Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) (and The Longest Day (1962))

    Pearl Harbour aflame in 1941, and below, as depicted in Tora! Tora! Tora!

History, they say, is written by the victors. This one dared to tell the story from both sides. As President Franklin D. Roosevelt said at the time, history will not remember who fired the first shot but who fired the last. The Japanese attack was at least (for him) a convenient means of how to get America into a war that was rapidly spiralling out of control in Europe and Asia, and for whom he had been at pains to try and supply his allies whilst keeping the pretence of neutrality. The one person who was most 'pleased' by the attack ultimately was Winston Churchill, who knew that America's entering WWII would help to turn the tide.

In an era when history is often sidelined when it comes to historical films, here is one from the time that scrupulously kept to the record, wherever possible. The truth as they also say, is often stranger than fiction.

To put Tora! Tora! Tora! into its proper context, one also has to mention (and sneakily add as an extra favourite film to this blog) its similarly epic predecessor The Longest Day, conceived by producer Daryl Zanuck as a tribute to those men and the whole operation of D-Day. As an operation very much involving several countries (on both sides), he chose to stage it from different perspectives from the American, French, British and German perspectives. For all of its idiosyncrasies (such as Rod Steiger and Richard Burton - right - doing walk-on parts), it remains the definitive telling of D-Day, from many of the original locations.

I may be in the minority here, but TTT  improves on The Longest Day by having more of a dramatic focus by telling the story from two specific perspectives, and also having the greater dramatic and historic power, particularly for Americans.

In order to re-create the story of the attack authentically, Zanuck likewise felt the need to use two simultaneous crews from Japan and America to tell the tale. From the American perspective, the reliable craftsman Richard Fleischer was hired to direct in rather pedestrian fashion, although the bulk of the major action that headlines the film is in his section, in addition to which he captures the escalating tension and unwitting incompetence of the American intelligence service that fails to act on fateful information that the Japanese attack was coming.

Maybe this why the film was generally critically panned at the time - it dared to commit the great Hollywood sin: depicting Americans as losers. Whilst The Longest Day had John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Henry Fonda and others triumphantly marching into Normandy, TTT is rather more muted in terms of star power: Joseph Cotten (above) is one of the few star names to pop up, the rest are excellent character actors of varying degrees of fame (similarly with the Japanese cast - Soh Yamamura was a supporting player in the acclaimed Tokyo Story.) This is where the history is much more important than the star-spotting. 

Time has been kinder to TTT however, and its screening on television was where I was first introduced to it. The film also tries to redress the balance over who in American eyes were to blame for the failure of the US to react effectively to the attack - in effect, the scapegoats: Admiral Kimmel (Martin Balsam) of the navy and General Short (Jason Robards) of the army, both stationed in Hawaii at the time.

One of many poignant images: the Japanese America farmers in Hawaii before the war itself is about to change the course of their lives forever.

The more skilful and more powerful piece of filmmaking however comes - as in the battle attack itself - from the Japanese angle. The two Japanese directors, Toshio Masuda and Kinji Fukasaku, capture the mood, the emotions and, in particular, the dignity of the Japanese Navy, pressured into going to war by the overzealous army and an ambitious Japanese Government, more influenced by the likes of General Tojo (Asao Uchida, left) than the Emperor Hirohito, accompanied also by a fine score for these scenes, by the American Jerry Goldsmith.

The most intriguing aspect of the Japanese half of the film is that it was originally to be directed (and shot - for just one week) by Akira Kurosawa - a legend in Japan for his autonomy, and unused to the foreign environment of working for an American film studio who called the shots more than he did. Twentieth Century Fox took the bold move of firing the great director. We can only speculate on how his style would have impacted had he been allowed the free artistic reign he was more accustomed to in his own country. In spite of Kurosawa's absence, the replacement directors do more than a creditable job - a reminder to largely ignorant English-speaking audiences of the depth of talent on offer in Japan.

The Zeroes take off - footage allegedly directed by the great Kurosawa

The showpiece of the film is the of course the raid itself, and the spectacular effects, both on and above ground - so much so that the footage was used for several subsequent WWII films (and even some documentaries which mistook it for the real archive.) The film also captures in semi-documentary fashion some of the ironies and authentic small true incidents, such as the hapless flying school instructor who suddenly found herself surrounded one morning by squadrons of Japanese planes, or the impact of the USS Arizona's explosion glancing even the Japanese planes that had destroyed her - in a similar semi-observational manner to A Night to Remember, with subtlety and no great fanfare, but quiet effect and power.

Like A Night to Remember, TTT itself also suffered the peculiar fate of a rather romanticised and trashy modern remake, directed by Michael Bay in 2001, about which the less said of Pearl Harbor, the better. It did at least serve to remind just what a quality product TTT was.

Over a quarter of a century after the first major attack on United States shores (if an island 2,000 miles away from the mainland can be considered on America's "doorstep"), its impact is still felt - a reaction of shock and revulsion among most Americans, that was reflected, once more, 70 years later, when the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington were attacked by Al Qaeda terrorists.

Martin Balsam and Soh Yamamura reflect the gravity of the event felt by both Navies - the prophetic quote at the end is alleged to have come from Yamamoto's diary.

Kafka (1991)

This comes under the category - of which there are many other candidates - of the "curiosity interest" film. Over the years that I've followed films and their development, news filters through of those in production which quickly become a "must see" in the mind's eye. For example, there was much anticipation and expectation when Francis Ford Coppola planned to make a faithful version of the original novel Dracula - the resulting film, entitled Bram Stoker's Dracula, betrayed the hint in the title that it was pretending to be a faithful version: the film had its admirers but they were more of Coppola's work than Bram Stoker's. Nevertheless, the expectation prior to the film was immense. There are other items in this page (Postcards from the Edge or Star Wars Episode I), which live up to their expectations, or others that do not.  

So it was too with Kafka, Steven Soderbergh's anticipated second film after the acclaimed Sex, Lies and Videotape that had won him the Palme D'Or at Cannes. The phrase "second film" seems to be something of a potential curse for successful filmmakers, especially in Hollywood: free of all constraints from the first film, second time around the director is a tried and tested "hot property" who can make whatever film he chooses that a grateful studio will entrust him with: John Sturges was successful enough with The Magnificent Seven to persuade United Artists to finance The Great Escape; George Lucas's American Graffiti was a big enough smash to persuade Alan Ladd Jnr to green-light the improbable Star Wars; Quentin Tarantino had made enough of a mark with Reservoir Dogs to be able to roll the dice even more audaciously with Pulp Fiction. Perhaps most notoriously, Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter gave him the power to make Heaven's Gate, whose ultimate failure caused an entire Hollywood studio to go out of business.

With Kafka therefore, Soderbergh was playing an equally dangerous game in taking something entirely removed from the style of his first film: a paranoia thriller in black and white, no less, in 1991. Up until then, only The Elephant Man in 1980 or Coppola's Rummble Fish in 1983, or other relatively obscure, arty films had dared to do this since the process became largely obsolete in the mid 1960s. In fairness, the only one who really managed to pull off the gimmick successfully was Steven Spielberg with Schindler's List.

Outside of commercial interests however, black and white still retains its magic and sense of mystery, particularly in a film such as this. Orson Welles once said that black and white was the only proper medium to convey the drama and the emotion of the human face: colour distracted and brought too much awareness of the pigmentation of the skin (all but his last three films were made in black and white). It is likewise, two of Orson's most famous films, The Trial and most particularly The Third Man, that served as a benchmark for Soderbergh. His cast was, likewise, a mixture of British, American and international faces, with the likes of Theresa Russell, Jeroen Krabbe, Joel Grey (almost as one critic put it, as if his MC from Cabaret was on a day job!), Armin Mueller-Stahl, Biran Glover, Ian Holm, and even veterans like Alec Guinness and Robert Flemyng lured to play supporting roles. The always treasured sight of Guinness in a film in his later career is a typically unexpected one from him (as the Chief Clerk), but full of wry, quiet humour amid suppressed menace in his two scenes with Kafka. 

In the title role, Soderbergh only ever had one  actor in mind: the tall but otherwise similarly slim, gawky and nervously handsome Jeremy Irons, who brings an intelligent yet clumsy and nervous tension to the role and the decaying, uncertain Bohemian atmosphere around him.

It is not a biopic of Kafka as such, but a semi-fantasy drama incorporating elements of Kafka's life and the settings of some of his stories (most particularly The Trial and The Castle). 

 
Things start to get creepy in the castle when the film suddenly switches over from mundane, atmospheric black-and-white, to in-your-face 'literal' colour (a la Wizard of Oz, although Powell and Pressburger reversed the process in A Matter of Life and Death from colour to b&w).

This perhaps is ultimately the film's main failing: once the sinister Dr. Murnau (a cheeky homage to the director of Nosferatu), is revealed in the flesh, all the implied terror becomes actual, and yet in the low-key presence of the talented Ian Holm, Murnau is less of a figure of fear that a would-be hack doctor with ideas above his station. The requisite chase scene in a (fantasy) film of this kind seems routine, before things return to the mundane and more comfortable black-and-white world of everyday Prague, after the colour interlude; Kafka has seen into the dark recesses of the Castle, and is depressingly content to stay in his own environment and write his stories, which turn out to have an even more vivid imagination than reality (as expected).

As such it is neither commercial entertainment or "arthouse" character observation: for some, it falls between two stools - which accounts for its relative obscurity, and the fact that I didn't get round to seeing it at the MGM Shaftesbury Avenue until two years later in 1993! I nonetheless found it a quirky, eye-catching experience, particularly with such an interesting cast, in such an old world environment.

I was lucky enough to visit Prague itself for the first time in 2017: it is the only one of the three great cultural Bohemian cities of Eastern Europe (alongside Berlin and Vienna) to have survived the ravages of history and still remained largely intact from the 19th century. The city itself is in many ways the star of Kafka, with its old, looming statues of the Saints watching over the characters like ghosts - two key locations are, of course, the giant castle (with the imposing Sternbersky Palace), and the original (and at the time, sole) bridge over the Vltava, the King Charles Bridge (named after the monarch under whose reign the bridge was designed and constructed.)

I recently watched Sex, Lies and Videotape for a second time to appreciate its virtues as a film - but I have seen bits of Kafka constantly in the intervening decades. Such a film has that curiosity value, and it's true that a lot more can be garnered from a director's "failed" film than from many of his successes.

Jeremy Irons on King Charles Bridge (also below)

Around the World in Eighty Days (1955)

Ironic, and yet perhaps appropriate, at the time of writing when the world is in shutdown from a pandemic, to cover a film that crosses the globe; appropriate because it allows audiences the experience of travelling the world, of a kind, from the benefit of their own cinema seat - or now their sofa at home on video.

"It's a wonderful world, if you'll only take the time to go around it!"

For the ultimate enduring success of the epic, we owe it to three principal gentlemen: firstly to its showmanlike New York producer Mike Todd - with a little creative inspiration from Jules Verne (who duly "drops" his book down from the heavens in Saul Bass's amusing title sequence): the novel is a fast-paced adventure yarn about a stuffy, enigmatic member of the London Reform Club, Phileas Fogg (very much the stereotypical English gentleman from a French perspective), who is suddenly dared into travelling around the world in 80 days - as boasted by modern transport in 1872. Fogg's sudden decision comes to the equal surprise of his new French manservant Passepartout, only recently thrust into the job after a visit to the London Employment Exchange to fill the new position of a "gentleman's gentleman."

This scene of Passepartout's recruitment is among the first of many witty vignettes which pepper throughout the film in between its epic journeys by road, rail, sea, and (via cinematic invention) by air, in a balloon.

No less a person than John Gielgud is the unfortunate predecessor to Passepartout's role, driven to distraction by Fogg's fastidiousness in requiring baths to be specific sizes, and his toast to be cooked at 23 degrees, no more, no less. "Extraordinary, how does one measure the temperature of toast?", asks Gielgud's employer, played by Noel Coward!

Coward was Todd's big catch: regarded then (and still now) as "The Master" of British theatre, he proved to be the hook that managed to get most of the British supporting cast into the film: Gielgud, and many others. That, together with Todd's own charm and dogged persuasiveness (and probably some form of lucrative reward for the actors), he managed to entice no less than 44 guest stars into the film, in "cameo" roles (an expression coined by Todd himself), and a suitable cosmopolitan bunch for a cinematic journey round the world - even if most of the cameos had a slight Hollywood bent.

Charles Boyer was among the 44 guest stars lured by Michael's Todd's money (and Phileas Fogg's)

The second key gentleman next to Todd himself, was his Passepartout in the form of the charismatic David Niven as Phileas Fogg. Niven was baying for the role, and he seems a natural choice today, but back in the 1950s he only occasionally merited leading man status. Samuel Goldwyn was once at pains in the 1940s to make him a new Hollywood leading man in the mould of Ronald Colman (who has a cameo in this film), but the stronger calling of duty to his country brought Niven back to Britain during World War II.

After the war his career consolidated but never took off. Around the World in Eighty Days was a grand showcase, for all the many players, of whom Niven was the most frequently seen throughout the film. The role surmises all his suave gentlemen he ever played, with an added flavour of English punctiliousness.

The third key and largely overlooked key figure in the success of Around the World in Eighty Days was the unassuming figure of director Michael Anderson. A production assistant and also brief actor (sparring once with John Mills in In Which We Serve), his film career prospered with The Dam Busters in 1954, now considered a classic (in spite of its naive special effects), and it impressed Michael Todd enough to replace original director John Farrow with Anderson - who, unlike Farrow, quickly accepted who the real boss of 80 Days was. This also however allowed Anderson to work with the key core of the movie, namely, the principal four participants on the long journey - Fogg, Passepartout, the princess (a miscast but pleasant Shirley MacLaine), and Inspector Fix (a gorgeous swansong by Robert Newton).

30 years after The General, Buster Keaton is still busy on the railways

I read the book first: the film is a surprisingly faithful adaptation, particularly in its depiction of London and of the novel's sudden twist ending. Television, being what it was in those days, could give only limited scope to the breadth of Todd's original epic. A video release restricted the picture to pan-and-scan square ratios, but commendably much of the humour still comes through. It took its time for widescreen TV to give the broad perspective of the Todd-AO canvas - and now in disc form, comes the film in as much of the original 1950s presentation style as could be presented.

It is very much a product of an era when movies were made primarily to entertain, and for the audience to have good time - in many ways, a form of cinematic circus, with lots of guests artistes, thrills and spills and laughs on the way. Other all-star adventures duly came along in its wake, such as Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad World, Monte Carlo or Bust, The Great Race, and others - until movies felt the need to grow up and offer less fluffy spectacle.

Around the World in Eighty Days had its exclusive London run in 1957 at the Astoria in Charing Cross Road 

Fail Safe (1964)

In the news recently it was revealed in 1983 a Soviet engineer actually had the foresight to prevent World War III, when he correctly surmised an attack by US missiles to be a computer error. Perhaps he had read the book Fail Safe as his guiding light - certainly my father had, in one gripping read, which Sidney Lumet makes into an equally gripping film.

The 1963 film version just happened to suffer the fate of being made the same year - and by the same studio, Columbia - as Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Kubrick's aforementioned film starring Peter Sellers was released first, and thus won the plaudits and the awards and a niche in cinematic history. Fail Safe, which followed it after a delayed release, is to my mind the much more effective film, particularly at depicting the escalating horror of its subject.

It's one of the curious ironies of modern culture that the same story tends to get told at the same time; whether through the general zeitgeist of the period, or perhaps that sneaky agents or writers got hold of other people's ideas and thrust them forward: also in the 1960s, there were two biopics of Jean Harlow; in 1994 the story of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral was told twice in Tombstone and also Wyatt Earp; in 1992 the Bicentenary of the discovery of the American continent was covered in two rather variable films about Christopher Columbus (with even one Carry On version!); in 1974 both Twentieth Century Fox and Warner Brothers had the story rights to books about tower blocks on fire, and took the unusual step of combining the two to make The Towering Inferno.

Certainly the nuclear menace was ever present through the 1950s and 60s - so it's understandable if writers and filmmakers got the same idea - and has sadly never really gone away, despite occasional peace accords and climbdowns amongst the more intelligent world leaders. Another curious similarity with Dr. Strangelove is the two films' curious fascination with sexual politics in a world where only a few men may survive. In Kubrick's film the theme is quite explicitly explored, and even in a more seriously minded film like Fail Safe, at a dinner party given by the oily Walter Matthau as Walter Groetescheler (a character roughly based on Henry Kissinger), lectures about the possibilities of survival during annihilation, and one of his glamorous guests (Nancy Berg) is briefly turned on by the idea. Groetescheler is less inclined, for all his sliminess however, and goes about his job, which is to consult the government and the Defence Department about tactics in the Ultimate War.

All the characters, indeed, are going about their everyday lives, which is perhaps what makes Fail Safe so much more compelling, and frightening. One of its other players in this game is Colonel Cassio (Fritz Weaver), a dutiful but edgy officer with family problems at home, underneath his more correct disciplinarian commanding officer General Bogan (Frank Overton). Likewise, the man who is given the job of mistakenly flying the US bomber towards Moscow (Edward Binns) is no gun-ho Slim Pickens type, but a regular fella who "likes" the personal touch.

The main thrust of the story is around General Warren Black (Dan O'Herlihy), suffering from a recurring nightmare involving a matador and the responsibility he holds as one of the key officers within the Pentagon.

As in Sidney Lumet's equally compelling Twelve Angry Men, each of these characters' true nature comes out the more they are pushed to the limit in the face of the horror of accidental nuclear war. What makes Fail Safe such a compelling and plausible scenario is the presence of Henry Fonda as the President - never a more dependable image of Presidential integrity, but even he is potentially outwitted by the mechanics of computers and two over-eager superpowers trying to outfox each other. Through a restrained budget where Lumet uses individual oppressive rooms rather than a generally wider canvas, President Fonda makes his red phone calls to his opposite number Moscow, who is represented only in translation form by a young Larry Hagman, which makes for compelling, taut black-and-white drama that Lumet in particular in the 60s was so good at.

The escalating tension and drama as the negotiations unfold, is the stuff that nightmares are made of. The closing message does little to reassure:

"THE PRODUCERS OF THIS FILM WISH TO STRESS THAT IT IS THE STATED POSITION OF THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENCE AND THE UNITED STATES AIR FORCE THAT A RIGIDLY ENFORCED SYSTEM OF SAFEGUARDS AND CONTROLS INSURE THAT OCCURRENCES SUCH AS THOSE DEPICTED IN THIS STORY CANNOT HAPPEN."

Field of Dreams (1989)

1989 was a vintage year for film - not quite the cinematic milestone as in 1939, 50 years before, but still pretty impressive - certainly with comparison to later decades where blockbusters have gradually taken over from the more thoughtful films. The likes of Dead Poets Society(qv), Parenthood, Born on the Fourth of July, Dead Calm, and the work of emerging talents like Steven Soderbergh (Sex Lies and Videotape) and Kenneth Branagh (with his new version of Henry V) came to the fore, and were as commercial and highly regarded in their day as the blockbusters; even the blockbusters themelves were pretty impressive and above average too, with the likes of Batman and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade filling cinemas that notable summer.

The "sleeper" hit of the year meanwhile covered slightly more humdrum but richly emotional subtexts. Baseball had re-entered into Hollywood's consciousness in the late 80s, with John Sayles' (no relation) Eight Men Out, and Kevin Costner as a baseball coach in Bull Durham: the former covered the "Black Socks" baseball scandal of the early 1920's, where noted baseball stars took bribes to contrive to fix the World Series. One of these, "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, was the subject of W.P. Kinsella's novel Shoeless Joe, about the lost era of baseball heroes whose legacy was tarnished by the Black Socks scandal, but as ghosts of the past were longing for the geater love of baseball itself.

I was frustrated from seeing Field of Dreams throughout 1989 - British distribution of American films in those days was often protracted, or in the case of films with the potentially limited appeal of baseball, never at all (often straight to video as with the excellent The Babe.) General release in the UK came in the late autumn of 1989 and drifted over into the 1990s - where I was watching a professional snooker match at Wembley Conference Centre between Willie Thorne and Dennis Taylor: Thorne was 4 frames to 1 ahead, and with extra time likely to spare for me to squeeze in a bonus visit to a London cinema. Taylor came back however to level the scores to 4 frames all, only to himself let it slip at the last, and for Willie to win the match 5-4, that he could have sealed two hours before.

I managed to get those two hours back however, to see Phil Alden Robinson's fine film at the Ipswich Film Theatre a few months later - always the ideal venue for thought-provoking films.

Robinson had been striving to make a film of Shoeless Joe for some years, and in spite of involvement in another baseball film that year, Kevin Costner was eager and willing to play the film's ideal everyman hero Ray Kinsella, who hears a voice in his Iowa cornfield:

"If you build it, he will come."

Ray himself, the most pragmatic and unsensationalist of individuals (as a photo montage prologue explains), deduces from this mysterious voice that it is something to do with a childhood hero of his late father's, Shoeless Joe. The impact of the message is strong enough to will Ray to build a baseball diamond within his farm (the actual set has now become a tourist attraction), with the help of his understanding wife Annie (Amy Madigan) and their intuitive young daughter Karin (Gaby Hoffman). One indeterminate evening - long after the field has been completed, and Ray has patiently warded off local naysayers including his brother-in-law (Timothy Busfield) - out pops the figure of Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta).

As a fantasy, Robinson plays it commendably straight, and it is this very pragmatic approach, to make the film as a normal drama with an element of the mystical, that makes Field of Dreams so quietly compelling. Shoeless Joe is a lost soul, one of the many lost souls in the American public's eyes since the Black Socks scandal. He and others from the lost era also magically return to the field to take the  chance to play their game once again.

Like Dead Poets Society, it is a film very much about idealism, but a more reflective, older idealism, less a field of dreams than of faded dreams. Many of the participants are idealists whose great moment passed them by, and they never really got their moment to shine.

It is not just for the dead, but also the living: Ray's voices reach out not only to distant baseball players, but their followers too. The essence of baseball, like with many sports, is as much about the fans as the players. One such is a distinguished writer, Thomas Mann (no connection with the German 20th century author of the same name), originally written in Kinsella's novel as John Steinbeck. Mann is, like Steinbeck, a reclusive individual since his heyday of the 1960s. In the imposing but wholesome presence of James Earl Jones, he is also rather embittered for it, a civil rights activist and philosopher from an era in a society that no longer cherishes his ideals. He is in avery way, a lost soul as much as the baseball players that he secretly admires from way back.

But he is also their chorus as well as their audience. The manner in which Jones's character is initially skeptical and even hostile to Ray's idealism then later won over through shared experience, is one of the most compelling characterisations of the film. Especially intriguing is the character's coda, where Shoeless Joe invites Mann himself back into the field. Ray, however, is not invited. It is one of the most benevolent and intriguing "death" scenes ever filmed.

Ray is resentful of being excluded from the field, but there are of course, excellent reasons for this. It is he who has first experienced the voices, and it is he - little though we realise until the end - to whom all the messages were actually intended for.

The film's values are therefore universal, not just for lovers of baseball. It also belies the notion that all ghosts are scary. One such is represented by the lost figure of Archibald "Moonlight" Graham - a player who was selected to play major league baseball but never got his chance to play and spent his time in the reserves dugout. Injury and fate contrived not to allow his big moment on the field, and he retires to become a country doctor until his death in 1972 - the year of The Godfather, as Robinson likes to point out - where Ray suddenly finds himself in a classic Twilight Zone-style moment walking along the street in the town of Burt Lancaster's Dr. Graham.

Graham is more benevolently resigned to his fate: saddened but not embittered. He leaves Ray to his own time and destiny - yet on the way back home, Ray picks up a young hitchhiker (Frank Whaley), by the name of Archie Graham.

In a film of few melodramatic momeents - but often melancholy, whimsically reflective ones - it's most dramatic moment is when little Karin falls down and nearly suffocates. Call the Doctor, Ray immediately thinks - and looks at young Archie.

It also turned to be Burt Lancaster's last cinematic farewell. A worthy final act.

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)

Amidst all the First World War centenary commemorations this year, comparatively little but necessary due attention must be given to this classic - the war film to end all war films about the War to End All Wars. It is still as potent today as it was back in the 1930s, and almost as provocative in its message as it was then.

The greater significance is that its perspective is from the losing side (if there are any real 'winners' here.) The novel, by Erich Maria Remarque, covered a group of enthusiastic Germanic boys fired up by the onset of war in 1914 to join the cause and fight for the Kaiser. They enlist and join the fight, but life on the Front is cruel and harsh and far from the crusade they expected, but through comradeship they struggle through the battles against the French, at a price.

Particularly potent is that this was made only a short time after the Great War itself, when dark memories were starting to fade away, but Germany itself was gripped by economic depression. The country was very much in a state of upheaval, and the Weimar Repubic tried (and failed) to deal with the problem. It led to the reactionary Nazi movement in time, and the subsequent burning of copies of Remarque's most famous anti-war book.

The novel was prestigious and powerful enough for Universal studios in Hollywood, U.S.A. to acquire it for a feature film adaptation, with all the technical expertise at their disposal - and also, back in those days, a strong adherence to trench life and the environment for those young German boys on the front.

Sometimes the effect of working on such a film as this can have a profound effect on an actor; for the casting of the central role, this most definitely happened to Lew Ayres. A young romantic lead with boy-next-door looks, his casting as Paul  Baumer led him to question the whole validity of warfare, just as his character does in the film. Particularly vivid is the scene where he is trapped in a shell hole in the middle of No Man's Land with a dead enemy French soldier, and realises the futility of what they are both doing in the name of their country.

It compelled Ayres enough to be declared a Conscientious Objector during World War II (although he was later allowed to join the Medical Corps - which was a similar case of life emulating art as he also played Dr. Kildare!), but his career was inevitably tarnished in the often cliquey world of Hollywood, when such attitudes during WWII were not fashionable.

Across the Atlantic, in 1930 the predictable violent reaction to the film in Nazi Germany led to sabotage and cinemas set ablaze, and pressure from Goebbels and the like to remove all "anti-German" sentiments. The subsequent sequel in 1937 The Road Back, also suffered by the political pressure imposed from Germany, and was heavily sanitised into something barely resembling the spirit of Remarque's follow-up novel. Its director, James Whale (who had directed Frankenstein and before that the British WWI play Journey's End), was never quite the same director again. It all seems highly incredible and unlikely to happen now, but recent evidence has shown how these feelings still unnecessarily come to the fore, so there are many lessons still to be learned.

My own memory of first watching All Quite on the Western Front as a child, is the unforgettable finale (not in the novel but a suitable coda) where Paul is the only one of his comrades left, and sees a small butterfly fluttering in the ground just beside his trench. Unfortunately, so too does a French sniper. When I saw this film again years later in 1991 (during 75th anniversary family commemorations of the war), a video release had inexplicably added grandiose music to the ending together with a heavily shortened edit of the film - this evidently, was one of the truncated versions of AQOTWF at the behest of the Nazis and butchered by a gullible Hollywood studio. It was only until many years later (in a restoration at the Curzon Soho), I was able to see the true, original dark ending in all its power, with no glorification, no music, just sobering respectful silence, as the sight of the soldiers looking back becomes a ghostly haunting memory.

In an era of Remembrance, here is the one war film that should be remembered most of all.

Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (1988)

For the genesis of this cult, I owe a certain debt to the late night ITV American-made programme Cinematractions  for being an early herald of the phenomenon of permanent teenage-inclined humour, popularised and satirised by Mike Myers in Wayne's World, but much more authentically portrayed here by Alex Winter, and Keanu Reeves.

This, for me, is Reeves's defining role and by far his most entertaining. He, as Edward Theodore Logan in his cheerfully non-intellectual way, is perfectly content to carry on playing noisy music and being himself, regardless of his complete lack of musical ability, or that of his chum William S. Preston - played with equal wacko gusto by Alex Winter.

There's a certain innocent charm to this generation of brainless Americans (George Washington - "the dollar bill guy" and "Born on President's Day"). Their happy ignorant bliss however is set to be torn apart due to their (not surprisingly) appalling school grades at history. Their unexpected ally in their quest to pass the subject, and save the future of their band "Wyld Stallion" (and the future of world peace!) comes from left field in the lugubrious figure of Rufus (American stand-up comedian George Carlin), sent as a time guardian from the future in a payphone booth (an obvious nod to Doctor Who's Tardis), giving Bill and Ted this device as their means to abduct various historical figures of note, in order to make this the greatest history report ever told.

The delight of this film is the unabashed way in which it allows historical figures to incorporate themselves into the lunacy without ever really compromising themselves as historical characters - Abraham Lincoln shouting "Party On Dudes!" stretches my imagination personally, but other than that I'm quite convinced by the notion of Genghis Khan rampaging through a department store full of clothes dummies, and of Beethoven jamming to Bon Jovi tunes. The one who seems to enjoy himself most is Napoleon Bonaparte (Terry Camilleri); some stock footage from Waterloo (produced by Executive Producer Dino De Laurentiis) comes in handy, before he is suddenly transported from the Austrian battlefield, and though he may not triumph at ten-pin bowling, his finest hour comes along the water slides ("Waterlubes"!) of San Dimas.

I confess, I haven't got round to seeing the sequel, Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey. Few films rarely deserve sequels (even the award-winning The Godfather Part II didn't completely pass muster.) This was however, even wackier than the original, if such a thing could be possible, with B and T dying and going into hell but having to challenge Death (just like the one in The Seventh Seal) to a game of - not chess - but Battleship, and even Twister.

I sometimes wonder if Alex Winter must be thinking: if only...?

30 years later however, Keanu Reeves may be considering going back to what he was best at.