely dramatised with hints and ellipses might be better approached head-on, particularly the sexualities of some characters (Erika and Klaus were both gay, Klaus openly so, but the film builds in ambiguity to that, arguably doing their characters a disservice in the process); on the other hand, we’re given room to interpret what we’re shown, and the film’s stylistic simplicity and brevity is a pleasure.

Fatherland is an interesting, intelligent and moving film, and, as José says, a fitting companion to Ida and Cold War: at least their equal, perhaps their superior. We recommend it.

Listen on the players below, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or YouTube Music.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

OBSESSION (Brian de Palma, 1976)

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OBSESSION (Brian de Palma, 1976)

 

Cliff Robertson plays Michael Courtland the businessman who loses his much-loved wife and daughter to kidnappers and is riven by guilt. When he goes to Florence with his business partner (John Lithgow) he meets a young woman who is the spitting image of his late wife and becomes obsessed, à la VERTIGO (Alfred Hitchcock,1958) a clear inspiration, following her through the dark nights of the old town until he meets her, dates her and brings her to America.

Good thing she’s a good Catholic and doesn’t put out, as the object of his affection turns out to be the daughter he’s long thought dead. Geneviève Bujold plays mother, daughter, and child-as-grown up, one of the many inventive twirls De Palma de ploys here.

She’s terrific and her work here makes me want to revisit her other work, particularly the films she made in Quebec with Paul Almond, Michel Brault and Claude Jutra. Robertson, as we can see in the clip below,  comes across as handsome but a bit stiff in contrast.

The story is filmed predominantly in very wide shots, that take in the surroundings, contrasted with close-ups, sometimes extreme ones, when the story calls for interiority or turns to dreams.

It’s a dazzling film full of rhyming shots (the mausoleum where the wife rests evokes the Church where they met, father and daughter are both filmed in the exact same place in the exact same type of shot at different moments in the film, the change in figure a change in meaning) with the last shot, a father/daughter embrace where  the camera goes 360 degrees on the impossible couple, themselves twirling with emotional release around the camera. It’s a tour de force ending to a fascinating film that as Gary Couzens says, ‘has both a 360° nd 540° pan’..

It was De Palma’s first mainstream success and Bernard Herrman’s last score (TAXI DRIVER was written later but released earlier),, a great one. Co-written by De Palman and Paul Schrader; the latter accusing the former of truncating and destroying his work (ostensibly removing or condensing the last third of the screenplay) and not speaking to him for years. But De Palma clearly made the right decision. It’s a noir infused psychological thriller with Gothic elements  that holds up beautifully, with the scenes of Robertson following the dream of his dead wife at night in Florence particularly memorable. The ending remains extraordinary. Bluray from Arrow.

José Arroyo

Femme Fatale (Brian de Palma, 2002)

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FEMME FATALE (Brian de Palma, 2002) is a sexy thriller where all the women seem to look like Helmut Newton photographs, lithe, long-legged, stilettoed and wielding metaphoric whips. The men are all patsies of course. Rebecca Romijn is Laure/ Lily, the femme fatale with the dual identity. She towers over Antonio Banderas (Nicolas Bardo), the main patsy, who even has a moment where he plays gay to try to fool her, and to raise questions in the audience about his character’s masculinity. . FEMME FATALE is a palpitating, glossy male projection full of desire, fear and a will to punish women. The film is framed at the beginning by the heroine, an amoral jewel thief, watching DOUBLE INDEMNITY (Billy Wilder, 1944) on TV while lounging in bed, the scene where Barbara Stanwyck says, ‘I never loved you Walter. Not you or anybody else. I’m rotten to the core. I used you…’, a sentiment which the film will dramatize over and over again. It’s beautiful to look at, fascinating to watch, until ¾ of the way through where, in a nod to THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW (Fritz Lang, 1944), the whole middle section of the film turns out to have been a dream. Then the film loses its logic, stops making sense, and dissipates the very considerable sexual charge that drove the earlier parts of the film. Before we’re told it’s a dream, the movie was a gorgeous picture of hell, violent thugs, heists, sex shops, utter immorality, all spectacularly filmed; after….it becomes a repetition but with romance and poetic justice. Another of De Palma’s films I’d like to see a director’s cut of, a wonderful illustration of so much feminist literature on the femme fatale (pro and con) and a glossy, sexy watch.

 

Neil Jackson has written a lovely piece on the film, differing in his estimation of the dream/vision device to mine, which is worth quoting at length:

‘

True to form, De Palma has infused the film with Hitchcockian allusions, as well as a more than cursory nod to Antonioni’s Blow Up (the shadow of which loomed large over De Palma’s own Blow Out). The high-tech trappings continue De Palma’s ongoing commentary on both the ramifications of surveillance culture, with images repeatedly evoked through the lenses of still and video cameras, night vision goggles and binoculars. Complementing the murderous, matrimonial and sexual pursuit of the eponymous figure by several of the film’s male characters, the film showcases De Palma’s familiar theme of sound and image technology, which has become the ultimate adjunct to personal obsession. In tandem, De Palma has upped the ante by aligning the play on images with a dream narrative, albeit one that comes complete with ‘seven years later’ captions, split-screen effects and subtitled French.

While much of the film gleefully baits those who accuse its director of stylistic overkill, there is a curious logic at play, even while the film seems to simultaneously go into orbit. All the signs that the audience is being led on a merry dance are there: surreal details such as the bloodied shirt still worn by a character shot seven years previously; the repeated emphasis on flowing water; and the clocks that all seem permanently stuck at 3.33. Also, many of the major characters in the mid-section are dream ‘echoes’ of figures glimpsed fleetingly during the heist and escape opening. Characters are frequently visualised through split screens or frames within the frame, grounding them in a rigorously sustained artificiality. The pivotal image comes following a jump-cut from the apparent suicide of Laure’s (Rebecca Romijn Stamos) doppelganger – momentarily filling the screen is what appears to be a giant swirling quotation mark, which is actually the design pattern on a jetliner engine.’

It’s a film that some devoted de Palma fans have listed as their favourite.

José Arroyo

THE BEGINNING AND ENDING OF RASHOMON

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Ending of Rashomon

Beginning of Rashomon

 

Looking again at the beginning and ending of Rashomon, how the latter replies to the former, adds another option to the possible interpretations the film offers, or best say another dimension, since various interpretations can be held at once, in various combinations, some selections offering no contradiction, others creating tensions.

The first post-credit shot at the beginning is the temple, a set so large and expensive to make. We know now that there were various trucks around it offering water, which workmen hosed onto the set to create the illusion of rain.  So a great deal of expense and effort went into creating a poetic image, this ruined temple, the rain flooding and muddying the ground, on which we see the detritus of destruction.

The second shot moves in closer, the rain moving in the wind, falling from the roof like a waterfall, the roof caved-in, a column fallen and upside down on the lower right hand of the frame.

The third shot moves closer, changes angle, and highlights the destruction, the fallen column taking up half the frame, the lower diagonal, and adds a theatrical element: in the background we see figures we can’t yet make out. Who are they?

This gets revealed in the fourth shot, a closer look, which reveals — is it too much to say with a theatrical flourish? At least narratively? — two figures, who we will later learn are the priest (Minoru Chiaki, on the left) and the woodcutter (the great Takashi Shimura).

In the fifth shot we move in closer to the figures at a side-angle, the monk placed higher than the woodcutter in the frame, as the woodcutter says, ‘I don’t understand. I just don’t understand,’ the first — and considering the film’s themes, portentous — bit of dialogue we hear in Rashomon. 

In the sixth shot, we get a close up to the monk, followed by a shot which rhymes with our first clear view of the two, and the an image of the flooded ground, creating an anticipatory space for a third figure to walk in, we will see that figure struggle to reach the shelter of the temple, the eight shot is held for quite a while, and in the following two we also see the new figure (Kichijiro Ueda, playing ‘the commoner) struggle through the length of each shot to reach the shelter (shots, seven, eight and nine). Once he reaches it (shot nine), the original phrase (I don’t understand) is repeated again whilst he’s introduced to us as separate and distant to the other two in shot ten (see figures below)

The three go on to talk about a terrible crime but what crime could be so terrible in a world where many bodies are hanging outside the temple and no one comes to claim them, a world characterised by war, earthquakes, wind, fire, famine the plague…year after year nothing but disasters?

The rest of the film will attempt to tell us of that crime, offering different versions, introducing to the world the concept of the Rashomon effect, where we see conflicting accounts of an event, tinged with each of the teller’s subjectivity, where each witness colours the truth to make themselves come off better in their recounting, sometimes lying even to themselves.

At the end we learn that even the woodcutter, who we had taken as an objective witness to that point, has stolen a valuable dagger, that he too is not innocent, and that we are no closer to the truth of what happens. And yet at the end, whilst the commoner steals the things that have been left with and for the baby, the woodcutter offers to take hiim in and raise him, restoring the priest’s faith in man. In the last extended  backwards tracking shot,, we see the rain stops, the sun comes out, the woodcutter, holding the baby firmly in hand first looking seriously at the baby then at looking up with a smile. But interestingly the woodcutter walks past the camera, leaving as the last image he priest in his temple, with all that represents of faith, morality, justice and an accounting to a higher power (See images below)

Perhaps we have come no closer to understanding what happened but human responses and interactions have restored faith and hope. Even in a world where people are bad, events worse, and trust is tested, the actions of a few good people are sufficient to spark a sense of a better future.

That Kurosawa evokes all of this with his combination of poetry and theatricality adds to the depth and beauty of the work.

José Arroyo

The Black Dahlia (Brian De Palma, 2006)

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In THE BLACK DAHLIA (2006), Brian de Palma works fully within a classic 40s noir vernacular – the voice-over narration, the fedoras and ceiling fans, police head-quarters and the boxing ring, blackmail and vice, ‘deviant’ sexuality and murder, all lit for shadows and sin. The film is based on James Ellroy’s 1987 novel – the first in the LA QUARTET series – which is itself based on the real murder of Elizabeth Short, a young woman on the fringes of the film industry who was brutally killed in 1947, her corpse mutilated and bisected. The story was so lurid, it became a national talking point, designated the ‘black’ dahlia case with reference to THE BLUE DAHLIA (George Marshall, 1946), a hit with Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake the previous year.

THE BLACK DAHLIA is designed by Dante Ferreti, lit by Vilmos Zsigmond, and directed with real imagination and flair by De Palma. It is so beautiful visually – breathtaking really – that it’s a sorrow that it doesn’t quite work narratively. The story as told seems quite convoluted and at moments  incomprehensible. When first released, the actors – Scarlett Johansson, Josh Hartnett, Fiona Shaw, Aaron Eckhart, Mia Kirshner — were found to be at fault, though I like them all very much except for Hilary Swank, who seems miscast in a part that calls for a young Ava Gardner. The director’s cut was originally three-hours, a version praised by Ellroy, and one I’d like to see. What’s available now are aspects and moments so extraordinary they hint at a greatness that the film itself doesn’t deliver upon. Perhaps a directors’ cut would.

As is I loved so much of THE BLACK DAHLIA: the look, the style, the direction, the subject matter and setting, the references to Lana Turner (Johanssen is dressed to evoke her 40s personae), Rita Hayworth, THE MAN WHO LAUGHS (Paul Leni, 1928), detecting the influence of THE BIG SLEEP (Howard Hawks, 1946) and other forties noirs; oh and the great K.D. Lang performing LOVE FOR SALE in a lesbian nightclub is another wonderful moment in a film full of them.

José Arroyo

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 485 – Verity

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We love a good thriller, and Verity is one… depending on your expectations. It’s reliant on three excellent star performances, Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett all charismatic and committed to getting the best out of the entertainingly daft screenplay. Verity does tricks on the tightrope between sincere and self-knowingly nonsensical, and is dramatic and funny in equal measure.

On top of this, we discuss the nuance – such as there can be, in the context of a somewhat absurd thriller – of the characters’ actions, how the opening sets a tone that might be easy to overlook, and the layers of irony and uncertainty built in to the themes of truth and villainy. And we consider some depressing aspects of the real world that the film reflects, including the general societal illiteracy and stupidity it unwittingly reproduces in its dialogue and the novelistic and journalistic writing we’re shown, the new media environment in which the podcast interview has become at least as important as legacy media, and the sizeable and vocal section of society that’s devoted to demonising women as manipulative, psychopathic, murderous liars.

Listen on the players below, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or YouTube Music.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

A note on Gary Cooper

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Have seen three films with Gary Cooper in the last three days and he strikes me as a soulful actor. It’s all in the eyes, which seem to convey all kinds of feeling, and the thickness and length of the eyelashes frame that feeling with a lush complexity. This in play with his mouth, a promise of sensuality. And he’s a whizz with double-takes. Moreover, whether he’s playing a millionaire, painter or mechanic, he manages to evoke All-American average Joe, which takes some doing when you look like that. You might guess I love him.

José Arroyo

DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS (Carl Franklin, 1995)

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Saw DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS (Carl Franklin, 1995), on my big screen in a gorgeous blu-ray last night and it was like seeing it for the first time. The opening credits appear over an Archibald Motley panting, ‘Bronzeville by Night’, of black people at night moving through a busy street in the city, all blues and blacks with splashes of red. T-Bone Walker’s ‘West Side Baby’ is on the soundtrack. It’s late 40’s Los Angeles but a different world, rich in relationships, sexy but also dangerous.

The dangers in this world mainly come from the outside. Here, alongside the usual corruption at City Hall, motifs typical of the genre, we also see the entrenched racism, the glee and brutality with which white supremacists enact that racism. My theory is that this aspect of the film is what made it a flop upon first release. All the white characters are either enthusiastic supremacists, have inhabited the racism to such an extent it’s exercised casually and unconsciously, or are aware but bow down to the ‘practicalities,’ such as what the effects of the ‘one drop rule’ might have on a political career in that time. I doubt a mainstream American audience, which is mainly white, likes to see itself so.

I find it one of the greatest noirs of the nineties, still undervalued. I remember when I read Walter Mosley’s novels, thinking its central conceit was so clever it brought new dimensions to the genre. How does a black detective solve crime during Jim Crowe when the institutions, entire parts of the city, even hotels and restaurants are no-go areas for black people? Here Denzel Washington is ‘Easy’ Rawlins, out of the army, out of a job because he didn’t kow tow enthusiastically enough to his white bosses at the aircraft company, and with a mortgage to pay. A gangster friend of a friend (Tom Sizemore) pays him handsomely to find a woman – Daphne (Jennifer Beals), the ‘Devil in a Blue Dress’, and before he knows it, he’s caught in a web of sleaze and murder and necessity and smarts make an unwilling detective out of him.

 

The film’s world is a black suburban, poor but neighbourly, a downtown area with black businesses; the rest of the city, dangerous with white people; a cabin in the woods, even more dangerous because only white people. Tak Fujimoto’s cinematography is gorgeous. This world black people live in is poor, but sensuous and beautiful, with a particular type of colour — blue, amber, burnt orange — and few cinematographers have filmed black skin better in this period: Denzel Washington’s looks like cinnamon velvet.

My other theory as to why this noir doesn’t quite get its due within noir fandom is that it has a ‘happy ending’. At the end of the film, we return to the black suburban community, with its local characters, its community, kids on bikes, church-going. The kiddie fiddlers, corruption, police brutality and racism are elements that impinge on this community, that it can’t at this stage overcome, but that it survives through the adoption of other, better values. Though many noirs end with the illusion of a ‘happy end’ this type of love for a place and a people is unusual, generically discordant but absolutely necessary in relation the film’s themes and intentions. Atypical of noir is also the humour that erupts, particularly through the casual killings of Mouse – a great performance by Don Cheadle.

 

Jennifer Beals’ performance is still a problem, she’s too awkward and ill at ease. But it’s about the only false note. As Shelley Wiinters said of Burt Lancaster, just watching Denzel Washington walk in this movie is its own sensual pleasure; and this in a film where the colour alone has its own erotics. A thrill to see in such a beautiful blu-ray from Indicator.

José Arroyo

Bluebeard’s Eight Wife (Ernst Lubitsch, 1938)

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BLUEBEARD’S EIGHT WIFE is so delightful that the only reason it’s not held in higher esteem must be that it’s a Lubitsch film. It’s not up to the heights of TROUBLE IN PARADISE or SHOP AROUND THE CORNER but then what is? It’s the story of an American millionaire, already married seven times, who falls for an impoverished aristocrat who’s unwilling to become the next notch in his belt (Colbert).  It has a  superb opening with maybe one of the great meet-cutes of all time, when Colbert and Cooper are out shopping for pyjamas and he only wants the top and she only wants the bottom. Colbert and Cooper are great together but it’s his double takes that made me laugh out loud most. A very young and very sexy David Niven has a small role and it’s a delight to see Edward Everett Horton, Franklin Pangborn, and others in the supporting cast. Lubitsch makes even the graphics funny (the section on Czechoslovakia). It’s one gag after another, with Lubitsch’s usual inventiveness, the sections we see but don’t here being a case in point. Billy Wilder and Charles Bracket are credited with the screenplay. Bliss. Lovely disc from Powerhouse.

José Arroyo

….In Conversation with Lee Nabbs

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The Mockingbird Cinema has been nominated for CINEMA OF THE YEAR by the British Independent Film Awards (BIFA). I love the Mockingbird; am an admirer of its programme, the quality of its projection, the kindness of its staff; of the way that it brings different types of film fandom together, builds community around one welcoming site in Digbeth but across diverse interests related to cinema throughout Birmingham and the Midlands.

In this podcast I talk to Lee Nabbs, Director and co-owner, to ask about the cinema’s history and its current operations. He tells me about the cinema’s connections to all the organisations that basically make up film culture in the Midlands, from festivals (Flatpack, Forward Film and Television Festival), to other cinemas (Midlands Arts Centre), filmmaking networks (Reel Brum), film clubs (Whatever Pays the Rent), events (The Secret Cinema Screenings at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens), patrons like Joe Lycett and Trevor Beattie, why he could have shown the PEAKY BLINDERS film forever, and much more.

At the end, when he reads to  me what audience members said when they nominated the Mockingbird for Best Cinema, he’s visibly moved: ‘Like a second home’, ‘The happiest place’, ‘The beating heart of Digbeth’, ‘They fight for justice’.

His being moved moves me. Birmingham is under-served in relation to cinema, only three independent screens in the Second City, two of them at The Mockingbird. But it’s clear from talking to Lee that what’s lacking in numbers and finance is compensated for with lots of love, care, community, mutual support; that those involved in The Mockingbird care about cinema, about making it available in Birmingham and about supporting the making and showing of films locally.

A lovely and illuminating chat.

The podcast may be listened to here:

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

 

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I have done podcast with some of the people Lee mentions in our chat.

 

Iaan Francis on Flatpack Festival:

I speak to David Baldwin on the Midlands Arts Centre here:

 

José Arroyo

FELLOW TRAVELLERS

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PSA: Fellow Travellers, previously available only with a Paramount subscription i now on Channel Four. I found it very moving when I first saw it: ‘Saw FELLOW TRAVELERS last night, binged the whole thing, which meant I spent most of the night a wreck, wrapped up emotionally in the sad sexiness of it all. It’s a work that seems both conventional and landmark at the same time and for simple reasons: the romanticism of a forbidden love lived ‘beyond measure’; and that it’s here embodied by two handsome stars, with each glamorously depicting one side of that. And of course, it makes loss, death, and grief central by anchoring it all in 1987 and the AIDS and Activism that characterised those years in the US. I can’t think of other works featuring gay men given such glamorous treatment and epic sweep; it’s a real saga with the emotions travelling through decades, with repression and oppression straddling different periods, from McCarthy to Reagan, and a kindled passion gluing it all together. I loved seeing images from Reichenbach’s films used in the credit sequence. Whoever chose the songs deserves a prize. I have to think on it some more – some aspects seemed quite cliché-ish — but I was too much of an emotional mess to care. I really love it, worth the Paramount subscription, and judging from the many discussion groups online, it seems to have hit a nerve with many others.’

José Arroyo

Kill Jackie

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KILL JACKIE has been getting very middling reviews but I’ve greatly enjoyed watching it. It’s about a former drug queenpin now making millions selling art in the grey freeport market who has a hit put on her by spoiled billionaire brat for refusing to sell to him. It’s very trashy – none of the characters are believable as people – but glamorous, glossy and fun. At the heart of it is Catherine Zeta Jones giving the most authoritative star performance I’ve seen from her since her Zorro/Entrapment/Chicago days. She goes full Welsh too, an added touch. She gives the equivalent of a Bette Davis or Joan Crawford mid-forties performance, every look, gesture, move is measured, patterned, performed with the camera in mind, and made significant. And then she opens her mouth, Swansea comes out, and with it a great deal of warmth and playfulness. She’s just terrific. In photos, her face can seem a bit blobbed out by surgery, flesh crossing contours. But in motion, and on camera, she’s beautiful, alive, full of feeling. The supporting cast includes Ron Perlman, Oscar Jaenada, Raff Law (Jude’s son), Daniel Ings and Christine Adams, all a joy to see playing cartoon characters.

José Arroyo