Free Cinema

Free Cinema 1952-1963 U.K. British Film Institute (475 minutes/three DVDs) Facets Video, 2006.

Nothing could be less ‘typical’ than a Saturday night at Piccadilly Circus or a Sunday morning at the old Covent Garden flower market in the hands of imaginative young filmmakers seeking their subjects in the ordinary.

This three-DVD set reissued by the British Film Institute includes 14 short documentary films, two short ‘art’ pieces, and a recent documentary which looks back at a group of young British filmmakers in the 1950s who called their movement Free Cinema. 

Hand-held cameras catch revelers at an annual bash for miners in Durham, as well as ‘peepers’ with binoculars trying to spot young couples making out in the bushes. American and British servicemen, civilians and prostitutes look each other over in the heart of a Saturday night. A film editor lays bare a campy amusement park exhibitor’s pretense of torture and death by execution as family entertainment.

Nightlife on Piccadilly Circus in Claude Goretta and Alain Tanner's Nice Time (1957).

An old East End Jewish neighborhood of storefronts and apartments appears through the crosshairs of a developer’s transit. A northern mill town closes down for the weekend. A working shed of Lancashire railway engineers regrets the passing of coal-fired steam to diesel locomotives.

A pair of deaf mutes as Beckettsian clowns is pestered by children as they make their way across the working industrial landscapes and German bomb-devastated postwar vacant lots of East End docklands. A Hungarian refugee newly arrived in London speaks little English and seeks a street address without the postal district code.

Eduardo Paolozzi and Michael Andrews in Lorenza Mazzetti's Together (1956).

A long-suffering ‘vegetable of love’ pursues her narcissistic spouse through artsy-surreal Chelsea where self-absorbed young men smooth sugar obsessively in bowls and umbrella-wielding middle-aged men in bowlers and macs are The Enemy.

London schoolchildren play street games with traditional counting songs, and adolescent girls skip rope and chalk squares across Edinburgh. Their older peers jitterbug to live rockabilly music at a London youth club and to r&b and Dixieland jazz in a pub.

Edinburgh schoolgirls with happy feet in N. McIsaac's The Singing Street (1952)

A local group of five family-owned West Riding weekly newspapers (still in operation) is profiled in the context of the communities they serve, from reporters and advertising personnel on the street, to composing and proofing the galleys and making pages from hot lead, to the early morning delivery boys. 

We also see and hear the distinctive individual voices of many faces in the crowd that marched to Aldermaston in Easter 1958 to protest Britain’s nuclear weapons program. The uncredited unseen narrator is the young actor Richard Burton.

'Ordinary people' protesting Britain's nuclear arms program in March to Aldermaston (1959). 

They called themselves Free Cinema. The original ‘they’ were Lorenza Mazzetti, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, and Tony Richardson. It was a start, if not a ‘new wave’; they made their pictures and never looked back.

They called their movement ‘free,’ because their projects, mostly short documentaries, were free from the strictures of studio suits and sponsors. The British Film Institute’s Experimental Film Fund provided them minimal funding to shoot and complete their films as they saw fit. (Reisz worked for Ford’s film unit with the understanding that he could use its facilities for his own work.)

These short films document what had been predominately white urban working- and middle-class Britain in the first era of the Cold War. From today’s perspective, it can be seen as much a look back at a disappearing industrial Britain as a look forward at how these films influenced what followed. The streets feel more open and at the same time more empty with the incredibly few automobiles there used to be on them.

Empty streets on a Friday night in the north in Michael Grigsby's Tomorrow's Saturday (1962).

The young men (and women) who made these films are less notably ‘angry’ than their dramatic contemporaries such as John Osborne; they were more focused on training their limited technology—mostly hand-held, black & white 16mm movie cameras—on their living subjects than training an audience.

The films’ authenticity derives from the cameras’ go-with-the-flow subjectivity. The cinematographers realized that what they were doing was not strictly objective, though some editors had a heavier hand than others (e.g., campy torture and execution = family entertainment). The subjects speak eloquently for themselves, more often than not.

Images that speak for themselves: Lindsay Anderson's O Dreamland (1953).

The sound technology at this time was primitive and rather limited. A viewer gets to know these mostly anonymous ‘ordinary people’ by their faces. They are fascinating to watch as characters, from the neighborhood children and working people who know each other well to strangers on London streets, as they interact with each other within the contexts of their particular settings.

One of the most intriguing features throughout this collection is watching how expressive people’s hands can be, what they do with their hands, where they put them, and how they use them.

Small Is Beautiful—The Story of the Free Cinema Films Told by Their Makers, the 43-minute, 2006 documentary included at the end of the set, gives a good introduction to the movement and its personalities and places them in a broader context.

Walter Lassally, a Free Cinema cinematographer, said he developed his technique for shooting Every Day but Christmas (1957), a typical morning among vendors at the old Covent Garden fruit, vegetable and flower market, and the short art film Together (1956), from closely observing his subjects and getting used to the rhythms in which they moved in their spaces.    

Covent Garden flower market in Lindsay Anderson's Every Day Except Christmas (1957)

‘I studied this rhythm so that when I was ready to shoot,’ Lassally said, ‘I was able to follow that rhythm and to anticipate. It’s like you’re a fly on the wall, but you’re an intelligent fly, and you’re very well trained, you’ve observed the process and you’re ready to film it in the most effective manner without drawing attention to yourself.

‘There again, like with Together, the result was a film which you can look at fifty years later and be perfectly happy with,’ he said.

Lost in the city in Robert Vas' Refuge England (1959).

_______________________________________________________________________

The films are:

DVD #1

O Dreamland 1953 (12 minutes) directed by Lindsay Anderson, filmed by John Fletcher. Middle- and working-class crowds enjoy themselves at an enormous amusement park and pavilion in Margate, England, where campy sexuality and torture and death by execution are part of the entertainment. 16 mm

Momma Don’t Allow 1956 (22 minutes) directed by Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson, filmed by Walter Lassally, edited by John Fletcher; set among young local regulars, including a dental assistant, a butcher, and a train cleaner (and some incidental slumming toffs) who come to dance at Art and Viv Sanders’ Wood Green Jazz Club in the Fishmonger’s Arms (north London), featuring the Chris Barber Jazz Band. 16mm

Together 1956 (49 minutes) directed by Lorenza Mazzetti with the collaboration of Denis Horne and the technical assistance of Lindsay Anderson, John Fletcher and Walter Lassally, among others. Two deaf mutes as Beckettsian clowns (British painter Michael Andrews and the Scottish sculptor and pop art pioneer Eduardo Paolozzi) lyrically navigate the postwar ruins and oversized industrial landscapes of the old East End docklands, pestered by children. 35mm

Wakefield Express 1952 (30 minutes) written and directed by Lindsay Anderson with John Fletcher, filmed by Walter Lassally, commentary by George Potts. A profile of a family-owned local newspaper group told in the context of the communities it serves in the West Riding of Yorkshire (Wakefield, Horbury, Pontefract, Selby and Skyrack, etc.), showing where the news and advertising comes from and how these weekly newspapers are produced and distributed. 16mm

Nice Time 1957 (17 minutes) directed by Claude Goretta and Alain Tanner, filmed by John Fletcher. Throngs of pleasure seekers in Piccadilly Circus on a Saturday night, centered on the statue of Eros. Filmed on 20 consecutive Saturday nights using the natural light, with pieces of movie soundtracks, barkers, a busker, and stray conversations. Shot at night with HPS Ilford 400 ASA 16mm stock.

The Singing Street 1952 (30 minutes) written and directed by N. McIsaac, J.T.R. Ritchie and R. Townsend. Edinburgh schoolgirls singing traditional songs while skipping rope and chalk squares and playing sidewalk games. 16mm

Every Day Except Christmas 1957 Ford of Britain’s Look at Britain!-1 (39 minutes) directed by Lindsay Anderson, filmed by Walter Lassally, edited by John Fletcher, music by Daniele Paris, narration by Alun Owen (who later wrote the screenplay for A Hard Day’s Night). A typical morning among vendors operating stalls at the 300-year-old Covent Garden fruit, vegetable and flower market (closed 1974). Shot inside at night with then-new HPS Ilford 400 ASA 35mm stock.

DVD #2

Refuge England 1959 (27 minutes) directed and cowritten by Robert Vas, filmed by Walter Lassally and Louis Wolfers, with Tibor Molnár as a Hungarian refugee of the failed 1956 uprising against the Soviet Union, new to London, trying to find a London address without a postal district code. 16mm

Enginemen 1959 Unit Five Seven (17 minutes) directed and written by Michael Grigsby and his team, colleagues from his day job at Granada Television, among railroad engineers and rolling stock at a locomotive shed at Newton Heath, near Manchester, England. Unit Five Seven’s first film. 16mm

We Are the Lambeth Boys 1959 Ford of Britain’s Look at Britain!-2 (49 minutes)   directed by Karel Reisz, filmed by Walter Lassally, edited by John Fletcher, music by Johnny Dankworth and the Johnny Dankworth Orchestra and the Mickey Williams Group. A lively profile of activities offered at Alford House, a youth club in Kennington in south London, among a core of its local 350 young men and women members. 35mm  

Food for a Blluuusssshhhhhh! 1959 (30 minutes) directed by Elizabeth Russell, filmed by Alan Forbes, edited by Jack Gold, with Elizabeth Russell, Nicholas Ferguson, Felicity Innes, Brian Innes. A long-suffering ‘vegetable of love’ pursues her narcissistic spouse through artsy-surreal Chelsea where self-absorbed young men smooth sugar in bowls and middle-aged men in bowlers and macs are The Enemy. The story ends on the threshold of The World’s End pub. 16mm

DVD #3 Beyond Free Cinema

One Potato, Two Potato 1957 (21 minutes) directed by Leslie Daiken, filmed by Peter Kennedy, edited by Morag Maclennan. London schoolchildren larking and playing street games among postwar bombed out blocks to a soundtrack of traditional rhymes and counting songs.

March to Aldermaston 1959 (33 minutes) an anonymously-made collaborative effort about the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament-organized, four-day march during Easter weekend 1958 from Trafalgar Square to the hydrogen-bomb producing factory at Aldermaston, about 50 miles west of London, with an uncredited narration by Richard Burton.

The Vanishing Street 1962 (19 minutes) directed, written and filmed by Robert Vas.  The ‘street’ is Hessel Street, high street of a soon-to-be-razed old East End Jewish neighborhood of storefronts and apartments, a synagogue, a Yiddish newspaper and kibitzers, viewed through the crosshairs of a developer’s transit.

Tomorrow’s Saturday 1962 Unit Five Seven (17 minutes) directed and written by Michael Grigsby, filmed by Chris Faulds in the summers of 1959 and 1960 among the working populaces of the industrial mill towns Blackburn and Preston, Lancashire, closing down the mills and mines for the weekend. The broad empty streets without automobiles feel unnaturally eerie.

Gala Day 1963 (25 minutes) directed by John Irvin with several teams of cameramen, shot among revelers and paraders at the Durham Miner’s Gala on July 21, 1962. Irvin got into hot water for including scenes in which men, some with binoculars, appear to be ‘peeping’ at couples making out in the shrubbery.

Small Is Beautiful 2006 (43 minutes) directed by Christophe Dupin. A concise, expository film about Free Cinema, including interviews with cameraman Walter Lassally and directors Michael Grigsby and Alain Tanner. 

Making whoopee in Lindsay Anderson's O Dreamland (1953)

Certified Copy

Copie conforme (Certified Copy) 2010 France/Italy (106 minutes) written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami; adaptation by Massoumeh Lahidji; cinematographer, Luca Bigazzi; montage, Bahman Kiarostami.

What on earth are a famous Iranian film director, a French actress and an English opera baritone doing in one of Tuscany’s picturesque hill towns in verdant midsummer, talking of a leafless garden?

Abbas Kiarostami makes films about the barriers to communication between men and women. Juliette Binoche, contrary to newly-minted Tovarishch Gégé Depardieu’s disparagements, often opts for and masters unfamiliar or challenging emotional territory in the roles she selects. William Shimell is an established English baritone who, apart from operatic performances, has never acted professionally on stage or screen.

We have yet to see a satisfying analysis of this intriguing work. It would hinge on a simple concept that the male lead states clearly at outset; getting this makes the difference between whether Kiarostami is casting after some vague pattern of ‘artistic’ effects, or telling the kind of compelling story for which he is known.

James Miller (Shimell), a distinguished-looking middle-aged British writer with genuine stage presence and a lovely voice, appears to be on a book tour in Tuscany with his Italian translator Marco Lenzi (Angelo Barbagallo—one of the film’s producers). They are promoting the Italian translation of a provocative long essay Miller has written titled Copia conforme in Italian—Certified Copy.   

The main drift of Miller’s essay is his original English title which, but for a marketing-minded publisher, he later says would have been Forget the Original, Just Get a Good Copy. Miller argues in essence that the copy of an original work of art ‘leads to’ and thereby ‘certifies’ the worth of the original.

A woman (Binoche, without makeup—this comes on later), standing in the back of the room with her son (Adrian Moore) has Miller sign a copy of his book as he enters late to give his talk.

Once he begins his presentation, this woman comes center stage, takes a front row seat marked ‘reserved’ next to Miller’s translator, and begins to speak as though familiarly with him in whispers. As she whispers with Lenzi, she makes distracting hand motions to her son who is moving around the front of the room while Miller speaks, using a handheld electronic device. Lenzi writes down something for her and she and her son leave before Miller’s talk is over.

Lenzi has given her Miller’s telephone number. The woman, never named and identified in the credits only as ‘She,’ is the French owner of a local antique shop who has been living in Italy with her son for five years. She arranges to meet Miller at the shop on a Sunday morning; the two spend the day together.

Kiarostami puts this photogenic couple together in Lucignano, a picturesque small town in Tuscany, and gives them dialogue in English and French which sounds at first a little like a middle-aged version of Ernest Hemingway’s short masterpiece Hills Like White Elephants. That is, the couple seems to be talking carefully about everything except the thing they most want to discuss, which appears to be their failed relationship.  

But the key to what actually is going on is something Miller says in his spiel:

‘It’s my intention,’ Miller told his audience, ‘really, just to try and show that the copy itself has worth in that it leads to the original and, in this way, certifies its value. And I believe this approach not only valid in art. I was particularly pleased when a reader recently told me that he found in my work an invitation to self-inquiry, to a better understanding of the self.’

It will not ‘spoil’ a viewer’s experience of this movie know in advance that this couple never before have met. What is going on here is exactly a mutual acceptance of the ‘invitation to self-inquiry’ to which Miller refers, which frames the thesis of this film. 

Miller and She identify in each other a ‘copy’ of a former partner with whom they had failed relationships. In these copies, they seek access to the ‘originals,’ thereby ‘certifying’ the value of those earlier relationships by engaging in role play with each other as a copy, as well as speaking frankly to the copy as the original. In practice, this works like a sophisticated form of ‘couples’ therapy.’

They act and react to each other as to their former partners, though also at times as their past and present selves. In alternating between different roles in English and French, they tell their emotional histories in metaphors as much to themselves—the self-inquiry—as to each other and the audience. Their emotional histories are the heart of this story.

‘You don’t expect a tree to keep its blossom after spring is over because blossom turns to fruit. And then the tree loses its fruit,’ Miller says as they walk.

‘And then?’ She says.

‘And then? The garden is leafless.’

‘The garden is leafless?’                           

‘It’s a Persian poem: The garden is leafless; who dare say that it isn’t beautiful.’*

The role-playing Miller and She do is enhanced richly by poignant incidental encounters they have with a series of strangers as they stroll around this small Tuscan hill town through the day. The town is itself a character.

They meet a café owner (Gianna Giachetti), a young local bride and groom (Manuela Balsimelli and Filippo Troiano), and a pair of older French tourists at a town square (Jean-Claude Carrière and Agathe Natanson). Each of these strangers respond to the couple’s ‘copy’ as an original, yet the simple, authentic things they convey have as much validity for Miller and She as they do for the viewer.

However, Miller draws the line at playing a fake. He refuses to pose with She as ‘a man and wife celebrating their fifteenth anniversary at the place where they were married’ with a young couple actually getting married at there. A copy that intimates an original is one thing; pretending to be something he is or they are not violates the spirit of the exercise.

This varied collection of encounters, exchanges, stories, vignettes and intimacies finishes on the open question of whether this pair of strangers will be satisfied to ‘forget the original, just get a good copy’—and what that means.

In addition to the mysteries the opposite sex holds for—and from—each other, and which draws a viewer into Kiarostami’s narrative, this is a gorgeous movie to look at because of the meticulous attention to detail and extraordinary framing of shots.

The as if inadvertent ease with which the action takes place within the frames, and the simplicity with which the narrative flows, at times dreamlike, at an unhurried, natural pace reflects the director’s careful thought and planning, consummate skill and art, no less than the skill and hard work of his cast and crew.

As Miller said in the drama: ‘There’s nothing very simple about being simple.’

Abbas Kiarostami on the set of Copie conforme.

*Miller quotes the modern Persian poet Mehdi Akhavān-Sāles poem A Leafless Garden:

باغ بی برگی که می گوید که زیبا نیست ؟

‘Who says a leafless garden is not beautiful?’

(Bagh bi-bargi ke miguid ke zibah nist?)

Freewheelin' Motl

Мы едем в Америку [My yédem v Amériku]/We Are Going to America/ אין פארן מיר אמצריקצ [Mir forn in Amerike] 1992 Russia Lenfilm/UniRem (81 minutes) directed by Yefim Gribov, co-written by Gribov and Arkadii Krasilshchikov, cinematography by Pavel Barskii and Denis Shchiglovskii; music by Mikhail Gluz; Tamara Lipartiya, editor.

This remarkable film tells the tale of a provincial Russian Jewish family’s journey ‘to America’ in the second decade of the 20th century through the eyes of an alert and sensitive adolescent boy.

Motl (Dima Davydov), who talks to birds, sees ghosts, and rides trains, brings to mind a young Bob Dylan. It is easy to imagine Motl’s stories as the kind of tableau vivant Dylan might concoct about himself or a forbear.

Inspired by Sholom Aleichem’s fiction and Marc Chagall’s paintings, the movie gives an unsentimental and even corrective view to the cheerful, cherry-cheeked cherubic images in such portrayals as Fiddler on the Roof (1971) based on the same artists’ work. The people portrayed in this film are sympathetic but rough and unsophisticated, highly religious and superstitious rural bumpkins.

The film’s rich sepia tones alternate with muted colors which lend to a sense of one’s clearing the cobwebs of memory. Its kaleidoscopic effects make it feel like the recalling or retelling in an old man’s memory of events in his faraway childhood, or his tales remembered and later retold by a younger relative. The stories are rich in impression, sensation and sharp images, with telling details that make them authentic.

Dima Davydov as Motl in Yefim Gribov's We Are Going to America.

In fact, the most fanciful parts often feel as though to be the truest. They would speak for what a narrator remembers it felt like to experience these things, rather an attempt to make a documentary record. Characters float and fade in and out like vapor; many of the factual details are long gone because they were unimportant to the teller in the first place, even had they been known. Images coined moments that stayed with the teller forever, and captivate the viewer.

Motl, his widowed Mama (Lyubov Rumyantseva), Motl’s much older brother Elya (Semyon Strugachev) and Elya’s wife Brokha (Danuta Slavgorodskaya) sell their home and leave their native Kazeltse to travel by train to an unnamed ‘border town.’ They take with them Pinya (Vadim Danilyevskii), a devout young neighbor. In the border town they expect an ‘emigrant committee’ to clear them for passage to America.

Motl and his family are shadowed by Korotyshka (Ivan Bashev), a malevolent Gentile dwarf with close-cropped hair, a long overcoat and a high-pitched voice, ever in the background when unsavory things invade their world. Korotyshka appears to embody a pervasive Old World evil, particularly the anti-Semitism that preys on them wherever they go.

On the train to the border town the family encounters others headed for America. Motl meets Masha (Olya Maksimova), a Gentile girl his age also travelling with her parents to America. Reb Leizer (Rafail Mishylovich), a rabbi from Tul’chin (a Ukrainian town south of Vinnitsa where the film actually was shot), introduces the family to Taibl (Baiba Kranats) and her brother Meyer (Mikhail Maizel), orphans whose ‘father was killed in a pogrom, and mother died of grief.’ Reb Leizer wants to broker a marriage between Taibl and Pinya, purportedly to insure their success in the New World.

The family is robbed when the train arrives at its destination (Korotyshka hobbles away into the station). After waiting in a long line, they make a rambling, emotional appeal for help to an official (Yurii Reshetnikov). They each suppose and prayerfully repeat throughout the film that a ‘better life’ awaits them in America. Could life be worse than in the backward, pogrom-plagued shtetl? But no one is clear as to exactly what this new life will be.

The official is too patient with these people to be a Russian Gentile. He is presumably a Russia-based representative of the Jewish Colonization Association, an international organization founded in the late nineteenth century by wealthy British and French Jews to facilitate Jewish emigration from Russia. He sends them to a doctor for eye examinations—another long line—on the theory that it is best to know in advance whether anyone has a medical condition that would cause U.S. Immigrations authorities to deny entry and deport them back to Europe.

Meanwhile, Motl meets Kopl (Volodya Belinskii), an older Jewish boy travelling on his own, who teases the adolescent about women. Motl and Kopl tumble into Feigele (Tatyana Bubelnikova), a flaky, sexy young woman ‘mystic’ from Kopl’s shtetl who Kopl says knows about devils, spirits and witches.

Feigele, whose name is from the Yiddish for ‘bird,’ entices Motl to lick sugar from her hand the way Motl feeds his occasional bird companion.

There is a traditional wedding. One of the party fails the eye exam (trachoma, a highly contagious infectious eye disease difficult to cure, was a cause for denying entry to the United States). This means that all either will stay in Russia—or devise an alternative route to cross the border to get to the Promised Land.

The haunting cantor improvisations that comprise much of the soundtrack are sung by Boris Finkelshtein, chief cantor of the Grand Choral Synagogue of St. Petersburg. The English subtitles of the spoken Russian are good; however there are no subtitles for the occasional Yiddish and liturgical Hebrew.

The only blemish noted in this otherwise meticulous work was Kopl’s parting anachronism that he would meet Motl ‘in tails and a top hat, swinging a walking stick,’ in Brighton Beach. It would take about twenty more years before this Brooklyn neighborhood would begin to become a destination for Jewish immigrants.

Oxford opera

Endeavour 2012 U.K. PBS Masterpiece Mystery! (103 minutes) written and devised by Russell Lewis; directed by Colm McCarthy; based on characters created by Colin Dexter.

‘Bad’ makes noise and stinks, but less often than not gives rise to the evil necessary to commit murder most foul.

In this story, sexual jealousy undoes a tidy blackmail set-up involving underage schoolgirls and bent cops, politicians, and government officials in mid-1960s Oxford.

Oxford City police bring in out-of-town help to find a missing teenage girl who turns up naked and dead in the woods. Police set about rounding up the usual clichés: a naïve young ‘redhead well-developed for her age’ fell in with the wrong crowd and got into trouble, and boys will be boys—especially old boys who should know better. It’s a tragedy, but life goes on.

That is, for all but one out-of-town rookie police constable brought to Oxford for his ‘knowledge of the local terrain’ as a former Greats candidate: Detective Constable Endeavour Morse (Shaun Evans).

Young Morse wonders what the devil a schoolgirl was doing with expensive first edition hardback poetry volumes place-marked with a series of Saturday crosswords clipped from a local paper. In each instance, only the first across and the last down of each grid is filled in; the acrosses are place names in Oxford, the downs are numbers.

Detective Constable Endeavour Morse (Shaun Evans) investigates the victim's reading

A loner who carries his resignation letter ready in his breast pocket, Morse has a thing for opera and crosswords and knows English Romantic poetry. His classical training and knowledge, intellectual curiosity, and a single-mindedness that makes him all but impervious to intimidation become crucial to cracking what turns out to have been ‘an almost perfect crime.’

This movie is a prequel to the Inspector Morse series starring John Thaw in the title role that Masterpiece Mystery! ran from 1987-2000. It is rich with references to the long-running series, not to mention Morse’s red Jaguar, Morse creator Colin Dexter behind The Times at an outdoor table at an Oxford pub, and Thaw’s daughter Abigail Thaw in a cameo as an Oxford newspaper editor. Thaw himself momentarily looks back from the rearview mirror at Evans’ Morse behind the wheel of a police car.

But the best thing about this prequel is that it and its star move comfortably in their own clothes in a well-cast, well-made, well-spun whodunit. In this spirit, the film calls itself by Morse’s first name, Endeavour, which fans of the earlier series know that Thaw’s Morse never used (and mentioned once only in an unguarded moment).

Evans might not be the first actor one would have cast for this role. He is ideal in it though, because he clearly understands the character and it is a pleasure to watch this young actor begin to become the man the middle-aged Thaw made flesh. (A series of four more episodes has been made but not yet released.)

'Good cop' Detective Inspector Fred Thursday (Roger Allam), Morse's mentor. 

Evans is supported in this role, and as a rookie cop, by Roger Allam’s excellent Detective Inspector Fred Thursday, a ‘good cop’ who represents everything that Morse likes about police work, and Danny Webb’s equally good Detective Inspector Arthur Lott, a ‘bad cop’ who stands for everything Morse dislikes about the police and which accounts for his letter of resignation.

Subsidiary to these is the cheerfully facetious and pedantic coroner (Is there any other kind?), Dr. Max DeBryn (James Bradshaw), who tells a squeamish Morse at his first crime scene, ‘You won’t make much of a detective if you’re not prepared to look death in the eye.’

Morse is not impressed by academics such as his former fellow student Alexander Reece (Christopher Brandon) nor Dr. Rowan Stromming (Richard Lintern), a Classics tutor. He is impressed the less so when he discovers the two had a £5 bet regarding Stromming’s Pygmalion-like ‘tuition’ of Mary Tremlett (Rachel Heaton), their dear-in-the-headlamps who ends up dead in the woods.

Mary Tremlett (Rachel Heaton), an Oxonian 'dear-in-the-headlamps.'

Shortly thereafter, Miles Percival (Harry Kershaw), Mary Tremlett’s former beau and one of Stromming’s undergraduates, apparently shoots himself on the riverbank—Morse’s first crime scene.

Morse subsequently discovers that Mary and some of her school friends attended ‘parties’ for influential older men, including Sir Richard Lovell (Patrick Malahide), minister for Overseas Affairs and constituency Member of Parliament for Oxford North. One of Mary’s friends is Jenny Crisp (Daisy Head), daughter of Detective Chief Inspector Crisp (Terence Harvey), who commands the city police force.

Teddy Samuels (Charlie Creed-Miles), a spiv Jaguar dealer with an edge, arranges these fêtes. They take place in a mothballed great house formerly owned by the Earls of Oxford, though since under the sketchy supervision of the Treasury Department. The house appears to fall within the purview of a shadowy ‘Special Branch’ chap who owns only to the name ‘Dempsey’ (John Light).

The murdered girl has an adoring older widower father Stan Tremlett (Ian Gelder) and a resentful older sister, Sharon Veelie (Emma Stansfield), married but separated from her husband, who has a connection with Samuels.

And there is the glamorous opera singer Rosalind Calloway (Flora Montgomery), now Stromming, the ‘beautiful woman with diamond earrings,’ who retired as a performing artist when she married Professor Stromming. It turns out that Morse’s love of opera began with first hearing Calloway sing Madame Butterfly; he can’t believe that his work has given him the chance to meet his lifelong ‘heroine.’ 

A star-struck Morse and his heroine, opera singer Rosalind Calloway (Flora Montgomery).

Morse’s challenge is to figure out how all these moving parts make this peculiar town clock tick. Our entertainment is to spend an hour and a half with this engaging fellow as he goes about doing this.

Apart from the recurring aria, Un bel di, from Giacomo Puccini’s Madame Butterfly (sung by Janis Kelly), Barrington Pheloung composed and conducted the theme and incidental music, as he did in the Inspector Morse series.

After we see Thaw’s Morse look back at Evans’ Morse from the car rearview mirror at the end, we hear Pheloung’s well known series motif based on the Morse code for M-O-R-S-E: Endeavour Morse has become Morse.

Shaun Evans, left, and John Thaw, right, as Masterpiece Mystery!'s Morse.

Vanya and Nyurka’s excellent adventure

Печки-лавочки [Pyéchki-lávochki] (Happy-Go-Lucky) 1972 Gorkii Film Studio U.S.S.R. (96 minutes) written, directed by and starring Vasily Shukshin.

This entertaining Soviet comedy contrasts a pair of collective farm country mice with more sophisticated urban Soviet fauna in the heyday of the Brezhnev era in the 1970s.

The humor is sunny. The story has a quietly personal political intensity at its core that made the movie resonate for Soviet audiences. Without being fatally ‘anti-Soviet,’ it has fun showing how ungrounded contemporary Soviet urban life might look to down-to-earth farmers with a foot in the nineteenth century.

The film opens with the expanse of the wide-open steppe and the rhythm of the lives that husband it. It is filled with the bustle of modern train travel, Moscow's quick tempo and Coney Island-like summer crowds on a Black Sea beach. It ends with the protagonist sitting on a home field with his bare feet on the ground.

Vasily Shukshin, the Soviet writer, actor and director, wrote, directed and stars in the film; his is one of the many great Soviet faces beautifully shot in black and white by cinematographer Anatoly Zabolotskii. Shukshin grew up in Srostki, a remote village on the Katun’ River below Biisk in the Altai region of southwestern Siberia.

Vasily Shukshin as Vanya Rastorguyev among family in Shul'gin Log in Happy-Go-Lucky 1972.

He shot the film on location in Srostki and the nearby village of Shul’gin Log (as well as in Moscow and Crimea, and aboard trains) with a mix of professional actors and local people which give it a ‘nonfiction’ flavor that makes it homely and also enlivens it. His actress wife Lidiya Fedoseyeva Shukshina and their daughters Mariya and Ol’ga play the protagonist’s wife and daughters.

The story is simple. Vanya—Ivan Sergeyevich Rastorguyev (Shukshin)—a Siberian ‘hero tractor driver’ (though only shown scything manually, like a Tolstoyan peasant), takes his wife Nyura (Shukshina) on a two-week summer holiday to a Black Sea resort in Crimea.

Vanya and Nyura have lived in Shul’gin Log all their lives and never ventured outside their region. They travel 2400 miles by train to Moscow, stay in the city several days with a retired philologist they meet on the train, and then continue their trip to the Black Sea coast, another 900 miles to the south.

As Vanya’s neighbors celebrate his leave-taking, he makes sure they understand he would be just as happy to take the time off at home.

‘Hey…I don’t need a vacation,’ Vanya says. ‘I’ll go along with this resort thing if you really think I should. I’d just as soon take my fishing pole, sit on the river bank, and chill out. That’s all: happy-go-lucky.’

(Вот…не отдых мне не нужен, сдались мне этот саниторий если уж вы думаете, что я. Я вон пошел с удочкой, набережку посидел, и отдохнул. И все, печки-лавочки.)

The title comes from the Russian expression, pyéchki-lávochki, translated ‘happy-go-lucky,’ which means something more like ‘loosey-goosey’ or ‘come what may.’ Vanya uses the expression again, later on the train. After he and Nyura unwittingly encounter a thief, a retired professor with the same kind of suitcase comes into their compartment.

‘Here we go again with the happy-go-lucky,’ Vanya tells her, aggressively eyeing their pleasantly unsuspecting new fellow traveller.

It turns out that the professor, Sergei Fyodorovich Stepanov (Vsevolod Sanayev), is a philologist interested in regional dialects and folklore. He enjoys speaking with the couple and invites them to visit him in Moscow before continuing their trip to Crimea. This gives Shukshin license further to enliven his story with nonstandard words and folk expressions that go along with Fyodor Teleletskikh’s lovely background balalaika music.

Shukshin’s narrative style isanecdotal. In addition to the professor, the couple encounters a variety of Soviet types, from petty bureaucrats and policemen to students and a scam artist.

Lidiya Shukshina, Vasily Shukshin and Vadim Zakharchenko in Happy-Go-Lucky 1972.

A Phil Silvers-like ‘business traveller’ (Vadim Zakharchenko) offends Vanya by suggesting to him that he should leave his country ways of speaking and acting in the country when travelling among more sophisticated people, such as having his wife hide their money in her stocking. (Others offer similar advice, in that sublimely Chekhovian manner of being not all that more sophisticated themselves.)

Vanya angrily calls the interloper a ‘prostitute in trousers, and a hat, and a raincoat’ which, true to the art of Russian insult and like many a Bob Dylan song, uses incongruous, euphonious words for the sounds they make to shape the sense one wants them to mean (profursyétka v shtanákh, i v shlyápe, i v plashché—профурсетка в штанах, и в шляпе, и в плаще).

The film’s best sketch is Vanya and Nyura’s time with Viktor Aleksandrovich (Georgii Burkov), a smooth-talking charmer who talked his way on the train without a ticket. Viktor tells the couple he is a ‘konstruktor,’ or designer, first of trains, then of aviation, and the originator of System ‘Y’ (sistema ‘i-grek’).

'Floating in the air': Vasily Shukshin, Georgii Burkov and Lidiya Shukshina in Happy-Go-Lucky 1972.

Viktor describes to these wide-eyed country folk a train he is working on that can levitate across spaces such as rivers that once required bridges. He gives them gifts from his suitcase—to which he incidentally lost the key, thus must borrow Vanya’s knife to pop the locks. In the end, he finds a practical application for his system right before Vanya and Nyura’s eyes—not to mention those of a curious police sergeant (Viktor Filippov).

‘Well there you go, Ivan, you asked for an explanation of System “Y”,’ Viktor says after the policeman leaves the compartment.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Just then, right before your eyes, System “Y” went into operation.’

‘Huh?’

‘Well, there we were in the air. We ever so gently rose up and then ever so gently touched down.’*

The exchange gives Vanya an inkling of what he soon will discover. Shukshin’s humor works by putting together lively characters from different walks of Soviet life, letting his characters have fun at each other’s expense while treading lightly on the edges of state organizations, institutions and ideology.

Vanya and Nyura scratch their heads throughout at the odd ways of ‘sophisticates’ whose mild patronization makes the couple the more sympathetic.

Having identified Vanya as a ‘type,’ the professor they met on the train gets him to speak to a group of university students on a subject of his choice. Vanya frets over what to say, thinking that his views must be too narrow, his learning to shallow to say anything useful to these privileged intellikents. He ends up telling them what he thinks is a silly story about shearing a horse’s mane, which he wraps up with a French ‘merci’ for the benefit of his learned audience.

In doing so, he turns the tables on the educated folk without really understanding what he has done; the professor gets it though.

Nyura and Vanya on holiday in Crimea in Happy-Go-Lucky 1972.

 *‘Вот, ты сейчас, Иван, спрашивал насчёт системы “игрек”?’

‘да.’

‘толко что, на ваших глазах, сработала система “игрек”.’

‘эх?’

Так вот, мы были в воздуке. Мы так плав-нень-ко поднялись, и плав-нень-ко опустились.’

The Man

The Man 1972 U.S. (93 minutes) directed by Joseph Sargent; screenplay by Rod Serling, based on Irving Wallace’s 1964 novel.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Once upon a time there was a stereotypical ‘minority’ American political figure modeled after an image of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, whose dignity and status seemed to derive from the essential fact that he had no real power and influence when push came to shove. He was ‘safe.’ His status and gravitas made him a ‘role model’ for schoolchildren. Better yet, decorous public accolades tended to reflect more beneficially on their ‘majority’ bestowers than on the recipient.

Douglass Dilman (James Earl Jones) fit this stereotype in Joseph Sargent’s 1972 political thriller The Man. Jones’ Senator Dilman is an ‘articulate’ academic who can—cue the music and replay the legend—look back with richly enunciated diction and no less ostentatious satisfaction on a lifetime of rags-to-riches achievement. But day to day he pads the corridors of power to his grove of restful laurels as a do-nothing legislator.

Dilman had been exactly the right ‘note’ to strike for the largely ceremonial role of President pro tempore of the Senate after the hope of the early 1960s turned to civil strife by the end of the decade. The political establishment considered him ‘a well-dressed rebuttal’ to the race riots and protest marches. A middle-aged career politician, academic and solitary widower with an adult daughter, Dilman was a serious Negro face in a prominent place meant to mollify Negro activists and firebrands—but only a face.

'The face in the mirror won't stop': James Earl Jones in The Man 1972

A chain of unforeseen events and the constitutional protocol for presidential succession ‘pushes’ Dilman out of the corridors he had padded and ‘shoves’ him behind the desk in the Oval Office at the White House. Dilman becomes ‘The Man.’

This takes place before the title credits: the opening sequence begins with a buzz of worried activity against the background of a Washington Press Correspondents Association dinner hosted by comedian Jack Benny—and ends with Dilman picking up a telephone receiver.

Thus, less than ten years after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law (and right before the Nixon presidency’s Watergate crises), the United States has its first black president.

To define is to control. But do others’ facile definitions suit this man? Few people seem to have any idea of who Dilman is. A key to his character and the shape the story takes is something his activist daughter Wanda (Janet MacLachlan) suggests to him as he wrestles with what he thinks the country expects of him, particularly other black people.

‘They don’t want you to be humble,’ Wanda says. ‘They don’t want you to apologize. They just want you president.’

James Earl Jones and Janet MacLachlan in The Man 1972

The story anticipates history. Once Dilman gets to the Oval Office, his staff and the Washington political establishment appear to divide between those who respect the office and look to President Dilman for direction and leadership to support or oppose, and those who simply cannot abide the thought of a black man in the White House.

Dilman begins to find his footing in the ‘bully pulpit’ at his first press conference. Rather than speak from a handler’s ‘talking points,’ he opts for candor, showing that he is committed to do the job that has fallen on him. His straight talk feels more like a screenwriter’s conceit than what someone in this position might actually say, but it is refreshing and entertaining. Americans usually welcome authenticity in their presidents.

As Jim Talley (Martin Balsam), Dilman’s inherited chief of staff, tells him after the event, ‘You went in with a rubber stamp and came out carrying a shillelagh.’ Dilman’s independence surprises Talley; but once Talley sees that this president expects to do his job, Talley knows what his own role is.

Dilman’s independence also surprises Arthur Eaton (William Windom), his inherited secretary of state. Eaton had assumed that the do-nothing senator gladly would coast while Eaton and the former president’s cabal run the show. Given the new terms, and despite the barbs of his hyperambitious ‘Washington wife’ Kay (Barbara Rush), Eaton’s lawyerly pragmatism counsels him to ride out the end of Dilman’s term and best position himself to seek his party’s nomination at the coming convention.

But one man’s well-dressed rebuttal is a far cry from that same man’s president. Senator Watson (Burgess Meredith), author of the comment and the devious Senate minority leader ‘from a Southern state,’ shows his hand in an attempt to pass legislation behind the president’s back blocking Dilman from replacing his predecessor’s cabinet members. (Watson would be entirely at home in the current House of Representatives.)  

The stakes go up after Robert Wheeler (Georg Stanford Brown), a black American student activist, creates an international incident by allegedly assassinating the South African minister of defense in South Africa. South Africa demands his extradition. Wheeler appeals directly to President Dilman to intervene in his case.

The bad news about this movie is slim: it was done on a 1970s telemovie budget and the original 35mm print apparently was misplaced or lost.

The good news is that it is an efficient, well-paced, well-made political thriller.

Jones leads a terrific cast with his Orson Wellesian voice and presence. Rod Serling’s thoughtful script engages fraught race issues while keeping Dilman’s character the focus of the story and leaving out cartoon characters. Serling best exercises his self-appointed role as public conscience by placing a man among other men and women in a drama rather than trying to teach a lesson.

As The Man in the drama, Jones wholly inhabits this first black American president as a father and widower, an academic philosopher who values truth and a canny politician looking for an edge. His is a portrait in leadership. Secretary Eaton might have a more serious rival than he expects at the party’s national convention. 

Skyfall

Skyfall 2012 U.K. (143 minutes) directed by Sam Mendes; written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan, based on Ian Fleming’s James Bond; director of photography, Roger Deakins; edited by Stuart and Kate Baird.

Skyfall is a heck of a good action thriller that gets back to basics to reboot the James Bond legend.

The latest Bond movie is unusual in that while it plays on a theme of doing things ‘the old-fashioned way,’ it also considers whether public and private organizations are better off when they rely on sophisticated technical means to do humans’ jobs.

Cash-strapped governments no less than profit-plush private enterprise revel in each technical marvel that lets them retire another idiosyncratic and expensive pair of boots pounding pavement—until those boots come pounding to their rescue. 

Nor does this fifty-year-old franchise’s latest entertainment pause on a boring plateau before the dénouement. The usual pattern would be that a fast-moving plot gets needlessly sidetracked by the exposition either of a romance going nowhere or the bad guy’s equally futile and rococo scheme to do away with Bond. More than two hours of this movie scoot by with scarcely a stop for a breath. 

However, the reviews are mixed. Anthony Lane noted that it is a good movie, just not a good Bond movie. This of course depends on what one means by ‘Bond movie.’

Ian Fleming’s novels are the pulp fiction cousins of Mickey Spillane’s brood, the former informed by the harsh realities of Britain’s receding empire during the Second World War and the Joseph Stalin-era Cold War.

Fleming remade the doughty gentleman soldier of an earlier generation of thriller writers, such as John Buchan’s Richard Hannay of The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), into a tough, capable, and solidly middle class male fantasy. He gave Bond a pastiche of knowing the value of things for which the target audience could be relied upon to know the prices. Fleming’s Bond is a Mike Hammer with a BBC accent.

In the hands of moviemakers, Sean Connery and the Bond screenwriters and directors cut capers round the male fantasy. They created the polished, wise-cracking lady-killer and the female and technical toys without which no Bond picture could be complete. Connery’s Bond was a tough act to follow. At best, his successors have given the fantasy their own distinct flavor.

Craig’s Bond is closer to Fleming’s original, a capable killer with more pluck than polish. Skyfall, Craig’s third crack at the role, is his best, after a promising beginning with Casino Royale (2006) and the disappointing and morose Quantum of Solace (2008).

In Skyfall, a suspected act of international terrorism turns out to be the handiwork of a former MI6 ‘double 0’ operative seeking revenge against M (Judy Dench), his former boss, for ‘giving him up’ to the Chinese.

Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem), a perverse, cackling bottle blonde roué with dental issues, is a master computer hacker. His ‘enterprise’ apparently made him a liability to MI6 and the British government in the run-up to the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty. Back at large, Silva turns his devious tradecraft against his former employer.

Meanwhile politicians at Whitehall conduct high profile inquiries into the relevancy and cost effectiveness of the secret services. Bond, trying to get a line on the hacker, tracks the assassin who tried to kill him in the opening sequence in Istanbul to the blue neon, other-worldly instant megalopolis which is the new Shanghai.

As an aside, it is interesting to note that while Bond watches the assassin set up to shoot a man identified as a ‘Shanghai art collector,’ we see the target appraising Amedeo Modigliani’s La Femme à l'Éventail (Lunia Czechowska) (1919). This painting was one of several masterpieces stolen from the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in May 2010, none of which have been recovered.

Bond subsequently encounters Sévérine (Bérénice Lim Marlohe), a mysterious Eurasian beauty with a checkered past and a Beretta strapped to her thigh, in a floating fleshpot in Macau, the Chinese Las Vegas. In Mondo Bond this usually means an express ticket to the big bad wolf. Enter Silva.

Before long, Silva brings the whole show home to old-fashioned London.

M and MI6 get political support from old fashioned Gareth Mallory (Ralph Fiennes), chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee and a former British Army officer with field intelligence experience in Northern Ireland.

The new Q, whom Ben Whishaw plays gamely as a callow computer geek, seems more like a throwback to the Ultra people at Station X at Bletchley Park. At outset, Q supplies Bond with two items: a high tech Walther PPK pistol which only the authorized user’s palm print can activate to fire, and a simple radio transmitter that Q branch could have issued in Goldfinger (1964). This will be all that Bond needs.

In a sense, using a straight razor to stand for doing things the old-fashioned way seems to translate as applying William of Occam’s shaving implement to get to ‘the British way.’ The dénouement is right out of Buchan.

Bond leaves behind the flash and dash to spirit away M as bait to the Scottish highlands in the iconic silver-birch gold 1964 Aston Martin DB5 (which first appeared in Goldfinger), to draw Silva to his home turf. The Scottish highlands prove to be good country for old men, especially a gillie like Kincade (Albert Finney), though perhaps a bit too hot for one old lady.

Director Sam Mendes ties his movie with a bow where many Bond films start: a fresh Bond with a new Miss Eve Moneypenny (Naomie Harris), every bit as bright and sexy as the young Lois Maxwell (Miss Moneypenny from 1962-85), outside the oak of M’s inner chambers; a new assignment awaits within.

All of which leaves no doubt that JAMES BOND WILL BE BACK: orbis non sufficit.