My Week of Movie Watching

The League of Gentlemen – Top-notch 1960 Brit caper film from Basil Dearden. Jack Hawkins plays a former colonel who enlists a group of ex-soldiers to pull off a bank heist. The group are all men who are struggling with civilian life, and the film shows them grabbing on to the chance to be part of this military-like operation. Besides Hawkins, this one features a who’s-who of British character actors: Nigel Patrick, Richard Attenborough, Roger Livesey, Bryan Forbes, Kieron Moore, and Norman Bird. Very highly recommended.

Withnail & I – The film that Richard E Grant will always be known for. Withnail (Grant) and I (Paul McGann) play a couple of struggling alcoholic actors who decide to take a vacation in the country. They meet up with Withnail’s gay uncle, who decides that he is going to have McGann. Rarely has a drunk been portrayed more colorfully than Grant does with the character of Withnail, who is pompous and rude, but so, so funny. Trust me, you will watch this and walk around quoting the lines afterward.

“I feel like a pig shat in my head!”

Gran Torino – I am always torn about Clint Eastwood films. On one hand, I like the fact that he tackles subject matter that others don’t, and I admire that he has used his later films to deconstruct the Eastwood persona. On the other hand, I find that he can be clunkingly transparent in his story-telling techniques. In this one, he plays a bigoted ex-auto worker, who has a Laotian family move in next door. What I find is that sometimes Eastwood almost holds up a billboard when he is trying to make a point, like when his grandchildren come into his wifes’ funeral in jeans and football jerseys, signifying that they don’t understand him, and don’t respect the occasion. Or the young Catholic priest who can’t crack the exterior of this hard man. Eastwood chooses an actor who looks to be about 17. On the whole, however, I like this – I like the fact that they don’t sand all the rough edges off the character; He is still a bigot right up to the end. I also appreciate how the finale doesn’t go down the road we think it has to. Recommended.

Rebecca – My first viewing of the only Hitchcock film to win the Best Picture Oscar. Rebecca is a fairly atypical Hitchcock film; it is more a romance with horror overtones than a thriller. A naive, somewhat mousy girl (Joan Fontaine) falls in love with a wealthy widower (Laurence Olivier), and finds herself tormented by his governess (Judith Anderson as Mrs. Danvers – One of the great villainesses). The governess is still obsessed with the former wife, Rebecca, who has been dead for a year. This film is notable for the performance of Anderson as a sad, repressed woman who is fierce in her devotion to a dead woman. There are some lesbian overtones in the way Danvers talks about her former boss, and when you see her rub one of Rebecca’s furs against her face, you have to feel that Hitch was giving us a little nudge. In his book with François Truffaut, Hitchcock said that he wanted Mrs. Danvers to be a ghost-like presence, and tried to not show her walking or moving. She would seem to just be there without warning. Recommended.

Borderline – Comedy from 1950 stars Fred McMurray and Clair Trevor as a couple of agents trying to infiltrate a Mexican drug ring led by Raymond Burr. Thing is, neither knows the other is an agent. He thinks she’s a moll, she thinks he is a mob leg-breaker. This plot could have produced a fun and clever little film, but this isn’t it. The problem is that it wants to be both a comedy and a drama/thriller, and it doesn’t really work either way. There are no laughs, and the two leads don’t create any kind of a romantic spark. Not recommended.