All Night Long: (1962. dir: Basil Dearden) Criterion has lately recognized English director Dearden's groundbreaking work in a series called "London Underground", works which explored and documented London's seamier underside during the fifties and sixties, the shadow London which went unacknowledged by the BBC. Dearden's bolder ventures included the important Dirk Bogarde films the Blue Lamp and Victim, dealing respectively with crime and homosexuality, and Sapphire, which dug into racism and anti-miscegenation.
All Night Long is a portrait of England's jazz community using the plot of Othello to surprisingly good effect. The setting is an all-night jam in honor of the first-year anniversary of esteemed piano-player Aurelius Rex (Paul Harris) and his retired singer-wife Delia (Marti Stevens). As the music and champagne flow, faux-Iago and drummer Johnnie Cousin (Patrick McGoohan) tries to convince Delia to front his new band, and, when that fails, sets up a complex of machinations to break up her marriage. The characters are interesting,and both the photography and performances are good (special mention to Keith Michell as the good-hearted and wronged pot-head band-manager Cass. Michell would a few years later become my own template for the royal wife-killer in one of the very first Masterpiece Theatre productions ever, the Six Wives of Henry VIII). Most surprisingly, the script is a good one, incorporating lingo of the time without becoming slave to it, and tamping the high melodrama down into a jumping pulse building to a believable climax.
On top of it all, the music running constantly behind the action transports you back in time. This is the kind of jam session where a guy who looks like your junior high science teacher sits down at the piano and you realize it's Dave Brubeck, and the cat on bass is called Mingus.
*SPOILER ALERT*
Satan's Little Helper: (2005. dir: Jeff Lieberman) Alternating between the lame, the funny, and the downright disturbing, this ultra-low-budget horror outing is strong on suspense and character, probably leaving behind a good hunk of its natural audience. When the gore came, I found it upsetting. The mime abilities of the mute villain are unsettling. Kathryn Winnick (Lagertha in the Vikings) is already a full-fledged movie star, very good in a difficult role, and Amanda Plummer brings her usual eccentricity to provide the needed depth to the maternal figure. This is a family under siege, and the women have to take charge, although not as successfully as one might like. It's also a satirical statement, not only about the debilitating power which super-desensitizing computer games wield over pliable, young minds, but also about the ready agency which we afford to the clothing a person wears. (It's Halloween, and the little boy believes that the guy dressed like Satan really is him, then the same guy dressed as Jesus really is God, then the same guy dressed as a cop... you get it. It's unsettling.) When this director gets a little money thrown his way, he's a fellow to watch.
Something in the Air: (2012. dir: Olivier Assayas) I get it. It was a brilliant time to be alive and an intellectual, the 60s and early 70s in Paris. Now every French director of an entire generation is making his film about coming of age during that heady time of anarchy in the streets, opium in the pipes, and free love everywhere else. (If you want to have a film festival, see also Phillippe Garrel's Regular Lovers and Bertolucci's the Dreamers.)
The trouble with making a movie based in your own (highly romanticized) experience is that you don't know what to leave out, so all these movies are too long. This one, Apres Mai, to use its original title, is my favorite. I particularly like the ending (very minor spoiler alert here), with the main character moving to London to work as gopher on a film about Nazis fighting dinosaurs.
The good thing about these films is the care that goes into the details. You really do feel you're walking through a different age in France. The bad part is that political anarchist kids are, probably by definition, grossly self-righteous and humourless. (And the kids in the Dreamers are just too smug to be borne. Too damned French, perhaps. I couldn't finish it, so it's possible that life cuts them down to size by the roll of the end credits.) Still, solely in the interest of time travel, these films taken together are a fascinating experience, with occasional, exhilarating highs alleviating the more consistent sense of petty annoyance.
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