From the Cheap Seats

It’s David Lean’s centenary this year and although the anniversary itself was in March, the BFI are celebrating with a jamboree of revivals and retrospectives. What better time to consider his career?

But then I realised I had nothing new to say. The standard critical line on Sir David is that the early films were wonderful, the later work bloated and self-important; “when a director dies, he becomes a cameraman”, as Pauline Kael had it. Oh, I can refine it slightly (my rule of thumb is: ignore Lean’s colour films, although I’ve a fondness for Summer Madness) and I can mount a spirited defence of Ryan’s Daughter (horribly miscast, madly overblown yet brilliantly written by Robert Bolt, and concluded beautifully). Those aside, my opinions are entirely orthodox.

What I’m more interested in is what those opinions say about the critical caste. Because for most folks, it’s the later Lean they love. To use a personal example: my Dad loves Bridge on the River Kwai. Doctor Zhivago might be his favourite film. I’ve watched both with him and in both cases there were two different films playing: I couldn’t see the stirring masterpieces he was watching, he couldn’t see the pomposity that irritated me.

This division between popular taste and critical values is most regularly glimpsed in the foul reviews most Hollywood films attract in the daily press but these are bad examples: it’s surely inevitable that a film aimed at teenagers will attract a frosty response from the curmudgeons who write movie reviews. Lean is a much better case study; the enduring popularity of his ‘big’ films exposes the gulf between mainstream opinion and the critics.

It’s worth pondering why there can be such divergence between those who write about films and those who are content just to enjoy them. My suspicion is that the two sides watch films in different ways. When you’re obliged to write even a short review of a film, you have to consider how you’re going to fill the blank page that’s waiting for you after the end credits. Saying that it was ‘cool’ or it ‘sucked’ won’t cut the mustard: you need to explain why.

Inevitably, this means you’re more aware of your relationship to what’s on screen. Far from taking you out of a film, I find it makes the experience much more intense. But it means you’re more aware of empty spectacle and sensation, hallmarks of the later work of David Lean.

Of course, that’s only my opinion. It’s not holy writ. No need to get steamed up about it if you don’t agree. That’s the point of criticism: it’s subjective. Crucially, however, criticism explains how it reached its conclusions. When you start having to do that, you start thinking a lot harder about what you’re watching and you’ll be judging movies by a different standard.

Having concentrated on division, let us end with harmony. For this is the centenary of that great director David Lean. Not that we need excuses to revisit Brief Encounter, Great Expectations or Oliver Twist, one of the greatest of all films. But it’s an ideal prompt to watch lesser-known work like The Passionate Friends or Madeleine. They remind us how wonderful movies can be – and on that, I hope we can all agree.

Summer’s here and with it, the seasonal cinema: big box-office-bursting behemoths. And, no doubt, trailing in their wake will be the inevitable pieces from serious cineastes, bemoaning the success of these vapid entertainments.

This isn’t, I hope, going to be one of them. It’s not that I dispute the critical analysis – how can I? – but rather, I think it misses the point about big movies. These are the only films most folk bother with; laying into them makes the egg-heads sound shrill and elitist. It’s also a touch hypocritical. It’s not hard to find contemporary reviews of film buff faves like North by Northwest and Rio Bravo, apparently written with the same poison pen many reviewers used to spear Speed Racer with.
We can condemn the showmanship and hype as crass. And, yes, there has to be more to cinema than empty sensation. At the same time, however, it can be a joy to sit as part of a capacity audience and to share the experience. I was reminded of that when I went to the final Pirates of the Caribbean flick last year.
It was rammed: with teenagers and pensioners, with harassed parents giving the nippers a holiday treat. Judging by the mounds of confectionery and the way they laughed at adverts that had been on heavy rotation for months, I figured most of them weren’t cinema regulars. And so what? It was a good crowd to be a part of, free of the cynicism that can sometimes waft through the art houses.
What surprised me, though, was how little they seemed to enjoy it. There was none of the enthusiasm which I observed at, say, Lord of the Rings or the first Pirates flick. Now, I accept what follows is as unscientific as Creationism but the thing is, I’ve noticed this sort of dissatisfied audience reaction at any number of the blockbusters I’ve attended in recent years.
It’s not that the people are tiring of spectacle and excess. My sense is that they’re getting frustrated with how bloated and self-important these films have become. Hands up who else thinks modern blockbusters are too long? That last Pirates flick was pushing three hours! And hands up who else is fed up with not being able to follow the action?
This last point is important because action is one of the major selling points of a summer movie. Yet directors have forgotten how to stage it. Instead, each set-piece gets divided by hundred of cuts, rendering everything incomprehensible. Maybe this looks ‘cool’ if you’re jacked up on sugared drinks from the concessions stand but it don’t do it for me.
I want to explicitly exonerate Paul Greengrass, whose remarkable work on the Bourne series uses this aesthetic brilliantly. But then, he’s a real filmmaker and it’s part of his overall strategy. Too often, though, rapid-fire editing is used by clods who have no idea how to build momentum, pace a movie or carry an audience.

Summer movies exert a powerful gravity. Despite the above, I’ll probably check out a couple of this year’s juggernauts. However, I have an inkling I’m not the only one to get ever diminishing returns for my ticket money. In an age of piracy and audience fragmentation, perhaps that’s something for the studios to consider.

The 26th of May is something of a red-letter day in the DVD release calendar. Whether this is because of a conjunction of the planets in the far-distant heavens or some sinister international conspiracy of art-house DVD labels, I don’t know. But whatever the reason, there’s a whole bunch of films released that day which are surely of interest to the discerning sort of person who shops at MovieMail.

For instance, Masters of Cinema release Akasen Chitai + Yokihi, their final double bill of late-period Mizoguchi films (any chance of some early ones, gents?) The BFI drop four films. First, the long-awaited (by me, at least) release of A Cottage on Dartmoor. Then there’s A Walk With Love and Death, a John Huston project rescued from limbo and happily restored to polite society.

You can – and frankly should – also get your hands on Lubitsch’s final masterpiece, the droll delight that is Cluny Brown. And then there’s another long-awaited (by me etc etc) British film, Radio On. Last year’s Palme d’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days – harrowing, outstanding – is made available by the good folk at Artificial Eye, while Tartan give us Chan-Wook Park’s I’m a Cyborg (But That’s OK.) And I haven’t mentioned collections gathering work by Paul Verhoeven and Andrzej Wajda. Nor things like Bandit Queen. Phew!

If that were everything, it would be a good week indeed. But there’s more. Right at the bottom of the page is what might be the pick of the litter: They Made Me A Fugitive. Not, perhaps, the most celebrated title but one that really does deserve to be better know. Even if it were not a good film (which, incidentally, it is), it would be of interest because it’s directed by Alberto Cavalcanti.

As the name might suggest, Cavalcanti wasn’t from round these parts. Born in Brazil, he arrived in Blighty after a spell in France working with the likes of Renoir. He threw his lot in with the documentary movement – he supervised Night Mail – before being headhunted by Ealing Studios to work for them. His most widely seen work is Dead of Night – he handled the linking scenes and the best story (Michael Redgrave and his dummy) but it’s Went the Day Well that is the masterpiece.

I included Went The Day Well on my ‘alternative’ list of best British films last year but frankly, it deserves to be hovering near the more orthodox accounts of our national cinema too. (Incidentally, I wanted to include Radio On on that list but it wasn’t available on DVD at the time of writing. Now that it is, it can take the place of The Offence.) It’s an astoundingly brutal film considering it’s supposed to be a wartime morale booster and it made me a Cavalcanti devotee.

They Made Me a Fugitive isn’t quite as brutal, or rather, its brutality manifests itself in different ways. It doesn’t have the same inexorable forward momentum as Went The Day Well; the pace is just a little more relaxed. But more even than its predecessor, it has contempt for the politeness of British cinema and little hypocrisies of society. It’s an unflinching film: women are beaten, drugs are smuggled (at least I assume it’s drugs, not actually sherbet, as the gang-leader claims). The police aren’t infallible.

And for a film made in 1947, it offers a very unflattering portrait of the home-coming heroes. Trevor Howard is the titular ‘Me’: Clem Morgan, ex-RAF, ex-POW and finding it hard to adjust to life on civvie street. He drinks too much; he misses the excitement – so he gets involved with the titular ‘They’: some nasty black-marketeers.

But Clem isn’t totally without scruple, which rubs the headman Narcy (Griffith Jones) up the wrong way. Narcy’s also taken a shine to Clem’s lady-friend, so when a copper gets killed during one of their raids, Narcy frames Clem and lets him face the music – breaking rocks on Dartmoor – leaving Narcy free to make his moves. Naturally Clem escapes, and revenge is high on the agenda.

What’s most remarkable about They Made Me A Fugitive is just how close it is to the contemporary American crime films that would subsequently become known as Film Noir. We often talk of British Noir – Brighton Rock, Odd Man Out and the like – but while they share certain common elements with the American films, their concerns are ultimately different. They Made Me A Fugitive is the real thing, something that’s in sympathy with the aims and ambitions of the very best Noir. It could have been produced by RKO or Monogram.

Except, had it been made in America, I dare say the production code might have had a few suggestions to make about the film. I can’t imagine they’d be too happy about the grim vignette in which Clem shelters with a woman who begs him to kill her alcoholic husband. And they’d have probably exploded when they saw the conclusion, which openly laughs at the conventions of the happy ending. To say more is to spoil it but it’s safe to say that you won’t predict the ultimate resolution.

As an outsider, Cavalcanti saw a different Britain than the natives. Coming from the documentary tradition, he was interested in telling the truth as he saw it. This is a very squalid Britain, sordid and grim. Indeed, I can’t think of another film from that era – or even for another a couple of decades – that showed this country in such a bad light; it paints a very different portrait of austerity Britain than we’re used to.

It’s a tough picture, pretty much the diametric opposite of the film that made Trevor Howard’s name, Brief Encounter. It’s enough to confirm Cavalcanti as a major filmmaker, one deserving of much more attention than he currently receives. I’ve seen very little of his work (which spanned three continents, at least) but even if the rest is bobbins, he made at least two bona-fide masterpieces.

I don’t doubt that there’ll be a shed load of titles in your shopping basket on May 26th but if you’ve got room for one more, then it’s only £7.99. It’s not much to see a master at work.

It’s perhaps a wee bit early to be talking about the best DVD of the year but if there’s a better release than the BFI’s splendid Land of Promise this year, I’ll be a very happy little chap indeed. As I’m sure you’re aware, it gathers together many British documentaries made between 1930 and 1950, taking us through those years of profound social change.

It’s a vanished world, of course: even the names of the production companies are enough give the modern viewer a jolt (the Empire Marketing Board?) One of the great attractions of this set is surely the time travel it allows, journeying to a country so familiar and yet so different. It’s a country bedevilled by problems of poverty but one filled with optimism and a touching faith in experts to solve the problems. Hindsight adds a poignant patina to many of these films: the optimistic souls who people these films didn’t know there was a war coming, nor what its cost would be.

But if Land of Promise offered nothing but nostalgia and social history then it would outstay its welcome long before the end of the fourth disc. It’s the quality of the filmmaking that makes it so worthwhile. This is the work of real filmmakers – some of Britain’s best – who knew how to compose a shot, edit the footage and structure their material.

These aren’t documentaries as we’d understand the term today, trading in facts and stories. What these films really document is how their creators felt about what they saw. For instance, Shipyard (directed by Paul Rotha) shows us far more than the nuts‘n’bolts of shipbuilding; we get a sense of the politics of the time (a worker ruminates that he’d never get to travel on the ship he helped build) and an insight into the men away from their work, racing their dogs.

Even less self-conscious films, such as Workers And Jobs, do their jobs in a more imaginative way than many of the public information films later generations are familiar with, using non-professional actors in real locations. (Which is not to diss the raw power of those later public information pics: I remain scarred to this day by the one warning children not to go with strangers. Indeed, I vociferously fought my mother’s plans that I open a Post Office Giro Account because the actor who advertised it played The Stranger in that terrifying, white-knuckle production. I still feel a cold stab of fear when I buy stamps, in case the man behind the counter asks if I’d like to see some puppies.)

What this set illustrates is how broad a church the English documentary movement was. They also show how far some of these filmmakers had diverged from the gospel of John Grierson. Grierson was the high-priest of the documentary movement, who did so much to establish its dominance. Grierson preached that ‘Documentary’ (real, honest, intellectual) was somehow superior to ‘studio’ pictures (meretricious melodramatic soufflés). His was a puritanical dogma that maintained that you could do either one or the other and that only a fool would chose to make entertainments.

Inevitably, this colours discussions not just of the films Grierson produced but the entire documentary tradition, usually to its detriment. But while many (most?) documentarians paid lip service to his nostrums, it’s clear from the films themselves that there were few true believers. Look at that most celebrated of British docs, Night Mail (available separately) which used such realist devices as – er – studio reconstructions and lyric verse to tell its story.

Directors like Hitchcock, Powell and Lean believed that ‘the documentary boys’ looked down their nose at the commercial directors, who felt patronised by Grierson’s edicts. Yet those self-same documentary boys often sailed far away from true realism to pursue their visions: few were so dogmatic that they didn’t re-stage shots or even make stuff up.

Land of Promise shows how many of Grierson’s flock had outgrown his narrow strictures and were making films that, yes, were broadly realist but also personal, artistic and imaginative. Most famously, of course, there’s Humphrey Jennings, whose poetic sensibility profoundly annoyed Grierson. He felt Jennings was an apostate from the true religion but he’s arguably the finest of all British filmmakers.

So if they were willing to create their own realities, why not go the whole hog and add a beginning-middle-and-end story? Why didn’t they extend their critique of British feature films to showing how it should be done? Looking back with the same hindsight that makes films like Housing Problems so poignant, I can’t help but wonder what might have been if the rigid bifurcation between the two disciplines – this artistic sectarianism – hadn’t been so ideologically charged.

Some directors jumped between the trenches, notably Alberto Cavalcanti (who supervised Night Mail and directed Went the Day Well?; we shall return to him in forthcoming weeks.) And Jennings’ Fires Were Started (which, again, you’ll have to buy separately – like that’s a chore) is, basically, a fiction feature film, no matter what its genealogy. Both men validated the documentary tradition and showed how it could enrich other formats. As an enthusiast for British fiction films, I wish more had followed, not least because it would have made it a lot easier for me to see their work.

There’s no use carping over what never was or re-fighting ideological battles long after the generals are dead and gone. There are some remarkable films here, from some of our finest filmmakers. If you have any interest in British filmmaking then Land of Promise is a mandatory release. There’s loads more in the archives too: let’s hope that Volume Two is forthcoming.

Seeing as how it’s five years since the tanks rolled in to Baghdad, the statue of Saddam was toppled and we were told it was ‘Mission Accomplished!’, it’s an appropriate time to reflect on the movies that have emerged from our misbegotten adventure in Iraq. After all, there’s an impressive roster: Lions for Lambs, Redacted, In the Valley of Elah, Stop Loss, Grace Is Gone, Battle for Haditha…

The trouble is, I’m not sure they’re actually very interesting. I haven’t seen all of them (most haven’t opened here at the time of writing) but everything I’ve read leads me to believe that they don’t say much I don’t already know from looking at the news. I’m sure I can find common ground with them – I wasn’t much in favour of the invasion and I’m deeply depressed about what’s gone on since – but I’d like a movie to offer more insight than pointing out that this war was A Very Bad Thing.

In fact, I’m not convinced that film is actually very good at reportage, capturing the moment as it happens. It’s true that movies can be made ever more quickly but urgency is no guarantee of insight. It can take time to do a film right, to really explore the subject. Let’s go back to the Vietnam war for an example: only one film was made that directly addressed that conflict during major combat operations and that was John Wayne’s The Green Berets.

It’s tempting to devote a paragraph or two to this film. It’s obviously very bad and morally offensive even after forty years, even to someone who wasn’t born when the battles were raging. Yet it’s a fascinating cultural artefact. It’s essentially just a second world war film clumsily adapted to a new setting, suggesting that The Duke hadn’t grasped why this war was different and why so many were appalled.

Most filmmakers who wanted to examine the war in South East Asia did so elliptically, most notably M*A*S*H (nominally set in the Korean war). It wasn’t until the war was over that The Deer Hunter and, most especially, Apocalypse Now appeared. Both those movies went beyond the headlines and sought to understand the war on a metaphorical level. They are artistic responses to war that help us – even those of us who know it only from history books – understand what was going on.

More recently, there’s David O Russell’s masterful Three Kings, about the first time the West butted heads with Saddam Hussein. It was released 8 years after the close of play, after the dust had settled. The distance allowed for a broader sweep and a more satirical approach: the film makes its points using a sardonic tone that’s much more effective than hand-wringing earnestness.

It could be some time before we have a film about the second war with Iraq that articulates more than the anger so many people feel about the war and the shock about how it’s being prosecuted. Future generations will, I suspect, get no more out of Lions For Lambs than I got out of Brian De Palma’s 1968 film Greetings!, which concerns three young men with a horror of being drafted. They might have been the epitome of cool back then but I found these radicals whiny and self-satisfied. Far better is the film he made about Vietnam with the benefit of 20 years hindsight: Casualties of War.

For the moment, the best reflections of the war and the times we live in are the oblique ones that don’t tackle the subject directly. There Will Be Blood explores the combustible mix of capitalism and fundamentalism – and the lust for oil – that got us into this mess. Crucially, it never loses sight of the drama and never lapses into easy schematics to spell out what it means.

But for me, the film that best defines the age we’re living in – one of uncertainty, of governmental deception, of rampant patriotism and sheer bone-headed official incompetence – was made in 1997. Yes, Paul Verhoeven predicted The War Against Terror pretty accurately in Starship Troopers.

Finally, it’s perhaps significant that all of these Iraq films have done very badly financially. The public aren’t interested. It’s too soon: the war is too painful. And after five years of it, I have every sympathy with someone who wants to bury their head in the sand and relax with a nice comedy. Let me finish this sentence and I’ll join you.

As Daniel Day Lewis collected his Oscar last month, there was one name absent from his roll call of thank-yous. Not a major omission by any standards, but maybe it would have been appropriate for the newly anointed Best Actor to acknowledge the spectre that hovers above There Will Be Blood, the film for which he won: actor-writer-director John Huston.

Paul Thomas Anderson, who directed Day Lewis to such award winning effect, claimed to have watched Huston’s film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre repeatedly during the writing and shooting of his own epic of greed and madness. This influence can be felt in the deep, clean lines and precision of Anderson’s film, a much more disciplined affair than his previous work.

There’s no dialogue in There Will Be Blood for ten minutes but when the lead character starts to talk, you notice another manifestation of John Huston. The rich, expansive voice that flows out of Day Lewis’ character Daniel Plainview is modelled after Huston’s own baritone and, while there’s much more to the performance than mere ventriloquism, it’s a smart touch. It suggests a link to another movie where power is equated to the control of precious liquids: Chinatown, where Huston’s Noah Cross monopolises water rights. Cross would surely admire the cut of Daniel Plainview’s jib.

Huston was a charming man by all accounts. Watch him in interviews and you can see exactly why he was such a smash with the ladies. There’s a twinkle in his eye and mischief on his mind. One of the reasons Noah Cross is such a demonic villain is that Huston is so seductive. Yet there was surely more to him than that, as each of his five ex-wives would no doubt be happy to tell you.

Your mother warned you about very charming men with a twinkle in their eyes for a reason; they’ve got the skills to get you to do what they want, whether it’s to your advantage or not. Which takes us back to the robber-baron Daniel Plainview, a man who’s similarity to Huston goes further than the voice. Like Plainview, Huston was an adventurer, a chancer. Like Plainview, Huston had a dark side beneath the veneer.

Huston was, of course, a filmmaker but his life was more interesting than anything he directed. I’m just looking at the brief biography in a reference book and even the bare facts sound colourful: “b. Aug 5, 1906 Nevada, Mo., a town that family legend claims was won by his grandfather in a poker game.” [My italics] A poker game! A TOWN! You don’t get that level of detail about, say, Norman Wisdom.

From there, we discover Huston worked the vaudeville circuit, became a boxer, an actor, a (Mexican) cavalry officer, a reporter and finally in Hollywood. If he’d been born a couple of decades earlier, you fancy he might have wound up prospecting for oil himself, just like Plainview. There’s probably some inflation and exaggeration – the source seems to be Huston’s own autobiography – but even if he was lying, he was lying with more flair than most fibbers.

Somehow, he became regarded as a great director but his reputation needs to be gently adjusted downwards. There’s not much consistency in his work. He made some very good films (The Maltese Falcon, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Wise Blood – all, significantly, from respectable literary sources) but he made some absolute stinkers.

Now, in any long career, there are bound to be a few misfires but Huston’s cock-ups are in a class by themselves. It’s inexplicable that he even agreed to direct them. Annie, for instance. Yes, Annie: little orphan Annie. The original red-headed step child – “the sun’ll come up to-morrow” – that Annie. Whatever persuaded him even to take it on? Probably the same imp of the perverse that suggested he undertake Escape to Victory. What was he thinking? “Here’s a film worthy of my talents: Sylvester Stallone and members of Ipswich Town Football Club giving the Nazis what for.”

Filmmaking seems to have been a way for him to indulge his wanderlust and give him the chance to have fun. Sometimes the audience shared the fun too: The African Queen is one of his most beloved films, although it’s rumoured he only made it because he wanted to go on safari and bag an elephant (an accusation made in the novel/ film White Hunter, Black Heart). Best of all is Beat The Devil, one of the very greatest films ever made. The original script was abandoned and they essentially made a new one up as they went along (Truman Capote came along for the ride: it shows.)

Huston may have had a high old time making all these but the legacy is wildly inconsistent. He seemed to have trusted to luck and hoped for happy accidents. But his luck was extremely variable – how else to explain The Bible…In The Beginning? What I’d like to see (or hear about) are the bits surrounding the filming of his movies – they’re surely more hair-raising than the bits between ‘action’ and ‘cut’.

There’s a lot to enjoy in Huston’s filmography. In addition to the above, The List of Adrian Messenger is an entertaining romp that plays like a pilot episode for The Avengers. Better still is The Man Who Would Be King, one of the greatest of adventure films. If he’d made nothing else but Beat the Devil and The Man Who Would Be King, he’d deserve his reputation as a great director. Unfortunately, he made lots and lots of other films which take the shine off his achievement.

But I think he was a major figure, not so much for his work but for who he was: he was one of the broadest characters to have worked in film, a dangerous man for sure, with depth and shading that must have made him hard to live with. It’s that life that we should study: a good biography is overdue. It would make exciting reading and, perhaps, a pretty good movie. I know just the man to star…

Oh goodie! The western is back! As Peter Wild notes in his interesting article in this month’s Moviemail catalogue, there’s something of a revival in cowboys. 3.10 to Yuma, Seraphim Falls, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford are all set in the old west; The Proposition might be Australian but is indebted to the American tradition. Throw in neo-westerns like Brokeback Mountain, The Three Burials of Melquades Estrada and No Country For Old Men and some folks reckon there’s a full-blown renewal.

If only it were true. But Western fans – and I count myself amongst them – will only believe our favourite genre is back in the saddle when we start seeing more films flowing out. We’ve been burnt too many times by Western revivals that turned out to be anything but.

We were told that Dances With Wolves would inaugurate a new golden age. Then it was Unforgiven. Then Maverick. Yet the Western remains stubbornly moribund. It gets taken out once in a while, trotted around the paddock like some old horse and everyone says how good it looks. But it gets taken back to the stable and everyone forgets about it. Again.

The trouble is what the Western has become. In its heyday, it was the most wonderfully fluid genre. You could do musicals (Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Paint Your Wagon), comedies (Cat Ballou), detective films (Rancho Notorious. Well, sort of.) and demented melodrama (Johnny Guitar) As long as the cast were in Stetsons, it was considered a western.

By the seventies, all that had changed. After Sergio Leone had anatomised the mythic dimension of the Western, many American directors chose to look at the reality of American history. They narrowed the range of the Western down to history. An iconoclastic era had no truck for the simple minded heroics of John Wayne and set about spelling out the reality of frontier life – murder, larceny and attempted genocide of the indigenous peoples.

They call this ‘Revisionism’ and since about 1979 (the year John Wayne died and, to my mind, a more sensible full-stop for the classic Western than Heaven’s Gate, the bloated mess that’s usually blamed for killing the genre), most of the infrequent forays into the old west have concluded that, actually, it wasn’t like the movies. Not at all!

Well, to quote the Bard, no shit Sherlock. Fictional stories aren’t history. What’s more, most of the people who made classic Westerns knew this too. Anthony Mann’s west, as Peter Wild notes, was a brutal place. So too was John Ford’s, by the end of his career. Two Rode Together is more vicious than anything the young pretenders could come up with. The Revisionists can’t see the irony in the famous line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the truth becomes legend, print the legend.” It’s not a manifesto; it’s a criticism.

And after all this time, what are they actually revising? They’re kicking against a myth that hasn’t been celebrated for decades. Is it any wonder that the Western declined in popularity when it lost it’s reason for being? The whole point of myths is that they speak of broader truths: to insist that the Western anchor itself in pedantic historical accuracy debases the genre.

Things reached their nadir with Clint Eastwood’s awful Unforgiven. Clint is a hero to Western fans: The Outlaw Josey Wales is the last great Western. But Unforgiven is nonsense, spelling out its concerns with painful literalism. Typical of the film’s sixth-form debating style is the name of Clint’s bounty-hunting character: Bill Munny. Bill as in Dollar Bill; Munny as in Money. He’s trying to be clever. He fails. (I wish he’d continued this scheme. Gene Hackman’s character could have been called Little Bill Totalbastard; Morgan Freeman could have played Ned Tokenblackman.)

For the kids who’ve grown up on this sort of rubbish, the West must seem an unwelcoming and pompous place. Too many of these new Westerns are made for Western fans. We might like ‘em (I do, mostly) but we forget that the Westerns that made us love the genre were made for mass audiences, not film buffs. Purists hate movies like The Quick and the Dead (out of print at the moment) and Shanghai Noon but they’re the sort of movies that will spawn a real Western renaissance.

So the writers won. The dispute between the Screen Writers Guild and the studios, in which the scribes downed tools for the first time in twenty years has been resolved. Even though the ‘schmucks with Underwoods’ (as Jack Warner called the people that provided his scripts for him) didn’t get everything they wanted, they won enough to be able to claim victory.

With the battle over money (the writers wanted more of it) over for now, it’s possible more militant members of the newly-bullish Guild will start agitating for a resolution to one of their other persistent gripes, credits. Specifically, they want an end to what’s known as the ‘possessory credit’. The is the credit, usually found before the title, that declares it to be “A [insert name here] Film” or, worse, “A Film By [so and so]”. That vacant space will always be filled by the director. But do they deserve it?

Ever since the young Turks of Cahiers du Cinema (Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, Uncle Eric Rohmer and all) started to promulgate what has become known as the ‘Auteur theory’, the director has been regarded as the Alpha and the Omega of any film. The young French critics contended that the director’s personality was reflected in his work; consistent themes would be visible through their careers, as with any artist.

The argument they started has been so comprehensively won that even the wider media, beyond specialist film buff publications, attribute films to the director whether they be the latest Bruno Dumont flick or un film de Bret Ratner. Some of us file our DVD collections according to director, pressing Hawks against Hitchcock as we might file Dickens next to Dostoevsky.

Yet I’m uneasy. We cinephiles might like to think that we somehow appreciate films more than those rubes who think that the actors make it up as they go along but isn’t this blanket veneration of directors only a more sophisticated version of the same idea? In his autobiography (A British Picture – out of print but much recommended), Ken Russell remarked that as long as a director is surrounded by good people he doesn’t have to do much beyond say ‘action’ and ‘cut’, except to soak up the praise for his colleagues’ work.

Of course, Our Ken himself is not one of those: even though I don’t much like them, I have no hesitation in describing the films he directed ‘His’ because of the way they’re staged and the positions they take. But not every director is so assiduous; how, then, can the films they lay claim to be considered ‘Theirs’ in any meaningful sense?

Film is a collaborative medium, like theatre and music but the balance of power is very different. No matter what help a director gives to a playwright working on a new production – and their input can be crucial – it’s the author who gets the curtain call and the glory of any revivals.

Conductors and soloists are not short of applause but their job is to serve the composer and interpret his vision. In television, it’s the author who’s auteur: Dennis Potter gets the credit for Pennies From Heaven and The Singing Detective, not Piers Haggard or Jon Amiel. Indeed, the current strength of US TV drama is founded on the writers running the shows, as producers, and throwing hissy-fits if anyone messes with their vision.

One of the crucial – and often neglected – parts of the Auteur theory is that not every director is worthy of the tag. That’s why Michael Curtiz, who made some of the best films ever (Casablanca, co-director of The Adventures of Robin Hood) isn’t allowed anywhere near the pantheon while Edgar G Ulmer, who directed a right load of old tat, is firmly established.

Indeed, Andre Bazin – the chap who founded Cahiers du Cinema and the patron saint of the young French critics – was somewhat sniffy about their idea. He preferred to concentrate on distinctive individuals for the most part and attribute the rest to what he called ‘the genius of the system’. Thomas Schatz took this as the title for an essential study of Hollywood’s golden age (The Genius of the System, Faber & Faber).

In it, Schatz suggests real power lay with producers. He points out that the directors who the French canonised – Hawks, Hitchcock, John Ford, Fritz Lang – were those who produced or co-produced their own pictures and thus the opportunity to mould their material. Most directors, then and now, have limited input into any script they’re given. The best of them do a damn good job. They’re craftsmen rather than artists and it does not diminish their achievements to acknowledge that they are serving the film rather than controlling it.

This is not a recantation. I remain an Auteurist (as you can see in the categories section on the right-hand side, where discussion of directors outstrips everything else). The best directors will impose their personality on any material they’re given by the way they organise a scene, where they put the camera, how they cut, how they emphasise those elements that they’re interested in. They fully warrant our attention. Blanket director-worship, however, only satisfies the egos of a few hacks who’ve done nothing to deserve it.

If the writers do press their case, they should draw comfort from the wisdom of one of Hollywood’s founding fathers, arch-producer Samuel Goldwyn. Interviewed by Andrew Sarris, then an earnest young Auteurist, he settled the debate once and for all:
Sarris: “Mr Goldwyn, When William Wyler made Wuthering Heights – ”
Goldwyn: “Wyler? I made Wuthering Heights. Wyler only directed it…”

Given that relations between Britain and Russia hover somewhere distantly below freezing point at the moment, I wonder how the Russians received Eastern Promises. It’s fair to say that this (ostensibly British) thriller doesn’t show its Russian villains in an entirely positive light. I wouldn’t want to be the projectionist who shows it to Vladimir Putin. No doubt the Foreign Office is praying he prefers to unwind from a hard day imposing his iron will on the people with a nice musical.

But while the diplomats might be appalled, the more humble filmgoer will be thrilled. Eastern Promises – newly arrived on DVD – is an authentically great film. The plot is simple: a young girl dies during childbirth. Her midwife, Anna, (Naomi Watts) finds her diary, written in Russian, and wants to know more. The trail takes Anna to the Trans-Siberia restaurant which, although she doesn’t realise it yet, is a front for an odious Russian gangster Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), his odious son Kirrill (Vincent Cassel) and their factotum Nikolai (Viggo Mortenson). Peril ensues.

What makes the film so interesting is that it represents a confrontation between two different aesthetics of filmmaking. It was written by Steve Knight; he’s a social-realist. He wrote the estimable Dirty Pretty Things, a concerned film that sought to illuminate the lives of illegal immigrants in London. Eastern Promises could be said to spring from similar motives, to understand the stories behind the headlines, to look at who the ‘new Britons’ are.

But the film was directed by David Cronenberg. He’s a surrealist and the good, honest virtues of social realism aren’t what get him going. He’s interested in the hermetic world of the Russian gangster, in codes of behaviour, in tattoos. He’s not terribly interested in plot – indeed that seems to disappear altogether in the second half – so much as what it enables him to explore.

The tension between these two visions drives the film. I consider myself lucky that I don’t know how accurate a depiction of Russian gangsterdom Eastern Promises but I’m guessing Knight did his research and the film touches on pertinent issues such as sex trafficking (see also: Lilya 4-Ever). Only, Cronenberg is less interested in the victims of this crime than he is in the sexuality of the animals that enslave them.

The results are arguably better than if either side had been allowed to go it alone. Knight’s vision stimulates Cronenberg’s imagination; Cronenberg’s oblique approach brings a texture to the material a more straightforward reading might have missed. This isn’t a London we’re used to seeing on screen and yet to me, it was a more truthful portrait because of that.

Of course, foreign directors are often the best placed to show the natives what Britain is really like. What Eastern Promises reminded me of most was the work of Jerzy Skolimowski, especially his film Deep End which showed the flip-side of Swinging London. Upon checking the cast list at the end of the film, I got a happy surprise – Skolimowski is credited as actor. He plays Anna’s Russian uncle and it would be nice to think the casting was an act of homage.

The film also benefits immeasurably from Viggo Mortenson. It’s a tremendously brave performance and not simply because of the memorable steam bath scene, where he fights two killers in the buff. He’s sufficiently confident in the script, his director and his own abilities to play a very shadowy, ambiguous character whose motives are resolved late in the day and who leaves the film on an oblique note.

Of course, we mustn’t overlook the memorable steam bath scene, where he fights two killers in the buff. It’s the finest fight in many a year and looks authentically painful: staged on a hard, slippery floor with no padding for the lead actor. Unplanned guest appearances by ‘little Viggo’ were surely the least of his worries.

What with this and A History of Violence, Cronenberg and Mortenson are shaping up to be the most interesting director-star team in contemporary cinema. I confess I wasn’t keen on A History of Violence. It had its merits but it was schematic and perhaps too academic. Eastern Promises is a looser film, less interested in testing a thesis than in lifting up some rocks and studying the discoveries, no matter how vile. The Kremlin might not like it but the results are compelling

Hi, glad you could make it. Take your seats. The fight’s about to start. In the red corner, there’s Mark ‘Lethal’ Lawson. He wrote a piece for The Guardian recently, saying how future generations will regard ours as a golden age of movies, comparable to the 1940s and the 1970s. He cited things like No Country For Old Men, Sweeny Todd, the Bourne franchise and (his favourite) There Will Be Blood. All are evidence, he said, of filmmakers reacting to our troubled times (spelt I-R-A-Q), and moviegoers should be grateful.

But not everyone agrees and in the metaphorical blue corner, there’s ‘Gorgeous’ George Clooney, perhaps metaphorically trash-talking about his opponent’s withdrawing hairline and (who knows?) his parentage. In an interview with the Radio Times, he pours scorn on modern films, including his own. He compared them unfavourably to what he thought was the golden age, 1964 to 1976: “it’s twelve years,” quoth cinema’s reigning Mr. Sex, “and you could find ten films a year that are masterpieces. They don’t make those films any more.” (He neglects to add if he remembers when it was all fields around here or whether policemen are looking younger.)

I doubt we’ll see George ‘n’ Mark go mano-e-mano anytime soon but between them they’re raising important issues. So, who’s the winner? Well, I am, obviously. The lazy assumptions and presumptions on both sides would give me material enough to fill this slot until Christmas if I wanted. For instance, the original pieces ignore foreign films, as though the only barometer of excellence are films with American accents: we could have hours of fun with that one.

To be fair to Clooney, he does say that it isn’t just American cinema he’s disillusioned with, it’s all “modern cinema”. Hmmm. Now, Clooney’s one of the few stars I respect. He’s made some interesting choices, he’s honest about who he is and he’s pissed off the right people. But on this one, he’s talking out of that-which-he-famously-bared-in-the-remake-of-Solaris.

Even a cursory glance shows that modern cinema is as buoyant as it’s ever been. Asian cinema is thriving, in particular Korean cinema. Anyone who still thinks that anything with subtitles automatically equals ‘art house’ is advised to pick up The Host or Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance. Those are films that show ticket buyers just how short changed they are by western blockbusters and they’re just the tip of a huge iceberg. Elsewhere, countries as diverse as Mexico, Thailand and Romania could all legitimately claim to be in a golden age. If there’s really nothing out there that floats your boat, you probably don’t like movies.

But just because George Clooney is wrong, it doesn’t follow that Mark Lawson is right. His arguments for the health of American cinema won’t wash. He buttresses his arguments with some good films but just as one Swallow doesn’t make a summer, so a few good pictures don’t make a golden age.

Even the worst of times are never without some interest. If you ask me, the worst times for the America film industry were the 1960s, a meniscus between the old guard’s glory days and the arrival of the young Turks. Yet, our pal George Clooney includes six of those years in his golden age, identifying flecks of gold (Dr. Strangelove, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold) amongst the sludge (The Happiest Millionaire; Doctor Dolittle).

However, I’d say the crucial aspect of a golden age is not so much the quality of the top-flight stuff but the state of the second or third divisions: when those are flying high, you know you’re on a roll. It’s the sheer diversity of the 1970’s that make it so worthwhile. It wasn’t just the young talent strutting its stuff, like Scorsese and Coppola (Taxi Driver and The Godfather respectively) but also older directors producing some of their best work: Robert Aldridge (Ulzana’s Raid), Stanley Kubrick (A Clockwork Orange), Don Siegel (Dirty Harry).

Below the radar, exploitation filmmakers like Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), John Carpenter (Assault on Precinct 13) and Joe Dante (Piranha) were having a little golden age of their own. Even elder statesmen were getting in on the act: Hitchcock (Frenzy) and John Huston (The Man Who Would Be King, Fat City) to name but two. There simply isn’t that sort of wild proliferation these days.

When Clooney talks about his ‘disillusionment’ with cinema, I’m with him up to the borders of the USA. I’m deeply underwhelmed by much of modern American cinema and I’m not talking about the blockbusters. Many critical favourites – I won’t name names just yet, if you don’t mind – strike me as profoundly deficient. Because, historically, Americans have always had the most vigorous film culture we assume that it’s always the case, so we’re slower to notice when the standard slips.

But slip it most certainly has: the first stage to remedying it is for people to face up to the problem and stop bandying terms like ‘golden age’ about. Films like No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood are as much exceptions as films like Seconds or Point Blank were in the airless sixties. We need to recognise the wider film culture; hopefully then, American directors will begin pulling their socks up, just as their forebears did circa 1970.

But just because Mark Lawson is totally wrong, doesn’t mean he isn’t right too. I’ve argued before how the only golden age is now, because we have the films that came before us and the films around right now. (With the added bonus, these days, that it’s never been easier to see them.). The 1970s might have been good but we still have those films today – and a clearer sense of which ones are worth bothering with.

So let us hear no more talk of golden ages. The best time for cinema will always be now. And tomorrow will be even better.