The Illusion of Depth

Some of you will probably remember last January, when I screened the German silent film Menschen am Sonntag ( People on Sunday ). Although that was wholly a German film; written directed and produced by Germans, filmed in Berlin and starring ordinary German citizens, it stands today as The Ghost of Hollywood Future. Virtually everyone involved on the creative side of Menschen am Sonntag eventually went on to wield an outsize role in Hollywood as it was to be. We have just seen Double Indemnity , written and directed by Billy Wilder... And before that we saw Detour , directed by Edgar G. Ulmer. This week, we are going to be visiting the other director of Menschen am Sonntag . Spoiler alert: we're going to be seeing quite a bit of Robert Siodmak over the next couple of months, because his "noir" offerings tend to be especially stylish and juicy. But this one in particular is almost as iconic as Double Indemnity . In 1933, Claude Rains earned himself a place in the history...

A few years ago, a British insurance company ran a television advert. A dark and sinister television advert.  It featured a young couple (with their dog) setting up their first home. In a tense and dramatic opening full of ominous foreboding, the naïve husband announces that he is off to work on the kitchen - presumably to fool around with faulty gas cookers or live electrical cables or exploding boilers. The young, glamorous wife immediately sets her scheme in motion. "Before you do, can you sort out your life insurance," she says, exchanging a knowing glance with the dog. She hands her husband a tablet with the forms already pre-loaded. The husband of course falls for the whole thing and signs his name to the policy, sealing his fate as he gullibly comments on "how easy it was" before heading off to the kitchen (and presumably his violent death) leaving the wife and the dog to collect the insurance money and head for some tropical country with sandy beaches and no...

There's Dark cinema and there's dark cinema. The term Film Noir was originally applied to American cinema in 1946, and seems to have been used by two French film critics at more or less the same time. The critic Nico Frank described a recent batch of American imports as "belong[ing] to what used to be called the detective film genre, but which would now be better termed the crime, or, even better yet, the "crime psychology film."  Fellow critic Jean-Pierre Chartier was less charitable in his take on the subject, condemning what he called Film Noir's "pessimism and disgust for humanity." It is Chartier's take on Noir that feels most relevant to this week's film, although personally I would challenge the value judgement implied by his attacks. One of the characteristics of the "dark cinema" of this era was that it didn't necessarily need to have anything to do with crime. Or sex. It's possible to have a Very Bad Day for enti...

____________________________________________________ The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means. Oscar Wilde; The Importance of Being Earnes t ____________________________________________________ Depression/Comedy Part II: Are you Being Funny? Last January (a year ago!) I launched a film series that I called Depression/Comedy . As I said at the time, film-makers of the 1930s made a conscious decision to make their films as positive and enjoyable as possible, in an effort to help the country get through a very difficult and painful decade. Putting that series together was a genuine pleasure for me, and allowed me to showcase some of my all-time favourite films.  This year, I want to look at what happened next . You might think of this as Depression/Comedy without the Comedy. Not that this season is going to be depressing . Not remotely.  Like Depression/Comedy , this is going to be a celebration of a very specific period in the history of Cinema. ...