I’d like to begin, not with the customary introduction, but by asking forgiveness – because given the passion that cineastes nurture for the films they love, this piece might be seen as a malicious provocation. But it is merely, for me, a clearing of the air – a personal catharsis to shake off the years of tolerating, or even pretending to admire films that, in reality, I profoundly dislike.
What follows isn’t so much an objective article as a personal caprice – the “outing” of a number of films that are claimed by those in the know to be not merely good but “great”.
This is the story of why those films leave me cold, bored and searching desperately for the eject button.
Is there anybody today, for instance, who will stand by the once widely held conviction that Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice is a masterpiece? Apparently: Peter Bradshaw of this newspaper asserted in a five-star review that it is “magnificent”. It won a Palme d’Or, an Oscar and a Bafta. It was lauded to the skies for its cinematography.
But as David Mamet once observed, if you come out of a film only admiring its cinematography, then you have probably been sitting through a lousy film. That’s certainly true of Death in Venice, which is a lot of window-dressed camp nonsense smuggling itself into the canon disguised as art.
That plot in full: German novelist Gustav von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde) goes to Venice to recover his inspiration, checks into a hotel and spends the next two hours, as cholera threatens the city, rubbernecking a beautiful adolescent boy in repressed paedophiliac lust. After several months of this, Aschenbach drops dead in his deckchair.
It is beautiful, luscious, leisurely, elegiac and so forth. But it has the regrettable drawback of being staggeringly tedious. It captures none of the nuance of Thomas Mann’s original novella, which was an eloquent meditation on the creative impulse, longing, the fading of artistic powers and the final triumph of the body over the mind. The film, in contrast, is not so much a masterpiece as a colossal piece of soft-focus masturbation.
Many critics have now rumbled Death in Venice. Not so John Ford’s The Searchers. Cahiers du Cinéma rated it the 10th best film ever made. The American Film Institute recently hailed it as the greatest western of all time.
It’s 1868. Comanches attack a homestead, slaughter most of the occupants and abduct a young girl, Debbie Edwards. John Wayne, playing Ethan Edwards, Debbie’s uncle, sets out with a posse to find her. When he does – after several years – Debbie decides she doesn’t want to go home because the Comanches are now her people. Ethan, infuriated, tries to kill the girl, but Martin, her step-brother, prevents him. Then after a brief interregnum, during which Martin and Ethan return to the homestead for some light relief, they track her down once more and Ethan again looks as though he’s going to execute Debbie. But he changes his mind. He tenderly takes a now-willing Debbie home.
The film fails to explain why Ethan would go to such trouble to find the girl if he only wants to kill her. Nor does it explain why he changes his mind at the end (or, for that matter, why Debbie changes her mind about sticking with the Comanches). The rude mechanicals of the piece – such as the absurd Swedish homesteader, Lars Jorgensen, whose verbal repertoire is limited to statements like “Yumping Yiminy!” – add a patina of slapstick that at times drags the film down to the level of Blazing Saddles.
Beautiful landscapes, yes, but you could put Basingstoke High Street in Monument Valley and it would look mysteriously evocative. A critique of racism? Only if you believe that portraying Native Americans as sadistic, rapacious savages is enlightened. A subversion of the whole genre? John Ford would have laughed at the idea.
Like The Searchers, François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim has few detractors. I am definitely and proudly one of them. In fact, I would very happily tell Ethan Edwards that the cast and crew were Comanches and set his psychotic rage on to them.
High concept? It’s a nouvelle vague buddy movie, set in France before the first world war. A pair of dreary, self-obsessed young men, one Austrian (Jules) and one French (Jim), meet Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), a “free spirit”. They spend the film competing for her affection. They have philosophical discussions about art and literature. Then, to pep up the storyline a bit, war breaks out and J&J are called up. Afterwards, they move to Austria and have some more philosophical discussions about love and poetry. They swap partners, and, despite the agony involved, show no emotion at any time – they are too cool for that sort of thing. Then Catherine dies in a car crash with Jules, or possibly Jim. Who cares? Fin.
Despite its historical setting, it is a film anticipating attitudes of the 60s by people who have an absurd, privileged and conceited idea of what the 60s should or will be. Its wit is not witty, its insights are nonexistent and its script is mannered and self-indulgent. Jeanne Moreau is beautiful. That alone does not make it one of the greatest films of all time – or even of 1962. Had Jules, Jim and Catherine been born a few generations later, they could have sustained 10 minutes of interest on the Jerry Springer show. Or at least five.
Fellini’s La Dolce Vita makes Jules et Jim appear restrained in its commitment to the unintentionally absurd and facetiously tedious. Marcello, the central character, a showbiz hack, has a clinging fiancee, Emma, with whom he lives in a dreary flat. Being Italian, he has lovers, one of whom, the bored and jaded Maddalena, he takes to a prostitute’s flat and slips some of the old Salami Romano. Emma attempts suicide but Marcello is unmoved – as characters in continental arthouse movies unaccountably are when faced by unusual or tragic circumstances. Then he finds himself alone with an “American” movie star, Sylvia (Anita Ekberg, who, being Swedish, is staggeringly miscast). Sylvia is one of the most tiresome and unconvincing creations in world cinema. She vogues in the Trevi fountain, giggles like a hyena and repeatedly thrusts her enormous breasts at the camera.
The film was hailed as a non-narrative masterpiece and a unique exercise in the “aesthetic of disparity” (that’s the critic Robert Richardson), but it could more easily be summarised as a turgid, lazy mess of half-realised conceits. And yes, I understand that it’s a satire on decadence, not a tribute to it. But only in that same sense that the Sun vilifies people over sex, while being obsessed with undressed women. It’s called having your panettone and eating it.
Shifting to modern cinema, there is Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, which features at No 9 in the AFI’s list of the greatest American movies and No 1 in Tim Lott’s list of all-time embarrassments. This film is actively offensive. To watch a group of cringing Jews gather around the “good German” during the Holocaust is bad enough. To manipulate one’s emotions, as when a group of incongruously good-looking refugees are tempted into the camp shower block only to receive – yes, showers! – is disgusting. And the final scene, straight out of a prime-time soap, when Schindler breaks down in tears and weeps “I didn’t save enough”, is enough to make the toughest stomach regurgitate its contents.
The only genuinely moving moment is when the movie is over, and the authentic Schindler survivors are shown visiting the real Schindler’s grave. For documentary or literature are the only forms big enough and true enough to fit the Holocaust. Go and see Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, or read a book by Primo Levi, if you want to know about the death camps. And if you want to be entertained by a tragedy with a happy ending set in an inhumane prison environment, go to see The Shawshank Redemption instead.
Or not. The Shawshank Redemption is a perfectly OK B-movie, worth three and a half stars from any critic, but the idea that it is the greatest movie of all time – repeatedly voted No 1 by cinemagoers (though not by critics) – is not so much offensive as simply mystifying.
It’s a straightforward Hollywood prison drama, in which the good people are a bit too good and the bad people are a bit too bad. The hero, Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), accused of a murder of which he is innocent, settles into prison life after having the misfortune of being repeatedly sodomised for several years by those nasty sex-crazed monsters that always seem to make a cameo in these prison films. He makes friends with Ellis “Red” Redding (Morgan Freeman), who is unaccountably pretty much the only black person in the prison. He builds a library – well, this is Hollywood – and helps the nasty warden swindle his accounts. Eventually he gets revenge on the warden, escapes and goes to live on a beach. Freeman later joins him. The end.
The narrative is mildly engaging and the characters well enough drawn – so it’s a decent movie, and certainly an improvement on Escape from Alcatraz – but not by all that much. And it’s certainly not the best movie ever made.
Dear reader, if I haven’t offended you personally yet – be patient. Other films I consider to be profoundly overpraised include Kieslowski’s Three Colours Red (nothing happens), Tarkovsky’s Solaris (nothing happens in space) and Von Stroheim’s Greed (nothing happens in the desert for 10 hours).
Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis is dated, overlong and absurdly wordy – in short, overly French. Jean Renoir’s La Règle de Jeu (according to many francophile critics, the greatest film ever made), is only a country-house drama with less veracity or dramatic power than Upstairs Downstairs. Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter has moments of melodrama that would not shame an episode of Scooby-Doo. On the Waterfront is a masterclass in ham acting – and if you really want to witness the Method at its best, check out Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker, from 1964.
None of these “masterpieces” deserves a place in history more than large numbers of other films that are either forgotten, not noticed in the first place, or languish on the outer periphery of the canon. The Blair Witch Project and The Innocents, for example, are much scarier and more innovative than the highly lauded Psycho. The dialogue-free Philip Glass/Godfrey Reggio project Koyaanisqatsi is one of the most original movies of the last 30 years. South Pacific and All That Jazz both make Singin’ in the Rain look like the empty spectacle it is. Try, also, The Rapture, a weirdly wonderful film about religious cults by Michael Tolkin (who wrote The Player), Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Terence Davies’s masterful Trilogy and my personal greatest of all time, Elem Klimov’s Come and See, a 1985 Russian war epic that makes Apocalypse Now look lightweight.
Please feel free to write in and tear any of these films to shreds. They might even deserve it. And let me tell you – it will make you feel a whole lot better. God knows, writing it down did wonders for me.
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