The Comedy Critic - Steve McQueen's 'Lame'

Adam Hollingworth casts a satirical eye over Steve McQueen's Shame...

Guys, have you ever woken up one morning, taken a long hard look in the mirror, and thought to yourself, “You know what? I’m really having far too much sex and this isn’t very good for me.” Well, Michael Fassbender does just that in a stark, hauntingly un-erotic scene in his latest collaboration with artist-cum-filmmaker Steve McQueen, Shame. He even has the temerity to have this dawning moment of sexual realisation in the midst of a hard-core threesome with two unfeasibly attractive prostitutes. Some people are so ungrateful.

It may well be the case that he’s had sex with more women during the course of the film up to this point than I’ve had in my twenty two years of British amorous bashfulness, and has done so with a Magneto the size of a small Oompa Loompa, and is growing decidedly tired of having to constantly think up increasingly unlikely ways of picking people up (I stare at hot women on the tube every day, and I assure you not a single one of them deviates from the standard behaviour of attempting to avoid your gaze at all costs). But the fact of the matter is that he really doesn’t seem to be suffering all that much from this alienating, perverse form of addiction.

Steve McQueen is one of that admirable band of filmmakers who views himself as an artist, and rightly so since he actually is, in fact, an artist. This however renders him more open than most to the desire to explore the great undiscovered country of arty cinema: the age-old question of whether a sex film can transcend the salaciousness of its subject matter to be a very serious and worthy piece of existential consideration. Pardon the phraseology for a moment here, but when it comes to making the arty sex film there are numerous exciting ways to do it. You can do it like Stanley Kubrick in Eyes Wide Shit (sorry, Shut) in which everyone wears a mask right out of a Halloween party in the Hundred Acre Wood, and Tom Cruise pretends not to be a homosexual whilst offering us a glimpse of what those top secret Scientology gatherings are really like. Or you can do it like Michael Winterbottom in Nine Songs, a veritable set list of supposedly casual encounters that would make even the likes of Joan Collins go a darker shade of crimson. Alternatively you can do it like Bertolucci in Last Tango in Paris, in which Marlon Brando certainly can’t believe it’s not butter. And for the gentleman of more fetishistic taste, or someone who just isn’t that into Utterly Butterly, you can do it like Nagisa Oshima in Ai No Corrida, and admit that it’s all so tediously boring that you might as well just chop it off!

Though all of these films certainly have their merits, they all encounter the same problem when it comes to addressing sex in an arty way on film: it always turns into a bit of an excuse to do some well-photographed rumpy pumpy scenes with two good-looking actors, and as such fails to properly distance ourselves from the on-screen erotica to objectively judge what the film has to say. This is certainly a problem with Shame: we’re too interested in admiring the technique of this fine specimen of a man to worry about how this is all gnawing at him physically and psychologically. This wouldn’t have been a problem if Brandon had been played by, say, Steve Buscemi. Fassbender’s a brilliant actor, and gives a courageous performance in the film, but I’m just trying to catch another envious glimpse of his German-Irish frankfurter.

The film’s problems are compounded when you think about the other dimension it presents itself as having: namely, that it’s as much about addiction as it is after sex. When you finish watching Trainspotting you don’t want to then take some drugs in case a baby starts playing Spider-Man on your roof, and after The Lost Weekend I was scared to have a pint lest the cast of Tales from the Riverbank besieged my home. After watching Shame, I fancied a shag, and that’s hardly the sign of a film putting you off the addiction it presents.

It’s not that I thought Shame was a bad film: indeed there is much to recommend it. The art direction and cinematography presents a cool yet cold world with an alien sheen: an objectified and superficially beautified view of reality that reflects the way Brandon objectifies the various elements of his life to feed his lusts. Fassbender is brilliant, and so too is Carey Mulligan, cast against type in an emotionally raw, unstable and fractured performance that’s probably the best thing she’s done (and she can knock off a mean, sultry rendition of “New York, New York”). However, after the extraordinary image making of Hunger I really did expect more from Steve McQueen’s direction. Aside from the above bit when Mulligan sings, and the bit when Fassbender decides to eschew sex for a brisk late-night jog, and a suitably nightmarish “descent into the maelstrom” sequence before the dramatic backlash of the central brother/sister relationship kicks in (he can’t engage emotionally with women, she’s very needy, he subsequently is absent in his sister’s hour of grave need), it’s all very uninspired, insipid, and safe. With such a deliberately vague and obscure narrative, in which little proactive drama or character history is supplied, one would expect mood, tone and detail to be found in subtly metaphorical imagery, but this is unfortunately lacking, and in tandem with the infuriating ambiguity of the drama makes for a rather superficial experience. It’s all too neat, too obvious, too well-trodden. Like Brandon’s sex life, the film just casually, if eventfully, crawls from one episode to the next with little meaning or impact.

Let’s get topical as a way of rounding things off. I’m not surprised Fassbender isn’t Oscar nominated for his performance in this: not because it’s not a great performance, because it very much is, but when even George Clooney is intimidated by your natural perks you know you’re seriously risking alienation from the mainstream. And although Carey Mulligan has also been unfairly slighted by the awards circuit, at least we get to see her naked in this. I really wanted the film to be better than it was, but unfortunately it isn’t better than it is, because it’s only as good as it is. That didn’t make much sense, did it? Maybe too much sex is bad for you…

Adam Hollingworth

The Comedy Critic - Steven Spielberg's 'Phwoar Horse'

Adam Hollingworth casts a satirical eye over Steven Spielberg's War Horse...

There have been many great love stories in the history of cinema. Rick and Ilsa in Casablanca, Rhett and Scarlet in Gone with the Wind, Yuri and Lyra in Doctor Zhivago. Well, this week saw the addition of another great screen romance added to this swooning pantheon, a story of two lovers whose mutual desire and affection transcends the fear and horror of wartime. This love is of course between the heavily-accented country bumpkin Albert and his horse Joey in Spielberg’s latest film War Horse.

This isn’t the first time a sweet bestial romance has attained the kind of colossal momentousness afforded to mere human couples. Indeed, some could read the history of cinema as a sweeping chronicle of man’s growing affection for fitties of the animal kingdom. Oscar favourite The Artist is acutely aware of this fact, portraying as it does the unfaltering romance between a movie star and his dog in the form of a silent film, harking back to the early days of cinema when such affairs were more commonplace and less frowned upon by the law. Where is Valentin’s lady-friend Peppy when his house is burning down with him lying unconscious in it? That’s right; she’s hoarding all his belongings in a mansion paid for with the money accumulated from a career he kick-started for her. Typical gold-digger. The dog is left to save his life. And if it seems unlikely that any man would prefer the amorous affections of a dog to the gorgeous Berenice Bejo, consider that the man in question here is French. Enough said.

Dogs and other small animals have always been man’s best friend though (apart from deer, which if Disney is to be believed are much more likely to be shot), so cinema has always reflected this closeness, for example the heartfelt, childhood-scarring moment when Old Yeller is shot in the face. This is not merely the loss of a friend, but of a true loved one. Kids have got to learn it all from somewhere after all. In any case, it wasn’t long before men and women were hankering for beasts of a somewhat larger nature. Take King Kong for instance. It is still a common misconception that Fay Wray is screaming in terror when a big, strong ape squeezes her tightly in his hairy fist. They are clearly screams of ecstasy, and later on screams of sheer delight at the bravery of her partner in defending her honour from the lecherous advances of creepy crawlies and dinosaurs. Peter Jackson took this even further, and to his credit realised the whole love story with a touch more romance and tenderness than the original. After all, what girl wouldn’t go weak at the knees at the prospect of a private ice-skate around the frozen pool of central park? Kong might be a savage murderer, but that’s no excuse for interrupting his date with a frankly excessive amount of army trucks and rocket launchers. Girls in the thirties just weren’t cut out for that kind of excitement.

I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that War Horse takes a leaf out of the Airplane! book of horse-loving, but with slightly less off-hand callousness. Albert wouldn’t take off for an emergency in the middle of the night without planting a sensual good-night kiss on Joey’s nose, especially knowing what we do about a horse’s natural anatomical advantages over humans. When angry they can be dangerous lovers, and my mate once watched a really dodgy video proving it.

It is odd that such a breath-taking film should come from the likes of Steven Spielberg. Not only is the closest he’s come to pure screen romance between a young child and a clearly diseased long-necked alien, but for my money he hasn’t made anything worthy of his talents for nearly twenty years. In 1993, you see, he released both Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List. The former was always going to be a triumph, being precisely the kind of escapist rollicking adventure he had at that point specialised in since the early seventies. The latter was a much more unlikely success, but lightning truly struck and Spielberg, against all the odds, created to this day the most emotively powerful and sensitive, not to mention artful, fictional cinematic Holocaust piece. This in turn caused Spielberg to miss the boat: he stopped making fantastical adventures and started making worthy serious films, and in the process forgot how to do the former genre well (witness as testament to this the abysmal fourth Indiana Jones film). Instead of making really fun films every agreed were brilliant, we instead got the saccharine A.I. Artificial Intelligence, the terminally dull Munich, and the over-long and more importantly over-rated Saving Private Ryan (the first half an hour is admittedly gruelling and ground-breaking, but the film’s three hours long and most of that is about saving Matt Damon from certain death. Just let him die for god’s sake!)

However, whilst the woeful dead-behind-the-eyes The Adventures of Tintin forbids me from hailing War Horse as a return to form for Spielberg just yet, it is nonetheless an impressively moving and beautiful film. The problems with the often plodding episodic plot are issues with the novel and not with the film, but at their best these narrative tangents effectively illustrate the futility and poignancy of World War One, for example when a British and German soldier combine forces and friendly banter to cut Joey free from barbed wire. Janus Kaminski’s photography is utterly gorgeous, leading to some sublime image-making, from the soldiers mounting their steeds in a wheat-field to the dusky-red return of Joey to Dorset which recalls the close of Gone with the Wind. John Williams’ music is similarly superb, sacrificing memorable leit motifs for a score which complements the emotional dynamic of each scene of the film. Most importantly, it’s really well directed. Spielberg’s staging is uniformly excellent, with some scenes leaving an indelible impression, such as the execution obscured by the rotors of a windmill, and an evocation of trench warfare that is as intense, though not as brutal, as the celebrated D-Day landings battle in the aforementioned WW2 snore-fest.

Oh, and the horse is pretty good too.

Adam Hollingworth

Special Features - The Irony Lady

Adam Hollingworth wonders where the irony is in The Iron Lady...

Did you see Mamma Mia a few years ago? To summarise for those who haven’t, the entire film is pretty much played as a drunken hen weekend on an orgiastic island paradise in a part of the Mediterranean more permissive of appallingly tuneless karaoke than any civilized nation on Earth.

Anyone who claimed that this film was good in the standard sense is clearly stark raving mad, or worse. On the one hand there’s the sainted Meryl Streep interpreting the greatest hits of Swedish disco darlings Abba, a catalogue of songs which were they any cheesier would actually physically turn into a block of Gotland Blue, as if she were playing Hedda Gabler. On the other hand we have Pierce Brosnan ill-advisedly warbling an excruciating rendition of “SOS,” which as a result became perhaps the most aptly titled song in the history of music. The film also allowed a horrified audience to savour the delights of the fine Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard being chased across a rafter by a horny Julie Walters, Christine Baranski gyrating manically atop a petrified young man to “Does Your Mother Know,” and a homosexual Colin Firth being tied to a post and felt up left, right and centre by a vicious mob of dance students last seen waddling along a promontory clad in suffocating speedos to “Lay All Your Love On Me”. Having subjected the unsuspecting crowd to all of the above, the film’s near-geriatric cast of acclaimed veteran actors murder yet another medley of songs which were crap in the first place, only this time dressed in full spandex, flairs and platforms. I can only assume that this was done just in case the audience had forgotten to also gouge out their eyes when they rammed hot pokers through both ears to make the pain go away.

Watching Mamma Mia, let us be absolutely clear, was the most embarrassing experience of my young life. It is also, with the exception of 3D Smurf-porn favourite Avatar, the highest grossing film in British cinema history.

If you’re wondering how this atrocity came to pass, allow me to shed light into the abyss. When I said the film wasn’t good in the standard sense, that doesn’t mean that I didn’t think it was a good film. On the contrary, Mamma Mia is a trash masterpiece. It’s good precisely because it is so inhumanly bad, but the real accomplishment therein that unlike The Room and Troll 2 this film knows how bad it is and proceeds to embrace its own rubbishness and have a damn good laugh about it. Meryl Streep is supposed to take “The Winner Takes It All” as seriously as when Cleopatra puts an asp to her breast in mourning for Mark Antony, and Pierce Brosnan singing is supposed to sound like an elephant being violated with a piano, because it’s all done in the spirit of irony.

It is surprising, then, that having created one of the great ironic films of the past few years, rejecting the glitzy seriousness of most movie musicals in favour of the tacky cliché-ridden corniness that is actually symptomatic of most stage musicals, irony is completely absent from The Iron Lady, also directed by Phyllida Lloyd and again starring Meryl Streep.

If the transition from frothy camp to a serious work about the life of probably the most controversial British politician of the last century seems like a recipe for disaster, then guess what: you’re absolutely right. The Iron Lady is a woefully stupid film precisely because it lacks the irony that prevented Mamma Mia from being stupid, or the irony that purposefully made it a sublimely stupid tribute to binge-drinking depending on how you view it. If The Iron Lady seems to aspire to worthiness it is because the film is unabashedly the Meryl Streep show, and we know from experience that this is at its best one of the greatest shows on earth. It is so entirely the Meryl Streep show that key members of the Thatcher cabinet appear only in the form of actors sporting the appropriate hairpiece, and even her husband Denis doesn’t get much of a look in: in fact for most of the film he’s already dead. Lloyd knows that Streep’s performance is the only thing going for the film, and as such throws everything else to the lions. This is probably for the best, as Streep delivers a typically bravura piece of acting, attaining utterly convincing verisimilitude alongside genuine dramatic depth, intensity and subtlety. She last won an Oscar nearly thirty years ago, and in the intervening years it has gotten to the stage where if she isn’t nominated the world will probably crumble in on itself leaving a small black hole singing “Dancing Queen” with its last gasps. If she wins next month it will be a deserved victory for a great performance, but don’t for one second think that this will excuse a highly problematic film.

There seems to be an inherent Feminist agenda to this film: it’s directed by a woman, written by a woman, starring a fiercely intelligent and cultured actress, and it’s about a woman who was the most powerful person in the country during the 1980s. Scenes of Thatcher bullying her all-male cabinet are played with gusto and not a little amount of admiration for her vicious admonishments. The flashback of her ousting by the same weak men is met by the decrepit present-day dementia sufferer with an angry tirade against the male sex, and a curiously jarring fear that she neglected her traditional maternal responsibilities: her relationship with daughter Carol is uneasy, and her husband’s ghost departs with the words “You’ll be fine on your own, you always were.” The heavy use of flashbacks conjures sympathy for the universal sense of degeneration that comes with old age, as they stem from a vision of a senile old lady who comes across not unlike Lear on the heath. Madness derives from helplessness when once the individual was all-powerful.

The filmmakers clearly used the political happenings of the Thatcher era to relate a personal tale of feminine struggle and the hardships of losing one’s power, both political and personal. Yet the film is foolish not to recognise the irony of portraying a woman proud of her working-class origins, which further set her apart from her peers, who as a leader crippled working class industries. Nor does it see the irony of creating a reverential silence around her pivotal Francis of Assisi line “Where there is discord, we will bring harmony,” when however you feel about her politics surely the one thing she failed to do was achieve this very harmony from discord. The result is a film that is worthy of no more serious analysis than that afforded to Mamma Mia.

Adam Hollingworth

Ten Essential... Movie Adaptations of Classic (Pre-20th Century) Novels

With Andrea Arnold's take on Wuthering Heights about to arrive in U.K. cinemas, Adam Hollingworth counts down his favourite movie adaptations of classic pre-20th century novels...

This week sees the release of Andrea Arnold’s latest film Wuthering Heights: an affecting and starkly beautiful film which contradicts the old adage that great novels don’t translate into great films.

However, the two principal reasons for the success of this disturbing, gritty and highly idiosyncratic adaptation are Arnold and screenwriter Olivia Hetreed’s willingness to liberate themselves from the letter of the text, and to achieve the same ends as Bronte’s brooding, melancholic yet hauntingly beautiful prose through filmic techniques, rather than linguistic ones. The tender naiveté of Heathcliff and Cathy’s doomed romance is portrayed through physicality and gesture, such as their heavily symbolic wrestling in the mud, and her sensual licking of the wounds on his back. The wild otherness of Heathcliff is enhanced by the transition of the character into a North African slave taken into and later reviled by a community of shallow Christianity. Poetic and highly stylised dialogue is in its sparse materialisations made more powerful by the coarse vulgarity of the often savagely profane dialogue of the piece. Most importantly of all, the dense pathetic fallacy of Bronte’s North Yorkshire Moors setting, a place of wild beauty and misted darkness, is made flesh by Robbie Ryan’s simultaneously sumptuous yet barrenly saturated cinematography, eschewing widescreen framing in favour of 4:3, creating a hypnotic string of far more grimly naturalistic images of the land.

It is the boldness to take liberties, and the intelligence to replicate the effects of a novel through cinematic means, which defines the following list of films I consider to be the most successful adaptations of canonical literary classics to the screen…


10. Frankenstein (dir. James Whale)

Kenneth Branagh’s early nineties, melodramatic take on Mary Shelley’s classic gothic romance may be more faithful to the letter of the novel, but James Whale’s iconic ur-text of the horror genre is still arguably more in keeping with the spirit and thematic resonances of the book, as well as managing to be a famed creation in its own right. Removed from the sanity-preserving framing device of surgical/biological study, Colin Clive’s Frankenstein becomes the epitome of misguided human ingenuity attempting to supplant the God-impulse to create life, whilst Boris Karloff’s portrayal of the creature is both a triumph of memorably macabre make-up and the realisation of a horrific yet sympathetic monster. The uncomfortable scene when he throws a girl into a lake to her death is quietly harrowing, yet we never lose touch with the Creature’s ignorance of the repercussions of his actions. Replacing Shelley’s technological vision with a kitsch laboratory inspired by German Expressionist cinema assures the film its unique identity as an early touchstone of literary adaptations.


9. Nosferatu (dir. F.W. Murnau)

One of two adaptations of Bram Stoker’s 1897 epistolary quest into superstitious fear and the dark sexual repression of the Victorian era on this list, many would still contend that Murnau’s silent masterpiece remains the greatest film treatise on Vampirism. Boasting an Expressionist aesthetic unmatched by any film of the period save The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, this is an unapologetically cinematic, visual reimagining of an unashamedly verbose book, generating a chilling sense of the other-worldly within a recognisable historical Europe through colour-tinged monochrome, heavy-set shadows and gothic art direction. Max Schreck’s Count Orlock is not the imperious, charismatic aristocrat of Stoker’s imagination, but a twisted and demented figure as harrowingly physically creepy as he is unquenchably lonely, and Murnau cuts to the root of the metaphor of venereal disease in the novel with sombre processions of coffins, in escalating numbers, parading through a Bavarian town centre: an idea Herzog’s remake borrows with knowing irony.


8. A Cock and Bull Story (dir. Michael Winterbottom)

How on earth does one set about filming what is commonly thought to be unfilmable? Laurence Sterne’s seminal comic novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy is both a daringly hilarious experiment with the form and an unwieldy mess: in attempting to narrate an absurd history of his own life, the eponymous protagonist proceeds to spend seven hundred pages meandering through tangential anecdotes, even interspersing blank and black pages into his prose. The inspired solution found by this film is to show not an attempt to tell a life story, but an attempt to make a movie through a witty cross-breed of mockumentary and parody. Just like in Sterne’s novel, the film constantly moves away from its central idea and into the peripheries of the narrative crux, formally challenges the line between fiction and reality, and is never beyond raising a cheap laugh (Steve Coogan dropping a hot walnut down his costume pantaloons springs to mind.) By being so irreverent and disregarding of the source it perfectly captures the spirit of the original, and pre-empts the even greater collaboration between Winterbottom, Coogan and Rob Brydon in The Trip.


7. The Jungle Book (dir. Wolfgang Reitherman)

The final feature length animation film Walt Disney personally oversaw before his death, this jazz-inflected piece of pure entertainment is surely one of the very best horses in the impressive Disney stable. Rudyard Kipling’s original is collection of whimsical short stories boasting a menagerie of memorable anthropomorphic personae, many of which have translated beautifully to family animation with the addition of Disney’s imaginative flavour. King Louis becomes a swinging scat singer who still possesses the ape-like lust for human knowledge, Shere Khan as voiced by the caddish George Sanders makes for a fearsome cad of a vicious predator upon man, and Balloo the Bear becomes both protector and mentor to the impressionistic Mowgli. However, Disney doesn’t neglect the undercurrent of Kipling’s tales of India under Imperialist British rule, as a phalanx of Empiric elephants drive forcefully and persistently through the jungle, nor does it ignore the coming of age dimension overt in the Kipling: the difficult transition from wild boyhood to uneasily civilized manhood. The Jungle Book hints at this is perhaps the most emotionally resonant scene in any Disney film: entranced by a beautiful young water carrier and her simple song celebrating manual labour and cosy domesticity, Mowgli thoughtlessly abandons his reluctance to depart from the adventure and vitality of the heavily symbolic jungle.


6. The Last of the Mohicans (dir. Michael Mann)

A still underappreciated gem that stands as arguably Michael Mann’s greatest film, this is a work which, despite the director’s claims to have been more a remake of a silent Hollywood epic than an adaptation of James Fennimore Cooper’s novel, exquisitely expounds upon the idea of a dying people in a dying world. The Native American traditional melody is expanded by rich orchestral treatment into a soaring and deeply affecting score, whilst the lush, rich cinematography perfectly captures a lost frontier forgotten by the land America would become: and both music and images combine to achieve the sense of a civilization torn apart by racial Civil War and the destructive, opportunistic greed of colonial white Europeans. Though it is his adoptive father who becomes the titular stalwart of a people cruelly hunted to extinction by both aliens to the country and their own kind (in the form of Wes Studi’s fiercely unfeeling villain Magua), it is Hawkeye (Daniel Day Lewis in one of his most uncharacteristic yet brilliant roles) who metaphorically ends the Mohican way of life through union with the white invaders (in the form of his romance with Cora Munro), and who is also at the centre of the romantic adventure which drives the narrative. Mann handles both the spiritual and the dramatic with supreme gusto, from Hawkeye’s impassioned “I will find you” speech before his leap through a waterfall, to the bravura final battle on a cliff precipice, yet the poetic, emotive dialogue of the novel survives to spine-tingling and provocative effect: “Our whole world’s on fire” Munro tells Hawkeye as he awaits execution.


5. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (dir. Francis Ford Coppola)

Whilst Murnau’s Nosferatu may stand as the peerless transition of the macabre, creepy atmosphere and pervading sense of spreading venereal disease in Stoker’s great novel to the screen, it is this underrated Coppola gem that best transcribed the sumptuous Victorian melodrama and seething sexual and romantic tension of the book onto film. The production design is gaudy and extravagant, with Coppola basking in the rich red of dawn and blood, and the heavily stylised hyperbole of Eiko Ishioka’s costumes adds a further element of vibrant, fantastical Nineteenth century gloss. The performances are similarly over the top, yet the larger than life nature of the characters seems to demand such interpretation, leaving the fetishistically porcelain figures of Winona Ryder and Sadie Frost between Hopkins’ Grand Guignol Van Helsing and Oldman’s by turns snarlingly monstrous, by turns desperately heartbroken Count. It is ultimately Coppola’s treatment of love and sex in the film which so closely relates to that outlines by Stoker: their exposure to the deadly desires and lusts of immortality and the exchange of bodily fluids crucial to vampirism acts as a sexual awakening for repressed and naïve Victorian women, whilst Dracula here is a tragically doomed figure, walking the night both damned and alone.


4. The Red Shoes (dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger)

A thrillingly theatrical and inventive spectacle from the Powell and Pressburger collaboration that so dominated British cinema in the forties, the film is also a rare achievement in adaptation in that it re-imagines Hans Christian Anderson’s titular fairy tale not once but twice: in the dreamlike balletic centrepiece of the company’s actual dance interpretation of the story, and in the definite allegory of the narrative proper. It is, after all, when wearing the anti-Oz red shoes that Moira Shearer’s tormented prima-ballerina is seized with physical fervour and psychological meltdown, and leaps to her death. As seen through the eyes of Powell and Pressburger, Anderson’s tragic tale is less a cautionary tale about desire and more a damning deconstruction of the superficial perfection of fine art, offering us a relentless peek at the strain and self-destructive elements of performance lying just under the surface. As always, the filmmakers mask the dark profundity of their work with the gorgeous and primal cinematography of Jack Cardiff and the fable-like simplicity of their whimsical narrative, offering a film which is both aesthetically beautiful and philosophically thoughtful.


3. Barry Lyndon (dir. Stanley Kubrick)

Being that every single one of his films after Killer’s Kiss was adapted from a pre-existing source, one would expect Kubrick to make an appearance on this list, yet it was when working from flawed and unspectacular novels that the director tended to make his finest work, in this case rejecting the polished satire and expansive moral universe of Thackeray’s masterpiece Vanity Fair in favour of this earlier and much lesser piece. Thackeray’s novel is a first person picaresque adventure of a boastful and unpleasant Irish rogue who cruises through various environs of eighteenth and nineteenth century European society before acquiring and squandering security and ignorance. It is important, having just employed the device so well in A Clockwork Orange, that Kubrick should choose to reject the novel’s first-person narration and shift the whole emphasis of the book. Kubrick removes the control of the narrative from his protagonist, and coupled with an intentionally blank performance from Ryan O'Neal creates the sense instead of an ineffectual, cowardly and ignorant upstart blundering through life completely overwhelmed by the world he occupies until his ridiculous lucky streak runs dry. Kubrick modelled the visual imagery of the film upon contemporary painting, and as such inhabits the universe of a classic novel with greater verisimilitude than ever seen before.


2. Apocalypse Now (dir. Francis Ford Coppola)

Between this magnum opus, The Godfather and the aforementioned Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Coppola could easily lay claim to being cinema’s greatest adapter of literary material. Taking Joseph Conrad’s turn of the century post-colonial odyssey through Africa, Heart of Darkness, and transferring the episodic structure, moral seriousness and mysterious yet stricken protagonist of the novella to the inferno of the Vietnam war, Coppola drew uncomfortable anti-nationalistic parallels between the two situations. Conrad’s Marlowe is horrified by his merciless exposure to the savage unknown of Africa, yet he knows that it is the destructive impact of his own country’s involvement with the land that has warped the untouched beauty of what he sees into a nightmarish horror. So too does Coppola’s Captain Willard come to be shattered by “the horror, the horror” as seen through the eyes of the deranged Kurtz, and both men harbour the burden that it is America, not Vietnam, that has made the land like this. Beyond this thematic link, Coppola also fashions a surreal jungle draped in thick black smoke, swirling white mists and the haze of acid and napalm that perfectly evokes the terror and confusion of the American experience in Vietnam, and contributes immensely to one of the most visceral of all war films.


1. Great Expectations (dir. David Lean)

I began this countdown by saying that in general one had to take a certain amount of liberty with a source text in order to successfully translate a classic narrative to film and maintain the resonance and impact of the original work, and that often the strengths of the page are not the strengths of a film and must therefore become a necessary casualty. There is an exception to every rule, and in this case the exception happens to be the greatest and most faithful adaptation of a canonical classic to the screen. In making a film of Dickens’ finest, most moving novel, David Lean’s absolute mastery of narrative filmmaking is at its most flawless: the bleak beauty of Dickens’ Fenlands and the urban murkiness of London is picture perfect on screen, his antiquated and idiosyncratic dialogue is translated with unfathomable naturalism, his extraordinary cast of hyperbolic characters are all vividly brought to life by the actors, and every emotional and narrative twist and turn is effected with exquisite aplomb. The film is as funny, frightening, exciting, haunting, romantic, heartbreaking, tragic and moving as Dickens originally wrote it, and the iconic scenes of the book become the iconic scenes of the film: the graveyard encounter with Magwitch, Miss Havisham’s dusty parlour and grotesque wedding dress, Estella’s proud cruelty in mistreating Pip as a young boy, his appeal to her as an emotionally damaged adult, and the extent to which he has become a snob when Joe Gargery visits London. A note-perfect translation of a wonderful book into a magical film.

Agree? Disagree? Feel free to leave your thoughts on the list...

Adam Hollingworth