Watch Magazine – June/July, 2002

Cabaret
(DIRECTOR: BOB FOSSE, 1972)

I loathe musicals in general but loved this one, precisely because the singing only happens where people actually sing, i.e in a cabaret club or a German beer garden, which means that you are spared the acorn-clenching, pube-straightening embarrassment of folk bleating into song in the middle of anywhere. Based on Isherwood’s informative years in Berlin during the ’30’s, The story was directed by Bob Fosse who used the songs to counterpoint the rise of Nazism with chilling effect. Joel Grey and Liza Minnelli gave career best performances as the emcee and Sally Bowles, respectively. The females in the cabaret band looked like real old slags and the clientele straight out of a George Grosse cartoon. The sense of people caught up in an historical landslide and unable to decipher the disaster ahead had an obvious parallel with the political situation in neighbouring South Africa and its tragic head-in-the-sand tactics. The film perfectly captured this conundrum. I also hugely admired the cinematography of Geoffrey Unsworth who made you feel you that you were actually seated at one of the smoky tables in the Kit Kat club watching a cabaret.

I saw it again in Budapest just as the iron curtain had been lifted and the Hungarians stood in long lines to see it, responding with visceral emotion to the Nazism which clearly struck them as ‘current’ as opposed to something that happened in the dim and distant past. Very potent and powerful, and Liza Minnelli, dressed in a plunging halter neck and hot pants, looked pretty sassy to a fifteen year old.

Nashville
(DIRECTOR: ROBERT ALTMAN, 1975)

Robert Altman’s country and western, multicharacter, grand old soap opera is stuffed with small town intrigue, gossip, rituals, sing-a-things and provincial pomp amidst tatty circumstance. It is not that far off the incestuous nature of small town colonial life. All the actors got to write their own songs, improvise and collaborate on the script, which seemed a totally revolutionary way to go about making a film. I dreamt that if any director was worth working for, it had to be this maverick, little realising that twenty years down the line, I would have the privilege of working with the maestro three times – The Player, Pret a Porter and Gosford Park. I obsessively got to see this film a total of 27 times, never tiring of the multiple story lines and corner-of-frame details. Film buffs were rewarded this year with the publication of the ‘Nashville Chronicles’, which were all about the making of the movie. Indelible highlights include Gwen Welles’ misguided song and strip, the miniskirted Barbara Harris belting out the finale to cover the assassination, Lilly Tomlin singing gospel in an all African-American choir, Geraldine Chaplin giving a yellow-bus car cemetery the poetic treatment, Karen Black’s crosseyed self-centered diva turn…….plus, plus, plus…..

Some Like It Hot
(DIRECTOR: BILLY WILDER, 1959)

The all time perfect comedy with perfect casting. It boasts a tight-as-a-clam script by Billy Wilder and I.A.L Diamond, great dialogue, insane situations and its spirit of farce under-towed by a gangster flick featuring the real life one-time hood, George ‘Spats’ Raft. Thinking of this film makes me think of Joe E. Brown wheezing with lust and laughter for Jack Lemon’s female impersonation, Monroe warbling, ‘I Wanna Be Loved By You’, Tony Curtis’s Cary Grant impression and seething rage at everything going wrong, Jack Lemmon’s castanet cantata….on and on. This movie never fails to deliver. I should also say that this film was another drive-in experience but this time accompanied by various snoggings and fumblings on the back seat.

Don’t Look Now
(DIRECTOR: NIC ROEG, 1973)

This film is director Nic Roeg’s version of the Du Maurier story, starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, set in a wintry deserted Venice. It contains the best sex scene in a regular film I’ve ever seen and that’s because they really looked like they loved each other and were doing it for real. Along with ‘Cabaret,’ this film too made incredible use of cross-cutting and fast editing to great dramatic effect. The sense of foreboding is palpable. As for the actors, Sutherland hailed from a small Canadian town, had a long face and made it into the movies without having to look like Robert Redford, giving hope to another long-faced kid from a small town in the middle of nowhere with dreams of being in flicks but who wasn’t Redford square jawed. I actually got to kiss my teen idol, Julie Christie, playing her toy boy husband in Dennis Potter’s last outing, ‘Karaoke’. The only thing was, I was made up to have a black eye, broken lip and swollen jaw, which somewhat quelled the ‘moment’. Still, it was a teenage fantasy come partly, albeit professionally, true.

Toy Story II
(DIRECTOR: JOHN LASSITER, 1999)

Alongside ‘The Godfather II,’ it’s the best sequel of the past ten years. Great characters, story effects and chase sequences. Witty, original, touching and moving by turn. The restoration of ‘Woody’ by the old skinny Gepetto figure is up there with the best bits in ‘Pinocchio’. It made me feel all of ten years old again without feeling schlocky or feeling patronized. Plus you get the bonus of the sardonic songs and computer animation that has more ‘reality’ than most of the ‘Phantom Menace’s’ C.G.I, effects put together. I am just so grateful that I have a daughter and can pretend that I went to see it as many times as I did in the cause of good fatherdom.

A Clockwork Orange
(DIRECTOR: STANLEY KUBRICK, 197l)

I grew up in Swaziland, a last-gasp-of-empire colony in SouthEast Africa, which is bordered by South Africa and Mozambique. Being the ‘Switzerland’ of Africa, it was allowed to show films banned in either neighbouring country. A Clockwork Orange was a regular tourist feature, as was being able to buy Playboy magazine and watching movies on a Sunday, which just about gives you an idea how socially restricted things were then. The movie was shown at the only cinema, called the Queensway, and always at ten pm and midnight, charging double the going rate for an ordinary flick. My best friend and I were hell-bent on getting into this X-rated epic and tried all manner of forward hair-brushing, voice-lowering and hipster pants-wearing ploys to get past the old boiler in the box office, this being 1972, and me a pimply faced teenager. We finally tried a dose of undiluted charm and flattery which went like this: we pitched up at 9.55, ducking and diving, hoping not to be seen by any lurking parent we might know. Then, jamming our faces to the box office window, we told our adversary, ‘D’you know who you are the spitting image of?

‘No,’ she replied with interest’

‘Elizabeth Taylor.’

The grecian haired lady blurted out, ‘D’you really think so?’.
‘Absolutely.’ ‘Spitting image. Now, my friend and I are studying the novel at school and wonder if you could make an exception on educational grounds, just this once and let us in?’.

She checked to her left and right then tore off two tickets and whispered, ‘Don’t tell anyone.’ To which I gallantly replied, ‘Thanks Liz’, eliciting a flurry of gums and smiles. We bolted inside.

We had heard all manner of how ‘horror show’ the film was and had listened to the soundtrack trying to imagine what it all looked like. We examined the poster for more clues but nothing quite prepared us for the shock of actually seeing it. Having only ever visited London a few times, the vision of a violent, ‘droog’ riddled city, albeit set in the near future, was sobering. Malcolm McDowell’s iconic ‘Alex’ was nothing short of hypnotic and I felt a post-dated frisson meeting him when he appeared as himself in a cameo in ‘The Player’. In fact I became star struck and lock-jawed.

Such was the film’s power I decided then and there in that cinema that when I next visited London, I’d kit myself out in armour-plated anti-thug gear to fend off any marauding ‘droogs’.

Pulp Fiction
(DIRECTOR: QUENTIN TARANTINO, 1994)

Or how to follow up ‘Reservoir Dogs’ with something as good. Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer in the restaurant shoot out for starters, Travolta’s career-swivelling comeback from the ‘Look Who’s Talking’ wastelands, the Royale Burger dialogue with Samuel L. Jackson, Travolta’s dancing with Uma Thurman, doing voodoo eye back and forth before plunging the needle into Uma’s chest, the soundtrack that declares its ‘fuck-you-fuck-me’ credentials upfront, Bruce Willis in anti-smirk form, it’s sheer audacity and chutzpah and so much more.

The Godfather
(DIRECTOR FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA, 1972)

The Queensway cinema burnt down, so a couple of doctors had the brainwave of opening up a drive-in cinema on a farm outside the capital, as the climate was so hot. Hot enough, actually, to turn every car into an instant sauna or else risk an infestation of mosquitoes if the windows were left open.

Coppola film turned up about a year after it had been released around the world and had won a pile of Oscars, so it came with high expectations. The problem with a drive-in is the sound system, which consists of a small metal speaker which gets clamped onto a window so the sound is all mono. Added to which, Marion Brando had a mouth full of cotton wool, so his dialogue was entirely indecipherable. However, despite the sound setbacks, we prevailed and were totally mesmerised by this family portrait of the Mafiosi, were staggered by Sonny Corleone’s Peckinpah-like assassination at the toll booth, and riveted by the cast – most of whom I’d never seen or heard before – which in retrospect reads like a who’s who of the very finest. But more than anything, the Godfather made me determined to eat spaghetti bolognese for the rest of my life. I subscribed to two monthly film magazines and slavishly film-buffed up on all the facts, never really believing, despite dreaming, that I would become a professional actor and that I would ever make it into the movies. I never would have guessed that thirteen years later I would get a part in ‘Dracula’ directed by Coppola himself.

The Godfather II
(DIRECTOR: FRANCIS PORD COPPOLA, 1974)

By 1974 the Queensway had been restored and reopened as the Cinelux, the luxe being wall to wall-to-ceiling blue carpeting, the glue for which hung in the torpid air for well over a year. Every time 1 catch a whiff of that particular product, the Godfather tune plops into my cranium. This film is the only instance I can think of where the sequel is as good as, if not better than the original, with the supreme bonus of Robert de Niro playing Don Corleone as a young man. The expansion of the Corleone family and their rise to power in Sicily via Cuba, Miami, Vegas, New York and Lake Tahoe is operatically plotted and paced. The film has some unforgettable set pieces and is full of brilliant domestic detail – Diane Keaton being thrown out of the Tahoe estate, the murdered hooker and the politician story, Mo Green’s massage table death, Fredo’s ‘fishing trip’ where he joins the fishes, Pacino’s death mask features at the end……

Forward to the DVD decade and the Godfather trilogy is available in its unadulterated whole. It has been re-cut chronologically and makes for epic viewing. As for the third in the trilogy, I watched ‘Godfather III’ at a midnight showing in Hollywood along with four lone punters and was drawn in by the familiar family story, despite a lack of horse-in-the-bed highs that mark the first two.