Motoring, Arts & LeisureDVD ReviewsTanitch takes a look at the latest DVD releases. Tanitch takes a look at the latest DVD releases.
29/06/2009
THE SEVENTH VEIL (Odeon). Psychiatric drama: huge success in 1945. Should a traumatised concert pianist (Ann Todd) marry a bandleader, a painter, or her handsome guardian (James Mason), a sadistic cripple, who is liable to bring his cane crashing down on the piano keys whilst she is playing? The public was asked to decide. No prizes for guessing who they chose.
THE HAPPIEST DAYS OF YOUR LIFE (Optimum). Bureaucratic blunder. Girls’ school is billeted on boys’ school. Hilarious 1950’s farce. Alistair Sim and Margaret Rutherford as the harassed head teachers are in top form. Sim’s comic timing is a joy to watch. Joyce Grenfell’s gauche, toothy games mistress (“Call me sausage!”) was a major turning point in her career.
THE WINSLOW BOY (Optimum). Terence Rattigan’s play, which waves a patriotic flag and knocks the Establishment at the same time, was based on a true story of a naval cadet who was falsely accused of stealing a five shilling postal order. The long drawn out trial (1910-1912) became his father’s fight against the despotism of bureaucracy. The admiralty argued that “in certain cases right may have to be sacrificed for the public good.” The enjoyable 1948 film version with Robert Donat as his consul has additional scenes in the House of Commons and High Court.
THE READER (Entertainment in Video). Hardly a month goes by without a book, film or play about the holocaust. Bernard Schlink’s novel found a new angle. How do you come to terms with the fact that the woman you loved when you were a teenager was a prison guard in a Nazi concentration camp? Illiteracy can never be an excuse, but it is an excuse. Kate Winslet won an Oscar for her performance.
THE VALKYRIE (20th Century Fox). Tom Cruise as the one-handed, one-eyed Claus von Stauffenberg in a mission (not as impossible as all that) to kill Hitler in 1944. Thoroughly researched and surprisingly gripping - even for those who know the outcome! There are some interesting glimpses, too, of what should have happened and never did. Bill Nighy and Tom Wilkinson give valuable support.
THE CLASS (Artificial Eye). Who would want to be a teacher these days? Certainly not after watching this improvised documentary about life in an inner city middle school in France. A charismatic former teacher Francois Begaudeau plays himself; but fact and fiction get more and more irritatingly blurred the longer the film goes on. Awarded the Palme d’Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. (Sub-titled.)
ETRE ET AVOIR (Artificial Eye). You might well want to become a teacher if you see the patient and caring Georges Lopez teaching 3 to 11-year-olds in a one-room school in rural France. This delightful, touching, endearing and nostalgic fly-on-the-wall 2002 documentary has won many awards and feels absolutely real. But the reality, unfortunately, for most state children and teachers, will be much more likely to be The Class. (Sub-titled.)
MILK (Momentum). Straight civil rights documentary about Harvey Milk, the high profile gay activist in San Francisco, who was murdered by a rival politician in the 1978. Sean Penn got the Oscar for best actor; but, dramatically, the activist is upstaged by the murderer (hints he might be a closet gay?) played by the Josh Brolin, an actor who is always good value.
THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON (Warner Home Video). The gimmick is that Benjamin is born old and ugly grows younger and younger until he looks like beautiful Brad Pitt and then he grows even younger and dies when he is a baby. The idea, based on a very short story by Scott Fitzgerald, is always much more interesting than the execution. The story-line, incredibly boring and heavy-going, does not get emotionally involving until far too late.
ODETTE (Optimum). Anna Neagle, top British box office star in the 1940s, is unexpectedly cast in this respectable tribute to a World War 2 agent who was captured, tortured and survived the concentration camp. The very young Peter Ustinov plays a wireless operator. Maurice Goring is very theatrical in dark glasses as German Intelligence. The Nazis are caricatured and yes you can hear the classic line: “We have ways of making you talk.”
THE WRESTLER (Optimum). A professional wrestler, well past his sell-by date and on an increasingly humiliating downward path, describes himself very accurately as a broken-down piece of meat. The body is revoltingly bloodied and deeply scared. Mickey Rourke is very convincing and the bouts in the ring, which open the film, are sick-making in their brutality. The film is very definitely not for the squeamish.
THREE MONKEYS (New Wave films). Speak no evil. Hear no evil. See no evil. A modern Turkish film noir: a family tragedy of corruption, guilt and denial. The powerful, poetic and extremely dark camerawork, gives a grim story an added intensity. Nuri Bikge Ceylan won the award for best director at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.(sub-titled)
Robert Tanitch is the author of London Stage in the 20th Century, an illustrated chronology published by Haus. See his website, linked below.