The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

On a wet September evening, or thereabouts (research reveals it to have been sometime after the first week in July) in 1980, my father and I - once again - headed out to see the much anticipated sequel to STAR WARS (see May 27th blog) at the Odeon Colchester. It was with a certain amount of excited anticipation, and also slightly idle curiosity - for I already knew most of the plot of this film: "Star Wars 2" as it became known in the media up until the Spring of 1979. Little did I realise at the time that what I was actually seeing was in effect "Star Wars 5", and the central story of a nine film saga.

Making our way with some difficulty through the wet weather, we also passed the ABC in St. John's Street (then still functioning as a cinema) and continued on eventually into Crouch Street to see the film, but had arrived rather later than planned, after the film had already started. This however, was in the dying days of roving performance times, when latecomers could enter the cinema and stay for the next screening. When Dad and I stumbled into the darkened Screen One therefore, it was to the sight of Han Solo, Princess Leia, Chewbacca and See-Threepio crowded inside the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon, nestled within a cave inside an asteroid which is "not entirely stable!"

In honour of that first occasion therefore, I will tell the story from that point onwards, then regress to the beginning.

Moments after settling down into our seats, we are taken from the mysterious asteroid cave to a semi-submerged X-wing fighter on the swamp planet of Dagobah, where Luke Skywalker emerges to begin his training as a Jedi knight, in the most seemingly unlikely of places, and the most seemingly unlikely of Jedi Masters: the initially comical and eccentric but quickly preachy and philosophical midget Yoda.

The original conception of Yoda (as seen in the original Marvel Comics adaptation), prior to eleventh hour amendment by George Lucas and Stuart Freeborn.

I will come to the defence of Yoda here, against my own later opinion of the character as much as anything. George Lucas was thrown into something of a dilemma during the making of Star Wars with the fate of Luke's previous mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi. With the character due to train Luke in the ways of the Force (in the later sequels), Kenobi had barely anything to do after a certain point in the plot, so Lucas took the audacious move of killing the character off (at the hand of Darth Vader), a decision which understandably upset Sir Alec Guinness at the time, but with hindsight it actually helped to make his character all the more memorable.

However, come The Empire Strikes Back, Lucas needed to create a new Jedi Master to teach Luke, and thanks to the combined genius of Stuart Freeborn and Frank Oz, the character of Yoda (a genuine original that Lucas has since slightly disparagingly referred to as "just a puppet") was brought to life, and perfectly suited the ethereal nature of both the character and the world of Dagobah itself. In the hands of Buddhist-leaning Irvin Kershner, Dagobah could almost be taken for a state of mind rather than an actual place, such is the mysticism. Subsequent attempts (in the Star Wars prequels) to take Yoda out of his native habitat and to also "quantify" the Force have been, in my view, misguided, when the mysticism should remain intact. The very elusiveness of the Force is one of the secrets of the whole success of the Star Wars saga.

The Jedi training scenes on Yoda may appear sluggish (there were apparently many other scenes which were cut - see right), but they are usefully counterbalanced by the continuing chase of the Millennium Falcon by the Empire, having evaded their clutches by the most sneaky of methods. Just when he thinks he has led them off the trail, Han Solo takes his friends over to the sanctuary of Cloud City on Bespin, where an old friend is in charge. Unbeknownst to them however, a bounty hunter knows some of Solo's tricks, and pursues the Falcon on its journey to Bespin: Boba Fett.

Fett was a character introduced quite early in 1978 to Star Wars fans (first seen in the one-off "Star Wars Holiday Special"), and from initial appearances I perceived him to be one of the good guys. This soon becomes patently not the case, but for whatever reason, he has become quite a cult figure among fans, more so in some ways than Darth Vader.

The old friend of Solo's meanwhile, is the Cloud City administrator, Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams), more in truth a gambler and smuggler - and a bit of a charmer with the ladies - than a "responsible leader", and intended by George Lucas as an "earlier" version of Han. Indeed, Billy Dee Williams was one of those who originally tested for the role of Han Solo in Star Wars.

One element that Calrissian is also not beyond is deception, and before our heroes know it, C-3PO is dismantled into several pieces by stormtroopers, and our heroes are finally caught by Darth Vader, who has been led on to the trail by...Boba Fett.

Lando's reasons meanwhile for "betraying" Solo have been purely mercenary, of course, but it's a deal which he soon begins to regret, and not just because of the involvement of Boba Fett, or the added betrayal of some boy named Skywalker. The two disparate elements in the story therefore suddenly come together in exciting fashion, and despite the dissuasion of both Yoda and the "ghost" of Ben Kenobi (a fleetingly seen but always memorable Alec Guinness), Luke deserts his Jedi training on Dagobah to rescue his friends, whom he perceives to be in danger. But - ahah - this is all Vader's trick, to lure Luke towards him.

And we realise by the end of the film just why Vader is so interested in young Skywalker, in a plot twist that few if anyone could have guessed.

How I first learned of the surprising twist in the tale.

Before that however, Han Solo is "tested" for carbon freezing so that "the Emperor's prize" can also go through a similar fate. The scene in the carbon freezing chamber I find rather sluggish and melodramatic, but it brings out the best in Harrison Ford. Famous for being allowed to improvise much of his dialogue in the Star Wars (and subsequent) films, he is at his most inventive in The Empire Strikes Back, with he and director Kershner changing the emphasis from Leia being emotionally stronger than Solo, to the other way round. There were those - Lucas in particular - who were nervous about the use of Ford's "I know" ad lib, as it was perceived to be unintentionally comical, but on previews of the film the only laugh it received was a laugh of recognition. It is for me, one of Harrison Ford's best and most underrated performances - up there on a par with Mosquito Coast and his Oscar-nominated performance in Witness - where he makes the character of Han Solo his own - and receives a semi-martyr's death for good measure, before the film's main climax.

If Ford takes most of the acting honours - closely followed by the always excellent Mark Hamill and Frank Oz - then in terms of characters the film belongs to Darth Vader, turning a character from what in the first film was something of a hatchet man for both the Emperor and Grand Moff Tarkin, into a black avenging angel of doom - and much more than that, we later realise.

The scene where he chops Luke's hand off (quite carefully edited for a "U" certificate film) and then tries - and fails - to turn Luke to the dark side, watching his own son fall down a massive chasm on Cloud City, has some of the poignancy for me of the end scene of King Kong, where you felt sorry for the monster in spite of everything.

We are nonetheless still on Luke's side as he tumbles down to the bottom of Cloud City and hangs - on one hand - to a slender weather vane, and appeals to Ben Kenobi for help. But Ben "cannot interfere", especially where family matters are concerned, so Luke uses the Force to turn to someone closer to home - hinting at a plot twist later to be revealed in Return of the Jedi.

Thus a curious love triangle reaches its closure, as Luke, in love with Leia from the beginning, is rescued by her - reversing the pattern set in Star Wars - but her heart now belongs to Han Solo, whom they both resolve to rescue, as too does Lando Calrissian and, of course, Chewbacca. The film ends therefore, beautifully poised with our surviving heroes severely humbled but having reached the sanctuary of the Rebel fleet, and looking out from the edge of the galaxy, to an uncertain but hopeful future.

Roll credits. End of film.

We sit sheepishly in Screen One, hoping that the Odeon staff will let us stay in the cinema for the next screening that evening, and after one audience has rolled out and another rolled in, we sit through the familiar "Rank Screen Advertising", and the trailers for some other fantasy films (none which I remember now), before in due course, the second screening is under way.

And so it begins.

Opening in a very similar fashion to Star Wars, a single Imperial destroyer comes into view, but this time with several Imperial pods flying out of the cruiser like angry wasps, to the various planets littered all over the galaxy, in search of the elusive new rebel base. One such vessel flies fortuitously onto the sixth planet of the Hoth system, out of which pops a sinister looking probe droid which floats across the snow like a fly, in a skillful visual effect created by the newly named Industrial Light and Magic.

Before Luke Skywalker - the boy himself - can check the status of the "meteorite", an angry snow creature assaults both him and the "Tauntaun" he is riding. This scene was apparently filmed as a means to explain the reason for Luke's badly scarred face - as Mark Hamill himself suffered facial injuries in a car crash in 1978, after the making of Star Wars.

Han Solo meanwhile, unlike Luke, has successfully returned from snow patrol duty, and emerges through the main rebel hangar (filmed on the then huge new "Star Wars Stage" at Elstree) past his wookiee co-pilot Chewbacca who is trying to fix a flagging Millennium Falcon, to tell the base commander, General Rieekan (Bruce Boa) that he has to leave to pay off an old debt to Jabba the Hutt - still unpaid since the first film. Listening in on this conversation, none too pleased at Solo's decision, is Princess Leia Organa, for whom clearly something has sparked between her and Solo in the intervening time, no matter how prickly.

Who will she choose? Luke - in a forbidden (by George Lucas) romantic scene...

...or Han?

Before the romantic complications can be sorted out however, Luke is rescued out of the snow by Han, and once these slightly sluggish opening scenes on Hoth are done with, we get to the nitty-gritty of the story of the story, when the aforementioned probe droid is disintegrated (by self-destruction) to just a fragment, and the alerting signal to the Imperial fleet is all the proof that Darth Vader needs that the Rebel Alliance, and Luke Skywalker, is there.

So the resulting impressive battle in the snow with giant evil Trojan Horse-style Imperial Walkers, was actually at the end for me, rather than the beginning - which probably helped - followed soon afterwards by a thrilling asteroid field chase, after the crew of the Millennium Falcon discover to their shock that the ship's trademark lightspeed is faulty! Using his wits and his cunning, Han Solo navigates the Falcon through a Grand Canyon-like gorge to evade the dogged Imperial TIE fighters, and finds temporary refuge in a mysterious "cave"...

... which as they say, is where we came in.

Mischievously, I watched a few minutes extra, and really wanted to see the rest of the film over again, but Dad eventually persuaded me out of the cinema.

On the way back home (by which time the rain had eased off) that night, I told my father of the various imaginative ideas I'd had for sequels ever since Star Wars first set me buzzing in 1978 - including one where I imagined a 9-year old (modelled on myself of course) befriending Princess Leia and helping the heroes to defeat Darth Vader. In later years I thought this to be just childish whimsy - or was it? Little did I expect that 27 years later, another Star Wars film would indeed feature a 9-year old as its pivotal hero.

So after all the anticipation, and indeed all the euphoria after the first film, the new follow-up in the "continuing" saga was enthralling, quite dark, and with some unexpected plot developments. But is also, on reflection, a very sluggish film, deliberately so at times, trying to focus on characters and philosophy rather than plot, and characters bicker with each other - C-3PO is reduced to a figure of ridicule, and Carrie Fisher's Princess Leia is still spiky and feisty but also petulant, rarely feminine or princess-like, and even reduced on a couple of occasions to a screaming heroine. Above all, the Empire strikes back indeed, with a vengeance, but it is not as much FUN as Star Wars.

So at the time for me, the excitement of the Star Wars whirlwind had blown its full course. Perhaps on reflection I wasn't entirely happy with the way things were mapping out for the characters; I certainly had always envisaged Luke Skywalker as Princess Leia's true love rather than Han Solo, and to see the way things were going was secretly disappointing - although that particular romantic triangle was later resolved in rather ingenious fashion.

Come 1980 however, my childhood days in Aylesbury were over, and rehabilitated in Essex, there came a new distraction just round the corner: football. Colchester United and in particular, Ipswich Town's successful UEFA Cup winning season in 1980/81, gave me another popular culture hook to latch on to, away from the cinema, and galaxies, far, far away.

It was a fashion which, by and large, did not swing back the other way until seven years later, when I got round to seeing Return of the Jedi.

With the director of the excellent first Star Wars sequel, the venerable Irvin Kershner.

Way Out West (1937)

A word is overdue now for my favourite comedy double act. There are so many of Laurel and Hardy's films that I love to watch: this one just happens to be the film that I enjoy the most consistently.


Apart from anything else, this is a darn good comedy Western, one of the best of its kind, that utilises the appeal of "the boys" to maximum effect. Their comedy routines honed to perfection, combined with an above average plot, make for magic entertainment. In the corrupt town (is there any other kind in the Wild West?) of Brushwood Gulch, hard-working Mary Roberts (Rosina Lawrence) slaves away Cinderella-like at the saloon of her irascible landlord and legal guardian Mickey Finn, and his wife and star attraction Lola Marcel, played with villainous relish by James Finlayson and Sharon Lynne. But unbeknownst to Mary, her gold prospecting father has recently died, and two unlikely knights on white chargers (or more accurately, a single mule) are riding into town to present her with the valuable inheritance of her late father's goldmine.

The villains alas, get word of the loot first, thanks to the incompetent innocence of Stan:

"Yeah, you see it's private. Her father died and left her a goldmine, and we're not supposed to tell anybody but her..."

.. and some skillful acting on the part of Lola as "Mary":

LOLA ("sobbing"): "Tell me. Tell me about my dear, dear Daddy. Is it true that he's dead?

STAN: Well we hope he is, they buried him!

LOLA: Oh, it can't be! What did he die of?

STAN: I think he died of a Tuesday, or was it a Wednesday...?"

The deception complete - in spite of Stan's unwitting resistance - the boys are packed off having delivered the deed, until they meet up with the real Mary. Ollie, ever the chivalrous one, marches up to the villains' lair and demands the deed back, or Stan "will eat his hat." So in they march, knocking on the door, and then when the door opens, he knocks accidentally on Finn's head:

OLLIE: (to Finn) "Out of my way, you snake in the grass!

STAN: You Toad in the Hole!"


The resulting chase round the saloon culminates in a hilarious scene in which Lola traps Stan in her boudoir (lucky chap) and burrows into his clothes to grab the deed back, and the ticklish Stan is paralysed with laughter. Even Sharon Lynne can't conceal the grin from her face, as you'll notice if you watch the scene.
"Just in the nick of time" comes the Sheriff, whom unfortunately the boys have already had a run-in with over sharing a stagecoach with the Sheriff's wife (Vivien Oakland) - and quick as you know, the boys are racing out of town - "you can't see them for dust!"
But fear ye not, the boys are back - after Ollie has first of all insisted than Stan carry out his pledge to eat his hat - with salt added for flavouring! Returning late that night to Brushwood Gulch, they sneak in to rescue the deed - and Mary - even in spite of being trapped in a piano (that Finlayson plays!), and Ollie having his neck twisted around 360 degrees (oddly pre-dating a similar scene in The Exorcist.)
Riding out of town to pastures new, the three triumphantly make their way home to the town where Mary was born, "way down South." Ollie declares that he is from the South too, as does Stan - "the South of London...and some good old fish 'n'chips!" The film ends with a running gag, as they march singing merrily across the river, until Ollie once again finds the deep end and takes a plunge!
And in the midst of this joyous and all too short 66 minutes, come two famous song and dance numbers, The Shoe Shuffle, and The Trail of the Lonesome Pine - a song which was popular enough to become a top ten single in its own right. The voices that Stan adopts when he switches from heavy bass to soprano, were actually the voices of co-stars Chill Wills, and Rosina Lawrence.

The Shorts

I realise that I've unfairly restricted this blogpage largely to "feature" films, so this is an ideal opportunity to also mention some of the classic Laurel and Hardy short films that they made in the 1920s and 30s, and were in many ways, their metier.
I can remember laughing uncontrollably when I saw Beau Chumps (the British title for Beau Hunks) on TV when I was younger, a spoof of Foreign Legion films - as much as Way Out West was a spoof of Westerns - where the boys foil a raid by the Arab armies by throwing drawing pins on the ground under their bare feet! Another amusing running gag was how everyone in the legion - including Ollie, and even the commander of the outpost (Charles Middleton - best known as "Ming the Merciless") has ended up there because of their one-time sweetheart, "Jeanie Weenie" - a pre-megastardom Jean Harlow, no less.
The most famous of their comedy shorts is probably The Music Box, an Oscar winner (the very first in that category) with the boys hauling a musical piano up a large flight of steps (that still stand today in suburban Los Angeles), and brilliantly finding ways to climb up the hill and then come tumbling straight back down again! As in Way Out West, there is also a pleasant little song and dance number, to the tune of the musical piano, naturally.
One of the best examples of their endearing antipathy with James Finlayson, is Big Business (perhaps the best of their silent films), where the boys are Christmas tree sellers - in June - and Finn is naturally an unwilling customer. The boys will not take no for an answer however, and Finn - unfortunately for him - does not know how to reject them politely. The disagreement escalates into a slapstick war which half demolishes both the boys' car and Finn's house, and in due course embroils the local policeman (Tiny Sandford), and ends with the four of them in a fit of mutual weeping - while the audience is weeping with laughter.
Stan and Ollie are in dungarees again in Dirty Work - a title with a double meaning, as the boys are chimney sweeps at the house of a mad scientist, who has dabbled in a formula for rejuvenation. At the end Ollie overdoses on the formula and turns into a chimpanzee - complete with bowler hat! (Was this where they got the idea for the PG Tips ads I wonder?) Their interaction in this short is particularly engaging. "I have nothing to say!" is Ollie's frequent response to the various indignities heaped upon him by Stan - not quite as distinctive as "Here's another fine mess..." perhaps, but just as funny.

Helpmates is a brilliantly funny black comedy, as Ollie tries to clean up after a wild party, before his dragon of a wife comes home. In one tour de force sequence, he slips on a carpet sweeper and crashes into the dishes that Stan has just cleaned, then accidentally catches his arm on a string which unleashes the soot from the stove and covers him! He then accidentally washes his hands with butter instead of soap, and to top it all, Stan gets a towel from the cupboard, but out falls a tin of flour onto Ollie's head, transforming him from a Minstrel into a ghost!
By the end of the film, Ollie has returned - alone - with a black eye, and Stan has rendered the house to ashes - "I guess there's nothing else I can do.", he says!

Legacy

I believe the secret of their appeal was very much how they seemed to be on the same level as their audience. They never spoke down to them. Chaplin had a brilliant common touch with his Tramp characterisation, but had a tendency to preach with his comedy, once his power and his success increased. Buster Keaton was technically brilliant, but didn't quite have that magic of engaging his character with the audience, the way that especially Oliver Hardy did with his frequent despairing looks to camera. Laurel and Hardy had just the perfect mix, and like so many successful double acts, it was one of those happy coincidences that just happened to come together and create a unique style, that has never really been surpassed.
Stan Laurel was of course, the prime mover in many of these classic comedies. He was actually already semi-retired as a comedy actor, and working largely behind the camera at the Hal Roach Studio before his official teaming with "Babe" Hardy. Many of their short films in fact, are not film scripts as such, but simple synopses around which they planned their own comedy routines, and then performed them in front of camera. Peter Cushing remembers a time when, during the making of A Chump at Oxford (below), the boys have a scene where they are tricked into walking through a maze, and naturally get lost. The scene was originally shot with doubles in long shot, but both Stan and Babe felt it needed themselves to do the scene, adapting it to their own unique style, an example of their model professionalism which they maintained throughout their 40-year careers.

A Chump at Oxford (1940). Standing in the middle with fake moustache: a young Peter Cushing.

It's sad to reflect that the time of Way Out West was actually at the end of a renaissance of fine comedy for Laurel and Hardy. This was the second and last of two official "Stan Laurel Productions" which were markedly slicker and more professionally made than many of their other films, and refuted the notion that LandH were only good in short films. But the golden run was brief.
For whatever reason - though their popularity remained - the feature films which they had successfully (and gradually) adjusted to from shorts, were to go by the wayside quite quickly, and contracts were negotiated for them away from Hal Roach, to other studios such as Twentieth Century Fox, who just did not understand the way Laurel and Hardy ticked.
But when watching Way Out West, time and time again, I defy anyone not to be engaged and feeling better after the experience. This, as I say, was their appeal. Other comedians made you laugh: these two made you laugh and also made you feel like you really knew them at the same time.

The Seventh Seal (1957)

A fitting tribute to the late Ingmar Bergman, whose death was much reported in the media recently, and for whom mortality was his favourite subject. This film of course - probably his most famous - deals with it in spades, but it's also about the virtue and strength of life - in all its quirky and various forms.

It's also about the uncertainties of faith, the keynote being whether or not redemption will be found in the afterlife, if it exists at all. A servant (Gunnar Bjornstrand) who potters around in the film like a wiser version of Baldrick, often represents this more cynical yet amusingly caustic side.

The period of the story is not specifically referred to, but can roughly be assumed to be the 14th century, the time of the Black Death. The characters have a splendidly allegorical feel to them which is never overplayed, making them much more real and believable as a result. Read into them what you will: the main character is Antonius Bloch, played by Max Von Sydow, a knight returning from the Crusades, and on something of an idealogical mission, both before and after his adventures; in some ways this predates Von Sydow's casting as Jesus in The Greatest Story Ever Told, and his later very successful role as The Exorcist.


Bloch also has a certain amount of Hamlet-like stature and gallant uncertainty about him - one of several Shakespeare influences in Bergman's tale. There is also a travelling theatrical troupe heading towards Elsinore (but warned off from going there!), headed mostly by a young couple named "Mia" (Bergman regular Bibi Andersson) and "Jof" (Nils Poppe) - and of course, they have a newly born child (by immaculate conception?) whom they steer through the wilderness whilst others are dying all around - for good measure, Jof also sees a vision of the Virgin Mary helping baby Jesus (we assume) to take his first steps. Other characters are victims of the time; suspected witches, blamed for the spreading of the plague, or temptresses, led by - or indeed leading - equally frustrated men astray.

And then there is Death of course, played memorably by Bengt Ekerot, and his game of chess with Antonius Bloch: a scene much imitated since - directly sent up in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, and even popping up in Last Action Hero - but the character, for all its over-familiarity nowadays, is still a very scary and effective image, resonant in so many artistic forms over the centuries, from Dickens' Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, to the Emperor in Return of the Jedi. In most of these cases, Death is an omnipresent, sinister, yet oddly blank figure, and portrayed here with a brilliantly simple but effective chalk-white face covered with a sinister black cloak. Much of Bergman's film is photographed in this haunting black-or-white style - if ever a film was suited to monochrome, it is The Seventh Seal.

Other quirky scenes seem to belie the notion that Bergman is a "Heavy" director. The subject is certainly a dark one, but that does not mean that his films are without amusing moments. There is one blackly comic moment where a travelling actor, discovered in an affair with a blacksmith's wife, decides to "act" his own death in order to fool the blacksmith, and then hides up in a tree, only to find Death walking right behind him with a saw, in order to chop the tree down!

I first saw the film in its entirety on video in the autumn of 1999, a suitably appropriate time, with lots of foreboding about apocalyptic "Millennium Bug" threats leading up to 2000. Seeing it again just recently at the Norwich Playhouse (the temporary stand-in venue for Cinema City during redevelopment), the film seems just as relevant today, and has lost none of its potency 50 years after it was made.

One of the most famous moments from the film is at the end, when "the seventh seal" (referred to in the Book of Revelation) is opened, and Heaven was silent "for half an hour" - or in this case, the six figures who face Death, as he leads them up the hill (improvised by Bergman with seven volunteers in the distance instead of the original actors) to the dance of death: the knight, his wife, his servant, the blacksmith and his wife, and a strangely mute girl (Gunnel Lindblom) who has just one line in the entire film, but quite a telling one.

Jof sees this vision of the seven of them in the distance, but his wife Mia gently dismisses it as another one of his "visions" (he has also "seen" the game of chess itself) as they walk off into the pleasant morning sunshine, seemingly the only people (together with the baby) who have survived the cataclysm overnight, and reaffirming hope for the human race.

Bergman leaves the audience to make up their own minds about its Christian symbolism. The only certainty in the story - and in life - is death. So beyond that, is there, as Bloch wonders, true salvation in life after death? Or is it all just illusion and fakery?

If the life thereafter and dreams of Heaven and Hell are just illusions of whimsical fantasy, and not scientific reality, then as Orson Welles once said (in the last film he directed F for Fake): "go on singing."

When Ingmar Bergman passed away on July 30th this year, I hope there were angels singing for him up in Heaven, and even if there weren't, there were still plenty down here on Earth to sing for him anyway.

Henry V (1944)

"Once more unto the breach dear friends, once more, or close the wall up with our English dead!" Never was the cry more fittingly made in 1944, when Britain and her allies were preparing to open up the long awaited second front against the Germans in World War II. As part of this feverish period of anticipation prior to D-Day, someone in Government circles proposed the idea to Laurence Olivier that he should make a film of Shakespeare's Henry V, in order to promote the cause of the crusading British and Americans into Europe (as well as a tribute to "the few" who fought the Battle of Britain), and also provide some excellent propaganda to bite back at the Germans, who had been making their own escapist adventures with a political message during this time.

Olivier's opportunity was a golden one, and he took it with both hands, and although his resources were often enforcibly restricted because of the war situation, he was able not only to make a richly satisfying colourful adventure, but also one of the most definitive adaptations of Shakespeare on screen.

The opening is beautifully evocative, and owes a minor debt of inspiration to the films of Powell and Pressburger, as a single billing sheet flutters in the blue sky before splashing broadly across the screen to display the title not of the film - in the conventional sense - but of the production as presented in the Globe Theatre in 1600.

There then follows what by today's standards is a horribly obvious model shot, of London in Shakespeare's time - a far cry from what it was to cinemagoing audiences of 1944. Perhaps this was Olivier's point, to present a "staged" version of a London long since gone but much cherished, and a glimpse into the wider world of what we were fighting for once peace finally came. The idea of restoring the Globe Theatre (as dreamed up by Sam Wanamaker in the 1980s) was a very distant thought back in those days, so to actually stage a presentation of the play in its original environment was entertaining and insightful; entertaining in the sense that it allowed for some quite funny Brechtian moments where the actor playing the Bishop of Ely (Robert Helpmann) mixes up the papers with the correct lines for the Archbishop of Canterbury (Felix Aylmer) to read from, and various other moments, such as the rain falling down on the audience standing in the middle of the "wooden O".

Olivier's own entrance onto the stage as King Henry is prefaced by a nervous little cough he gives backstage before entering, another delightfully simple but innovative touch. As the camera eventually pans away from the stagy appearance of the Globe Theatre, Leslie Banks's Chorus takes us into the more "realistic" realms of the outdoors, where the fleet assembles for the invasion, then onto France itself, and the Battle of Agincourt.

As is fairly well known, Olivier did not have the safe resources to film the stirring battle scenes in Britain, so the production switched to Ireland. Here, with the use of only a hundred or so extras on horseback made to look like thousands (an ironic contrast to Richard III which managed to make a thousand extras look like a few hundred!), together with some fine camera tracking work by Robert Krasker and a stirring score by William Walton, he was able to create one of the great battle charges in world cinema, with an especially evocative visual effect of hundreds of English arrows streaming into the air to fall down upon the marauding French forces.

The acting (from quite an impressive cast) is, I have to say, a little "Shakespearean" and grand, as though most of the actors are treating it like theatre instead of a film set. The novice movie director Olivier clearly felt this was more in keeping with the style of the film he wanted to make. His own speeches as the King are suitably "big", with the occasional softer inflection (that he'd learned from William Wyler when playing Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights) in some of the character's soliloquies, as well as in his closing scene with Princess Katherine, played by a young Renee Asherson, who gives one of the film's more subtle and refreshing performances. The other performance of note in the film is that of the great Robert Newton (as Pistol), over the top as usual, but his style of ham acting was often the exception to the rule that transcended both cinema and theatre. I remember particularly him as a terrifying Bill Sykes in David Lean's version of Oliver Twist. Alcoholism cut his career short in 1956, when he should be better remembered than he is.

The rest of the cast is impressive indeed, for its time (those who were available and not on active service): Leslie Banks, Emlyn Williams, Niall MacGinnis, Felix Aylmer, a very young George Cole, and special mention I give for John Laurie, always convincing in whatever role he plays, whether in Shakespeare or Dad's Army.

The film has recently been restored in a gleamingly colourful new print, and is well worth catching both for its visual and musical impact - Olivier rightly gives William Walton major credit at the end. This was also the first in a triumphant series of Shakespeare films that Olivier was to go on and make, of which Hamlet (1948) won an Oscar, with another excellent cast and a fine William Walton score, and then Richard III (1955), which not only allowed Olivier to put one of his greatest characterisations onto film, but also paired him with his two great fellow acting knights, John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson.

The Remake

In 1989 Kenneth Branagh had the audacity to make his own adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry V, and it's worth noting here for some of the similarities as well as the differences to the 1944 original, to demonstrate what Olivier left out.

This version also had a stirring score (by Patrick Doyle) and an all-star cast, with Branagh himself directing and taking the lead role, as Olivier had. But this was a much grittier, more "realistic" film, pointing up the anti-war elements over 40 years after the end of World War II, that suited modern audience tastes better. Certain scenes such as the treachery of three knights, and the execution of Bardolph (Richard Briers), not featured in the original, were included in Branagh's film, demonstrating that Shakespeare can be adapted in all sorts of ways, suiting the differing moods of whatever time the play happens to be performed, be it today in war-torn Iraq, or back in war-torn Europe in 1944.

But Laurence Olivier's version still has that marvellous score, a wonderfully colourful look, and that opening and closing model shot of Old London, as well as all the terrific action.

The Mission (1986)

Here is a film that comes under that rare category, the school visit to the cinema.

I say rare because nowadays in the era of DVD it is so much easier to see the latest film within just a matter of months of its release. Even then, back in 1987, such a thing was not uncommon: I can remember seeing Roland Joffe's previous film The Killing Fields on video in a classroom with the rest of the 4th Year in R.E. class. Then on wetter days, when most of the school were confined to the main hall instead of the playground at lunchtime, we would watch on video such (very) variable entertainment as Ghostbusters, Tron, The Toy, or The Goonies.

But to see The Mission at the Odeon Colchester was, as I say, something of a novelty. Significantly for me, it was also my first visit to the cinema to see any kind of film in 6 years or more.

Cinema in those days for me was very much on the back burner. Before The Mission, the only kind of films I had ever seen or taken an interest in were largely "fantasy" oriented: Star Wars, Disney, etc. At home I remember my family also liked to keep up a healthy collection of war films recorded off the telly, using the relatively new medium of video.

At first, when I was told we were going to see "The Mission", I thought I would have to suffer listening to a pop group of some kind, which I had heard fellow pupils (to call them "friends" would be a misnomer) talking about, chiding each other about their favourite pop groups as if they were football teams competing against one another. Adolescent years at school were, as they are for most of us, slightly confusing, painful and revealing years in which one's sense of identity is eventually forged, and shyness got the better of me at St. Benedict's.

To see a "serious" film therefore, set on our own planet in a non-fantasy and largely mature fashion, was something of a breakthrough, as well as a welcome escape from the everyday stresses of school life. Before the film began we trotted our way in, some of the kids threw sweets at the screen before the start of the show, and we sat down to watch some of the trailers and ads - which I remember included one for a Harrison Ford film, The Mosquito Coast. I found a seat out of the way of most other people to the side - a trend I have tended to lean towards ever since.

The main feature film which duly followed that afternoon wasn't perhaps the greatest film to bowl me over, but there were nonetheless certain indelible impressions that stayed with me.


The strongest one I suppose, is the image of those waterfalls, which dominate the screen in the opening titles. Indeed, the sight of a martyred missionary priest being tied to a crucifix and sent over the edge to his death had a powerful enough resonance for it to adorn the film's poster (see above). The first, exquisitely beautiful sight of these waterfalls was like being transported to another world, VERY far removed from the Odeon Screen 3.

The locations were in deepest South America, still under threat from outside forces even at the time of filming, where Father Gabriel (Jeremy Irons) atones for the death of one of his Jesuit colleagues by climbing up the rockface of the falls himself to spread the message of Christianity. He wins the natives over by playing his oboe in the middle of the jungle, in a scene which is a gift for composer Ennio Morricone, who duly obliges with a beautifully lyrical theme combined with harpsichord and orchestra. Indeed, his whole score is a marvellous mixture of all his musical influences, from his own Catholicism to the heart-pounding tension of the Spaghetti Westerns that made him famous. Shamefully, he has never won an Oscar for his music in all his 40 years of composing.

The story perhaps took second place to the visual impact of the film, but that is not to say the plot is uninteresting: being in a Catholic school, the subject - of Jesuit priests struggling against slave traders to bring the beauty of Christianity to the South American jungle - was of course a very relevant one. Added to that was of course a strong environmental message which still applies today, of the rainforests being continually plundered by modern technology and economics.

The main actors in the film I had no real knowledge of, save for a vague awareness that Jeremy Irons was in Brideshead Revisited on ITV. Robert De Niro was, I later discovered, something of a big name in the film world, and therefore took top billing in the film as Rodrigo Mendoza, the slave trader who turns to the cloth as a mark of penance after murdering his brother (Aidan Quinn) in a fit of jealousy over the woman they both love (Cherie Lunghi).

Also in this distinguished international cast was a young up-and-coming Irish actor, Liam Neeson - yet to make a breakthrough in films such as Schindler's List, but full of energy, enthusiasm and commitment to his craft - and fellow Irishman Ray McAnally, whose face is the first we see on the screen as narrator and also presiding judge over the ultimate fate of the Jesuit mission.

That fate, is a tragic, cynical, desperately sad but also extremely powerful finale in which the Guarani jungle territory is given over to the Portuguese and Spanish soldiers to ransack and destroy. But the Jesuit priests, who have built the community and grown to love it and its people, do not want to see it die, and remain to face up to - and in some cases engage in - the fighting to the bitter end, sacrificing their lives. Morricone underscores this gut-wrenching finale with a powerful ending on one single drumbeat as the flames engulf the huts and the church and the floating wreckage on the river.

It is an impressive film indeed, that can silence an audience of noisy 15 year olds on a school trip, and I can remember most of us being completely spellbound by the experience.

Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

From the best, to what is commonly considered to be the worst.

The worst film I ever enjoyed.

THIS film as a favourite, I hear you ask? Well, just to be different, yes, and to show I suppose that love of movies is not necessarily a love of great art, but an identification with - and even a nostalgia for - a certain kind of entertainment no longer possible these days.

Just picture the following scenario: the Earth is rapidly developing its atomic power so that it can destroy millions not only in their own world, but even destroy the entire universe. A race of beings from another planet travels to Earth to prevent the potential catastrophe, by raising those Earthlings already dead as a warning of what will happen to everybody else if the Earth scientists do not stop their research.

Sounds like an interesting, perhaps even mind-boggling idea for a movie perhaps? In this particular case however, the creator was the ever enthusiastic but almost totally talentless Edward D. Wood Jr, whose body of work has to be seen to be believed.

Plan 9 from Outer Space was his nadir, both his favourite film and also his shoddiest, his most profound and also his most laughable. It also demonstrates a director with a passion and enthusiasm for his craft that overcame everything else, including how awful it was.

It is ultimately the enthusiasm and sentiment that shines through Plan 9, and is what makes it so endearing. It took me more than a couple of viewings for me to appreciate this however, as well as the added interest in Ed Wood's career with the Tim Burton film of that name released in 1994. The first viewing was on Channel 4 in the mid-1990s, among a series of strange films entitled "Attack of the Killer B's", which had the most bizarre theme tune, that couldn't possibly (so I thought) be from a film. Yet I soon discovered this was Plan 9's opening theme!

What makes it so nostalgic in many ways is the brief appearance of Bela Lugosi, who died a few days into pre-production. Lugosi's appearance was actually some early test footage for a unfinished film entitled Tomb of the Vampire, beginning with the poignant sight of Lugosi at a funeral mourning the death of his wife. Clearly Bela himself looks frail and close to death, and his pain in this little sequence is all too evident. Next we see him outside his house, still in mourning but coveting the preciousness of life by picking up a little flower from his garden - seconds later he walks off camera, and a hideous sound effect of a man run over by a car constitutes the presumed "death scene" of the character. But being Bela Lugosi of course, he "rises" from the dead and is seen parading regally around his house and a weedy looking field in his iconic Dracula costume.

That represents the sum total of Lugosi's actual "performance" in Plan 9 from Outer Space. The rest of him, as such, is represented by a rather tall and lumbering American non-actor (Ed Wood's chiropractor apparently!), who waddles around rather unconvincingly with the Dracula cape obscuring most of his face (as Lugosi himself did in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein) in an attempt to pad out the genuine Lugosi footage into the fabric of the story. Lugosi himself would probably have been amused at the sheer effrontery of it.

This is one of many hilarious continuity goofs in the film. On other occasions the hero, Jeff Trent (Gregory Walcott) says goodbye to his wife Paula (Mona McKinnon) from their veranda, and walks into a patently obvious indoor studio where his car awaits with velvet curtains attempting to replace the night time affect. These same curtains also pop up in Jeff's airplane cockpit, and even the headquarters of the Supreme Ruler of the Universe (Bunny Breckinridge) in his faraway space station!

There were others besides Lugosi in Ed Wood's band of lovable "rogues". Chief among these was giant wrestler Tor Johnson, who broke - literally - into occasional film roles in the 50s and 60s, usually in wordless parts using his awesome physicality. Here however, he is in a "speaking" role as a police inspector who is quickly dispatched by the aliens, which is just as well, because his lines up till then are delivered in an accent that is even thicker than his muscles! Third in this triumvirate of horrors is Maila Nurmi, a TV celebrity whose exotically Gothic looks as "Vampira" led to her not only being cast (appropriately) as Bela Lugosi's wife, but also directly influenced the look of other vamps to come such as Elvira.

This "army" of the living dead is summoned out of their cardboard graves by the aliens to set upon and terrorize the human race, who are powerless to stop them with their guns loaded with blanks. From this enjoyably ridiculous first half of the film, we get to the more "meaningful" part of the story where our heroes eventually manage to track down the captain of the alien spaceship, who is played by Dudley Manlove (a narrator of ice cream commercials), and has the bulk of the ridiculous plot to describe from this moment on.

To top and tail it all off, comes the flamboyant and ludicrously inaccurate TV psychic Criswell, who was moved enough by the film's subject matter to write his own introduction and postscript, and whose narration is in many ways, the icing on the cake. One of his own lines of narration seems an apt description of the film:

"There comes a time in every man's life, when he just can't believe his eyes!"

Well, see for yourself....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2EdYGSk1VE

Gandhi (1982)

“When I despair, I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they can seem invincible but in the end they always fall. Think of it, always.”

Back in 1989, when I seriously started to rate films on a 1-10 scale, rather than thinking of them as just mere entertainments, this one came top of the list of those I had seen - and we're including the likes of Citizen Kane, The Godfather and the Star Wars trilogy among the competition here.

I mention this in passing because the achievement may well have been influenced by topical events: 1989 was a pivotal year in world history. A dramatic revolution took place with the falling of the Berlin Wall and the demise of several Eastern Bloc dictatorships. Only the tanks of Tianenmen Square prevented the Chinese government from being added to the list of conquests. Within a year Nelson Mandela was also freed from captivity and South Africa became a more democratic nation.

So the atmosphere in those days was very much towards upheaval and the eventual rise of a more peaceful and humanitarian society. But regardless of which year I happened to see it, Richard Attenborough's Gandhi is, first and foremost, a grand and gracious biopic with an extraordinarily vivid central performance by Ben Kingsley. But it is also a triumphant message for our time, be it the 1940s, the 1980s, or today.

First impressions of the film itself came in the shape of all the awards it won (beating Spielberg's wonderful fantasy E.T.), together with Attenborough's endless speeches about his film and the state of the British film industry. Having subsequently seen the film, and the effort that went into it, I think he'd bloody well earned the right to.

It took him over 20 years to realise his ambition of bringing the story of the Mahatma to the screen. The biggest problem, aside from trying to convince Hollywood backers to finance his epic ("Who the hell is interested in a little brown man with a beanpole?" was one unkind executive's reaction), was to find the actor to play the central role. In the early days of the project the film was being planned for David Lean to direct, with Alec Guinness the only possible choice to play Gandhi, once Lean had first finished a little film he was making in Ireland. This "little" film turned out to be Ryan's Daughter, an extremely long romantic drama which took even longer to make, at the end of which Lean was dissuaded from the Gandhi project (although both he and Guinness did make A Passage to India together in 1984, to a mixed reception.)

Anthony Hopkins, a favourite of Attenborough's, next became a candidate to play the role. By this time Attenborough had acquired considerable kudos as a director in his own right, with two boldly cinematic anti-war films, Oh! What a Lovely War and A Bridge Too Far, and also a biograpahical drama, Young Winston, with an uncanny impersonation of the young Churchill by Simon Ward. Anthony Hopkins also gave a good account of himself as David Lloyd-George, but ultimately was considered too Welsh and skinny to play Gandhi, and so Attenborough's thoughts turned round to the possibility of an Indian actor playing his Indian hero.

At this point in the mid 1970s, Richard's son Michael Attenborough was working at the National Theatre, and suggested to his father a half-Indian actor on the books named Ben Kingsley. It may not have been Manna from Heaven, but it was certainly providential casting, and at last it seemed now that the right man for the role was in place.

With the assistance of India's Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (daughter of Pandit Nehru), and Earl Mountbatten - both of whom were later assassinated in similarly tragic circumstances to Gandhi himself - the filming could begin.

Like Lawrence of Arabia, the film begins with the end of the central character's life, when world attention was most focused on Gandhi's assassination by a Hindu extremist in 1948 - the scene itself was "shot" hauntingly in the same garden where the Mahatma was. From this striking beginning comes the largest funeral scene ever filmed - over 300,000 extras were allegedly used for the procession in New Delhi (a tribute to costume designer John Mollo who had to devise period clothes for most of them!) If you look VERY carefully, you will see Richard Attenborough himself as one of the army officers standing behind the coffin; such was the sheer scale of the scene that he had to play one of the mourners in front of camera in order to be able keep an eye on everything else.

At the end of this extraordinarily epic sight, the words of Albert Einstein are quoted: "Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth." It sums up the astonishing aspect of the whole film really, that one man of peace could be able to uproot an entire British Empire from its greatest Dominion.

The film jumps back over 50 years earlier to "South Africa 1893", when we see what looks almost like a different actor to the old man we've just seen shot (the film's make-up is a masterpiece), sitting in a First Class compartment, where Gandhi, a young, affluent, English-trained lawyer, was thrown off the train, in a country that later adopted Apartheid as law.

The incident was a watershed in Gandhi's life, and started him on the trail of fighting social injustice - by non-violent means. A key speech is made in the early South African scenes when Gandhi defends his reasons for using non-violence as his weapon:

"I am asking you to fight. To fight against their anger, not to provoke it. We will not strike a blow, but we will receive them, and through our pain we will make them see their injustice, and it will hurt, as all fighting hurts! But we cannot lose, we cannot."

His first ally in this dauntless quest is his client Mr. Khan, played with quiet dignity by Om Puri. A number of fine Indian actors also contribute good character performances, including Roshan Seth as Nehru, Saeed Jaffrey as Sardar Patel, Harsh Nayyar as Nathuram Godse - the assassin, and most outstandingly of all, a BAFTA-winning Rohini Hattangady as Mrs. Gandhi.

Ian Charleson (on the back of his acclaimed role in Chariots of Fire) is also excellent as a rare British ally of Gandhi's, Reverend Charlie Andrews, in quite a moving scene where he and Gandhi eventually go their separate ways because India has to believe that "what we are doing can be done by Indians alone...". The rest of the international cast is as exemplary as could be expected from any Richard Attenborough epic: John Mills, John Gielgud, Martin Sheen, Candice Bergen (as photographer Margaret Bourke-White, whom she uncannily resembles), and some notable early cinema roles for Nigel Hawthorne and Daniel Day-Lewis. Favourite among the supporting roles for me are Trevor Howard in an unusually understated performance as Judge Broomfield - a staunch Gandhi sympathiser who ironically had to sentence him to 6 years imprisonment - and Edward Fox as the coldly ruthless General Dyer, who ordered the massacre of thousands of Sikhs at the massacre of Amritsar.

The massacre, together with the funeral scene and all the other great set-pieces including the Salt March and the later riots in Calcutta, were staged brilliantly by the veteran Second Unit Director David Tomblin, an old ally of Attenborough's, who has also staged many of the set pieces for the likes of Spielberg and Lucas in their best films.

John Briley's excellent script also captures the domestic life and jovial humour of the man himself, an important element. This is not just the story of a hero, but of a real person.

In many ways this is a portrayal that shines more than the image of the real "Bapu". Reverential perhaps, but as the film itself admits at the beginning, the story of one man's entire life can never be encompassed in one telling (even when 3 hours long), all that can be done is to try and be faithful in spirit to the record and try and find one's way to the heart of the man. This is certainly achieves successfully.

There are those, even today, who feel that the British should never have left India - the most notable and vocal opponent was Winston Churchill - and given the sub-continent's subsequent bumpy history, this is understandable. Perhaps it helped that the Dominion was looking a little shaky for some time anyway, and if anything, it was the intervention of World War II that tipped the balance over towards Britain giving India independence. As one British Governor says mockingly, "we're too damned liberal" - an amusing jibe considering how many of Attenborough's critics consider him a militant liberal himself.

When the question of using such "pacifist" methods against a dictator like Hitler is raised, Gandhi's answer is simple if cunningly evasive: "not without defeats, and great pain, but are there no defeats in this war, no pain?"

Attenborough does not however shirk from making Gandhi just a one-dimensional story of one man's struggle against British oppression, but against racial intolerance as well. The later scenes involving the controversial partitioning of India into two separate nations (India and Pakistan), and the bloody aftermath between Hindus and Muslims, are harrowing and heart-rendering, even if the film sags just a little bit when Gandhi goes into another one of his notable "fasts unto death".

The resulting truce that is declared across the whole of Calcutta, so that Gandhi can live again in a world than can still be united and free and just, is a truly inspirational moment, at the end of a truly inspirational film.

The author at the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial in Tavistock Square, London