BFI London Film Festival 2016: Twenty-two Tickets

Two recommended screenings per day at this year's BFI London Film Festival...

The 1960 French classic is released on Dual Format Edition by the BFI today.

The Driving Force: industries and imagery without equal today

'The Driving Force', the latest and twelfth two-disc set in the BFI's British Transport Films Collection, is out on DVD today.

"Turn from the light... look into the dark": Schalcken the Painter

Out on DVD/BD from Monday 18 November...

London Film Festival 2013: Index

Reviews, reports, recommendations. Updated as and when...

Form befits content: Experiment Under London

'Experiment Under London', the latest and eleventh two-disc set in the BFI's British Transport Films Collection, is released on DVD on Monday, 19 August.

Culture, contradictions, complexities: The Complete Humphrey Jennings Volume Three

The BFI's latest release in its now-complete Humphrey Jennings series demonstrates an artist's care for both culture whatever its national origin and for the contradictions of Britain's historical development.

Murder, my sweet: The Killing of a Chinese Bookie

John Cassavetes' film, starring Ben Gazzara, is released in Dual Format Edition by the BFI on Monday, 15 July.

Mind the sap: Underground

Anthony Asquith's 1928 film 'Underground', the BFI's latest Dual Format Edition, is released on Monday, 17 June.

Allegories perceived and actual: Night Train, Cria Cuervos and Theorem

Three films released on Monday, 27 May play to varying degrees with allegory: 'Night Train' (1959) is the latest DVD from Second Run, while 'Cría cuervos' (1976) and 'Theorem' (1968) are the BFI's latest Dual Format editions.

BFI Flipsides: John Krish and B. S. Johnson

Two new BFI Flipsides, both released on Monday 15 April, celebrate two unsung British talents working within and against the social currents of their time.

The birth of a nation: Your Children and You

The BFI's latest DVD release, out on Monday 15 April, brings together Government-sponsored films made between 1946 and 1985, on parenting, teaching and caring for children.

Steel - A Century of Steelmaking on Film: celebrations... and warnings

'Steel: A Century of Steelmaking on Film', out on DVD from Monday 18 February, continues the BFI's excellent 'This Working Life' series.

The importance of history: Tsar to Lenin and Pathé’s Fairy Tales

‘Tsar to Lenin’, available now from Mehring Books, is an invaluable assemblage of archive footage from the 1917 Russian Revolution, while today the BFI releases ‘Fairy Tales’, a collection of early colour stencil films from French production company Pathé Frères.

London the Modern Babylon

Out on DVD on Monday 29 October.

We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)

Lynne Ramsay chose to direct her adaptation (co-written with Rory Kinnear) of Lionel Shriver's 2003 novel We Need to Talk About Kevin with an intentionally grating texture of recurring visual and aural motifs and a great deal of heavy symbolism. The result is an effectively claustrophobic and unsettling film. But what else?

Two more "Treasures from the Archives" at this year's London Film Festival

You know the drill. A short write-up of The Caine Mutiny (1954) and Cry Danger (1951) can be found here from earlier in the week. Without further ado, I'll write a little on last Sunday's films, which, like the two preceding them, screened at the Southbank as part of the LFF's Treasures from the Archives strand, programmed by Clyde Jeavons.

Two "Treasures from the Archives" at this year's London Film Festival

Over the weekend I caught four of the films programmed by Clyde Jeavons - whose reliably knowledgeable and succinct introductions to each film infect you with that immediate sense of passion and history - as part of the Treasures from the Archives strand at this year's London Film Festival: The Caine Mutiny (1954), Cry Danger (1951), America America (1963) and Bye Bye Birdie (1963). Some observations on the first two follow, and there'll be a second post later in the week... 

The Caine Mutiny, restored from worn Technicolor originals by a team headed by Grover Crisp at Sony-Columbia (the production still accompanying the festival brochure's entry is black and white), makes a virtue of good casting and generally gets better as it goes on following a limp and plodding opening third.

Adapted by Stanley Roberts from Herman Wouk's 1952 Pulitzer-winner, the film stars Humphrey Bogart as Philip Francis Queeg, a US Navy veteran who assumes captaincy of an old creaky minesweeper, whose crew struggles to come to terms with his authoritarian approach. After Queeg proves indecisive at critical moments,  Lieutenant Steve Maryk (Van Johnson) and idealistic Ensign Willie Keith (Robert Francis) are encouraged by dubious wannabe author Lieutenant Keefer (Fred MacMurray) into opposing their captain with mutiny.

Less violent than legal, the mutiny comes during a typhoon when Maryk relieves Queeg of his command following the latter's refusal to make a decision that determines the fate of the ship. As a dramatic climax, the film provides a sequence in which Maryk is court-martialled and defended by Lieutenant Barney Greenwald (José Ferrer).

A fine ensemble cast moves the film throught its motions; MacMurray might have stolen it but for Ferrer's engrossing turn late in the film as a tough and understanding sympathiser of his mutinous defendant. Bogart cuts a sad and pathetic figure very well; there's a sequence, after MacMurray's catalysing conspirator puts forth a shoddy diagnosis of extreme paranoia, in which Queeg's orders to officers are met with visual cut-aways that suggest increasingly absurd misunderstandings on which we're in but on which the officers - from whose perspective the cut-aways are - are not. Climaxing in a scene that involves accounting for missing strawberries, this sequence - central to the film as a whole - provides comical overtones that make Bogart's agitated testimony in the court-martial all the more tragic.

To direct The Caine Mutiny, producer Stanley Kramer hired Edward Dmytryk, whose filmmaking career had now comparatively recovered following his blacklisting by the House Un-American Activities Committee as part of the "Hollywood Ten" in the late 1940s and subsequent brief imprisonment; following the latter, Dmytryk testified in a second round of anti-Communist hearings before HUAC and, in 1951, informed on other members of the American Communist Party. Among these was Adrian Scott, Dmytryk's friend and the producer of four of his previous films; as a result of Dmytryk's testimony, Scott never produced a feature film again.

Given its director's despicable self-preservationism, The Caine Mutiny's most interesting element is Fred MacMurray's character, whose decision to recant his own testimony places his colleague's actions at the mercy of a ruthless trial. Ferrer's Greenwald is right to declare him the real villain of the piece, with a great line too: "If you want to do anything about it I'll be outside; I'm a lot drunker than you so it'll be a fair fight." Indeed.

By coincidence, one of the four films Dmytryk made with Adrian Scott was Murder, My Sweet in 1944 - released in the UK as Farewell, My Lovely - which is notable for being the first film in which crooner Dick Powell played a serious tough guy (earlier that same year, Fred MacMurray had reinvented himself as a noir protagonist in Double Indemnity). Following success in similar roles - including 1945's Cornered, also produced by Scott and directed by Dmytryk - Powell was, by 1951, an unarguably dramatic actor, and it's his turn in Cry Danger that makes it a top-tier crime flick.

Cry Danger is a lean, mean noir in which Powell plays Rocky Mulloy, released from prison following a false alibi given by a stranger, Delong (Richard Erdman), hoping to be rewarded with a slice of the money he assumes Mulloy got in the heist for which he was imprisoned. But Mulloy didn't partake in the heist, and is back in Los Angeles to get back at the gang who framed him.

Clocking in at under 80 minutes, the film is a no-nonsense thrill, during which we're undoubtedly rooting for Powell's toughie and his new alcoholic sidekick, played with a somehow endearing mysogyny by Erdman. Rhonda Fleming is the dubious love interest and William Conrad the bulky villain. (Another coincidental link to the director of The Caine Mutiny is the presence here of Jean Porter, Edward Dmytryk's wife.)

The film was the directorial debut of Robert Parrish, whose 1976 book Growing Up In Hollywood is, we were told by Clyde Jeavons, one of the finest Hollywood memoirs. The prolific Joseph Biroc was cinematographer, and there's an unvarnished grit to the film, with only sparing visual cues to a larger city in the background (like in that still above); indeed, this film continues noir's tradition to have action take place in the suburbs, as if the overflow of a corrupt city capital is all-infecting, at the expense of the sacred provinciality of those considered outside its reach.

Nancy Mysel's team at UCLA restored the film (disappointingly, the festival brochure makes no reference to "teams" of preservationists), and the visual clarity lends fitting crispness to the terse plot. The feature was preceded by Popular Science (Issue No. J7-6), an amusing 9-minute featurette from 1947 "processed in the new Magnacolor", which presented self-promotional material on new scientific wonders, such as ready-made meals made for mass home consumption, a mechanical "brain" tested at UCLA and a look at the possibilities of commercial airlines.

There's a fascinating piece at Ferdy on Films written by Eddie Muller, founder and president of the Film Noir Foundation (who fully funded UCLA's restoration), which explicates the history of the film's rights, and why this and so many other films of the period are under risk of being forgotten.

Finally (for now; the second part of this write-up will follow), since I've already noted that the LFF's brochure accompanied its write-up on The Caine Mutiny with a black and white production still, here are some interesting reversals: various one-sheets for Cry Danger, all in glorious colour.

"See the movie before everyone else has seen the trailer"... or not, as the case will be

Later this month I'm heading to London for a short annual trip to its 55th Film Festival. Last year - my fifth visit - was the first I'd spent the weekend seeing five films all in one building, the BFI Southbank, as opposed to hopping to and fro between different and sprawling venues. This year, the focus is even narrower: I'm seeing four films across two days not only in the same building, but the same screen (NFT1). They're also all "Treasures From the Archives", that festival strand that shows preserved and restored classics: The Caine Mutiny (1954) and Cry Danger (1951), and America, America and Bye Bye Birdie (both 1963). Should both finances and geography permit, I might in the future be able to afford more films over a longer visit, but as it is, the four film tickets alone come to £42 (minus booking fee), and a return trip on the train will be a further £60 or so - with a young persons rail card. One might dream of some delegates pass in years to come, but for now, one makes do with travelling, attending and viewing with the mortals...

Ken Loach, Kes and brief questions of independence

MP here

Kes - which made my Top 100 list, at #17, last week - has been restored by MGM and is being re-released in the UK by Park Circus this Friday, September 9. The extended theatrical run at the Southbank coincides with the BFI's Ken Loach retrospective, which runs through October 12 after launching this evening with a screening of his debut feature film, Poor Cow (1967).