Star Wars (1977)

30 Years On

Picture the scene if you will: a wide-eyed innocent 7-year old, with no knowledge at all of films, and only a vague awareness at the time of 1970s popular culture, hears along the grapevine of an exciting new "thing" that is encapsulating the imagination of children everywhere (in much the same way as the Harry Potter books did 20 years later). Intrigued to the point of wonderment, this boy visits the local newsagents in Prebendal Farm, Aylesbury, and sees on the shelf a "STAR WARS Weekly" comic, emblazoned with the typically bold Marvel Comics image of an idealistic hero fighting two opponents, watched over by two odd looking semi-human robot figures.

Picking the item up off the magazine rack, I persuaded my parents to buy the comic for me, and I read on, gripped by the "story so far" of Princess Leia Organa, Han Solo and Chewbacca the wookiee, captured by space pirate Crimson Jack whilst on their way to the Drexel system to find Luke Skywalker, who has crash landed there whilst in search of a new Rebel base, and finds himself at the mercy of the Dragon Lords and Governor Quarg.











So began my first interest in the phenomenon that was (and still is) Star Wars. The comic I read was printed in July 1978, over a year after the film first exploded onto American screens in May of 1977. Reading through that first comic - issue No. 23 - I check back and discover that the whole story did not begin with Dragon Lords and space pirates, but with an unfortunate rebel cruiser attacked mercilessly by the Galactic Empire, and the precious princess on board captured by the menacing figure of Lord Darth Vader, but not before her two robots have escaped onto a desert planet, where our young hero retrieves them.

Investigating further, I talk with my father and discover that this whole legend is not actually a comic book, but a film. Naturally aware of my curiosity, Daddy - as I called him them - looks into the matter and discovers that Star Wars the Movie is being shown at the Dominion Tottenham Court Road in London. Excited at the prospect of visiting the city and seeing my first major film, I accept his suggestion for us to go there.

The Dominion Theatre is a magnificently retained example of splendid cinema architecture. It is only used for theatre shows nowadays but still retains its magnificence, and back in 1978 it had been installed with a new, exciting sounding system named "Dolby Stereo".

And so it begins. The lights in the huge theatre darken, and then the screen bursts open to the sound of Alfred Newman's magnificent Twentieth Century Fox fanfare, followed by a moment's silence, and a strange but oddly haunting message on the screen:



A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...



Seconds later the screen explodes again, the title retreating into infinity amidst a background of thousands of stars in space. George Lucas used the somewhat unconventional method of ditching opening credits in favour of "story so far" sloping credits (borrowed from the Flash Gordon serials), perfectly setting the scene for a new modern myth. Seconds later that same rebel cruiser that I had read about in the comics, races through space, and is completely engulfed by an Imperial spaceship that is almost larger than the cinema screen itself.

The memories go on, many of them hazy now nearly 30 years later, but once first introduced to movies - especially this one - it is never forgotten. The only definite memory I have of the film itself that day is how much I enjoyed the sequence where Luke swings to safety with Princess Leia. One tangible - or rather intangible - memory of the day is of leaving my coat behind whilst coming out of the cinema. 30 years later, I still whimsically wonder if the Dominion Theatre has my little dark blue jacket in their Lost Property Department.

Childhood memories of a film tend to be rose-tinted and overly nostalgic, particularly of the actors participating in it, but I still think that my first opinions ring true even today. Mark Hamill was a fine Luke Skywalker whom I strongly identified with, Harrison Ford was popular and fun as Han Solo, and Carrie Fisher I thought was a major star actress with a pretty, pert and brilliant talent. There was also an actor playing Ben Kenobi, little known to me in those days of course, but I soon discovered he was a distinguished actor of many years experience, and British at that: Sir Alec Guinness.



Looking back now, I suspect it was Guinness's down-to-earth Britishness that brought home to me the appeal of this saga. In those days there wasn't quite so much of the distinction between the all-American hero and the "English" villain (NB: most of the cast of Star Wars were British actors who were dubbed into American), and so the loss of Obi-Wan two-thirds into the film - killed by his former apprentice Darth Vader - was a loss indeed.


Perhaps this is also why I enjoy "Episode 4" over Episodes 5 and 6, because Alec is such an intrinsic part of the film. I truly believe that the reason it has become such a landmark film above so many other "blockbusters" (a term coined in 1977 apparently) was because of the presence of Alec Guinness. He gave it that extra edge. It's perhaps also true to say that Star Wars, and Alec Guinness, gave me the impetus to act (or certainly to be creative) which I have today.




Most of the other lingering memories of the film on reflection come after the second viewing - such was I swept along by the experience first time round - at the local Odeon in Aylesbury. This was still in the days of the "roadshow" movie distribution, where a film had an extended run in the big cities prior to wider release, not at all like the global mass distribution of today.

Both my parents came along for this one, and at the end my mother was having trouble finding our house keys under the seats in Screen 2. In my impatience to get out of the cinema, by chance I watched some of the closing credits, and heard for the first time the lyrical closing themes of John Williams's iconic score. To this day, I watch films to their complete conclusion, often just for the pleasure of listening to the end title music.

Since then I've probably seen the film - in rough figures - about four or five times in the cinema, one of the most recent occasions being in 1997 at the Odeon Leicester Square, for the much hyped "Special Edition" - which tinkered about with bits of the film but made no difference at all from the exhilaration of the original. History nearly repeated itself as I left behind my (Star Wars) baseball cap under the seat, and just remembered at the last second to retrieve it.



I'm sure there are thousands - nay millions - of other stories from each individual who remembers the first time they saw this film. Such is the effect it had on that generation, and subsequent generations too.

Last but not least reflection however, goes to its creator, the brilliantly talented and surprisingly sanguine figure of George Lucas, a much maligned filmmaker in the years since, who unofficially "retired" from directing after Star Wars. His return to the director's chair with The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, inevitably paled in comparison with his 1977 original.

In spite of all the supposed problems he had making it, his collaboration with the actors, John Williams, his film-making friends, a bemused British crew, and a new veritable rebel alliance of Special Effects technicians (soon to be team-named "ILM"), created a piece of cinema magic that rivals The Adventures of Robin Hood and Casablanca for freshness and consistently entertaining its audience after repeated viewings.

Oh, and how do I know the exact day I saw it?


There was a newspaper stall outside the Dominion Theatre - selling a Star Wars Weekly dated 19th October 1978, and I saw the film the following Saturday, the 21st - Carrie Fisher's birthday.

Back at the Dominion Theatre in 2003

A provisional list

Hello there. As a supplement to the film review blogpage, and in slightly less formal detail and more analytical style, here is a selection of films that, for whatever reason - good or bad - have a special place in my heart. Just to whetten the appetite, here's a list of the films you can expect to read about in the months ahead - in no order other than alphabetical:

1. The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
2. Airplane! (1980)
3. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
4. Angel Heart (1987)
5. Around the World in Eighty Days (1955)
6. The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
7. Bambi (1942)
8. Batman (1989)
9. La Belle et la Bete (1946)
10. Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (1988)
11. Brief Encounter (1945)
12. Cabaret (1972)
13. Casablanca (1942)
14. Casino Royale (2006)
15. Chicken Run (2000)
16. Cornucopia (2002)
17. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000)
18. The Cruel Sea (1954)
19. Cry Freedom (1987)
20. Dark City (1997)
21. Dead of Night (1945)
22. Dead Poets Society (1989) 
23. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)
24. The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
25. Enchanted April (1991)
26. Escape to Victory (1981)
27. Fail Safe (1964)
28. Fantasia (1940)
29. Field of Dreams (1989)
30. Five Easy Pieces(1970)
31. Gandhi (1982)
32. The General (1927)
33. The Godfather (1972) 
34. Goldfinger (1964)
35. The Happiest Days of Your Life (1949)
36. A Hard Day's Night (1964)
37. Henry V (1944)
38. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
39. Intolerance (1916)
40. It Happened Here (1964)
41. It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
42. Jaws (1975)
43. JFK (1991)
44. Jurassic Park (1993)
45. Kafka (1991)
46. King Kong (1933)
47. The Lady Vanishes (1938)
48. Last Action Hero (1993)
49. Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
50. The Lord of the Rings (2001-3)
51. The Magic Box (1951)
52. Metropolis (1926)
53. A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)
54. The Mission (1987)
55. The Naked Gun (1988)
56. A Night to Remember (1958)
57. North by Northwest (1959)
58. Oh Mr Porter! (1937)
59. Oh! What a Lovely War (1969)
60. Oliver Twist (1948)
61. Olympischespiele (1938)
62. The Omen(1976)
63. Once Upon a Time in the West (1969)
64. The Passion of the Christ (2004)
65. The Phantom Menace (1999)
66. Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)
67. Postcards from the Edge (1990)
68. Psycho (1960)
69. Quatermass and the Pit (1967)
70. The Railway Children (1970)
71. The Red Balloon (1955)
72. Return of the Jedi (1983)
73. Russian Ark (2002)
74. Saving Private Ryan (1998)
75. The Seventh Seal (1957)
76. Shaun of the Dead (2004)
77. Spiderman (2002)
78. Star Wars (1977)
79. Superman (1978)
80. Taxi Driver (1976)
81. The Thief of Bagdad (1940)
82. The Third Man (1949)
83. Thirteen Days (2000)
84. The 39 Steps (1935)
85. This is Cinerama (1953)
86. Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965)
87. To Be or Not to Be (1942) 
88. Tom and Jerry: The Cat Concerto (1947) and others
89. Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970)
90. The Train (1964)
91. Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988)
92. Tunes of Glory (1960)
93. Twelve Angry Men (1957)
94. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954)
95. The Untouchables (1987)
96. The Vikings (1958)
97. The Village (2004) 
98. Way Out West (1937)
99. West Side Story (1961)
100.Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)

Intolerance (1916)

The Greatest Film Ever Made?

Many film buffs and critics can lay claim to have been so entertained and captivated by a movie that they herald it the Greatest Motion Picture Made on Earth. Many will tell you how Citizen Kane warrants this accolade. Others will refer to the work of many overseas film masters such as Kurosawa, Eisenstein or Lang. Those in musical vein might well be encapsulated by Singin' in the Rain or Astaire and Rogers in Top Hat. Many true film buffs salute Casablanca. In more recent times some modern audiences would even cite Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings epic as the greatest achievement in the 100-plus years of movie history. But for me, the only film that could fit that title is D.W. Griffith's Intolerance.

Griffith's inspiration for making the film came about from a combination of circumstances that prevailed in the months following the release of his most sensational motion picture of the time, The Birth of a Nation. It was a ground-breaking moment in the history of motion pictures, a fantastic large scale epic which took the form of not an hour or two in the nickelodeon (in those days the average film lasted 20 minutes with a full supporting programme of other short films), but a whole evening's entertainment before respectable audiences in lavish theatres. It gave cinema respectability, and in many ways invented movies in the form that we know them today. The story was a stirring one, of the American Civil War and the effects it had on the lives of the losing Southerners (twenty years before the whole world was swooning over Gone with the Wind) with some marvellous battle scenes. But also, most controversially, Griffith's film had depicted the negro populace of America in grossly caricatured style, in a film which embodied the Ku Klux Klan as heroes. Naturally therefore, the eruption of anti-racist feeling throughout America, even for those days, overwhelmed Griffith, who viewed the enormous furore about his misunderstood film as a gargantuan example of intolerance by man towards his fellow man.

And so began his personal crusade against the intolerants of the world, which due to the success of Birth, would have to be even bigger and more audacious (but thankfully less radical) than before. Using the unused footage from The Mother and the Law, a film which he had already started shooting before The Birth of a Nation, Griffith used this modern story as the main thrust of the narrative for Intolerance, and interspersed it with three other stories to illustrate the same concurrent theme, of the pain and anguish suffered by benevolent families and individuals when persecuted by other factions, governments and armies throughout the centuries.


Linking all these strands together, Griffith used the motif of a child's cradle rocking constantly, as if to embody the shakiness and the preciousness of life itself, and he cast one of his most popular leading ladies, Lillian Gish, as the eternal mother figure watching over the cradle, in a sequence that only took two hours to film, but features at constant intervals throughout the movie.

Naive it certainly was - as indeed was The Birth of a Nation - but Griffith never compromised either his motives or his style. The peculiarity in which he targets women's progressive movements and individual sneering villains would seem odd even in those days, but the way in which he blended the emotions together, resulting in a climax where the four stories come to their dramatic head, in a sequence which became known as the world's first and only "film fugue", was quite astounding.

Taking the four stories in isolation, they would seem mundane, but linked together it gave a grandness and a scope that had never been attained in motion pictures before, or since.

The first story, the modern tale taken from The Mother and the Law, told the fairly minor tale of two young lovers, played by Robert Harron and the captivating Mae Marsh, Griffith's perennial little girl innocent, who on her day could be as brilliant as Mary Pickford and more. Harron was also a very popular leading man at the time, whose name is forgotten nowadays because of his tragic early death in 1920. The young lovers meet in the (unnamed) big city and marry, but are beset by injustice and cruelty by both gangsters and the system, which wrongly convicts "the boy" for murder and deprives "the little one" of her only child. Amongst the other players were Miriam Cooper as the jealous mistress of the gangster who has deserted her for the little one, and resorts to murder when the going gets rough. The gangster (a "musketeer of the slums") was played with characteristic brutishness by Walter Long, a few years before he was about to strike equal terror into the hearts of Laurel and Hardy, to rather more comic effect. In the famous climactic chase where a racing car intercepts a speeding train (and stops right across the track), the driver of the car was played by one Tod Browning, who later terrified the world as a director himself with horror flicks such as Dracula and Freaks.

The second and most celebrated of the four stories of Intolerance, was the chronicling of the siege of Babylon by the Persian forces of Cyrus, brought about (according to Griffith's version of events) by the betrayal of Belshazzar by the High Priests of Bel in favour of Cyrus. The sequence in which the city celebrates with an almighty feast after the first initial defeat of the Persians (prior to the betrayal) was one of the great moments of cinema as the camera craned down from the skies overlooking the elephant-lined towers to the massed throng of dancers gathered down below.
Walter Paget played the mighty and benevolent King Belshazzar, and the stunning Seena Owen played his majestic queen, and best of all came Constance Talmadge who brought a very pugnacious human quality to her role as a feisty, sword-wielding, arrow fighting soldier-like loyal servant to the Babylonian prince, and helped greatly to make the ancient setting relatable to modern audiences. Amongst the extras in this huge Babylonian entourage were Mildred Harris - a teenage actress who gained notoriety a few years later when she married Charlie Chaplin - as one of the vestal virgins, and Douglas Fairbanks as one of the soldiers, then unknown and practically an extra in the film, but highly athletic with a huge star career of his own just around the corner.

Third of the stories was the massacre of several millions of Huguenots on St. Bartholomew's Day in 17th century France, brought about by the wily Machiavellian schemes of Catherine de Medici. Even Griffith was honest to admit this was the least memorable of the four stories. Nonetheless, the piece was wonderfully staged and dressed, and the tragedy was well put across thanks to the two central figures persecuted in the massacre, two Huguenot sisters, one of whom (Margery Wilson) has a lover with "the badges of safety", played by a lean and young looking Eugene Pallette, two decades before he settled into portlier character roles such as Friar Tuck in The Adventures of Robin Hood.

Rounded off by a fourth story which was basically a collection of bible scenes leading to the crucifixion (featuring, as one of the high priests persecuting Jesus, an unknown but sinister looking actor named Erich Von Stroheim, who also assisted Griffith in some of the direction), to give the movie a traditional semi-biblical context, the whole enterprise was a gargantuan effort, which deserved the success that it never attained.

Why?

Well, possibly because, like Citizen Kane in 1941, it was a film too far ahead of its time. Audiences of today might be sophisticated enough to understand the narrative thrust of cross-cutting all four stories to embody Griffith's message, but in 1916 audiences were still rather accustomed to the stodgy uncinematic approach of one scene after another as if in a stage play, and found Intolerance all too baffling because of its surreal juxtaposition from one story and one lifetime to another. Original versions of the film had run to a mammoth 8 hours, and Griffith was desperate at the time to cut the length down to a more manageable level to make it accessible for general audiences.

Needless to say, it was a fruitless exercise; no amount of cutting would make Intolerance the success he wanted it to be, and together with America's increasing anti-pacifist movement during World War I - which contrasted greatly with Griffith's final Utopian message of a peaceful world - shortly before America entered the war, as well as the lawsuits flying in all directions about Birth, Griffith would spend most of the rest of his years in between films battling both the lawyers and his own financial constraints. He died on the verge of bankruptcy in 1948.

But his films, in particular this one, still remain as his lasting legacy. At the heart of Intolerance one can see not only the brilliance of Griffith's craft at work, but also his heart and soul being poured onto the screen in quite epic fashion. In later years it became the inspiration of all the major epic film makers in Hollywood and around the world. Figures such as Cecil B. de Mille, Sergei Eisenstein, Erich Von Stroheim, Irving Thalberg, David O. Selznick, Jack Warner, John Ford, Akira Kurosawa, David Lean, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Peter Jackson, and even Walt Disney, would not have found the creative energy to make their own epics without the inspiration of Griffith's talent behind them. It is possibly the greatest film ever made simply because it inspired the next 90 years of movies themselves.

To that therefore, Intolerance is a testimony not necessarily to the hatred and intolerance through the world as intended, but a tribute to the vision and sincerity of Griffith himself.