Robert Tanitch reviews the latest DVDs
SUFFRAGETTE (Pathe). The climax is a reconstruction of the 1913 Derby when Emily Davison stepped in front of King George V’s horse. The film, however concentrates on a fictional character: a laundry worker (Carey Mulligan), maltreated in the home and workplace, an amalgam of suffragettes, who ridiculed, battered and ignored, finally resorted to violence. They were treated with violence by the police – vividly portrayed here. Meryl Streep appears as Mrs Pankhurst but so briefly as to be absurd. Sarah Gavron’s film is sincere and well-intentioned but never quite the riveting experience many will have hoped for. If you were living an hundred years ago are you absolutely certain you would have wanted women to have the vote?
VALENTINO (Eureka). 10,000 people turned up for Rudolph Valentino’s funeral in 1926. The hysteria was incredible and “mourning performance” given by Pola Negri, much ridiculed in the newspapers, has passed into legend. The critics said Ken Russell’s highly fictionalised film (released in 1977) was gaudy, tasteless, absurd, vulgar, camp and grotesque. What did they expect from a Ken Russell film? Restraint was never in his vocabulary. He was obviously going to go right over the top as he had done with his films on Strauss and Tchaikovsky. The master stroke was to cast Rudolph Nureyev. Valentino was a gigolo/cafe professional dancer before he became an erotic silent movie star. The Sheik defines him. Women were fainting all over the place. His masculinity was questioned. The outrageous and absurd public boxing match (the actor’s response to the Pink Powder Puff slur in the press) is very Ken Russell.
JAMES WHITE (Soda) Josh Mondon, drawing on his own experience, writes and directs a sad story of a son’s love for his mentally-ill mother who is dying of cancer. He is not always there when she needs him. He desperately needs to get his act together. His life is a mess and he needs to settle down and get a job. The raw performances given by Christopher Abbott and Cynthia Nixon are terrible convincing. The scenes in the hospital are particularly distressing. Some people may find the film too distressing and too near to home.
BACKGROUND (StudioCanal). A 16-year marriage has been going through a bad patch for the last two years. Warren Chetham-Strode’s dull and very English 1950’s sermon on the damage done to children when parents decide to divorce was seen on stage, film and television. The couple (Philip Friend and Valerie Hobson) change their minds about divorcing each other when their 15-year-old son (Jeremy Spenser) decides to shoot his mother’s lover (Norman Wooland). The film should end in tears; instead it ends in laughter which may be good propaganda but it’s ridiculously glib and utterly false. Lilly Kahn played the German nanny in all three versions.
THE CARDINAL (StudioCanal) is a 1936 cardboard stagy film version of a 1904 West End cardboard play. The action is set in Rome in 1510. Cardinal Medici (Matheson Lang) attempts to save his young brother (Eric Portman), who is falsely accused of murder, from execution. The Cardinal knows who the murderer is because the murderer (Robert Atkins) confessed to him during confession.The Cardinal cannot tell anybody. The Roman Catholic Church forbids it. Now what this Italian Renaissance melodrama really does need is a script by one of the Jacobean dramatists. American playwright Nathaniel N Parker wrote a lot of popular historical plays, but his scripts never had their expertise.
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