Vote for Britain

A crucial week here in the UK, with our election on Thursday and terror attacks escalating - lets return to the glory years of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s and all those British movies we love, part of our current Lists season, and no, I may not be able to stick to 20 each - but then, my blog - my rules. Reviews of lots of these at British label.

1940s:

• Lets start with 7 David Lean, all essential: IN WHICH WE SERVE / THIS HAPPY BREED / BLITHE SPIRIT / BRIEF ENCOUNTER / GREAT EXPECTATIONS / OLIVER TWIST / THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS
  
• 4 Michael Powell, even more essential: A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH / I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING / BLACK NARCISSUS / THE RED SHOES
• 2 Carol Reed: THE FALLEN IDOL / ODD MAN OUT
• 2 Basil Dearden: SARABAND FOR DEAD LOVERS / THE BLUE LAMP
• Asquith; THE WAY TO THE STARS
• Annakin - HOLIDAY CAMP - the post war boom starts with those new holiday camps, 1947.
• Hamer – IT ALWAYS RAINS ON SUNDAY - the grim side of postwar London / KIND HEARTS & CORONETS
• Crichton – WHISKEY GALORE.

Let's throw in some Gainsborough melodramas which brightened up the war years: THE WICKED LADY, MADONNA OF THE SEVEN MOONS, CARAVAN, BLANCHE FURY, and some Anna Neagle epics: I LIVE IN PARK LANE, MAYTIME IN MAYFAIR. 

1950s:

Often seen as a bland decade for English movies, but lots of pleasure for those of us growing up then:

• Dearden – POOL OF LONDON / THE GENTLE GUNMAN  / VIOLENT PLAYGROUND
• Crichton – DANCE HALL (by Godfrey Winn - the leisure time of factory girls, as much a social document as SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING would be at the end of the decade)
• Hurst – DANGEROUS EXILE (ditto Belinda Lee in this 1957 costumer about the son of Marie Antoinette..)
• Box – CAMPBELL’S KINGDOM (Dirk and very tough guy Stanley Baker in the Canadian Rockies (actually the Dolomites in Italy), we loved it in 1957.
• Fregonese - SEVEN THUNDERS (Boyd leads a terrific cast in 1957 wartime thriller set in occupied Marseilles - one I enjoyed as a kid)
• J Lee Thompson - NO TREES IN THE STREET / TIGER BAY / NORTH WEST FRONTIER (all 1959)
• NO TIME FOR TEARS - 3 Anna Neagle classics:
• MY TEENAGE DAUGHTER 
• THE LADY IS A SQUARE
• THOSE DANGEROUS YEARS
• WONDERFUL THINGS
• SIMON AND LAURA 
• AN ALLIGATOR NAMED DAISY
• NOR THE MOON BY NIGHT
• OUT OF THE CLOUDS
• JET STORM - Stanley Baker pilots the plane, Richard Attenborough has the bomb, all star cast in 1959. Love it 
• HELL DRIVERS
• ALIVE AND KICKING
• THE WEAK AND THE WICKED. Glynis Johns is sent to prison and shares a cell with Diana Dors, in this delicious 1954 meller, from J Lee Thompson.
• TURN THE KEY SOFTLY. More ex-jailbirds with Yvonne Mitchell and young Joan Collins in 1953
• PASSPORT TO SHAME 
  
• EXPRESSO BONGO
• SERIOUS CHARGE
• ROOM AT THE TOP.

1960s:

The new boys and girls and directors hit town:

• VICTIM
• A TASTE OF HONEY
  
• A KIND OF LOVING (above right)
• THE L-SHAPED ROOM (Leslie Caron joins the seedy Notting Hill bedsit set, 1962)
• WEST 11 (Di Dors also in Notting Hill bedsit land with gay Alfred Lynch, in early Winner 1963)
• TWO LEFT FEET (Young Hemmings and Michael Crawford shine)
• SOME PEOPLE, 1962 charmer about Bristol teenagers, with Hemmings again.
• THE BOYS - fascinating 1962 time capsule
• THE LEATHER BOYS - another early gay British saga, 1964, below)
  
• BILLY LIAR
• THE SERVANT
• DARLING (above right) - Julie and gay pal eye up the waiter .... both get him.
• THE GIRL WITH GREEN EYES
• I WAS HAPPY HERE
• THE KNACK
• THE SYSTEM - perfectly 1964 as England began to swing ...
• THE WORLD TEN TIMES OVER - 1963 Soho saga
  
• A HARD DAY'S NIGHT
• HELP!
• THE PLEASURE GIRLS - 1965 Kensington girls, gays too!
• SATURDAY NIGHT OUT
• NOTHING BUT THE BEST
• REPULSION
• ACCIDENT.

SWINGING 60s:

• TOM JONES
• WHATS NEW PUSSYCAT?
• MODESTY BLAISE
• BLOW-UP
• SMASHING TIME
• HERE WE GO ROUND THE MULBERRY BUSH
• DEEP END
• PERFORMANCE.

All covered in detail at British/London labels. 

Monica

Some super black and white shots of our goddess Monica Vitti, by Elisabetta Catalano. I have finally got my hands on that 2011 issue of Italian "Vanity Fair" with 12 pages on Monica, with some terrific photos and comments and features on her, on her then 80th birthday.  There is also now that new Blu-ray of L'AVVENTURA .... Those Antonioni films find new admirers all the time. 
My first appreciation on Monica back in 2010 is at Monica 1 label, got over 2800 views then. She is still a major European star even if she has been silent for some years .....

The landscape and architecture of that face ... and that distinctive voice and sense of fun.
I came across a piece on her by Alan Stanbrook from 1990:
"There are two Monica Vittis: the husky, effervescent comedienne, which is how she sees herself, and the grave, statuesque beauty gazing into a haunted future which is how director Michelangelo Antonioni saw her. They worked together five times, between L'AVVENTURA in 1959 and THE OBERWALD MYSTERY in 1980. A presence more than an actress, Vitti was moulded into a Bernhardt (and the face of European cinema) when she wanted to be a Betty Hutton or Kay Kendall. Humour has surfaced throughout her career, from CHATEAU EN SUEDE to MODESTY BLAISE.. The first film she directed SECRET SCANDAL (unavailable here) is also a comedy. A thick Roman accent denied her an international career, but, with Antonioni, she had more than that: like Jeanne Moreau, hers became the face of our troubled times."  

Those Italian ladies

Regulars here will know how we appreciate those Italian ladies - Sophia, Monica, Gina, Claudia, Silvana, then there's Alida Valli, Elsa Martinelli, Laura Antonelli and of course Magnani .... here are a clutch of new stills. Thanks to Colin for the Sophia pictures I had not seen before; and to that great site Silents & Talkies for that stunning Vitti portrait. (http://silentsandtalkies.blogspot.co.uk/)
I like this one of Claudia and Monica together too - they co-starred a few times in Italian comedies in the '70s, BLONDE IN BLACK LEATHER is a lot of fun, as per my review at their labels. We love Silvana too in those items like MAMBO, THE SEA WALL, TEMPEST and those later Visconti and Pasolini films she appeared in. They all have amazing faces and certainly ramp up the glamour. Its been great too discovering Sophia's Italian movies from 1954 and '55 before she went into American films: I particularly like TOO BAD SHE'S BAD, SCANDAL IN SORRENTO, WOMAN OF THE RIVER etc., as per reviews (Italian labels). 

Lots more on them at the labels.

Claudia in THE LEOPARD or SANDRA, Monica in L'AVVENTURA or L'ECLISSE or MODESTY BLAISE, Sophia in anything. Valli in SENSO, Magnani in WILD IS THE WIND or BELLISSIMA, Antonelli in L'INNOCENTE, and how could we forget Gina Lollobrigida in so many movie moments ....

Dirk in 1971

I came across a fascinating long interview with Dirk Bogarde by Gordon Gow in the May 1971 200th issue of one of my favourite magazines "Films and Filming", about the time Dirk was promoting Visconti's DEATH IN VENICE. (As I have recounted here before, I met him about 6 months before this interview, at the London BFI in November 1970 where he gave a very entertaining lecture and Q&A session, and he autographed the programme for me afterwards when I managed to have a quick conversation with him). 

Dirk always gave good interview and this one is choice. I must quote some extracts .... as he talks about Marilyn Monroe, and various films of his like THE SPANISH GARDENER, THE SERVANT, ACCIDENT and DEATH IN VENICE. He talks a lot about Visconti here, and was particularly fond of SENSO. 

"Marilyn had this intangible wistfulness … in BUS STOP she was magical. Do you remember the scene where she gets her tatty old train ripped off her by a man at a café table when she is doing her act? Do you remember her look of pain and rage and despair?

THE SPANISH GARDENER: “In those days they wouldn’t have anything to do with homosexuality. The whole premise of the original story was that a small boy, without any sexual knowledge, fell in love with the gardener because he had no love at all from his parents. He had no mother and a perfectly foul father. This sort of thing so often happens. The whole story tilted on the fact that the father became incurably jealous because he was sexually in love with the gardener. And of course that did not come through because then we were supposed to be making nice wholesome pictures. In the end nothing worked out, I wasn’t killed as the gardener was in the book. We made it all nice for the Odeon circuit. It was so absurd and shameful I did not go and see it, but the old aunties and uncles loved it." (In the book, a best-seller by A.J. Cronin, Jose the gardener is 19 - Bogarde was 35 at the time, and the character was not killed off as in the novel, as Rank created a false happy ending to send audiences home happy).   

He is not especially fond of his work in THE SERVANT. “It amuses me. It was enormous fun to do – it was no effort. It was entirely technical to act. Harold Pinter had written it so unfailingly that you couldn’t put a foot wrong in it. I was surrounded with only the very best people, and it was as easy as falling off a log. But THE SERVANT will be a classic film for all time. I know – whatever happens to me – I will be in the archives because of THE SERVANT. In its entirety of course, its an important film. Especially now we know all about LSD – surprise, surprise. Apparanty audiences didn’t now about LSD when the film was first shown, and none of the critics did either, and the whole ending is LSD – the boy is on a trip. I’ve seen it again in America recently and it stands up, and it is absolutely chilling in German – more than that, it’s a towering picture. But from my point of view it cost me very little emotionally, because I’m nothing to do with the man I played in THE SERVANT so it was easy to become a North country bastard called Barrett and his compulsion to dominate." Shame he was not asked about Gabriel, his high camp arch-villain in Losey's 1966 MODESTY BLAISE ... (one of my essential movies). Left: a MODESTY publicity shot.

He says though that ACCIDENT is the best film Losey and Bogarde did together. “I was very aware of the emotions of the man in ACCIDENT and I was almost in a trance for about four months after I’d finished it. …. I put all the clothes and shoes that I wore for the character into a trunk and locked them up. I wore them later in JUSTINE and left them all behind me in Hollywood, so they may come up for sale in 20^th Century Fox’s lot. I got rid of them, you see, because the man I had been in ACCIDENT was dead and I didn’t want his clothes  - locked them away as you would with the clothes of anybody who has died in a sudden car crash. JUSTINE was much later and Pursewarden was a different man." (I saw and reviewed ACCIDENT again recently, scroll down or over the page..).

"Aschenbach in DEATH IN VENICE is the ultimate loser. He’s a dying man, he goes to Venice for the last months of his life. After years of rigorous and strict belief that beauty is created by man, he suddenly finds at dinner one night that God, quite alone by Himself, all up there in Heaven, has created a piece of beauty sitting across the soup plate … a youth of such beauty that Aschenbach can’t believe it. … Before he dies he sees that God was right and man was wrong. That God is in fact the creator of beauty … I do believe there is a higher power, and I don’t know any other word for it but God. I think our future is formed: whether you go and play golf on the moon or get squashed by a truck on a French bypass. Its all shaped."

Bogarde now lives in his house in France, at Grasse, eschewing the crowded beaches below and settling for a hose-down in his back garden. He is waiting for Alain Resnais to give him the word to start work on a film about the Marquis de Sade, but money has been difficult to raise. “I’ve got a very pleasant place to live in now. Sufficient money to exist for the rest of my life if I’m very careful. I can manage … DEATH IN VENICE could well be the finish for me. I don’t want to go back to the things I did before – the DOCTORS and all that rubbish. If DEATH IN VENICE fails, I’ll stay with it as a failure. If it’s a success, and my performance in it has worked, then perhaps it’s the film I’ve always been wanting to make – and I might someday go and do another somewhere, but I’m not anxious." 

Of course that Resnais film did not happen - Dirk as the Marquis de Sade would have been interesting! - , but he and Resnais did the wonderful PROVIDENCE in 1977, and by then he had began his series of memoirs and novels as he became a best-selling writer. 
His later books like "A Short Walk From Harrods" recount his later French years and his and partner Tony Forwood's return to London due to ill-health - where he died in 1999 aged 78. Interesting too to read about the LSD in THE SERVANT, It did seem that Tony (James Fox) was drugged at the end, but I did not imagine it could have been LSD! (We certainly knew about LSD in 1968 when we were seeing The Doors and Jefferson Airplane in concert and the 2001 film on acid, but hardly early in the decade). 
It was interesting too seeing THE SERVANT again on the big screen a couple of year ago, as I have recounted previously, at the Curzon Soho, to tie in with its Blu-ray release, with co-stars Fox, Sarah Miles and Wendy Craig present, to discuss the film and their memories of working with Dirk and Losey, both of whom I had seen (separately) back in 1970 when I was a mere 24. Left: Bogarde at the BFI in 1970.
LOTS more Bogarde at the labels ....  

Pour le weekend: '60 European glamour

Does European glamour get better than this?  Soon: '70s and '80s glamour ...

Some of our '60s European favourites: Alain with Marie Laforet, Romy, Monica, Claudia, Deneuve & Dorleac, Anouk, Audran, Belmondo, Vitti & Stamp in MODESTY BLAISE, Jean Sorel & Robert Hossein in that terrific thriller CHAIR DE POULE, 1963, (both in their 80s now, as are Loren, Delon, Bardot, Aimee, Belmondo etc), Brigitte avec Laurent Terzieff in Scotland for TWO WEEKS IN SEPTEMBER, a 1967 cult favourite, and Sophia with that kinky boots moment in ARABESQUE ! Lots more on all these at their labels.

Monica Vitti in 1977 ...

and some new photos from MODESTY BLAISE, 1966 ..... does Sixties glamour get any better?

Thanks too, once again, to Colin for finding me the January 2 1977 UK "Sunday Times" colour supplement, with Monica on the cover and an interview with her inside. I had this at the time but misplaced it over the years. Fascinating to see it again, and it also has an interview with the young Ian McKellen. Here's what it says on Monica then ...

“Monica Vitti was that high-strung lady who floated through those starkly beautiful Antonioni films of the early Sixties like L’AVVENTURA and LA NOTTE. In Italy these days she has, surprisingly, made herself a new reputation a a comedienne but in her next film MIMI BLUETTE she plays a more symbolic role. The setting is pre-1914 Paris; she plays the part of a dancer who goes from country to country searching in vain for her lover”. It was a project MGM bought for Garbo back in the 1920s, but was never made.

So starts a “Sunday Times Magazine” feature on Vitti in their colour magazine, dated 2 January 1977, where Monica is interviewed at her Rome apartment by Meriel  McCooey and photographed by Eva Sereny.

Vitti is a remarkable looking woman, a combination of strength and delicacy, Her fashionably untidy, silky blonde hair surrounds a fine-skinned face quite a stubborn jaw, all illuminated by alert green eyes, her nose has a slight curve and she avoids being photographed in profile.

In her Rome apartment which looks out on the Tiber, she was wearing a pastel patchwork dress trimmed with different laces which she picks up in markets and second-hand shops. She looked like a hippie butterfly and the effect was calculatingly ethereal. Her sitting-room is filled with priceless bric-a-brac, Tiffany lamps, oriental rugs, good sculpture, a coffee-table overflowing with non-coffee-table books, and pink and white blossom everywhere. “I bought this flat 16 years ago with the money from my first film. But I was so insecure that I kept all my clothes at my mother’s and used to go home to sleep”.

She was reading theatre notices in “The Sunday Times”  spread out over her huge cretonne-covered sofa. She reads in English, French and Italian, and in a husky come-to-bed voice speaks a little English, a lot of French and an enormous amount of quick-fire Italian. “I would love to go back to the theatre. I started in Rome (her hometown) when I was 14. I played a woman of 45 covered with lines and a snow-white wig. I thought that was what a woman of 45 looked like. But I did have this deep throbbing voice. When I began making films I was physically very different from the ideal Italian beauty. Loren and Lollobrigida were much more acceptable. But something happened with Michelangelo and myself – together we invented some stories, using little bits of autobiography, a soupcon in L’AVVENTURA, some in LA NOTTE. I was living materal".

In Antonioni’s films, Vitti seemed like to express the boredoms and tensions of modern women. You felt she was caged and longed to escape, vulnerable, trapped, brought to the brink by her environment.

“Antonioni was the only Italian director who told the woman’s story. The only creative man to take their problems seriously. After me, he didn’t make stories about women. We lived together for seven years. He still has the apartment above and we see each other constantly. He is my best friend.”  They did not contemplate marriage - “I decided at 12 that I didn’t want to marry. It’s a terrible life, so enclosed. Anyway, there are too many children in the world, why add mine."

"When we parted I had to change. I wanted to do comedy …. But it was difficult to get the audience to accept me, they were waiting for this neurotic woman.” Now she is very popular, she has made many hilarious comedies, such as THE GIRL WITH THE PISTOL and THE PIZZA TRIANGLE and THE SCARLET LADY, which are seldom shown outside Italy. She bought the rights to MIMI BLUETTE three years ago – the film was made by Carlo Di Palma last October in France and Morocco.  

“But I hate to fly. I went to Africa by car, it took five days there and 5 back. I refused a lot of work in America because of this, though Antonioni and I once went to New York and Mexico. But I was terrified in America, I didn’t like to watch the way the women get old. Anyway I love Europe, its so original, so full of faults."

Nowadays she says she lives alone: “A very simple life. When I’m not working I go to the cinema every night. Sometimes its very difficult. I am three dangerous things: a woman, an actress and not married, so I suppose I will work until I’m ninety.”

Flash-forward to now and Monica, in her 80s, has been in seclusion for some years, - as per other posts on her, see label. MIMI BLUETTE never made it to the UK either and seems unobtainable now. She married Roberto Russo in 1995 according to IMDB ., Antonioni died in 2007 - here they are with Alain Delon at Cannes in 1962 for the screening of L'ECLISSE.  

Monica Vitti in Town

As reported on those vintage magazines (sounds better than old magazines) it was nice to get my hands on this issue of TOWN, which I had when I was 16, a British fashion/style magazine for the man about town, from October 1962 with that exciting new star Monica Vitti on the cover - Antonioni's L'ECLISSE had opened and was the must-see movie then. I have written a lot about this film and Antonioni and Vitti before, see the labels.

There is a good feature in this issue by Italian specialist John Francis Lane ("Films and Filming"'s Italian correspondent) interviewing Monica here. 
She is the new Italian sensation after Lollo, Loren and Cardinale ..... and she wants to do comedy but Antonioni only sees her in serious drama, as in L'AVVENTURA, LA NOTTE and now L'ECLISSE, and he is preparing THE RED DESERT for her, another serious role. Monica, then 28, does not identify with these women and wants to be a clown, and funny like Kay Kendall. 

The intellectuals at that time saw Antonioni and Vitti as the height of chic in that fascinating era of early Sixites international cinema. Alienation was the topic of the day and Antonioni specialised in it. Monica giggles and says nobody could be less alienated than she. Monica wants to act in a comedy - for her, life is a continuous joke. 

Like Fellini, Antonioni moulds his characters on to the personality of the actor. Much of Monica has gone into those characters: Claudia in L'AVVENTURA, Valentina in LA NOTTE and now Vittoria in L'ECLISSE - what has emerged is the personality of an actress who is the anti-star, who has nothing in common with Loren and Cardinale and even less with Bardot and Monroe. The girl of the new decade will recognise herself in Claudia, Valentina and Vittoria. 

Fifty plus years later, Monica now in her 80s (as are Loren and Lollobrigida) is it seems in seclusion with Alzheimers, and has not been seen in public for a decade or more. One trusts she is being looked after and happy. She has been married to Italian actor Roberto Russo since her Antonioni period. 
Antonioni died in 2007 - the same day as Ingmar Bergman, as per our reports on that - Antonioni label. The films go on being watched and discovered. 

We love Monica too of course as MODESTY BLAISE and in all those comedies she made, after Antonioni, as per Monica label.