Three Films Make A Post: Just how far will a government go to hide the truth?

Defence of the Realm (1985): This British conspiracy thriller by David Drury makes an interesting contrast to comparable American films where journalism beats a government conspiracy in that the British view on journalists is much less heroic than the American one – at least once the 60s rolled in - often is. Which is what a press dominated by various models of scandal rags will do to one’s opinions. Our protagonist, wonderfully embodied by Gabriel Byrne, is a bit of a shit, perfectly willing to lie, cheat and probably steal, to then turn what he writes into melodrama; but as it turns out, he’s also – to his own surprise - unable to let the lies and injustices committed by those in power go, and turns heroic despite of himself. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have much of a movie.

And it’s a bit of a classic, probably a bit slow-paced for many, I’d assume, but very good at portraying the process of research, and the looming understanding of how big and at once petty this thing that’s being violently suppressed actually is. Drury’s dry but effective direction works very well with the material, and the cast includes greats like Greta Scacchi, Denholm Elliott and Ian Bannen even in the smallest roles.

Bell Book and Candle (1958): For its first two thirds, Richard Quine’s fantastical romantic comedy is pretty much the sort of delight you’d expect this sort of thing to be, with so many clever script and staging ideas one can get a bit drunk watching it. Yet it also turns into a film that seems to be not too fond of its own supposed happy ending, something that equates romantic love with pain, and can see the process of an independent woman becoming part of a couple only in a way where the woman becomes lesser. There’s certainly a feminist perspective at the way this time and place treats women and romance buried rather shallowly in the film, but it’s also too conservative a thing (plus, a big studio movie from the late 50s) to go somewhere different than the times tell it to go.

Which leaves us with a film that tries selling a woman losing her magic, her fashion sense, and her taste in exchange for tears and fifty year old James Stewart as an actual happy end, something that leaves this heterosexual male viewer rather sceptical.

Death Comes at High Noon aka Døden kommer til middag (1964): If you want to look at it that way, you can find the influence of the giallo – or influences on the giallo – everywhere. Case in point is this Danish mystery directed by Erik Balling, where an amateur detective (Poul Reichhardt) – he’s a crime writer – stumbles upon a corpse and then a whole series of other crimes committed by a very honourable citizen indeed. Its political subtext, its stylish production, and the intense way Sander flirts with female lead Helle Virkner’s character – and vice versa, in a way that would have had contemporary censors in my native Germany screaming in horror – all seem to parallel developments elsewhere in European film while also having enough regional specificity to delight friends of the regionally specific like me.

Three Films Make A Post: When 400,000 men couldn't get home, home came for them.

Dunkirk (2017): Of the couple of reviews that don’t heap praise on Christopher Nolan’s somewhat different war film – a genre that’s not generally about retreat even if it is set against war as such – the ones that don’t complain about its lack of diversity - which I understand but personally don’t find relevant as a criterion for the quality of a film as a film - criticize its sentimentality. That one, I really don’t get, for if the film has one stark and obvious virtue to me apart from an incredible realization on a technical level, it is how much it avoids sentimentality in its treatment of material that could all too easily fall into that trap. Instead, it explores the humanity of defeat and humanity in defeat in a manner I find deeply compassionate, using Nolan’s huge technical acumen to get to a very human core of emotions the characters don’t ever precisely state because they cannot be precisely stated but only demonstrated. Which the film does as well as any film I’d care to mention.

Alice in Earnestland (2014): Where I find the core of Nolan’s film pretty easy to grasp and understand, I have a bit more trouble with Ahn Gook-jin’s dark comedy. It does fit nicely into the large number of contemporary South Korean films about class divisions and the shittiness of being one of the working poor, but having watched it, I’m not terribly sure what it is trying to say about this. The quirky structure it shares with many a film from Korea doesn’t make an attempt to understand what this one’s actually about on more than a plot level more difficult too. Some of the film’s weirdness and humour is certainly attractive, and some of it unattractive in a highly entertaining way bordering on splatstick (not to be confused with slapstick); I’m just not confident it adds up to much beyond that.


The Shop Around the Corner (1940): And here’s the point where I unmask as a total barbarian, for I do not prefer Ernst Lubitsch’s original version of the “a couple who hate each other in real life are unknowingly in love in letters” set-up to its later versions. It’s not just because I would have preferred the later movies’ emphasis on the romantic parts of the tale (though I certainly would) in this first version, too, I also don’t find the depiction of the social aquarium of the titular shop it puts in the romance’s place all that riveting. Of course, there are moments where the film delights with precise insight and a good joke or three, but there’s also a lot of restating of things the film has said just a couple of scenes before, and some truly obnoxious character work by William Tracy. Add to that the tragic fact that I’m not actually very fond of James Stewart in this stage of his career, and you might understand why I don’t find this classic all that classic.