Day for Night

Year of Release:  1973
Director:  François Truffaut
Screenplay: François Truffaut, Suzanne Schiffman, Jean-Louis Richard
Starring:  Jacqueline Bisset, Valentina Cortese, Dani, Alexandra Stewart, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Jean Champion, Jean-Pierre Léaud, François Truffaut
Running Time:  116 minutes
Genre:  Comedy, drama

In the balmy South of France, a film crew are working on a trashy, romantic melodrama called Meet Pamela.  As the cast and crew negotiate romantic entanglements, various personal and professional crisis, the dedicated but increasingly harried director (Truffaut) is just determined to get the film finished.

François Truffaut was one of the cinema's great directors, and this is one of his finest, and most purely joyful films, a celebration of film and film-making.  The film features Truffaut's regular alter-ego Jean-Pierre Léaud as the sulky, neurotic leading man who has an affair with brittle, British star Jacqueline Bisset, while Valentina Cortese plays a formidable Italian diva, who has a past relationship with the ageing Lothario Jean-Pierre Aumont cast opposite her, and Truffaut himself plays Meet Pamela's put-upon director.  The celebrated author Graham Greene has a cameo as an insurance agent, credited as "Harry Graham". Everyone seems to be having a great time in their roles, and the film, which opens with a dedication to Lillian and Dorthy Gish, two great stars of the silent screen, is full of references to films and filmmakers.  The story focuses just as much attention on the nuts and bolts of making a film, as it does on the interweaving stories of the actors and crew.  The film-makers have to deal with lack of time and money, journalists, investors, costumes, sets, even a seemingly simple shot of a cat drinking from a saucer of milk takes forever to put on film, and the film's most expensive and elaborate scene is destroyed due to an accident in the development lab.  The film is at times, surprisingly dark and has moments of real emotion, but the mood, predominantly, is one of joyful celebration, and crucially is very funny.

François Truffaut and Jacqueline Bisset in Day for Night

The Third Man

Year of Release:  1949
Director:  Carol Reed
Screenplay:  Graham Greene
Starring:  Joseph Cotton, Alida Valli (as Valli), Orson Welles, Trevor Howard
Running Time:  108 minutes
Genre:  Thriller

In war ravaged, Allied-occupied Vienna, Austria, in the years immediately after the Second World War, racketeering thrives.  Holly Martins (Cotton), an American writer of pulp Westerns, now fallen on hard times, arrives in Vienna because his friend, Harry Lime (Welles), has offered him a job.  However, no sooner has he arrived, than he learns that Lime has been killed in a traffic accident.  With the help of Lime's girlfriend, Anna (Valli), Martins investigates his death, but becomes suspicious that it may not have been an accident.  To his horror, he learns from a British major (Howard), that Lime was a callous, murderous racketeer.

This British movie is widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made.  It is a suspenseful, dark thriller.  Filmed in crisp black-and-white in an almost expressionistic style with harsh light and deep, inky black shadows, and shots frequently photographed in a distorted  "Dutch angle" style, and boasting a literate, witty and intelligent script from acclaimed novelist Graham Greene, with memorable performances.  Cotton is memorable as the alcoholic novelist torn between loyalty and conscience, and Valli as the mysterious, tormented Anna.  There is also of course Orson Welles, who despite not appearing much in the film is gifted with one of the most memorable introductions to a character in the history of cinema, and two memorable speeches.  The film's ear-worm theme music by Anton Karas performed entirely on the zither became an international hit, and spent eleven weeks at the top of the US charts.  From the cynical, opening narration (spoken by an uncredited Carol Reed) which introduces the situation in Vienna at the time of the film, to the final chase through the sewers, this depicts a bleak, fallen world of betrayal, and quick violent death with little to provide light or hope.   

"You know what the fellow said, in Italy under the Borgias, they had warfare, murder, terror and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo and the Renaissance.  In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace.  And what did that produce?  The cuckoo clock."
 -Harry Lime (Orson Welles)

Orson Welles in The Third Man

Brighton Rock (2010)

Year: 2010
Director:  Rowan Joffe
Screenplay:  Rowan Joffe, based on the novel Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
Starring:  Sam Riley, Andrea Riseborough, Helen Mirren, John Hurt, Andy Serkis
Running Time:  111 minutes
Genre:  Crime, drama, gangsters

This film is an adaptation of a novel by Graham Greene, which was previously made into a critically acclaimed film in 1947, directed by John Boulting and starring Richard Attenborough.  In this film the setting is updated from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Brighton, England, 1964.  Violent gangs of warring Mods and Rockers are tearing up the coastal town of Britain, and young gangster Pinkie Brown (Riley) murders rival Fred Hale (Sean Harris) against the express wishes of his gang.  Brown hastily seduces and marries young waitress Rose (Riseborough), who is the only person who can tie him to the murder.  However Rose's boss, Ida (Mirren), was a close friend of Hale's and suspects that Rose can tie Pinkie to the crime and is determined to make her testify.  With the threat of the police, and powerful and wealthy local crime boss Colleoni (Serkis), as well as his own gang increasingly turning against him, the already psychotic Pinkie becomes increasingly unhinged and it is only a matter of time before he decides to silence Rose permanently.

This is a powerful and intriguing gangster movie, which plays more like a doom-laden tragedy.  The main focus of the film is the corruption of the innocent waitress Rose by the sadistic gangster Pinkie.  Despite a memorable riot scene between the Mods and the Rockers, it is difficult to see what difference it made, updating the story to the 1960s.  Also the film suffers at times from being too heavily symbolic, with Catholic symbolism (well, it is an adaptation of a Graham Greene novel) and at times almost apocalyptic portents of doom being layered on with a trowel. 

However, despite the flaws, the film looks good and is stylishly made.  It memorably depicts a bleak and savage world where there is little light or hope.  In the process, it manages to make the seaside town of  Brighton make Dante's Inferno look like an ideal holiday destination.  Sam Riley, who previously made an impression as Joy Divison frontman Ian Curtis in musical misery-fest Control (2007), gives a great perfomance as the monsterous Pinkie Brown, and Andrea Riseborough gives a star-making perfomance as the tortured Rose.  

This is a slow-burning but endlessly fascinating film, which provides enough thrills and suspense to keep fans of gangster movies happy, but adds a bracing layer of darkness and grit to the genre. 

Oh, they do like to be beside the seaside: Sam Riley and Andrea Riseborough in Brighton Rock