One of my pet peeves is when critics reviewing children's films decide to go easy on them because they're "just for the kids" and can therefore be excused for not holding up in front of an adult audience. This smacks of the same lazy thinking routinely employed by people who insist that children should be our biggest priority as they are 'the future'. Just like this idea ignores the fact that by the time the future gets here the children in question will actually be adults, making films that can only be enjoyed as a child means they have no longevity for their audience, and will not reward repeat viewings. There are few film experiences more disappointing than the revisiting of a film which your memory tells you was amazing, but which turns out to be a load of old rubbish.
Comedian Demetri Martin once said that saying "I like kids" is the same as saying "I like people... for a little while". Similarly, making a film just for children is like saying "you can enjoy this film... for a while". The whole idea just contributes further to an already disposable culture, where media products come and go faster than plastic rodents in an arcade Whack-A-Mole game. The films we see as children should be the films we want to remember our whole lives, the films that define us as people. The generation of children that grew up in the 70s and 80s can now almost be defined simply as the 'Star Wars generation', such was the impact of the franchise on almost every child who saw it. The popularity of comic books and fan fiction which continue the story long into the future is evidence of the fact that, not content just to grow up with these characters, people want to grow old with them as well.
We need film-makers to keep making films that appeal to children on a level deeper than fart jokes and unimaginative CG animal slapstick, because the fanboys of today are the film-makers of tomorrow: the Steven Spielbergs and the Joe Dantes. And to make sure we get them we need films that aren't going to be forgotten the moment The Simpsons starts, or mum yells "Tea!", but which will continue to bring joy and inspiration to people who watch them long into their old age.
What with the countless slasher remakes and J-horror rip-offs filling our screens at the moment there has been a dearth of great horror in our cinemas recently. Perhaps if today's film-makers are to create truly great horror films again they need to look to the past for some lessons in creating suspense or sustaining mood. Here is a selection of films which illustrate some of the elements lacking in modern horror.
Sound Design - The Haunting In this classic 60s horror, nothing is actually seen of the malicious presence which torments the team of volunteers investigating the old house, but everything is heard of them. A cacophonous mix of banged doors, rattling windows, footsteps and whispered voices all contribute to the sense of menace which pervades every second of this movie. You can cover your eyes or cower behind the sofa, but you can't escape the horror.
Cinematography - Cat People This low budget horror classic marked producer Val Lewton's first film as head of his own horror B-unit at RKO pictures, and it was an effective demonstration of his theory that things were scarier when left to the audience's imagination. The film's killer, a black panther, is only seen once in the film, and the danger is far more effectively conveyed through the flickering shadows and dark shapes that dance around the edge of the frame as the protagonists try to escape a terror they can barely see. Sound design also plays a significant part, and the film's strongest set-piece takes place in a swimming pool as a girl desperately treads water as the refracted light from the water gives glimpses of the silhouette whose growls echo around the pool.
Make-Up - Phantom of the Opera In this CGI age horror effects are probably less scary than they have ever been, though even the copious amounts of blood and guts in the glorious gore-fests of the video nasty era were a little lacking in the quiet creepiness of earlier horror. Undisputed master of the modestly macabre is silent horror star Lon Chaney, who probably found his finest moment in an early adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera - the reveal of the Phantom's hideous features halfway through the film becoming one of the most iconic moments in horror history, an image burned on the retina of anyone who has ever seen it.
Showmanship - The Tingler Horror movies are often most effective when they mess with our sense of reality - blurring the boundies between watching and participating in the film, albeit through campy or gimmicky methods. Master of the theatrical gimmick William Castle is perhaps most notorious for the release of this film about a creature which would tingle the bottom of a victim's spine until they died, their only escape being to scream. On the film's roadshow release, Castle would rig up selected chairs in the audience to tingle at the point in the film when the Tingler is set free in a cinema. It's arguable that Castle's techniques have their modern equivalent in the viral marketing of films such as The Blair Witch Project, but none of these provide such a memorable shared horror experience as Castle's screenings used to.
Ideas - The Undead No one can claim that Roger Corman wasn't ambitious, and this film is perhaps one of his most surprisingly aspirational films. Intended to exploit the public's fascination with past lives in the late 50s, the film starts out as a conventional supernatural thriller with cardboard sets and unconvincing plasticine make-up, but is so earnest in its ideas that the audience is compelled to buy into what eventually ends up feeling like a powerful existential drama. The brutal intercutting between antagonists and protagonist as she realises the sacrifice she is being asked to make lingers in the mind longer than any musical stinger or gore-shot ever could.
When the topic of the greatest silent epic is under discussion, it is often the predictable names such as D.W. Griffith and Sergei Einstein, and titles like Birth of a Nation and Cabiria that are put forward for the title. However, many of these films are somewhat stodgy and lifeless, with production values and spectacle making up for their lack of warmth or imagination. Here are 3 somewhat underrated epics which I feel embody the best of silent era...
Robin Hood (Allan Dwan, 1922) Silent star Douglas Fairbanks' adapatation of Robin Hood involved one of the biggest sets thus built, an enormous castle complete with concealed ladders and slides which provided the agile actor with a myriad of gymanstic opportunities, and set the scene perfectly for this big budget, epic retelling of the legend. Fairbanks was just coming into his own as an action star when he made this and the stunts are as top class as ever, but he never loses the sense of winsome comedy that made him popular. Although the 1938 Errol Flynn vehicle The Adventures of Robin Hood now seems to have eclipsed this version in the public consciousness as the definitive rendering of the legend, this engaging adaptation still shines brighter for the expert way that director Allan Dwan manages to maintain a light-hearted tone whilst still effectively conveying the horrific greed and corruption of King John's government, the perfect foil for such a hero of the people (a description befitting either Robin Hood or the hugely popular Fairbanks himself).
The Iron Horse (John Ford, 1924) Director John Ford never lost his fascination with the creation of American legends and in The Iron Horse he found the perfect canvas on which to paint his version of the taming of the American west, with each stroke as broad and epic as the Mississippi. As we follow the railway workers in their efforts to build the first transcontintental railroad we may as well be watching them build America itself, as Ford uses their story as an excuse to weave together people and events from throughout all of America's short history. Abraham Lincoln, Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill Hicock... all make an appearance in Ford's epic tale, as do so many of the elements that have become familiar parts of the Ford canon; the rogueish Irish comedy, the love of fistfights, the composition - where trivial events are transformed into vital parts of American history when shot against Ford's magnificent western vistas. Ford didn't really hit his stride as a top-class director until the 1930s, but this film is testament to the fact that most of the elements that made his later films so special were right there in the 1920s.
Dr Mabuse, The Gambler (Fritz Lang, 1924) Although Fritz Lang's Metropolis is rightly regarded as one of the finest films of the entire silent era, and shows Lang at perhaps his most ambitious, it is in this earlier film featuring diabolical supervillain Dr Mabuse that is his most accomplished. Where Metropolis sought to remedy society's problems by looking to the future for enlightenment, Dr Mabuse turns its eyes squarely on the present, exposing the seedy underbelly of Weimar Germany, where morals can be bought and sold on the open market, and where nightclub patrons are greeted with the question "cards or coke?". Rudolf Klein-Rogge is suitably mesmerising as crime-lord, master of disguise and occasional hypnotist Dr Mabuse, and the effects Lang uses to convey Mabuse's mastery over disguise and persuasion techniques are sufficiently bold and striking to never seem dated. If Mabuse is evil incarnate then this film offers new meaning to the phrase "the devil is in the detail" as Lang's rigorous 4 and a half hour thriller guides us through the machinations of Mabuse's empire with a rigorous detail seldom equalled in the 80-odd years of cinema since. That the film manages to be conistently gripping over such a long duration is testament to Lang's supreme mastery of the silent form. The fact that he never managed to reach such heights when working with sound is also revealing, a signifier of the unique pleasures to be gained from this sadly lost form of art.
While watching 'Just Like Heaven' recently, it struck me that the endings to modern romantic comedy movies are all essentially the same. Crass generalization? No. The couple catch up with each other in a rose garden, on a rain soaked street, or atop the Empire Street Building, they kiss, the camera pulls out, and a Nat King Cole/Bing Crosby/Insert-Crooner-Here song leads us into the closing credits. To many viewers this might seem to be par for the course. Romantic comedy is traditionally one of the most formulaic of all movie genres, and you would expect the ending to be as unoriginal as the rest of the plot. This wasn't always so, however. As much as I love to watch an aerial shot of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan locked in an embrace whilst Harry Nilsson croons (and I do), I also miss the days when romantic comedies were a bit more inventive and unexpected in the way they finally brought the couple together.
In the 1930s, the heyday of the screwball comedy, it was rare that we would actually witness the couple finally overcoming their inhibitions and 'getting it on', but we would instead have to infer it from some form of fiendishly clever callback or visual joke. Part of this was due to the moral climate of the times. The "production code" dictated that it was inappropriate to see an unmarried couple spending a night together, and even if they were married, only in separate beds. This posed a problem for 1934 screwball romance "It Happened One Night", the plot of which involved a runaway heiress and a newspaper report forced to spend a night in the same motel room. The (somewhat risque for the times) solution was for star Clark Gable to rig up a rope and blanket between the two beds which was henceforth referred to as 'The Walls of Jericho'. This achieved the dual goal of appeasing the censors, and setting up what would become a running joke. After the couple eventually realise they want to be together, the reunion is achieved through two very simple shots. One is a slightly befuddled motel owner reporting to his wife on a couple who made the unusual request of having a rope, a blanket and a toy trumpet. The next is said blanket ceremoniously dropping from said rope whilst a tinny bugle call plays in the background. No need for further explanation.
Examples of this kind of wit and ingenuity abound in classical Hollywood. Another great example being Only Angels Have Wings, the ending of which finds pilot Cary Grant setting off from his base while a desperate Jean Arthur begs him simply to ask her to stay and she will. The stubborn Grant responds that he "never asked a woman to do anything", and he flips a coin, telling her if it's heads she might as well stay. It lands heads, but this is not good enough for Arthur who watches tearfully as the object of her love walks away, seemingly indifferently to her presence. But on inspecting the coin in question she realises that it is in fact the double headed coin which Grant has been flipping the whole film. There's no need for schmaltzy dialogue here, just her ecstatic face as she sees him soaring into the sky is enough that we know everything will work out fine.
Perhaps the best example of the unexpected nature of these endings is to be found in another Grant film - "The Awful Truth". An estranged but still very much in love married couple wait up in separate bedrooms of a creaking house as a cuckoo clock ticks away the final hours until the divorce that neither really want will be official. Just before midnight we find Grant despondently pacing around wife Irene Dunn's bed as she watches helplessly, neither willing to make a move. Again, two simple shots resolve the seemingly impossible situation. The wind blows the door shut behind Grant, leaving him and Dunn shut in the room together. The cuckoo clock hits midnight, and we see the familiar figures of a wooden bride and groom trot mechanically out of the clock and begin to head back in. Only this time the tiny toy figure of the groom doesn't return to his own enclosure, but instead decides to trot after his wife in an ending which is totally implausible, but bolder, more surprising, and more econimical in resolving the plot strand than anything current Hollywood could ever dream of. In short - utterly delightful.
So although the filmmakers today are less limited by what they can show on screen, this doesn't mean that their ideas need be more limited. Next time I see a Hollywood-born rom-com, I'm going to have my fingers crossed that the director has the courage to end it on more than just a kiss and a thunderstorm. Preferably without Celine Dion, too. Or Mariah Carey, for that matter.
