Reviews

A detective obsessed with catching a criminal, to the point where the two mirror each other . . . not Heat (Michael Mann, 1995) but a film of 40 years earlier, The Big Combo (Joseph H Lewis, 1955). What an array of talent! Not just director Lewis, but screenwriter Philip Yordan, composer David Raksin, and director of photography, John Alton. Low budget, high art. Ars longa, vita brevis.

Consider the opening 10 shots, following the credits: 1. Night, cops directing crowds across a road. 2. Dissolve to LS of boxing match. 3. Back of the stadium, lit with light and shadow, very high walls: a woman comes towards us running, chased by two men. 4. Shaft of light: the woman enters it running, then exits. 5. Repeat of shot 3, the set a little altered: the woman chased again, as if in a labyrinth. 6. Swing doors in dark and light: the woman runs through them. 7. LS of woman other side of the doors, two men still chasing. Our eye is drawn to a coffee counter at the right with a single customer. 8. The two men catch and hold the woman, then let her go. 9. Frontal MS of woman walking into the light, slight pullback of camera while a muted trumpet plays the main musical motif softly; the two men enter the frame, and one leaves. 10. MS of woman with hoodlum (Lee Van Cleef, for it is he is) in full light throwing shadows on wall, followed by camera doing a swift pan right to the coffee counter from shot 7, where it holds the shot, then as the customer finishes his coffee he walks diagonally into CU. 11. Dissolve to . . . etc.

The first thing to applaud is the way the film states that the woman is running from the boxing match: she's not shown at the ring, just at the back of the stadium, in flight. The juxtaposition of the ring and of the woman running is all that is needed for us to connect the two, while at the same time conveying the notion that she is running from everything, not just a boxing match. Top economy of narrative.

The second reason is John Alton's direct quote of Edward Hopper, the painter of human solitude, who liked to frame his individuals in the window so that we see them through a glass screen, rather like a film director in fact. Nor is this redundant pictorialism since the pan to the coffee counter and the man then moving forward links the two elements of the story: we've seen the hoodlums; now the film introduces a detective.

The third reason is the immediate sense of claustrophobia that the sequence generates, a case of 'Start as you mean to go on': the protagonists move in spaces determined by the lighting and the shadows and silhouettes they create. A triumph of black-and-white chiaroscuro.

A triumph too for classical Hollywood as opposed to the mannerist Hollywood of Heat. That was made with a massive budget, bigger stars, bigger set pieces when with The Big Combo Joseph H Lewis (and the producer Sydney Harmon) show how it can be done so much more simply without losing quality. What is more the psychology of the cop-criminal relationship in Lewis's film is far less glamorous, more gritty and more cruel than in Heat. Heat managers to give a sheen to its posturing, show-off psychopaths; in its underplayed but disturbing torture scenes, The Big Combo paints a darker interior picture to match Alton's exteriors, oppressive in their combination of darkness and blinding light.

171 minutes of Heat? Well, probably. 84 minutes of The Big Combo? Yes, definitely.

www.timcawkwell.co.uk

'Rome Open City', premiered in September 1945, was made with non- professionals; it depicted the war with dramatic intensity; it was filmed in the street as well as the studio. But if you change 'in the street' to 'on the open sea' I could as well be referring to 'Western Approaches' premiered almost a year earlier in December 1944. Rossellini of course went on to even greater things, whereas Pat Jackson, the maker of 'Western Approaches', went on to Hollywood and oblivion of a kind. Pity, because his wartime film is outstanding.

For two reasons. It seems to be a drama but is it a documentary about the Atlantic convoys and the perils they faced? or is it a drama made realistic by documentary techniques? That ambivalence makes the film much more compelling, and Jackson can especially take the credit for the melodramatic but still credible idea at the centre of the film which lends it the suspense proper to a fiction film, that of the triangular situation between lifeboat, u-boat and destroyer.

The second reason is the use of non-professionals, schooled in part by Jackson to use eye and voice, but also semi-improvising on the script, following it but also saying things in their own words (including a lot of natural naval swearing which the censors jumped upon unfortunately). They bring no baggage of other roles and lend an authenticity at all levels from captain to other officers to the merchant seamen in the lifeboat. It makes the film mesmerizing. Not to be sure Robert Bresson's 'involuntary expressive' but certainly naturally rather than artificially expressive which should be cinema's truest technique.

www.timcawkwell.co.uk

A sleeper, as these things go, now waking us all up. Made in 2009 and released in 2010 to a desultory response, the film then began to gather awards including a Czech Lion for best film in 2011. It toured the USA in 2012 and is one of a handful of new Czech films touring art-house cinemas in the UK at present (April 2013).

No need to describe the plot – suffice it to say that it concerns a Statni Bezpecnost officer (i.e. secret policeman) in Czechoslovakia after 1980 (a Solidarity poster gives a terminus post quem) and before the Velvet Revolution of 1989. The film information and blogs refer to the fact that it is set in 1982, but there was nothing in the English sub-titles that I spotted to confirm this. This is a dark past which Czechs and Slovaks need to face up to; as did Lumet's Pawnbroker for a public understanding of the Nazi Death Camps when it came out in 1964, this film will mark an important Czech milestone in this process. The secret policeman is the magnet for the film. His victim,Tomas Sikora, is a shadow, although nuances of the portrayal may have escaped me.

Unfortunately, in the modern manner, it is 146 minutes long. It begins tautly, but in the last 20 to 30 minutes this tautness is abandoned. Several commentators refer, correctly, to its noir elements but one noir element they ignore is the tightness that a 90-minute feature can create: beginning, middle and end.

The digital camera work and choice of locations produces a highly convincing drabness, but for some reason – perhaps the continued sway of neo-realist precepts – it eschews close-ups of hands and objects, although it does close in on facial expressions effectively. And yet close-ups can be used to create suspense as Hitchcock well knew, and if we are watching a thriller not a historical tract, as we are, then close-ups could have been used to great effect: Antonin's paper bags, his gun, for example. And why not make a fetish out of the handcuffs he carries?

One striking thing is the way it handles disparate groupings of characters: Tomas, Klara and Pavel; Antonin, Martin and the Lieutenant Major; Klara and Darina; Tomas and his family; and so on. Not quite Altman's Nashville but in its own way using a wide range of characters to evoke a whole society and era. No doubt this is what its director, Radim Spacek, would point to in order to justify the film's length.

At the centre of it all is Antonin Tonda, on-screen for much of the film. The way he chooses to corrupt himself, beyond the control of his masters, is a metaphor for the way Soviet Communism corrupted itself. He starts as a risk to all citizens, but he turns himself into a threat to the whole state. When I came out of the cinema, I could see how the system that produced a narrative like Walking Too Fast could also trigger Bela Tarr's The Turin Horse (Hungary 2011), a re-wind of the Book of Genesis back to 'Let there be dark'.

Occasionally a film about which you know nothing comes along and knocks you down. This is even more remarkable when it is 30 years old. It is what in Poland they call a polkownik or 'shelf movie', that is to say a film that was so explosive it had to be put on a shelf and not shown. Bugajski made Interrogation/Przesluchanie in Poland in 1982 and finished principal photography a week before martial law was declared. He then buried the film, literally, in order to keep it from being destroyed. With the end of Polish Communism it resurfaced in 1989, being premiered in the UK in 1990, and was the official Polish entry at Cannes in 1990. The story is compelling: in 1951 a young woman, Tonia Dziwisz, is arrested when she is drunk, and thrown into prison where the UBeks, a major and Lieutenant Morawski, try to force her to spill the beans on Olcha, a war resistance hero she had slept with, in a way that would condemn him to death, regardless of whether what she said was true or false. But it is not just the story that compels, but the way it is made. Much of it is in close-up, a style I am normally wary of, but Bugajski uses it to convey the visceral nature of mental and physical torture. There are some medium shots in the film, and towards the end a long shot is used to convey how distant the outside world has become. But mostly we see the faces of both victims and torturers wrestling with inner demons. Is it true? Yes. It starts in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon territory, and develops into a cat-and-mouse psychological thriller. I think fiction takes over here, but it only shows how fiction is more powerful and more true than fact. I never have nightmares, but this film gave me one. Highly recommended.