Hitler's Madman, a WWII propaganda film, had a complex origin story: filmed shortly after the real events it depicts (the assassination of senior Nazi Reinhard Heydrich and the subsequent massacre of the Czech town of Lidice in reprisal), the appearance of Fritz Lang's similarly-themed Hangmen Also Die! caused its release to be delayed and it also suffered a title change from the catchier Hitler's Hangman. On the plus side, the tiny independent production, shot in just a week, was acquired by MGM and given a bigger budget for re-shoots to enhance its production values. But Sirk ruefully admitted the new scenes actually weakened the film's Poverty Row sensibility, which gave it a slight documentary flavor which was useful.The Lang film is, I think, superior all round, but the two make interesting companions and Sirk's is tougher, in a way. Lang's movie, originally written by Brecht, attempts to build in a small victory,...
- 12/24/2015
- by David Cairns
- MUBI
In the 1940s and 50s, the Boulting brothers won over filmgoers and critics with a series of classics – from Brighton Rock to Private's Progress. As the BFI begins a retrospective, Michael Newton explores their version of Britain
The history of the Boulting brothers is the history of British cinema in miniature. The brilliance, the comforts and the disappointments are all there. In the 1940s, they take off from documentary realism to reach the heights of noir extravagance, before falling back into a gently unexciting worthiness. At the start of the 1950s they produce two fascinating oddities, characteristic of the oddity of the times. Later that decade, they turn to cosily satirical farce, the products of an exasperated, grump. The 1960s see them trying to get with it and making a middle-aged effort to "swing", but also creating one work that finds a vulnerable, extraordinary beauty in ordinary lives. And after that comes a petering out,...
The history of the Boulting brothers is the history of British cinema in miniature. The brilliance, the comforts and the disappointments are all there. In the 1940s, they take off from documentary realism to reach the heights of noir extravagance, before falling back into a gently unexciting worthiness. At the start of the 1950s they produce two fascinating oddities, characteristic of the oddity of the times. Later that decade, they turn to cosily satirical farce, the products of an exasperated, grump. The 1960s see them trying to get with it and making a middle-aged effort to "swing", but also creating one work that finds a vulnerable, extraordinary beauty in ordinary lives. And after that comes a petering out,...
- 7/26/2013
- The Guardian - Film News
(1941-43, BFI, E)
Created in 1930 by John Grierson, the British documentary movement reached its apotheosis during the second world war as the Crown Film Unit. Its dominant figure was Humphrey Jennings, "the only real poet the British cinema has yet produced", as Lindsay Anderson put it in the influential 1954 Sight & Sound essay reprinted in the excellent booklet accompanying this outstanding second part of the BFI's three-volume collection of Jennings's work.
The war transformed the Cambridge literary scholar and surrealist painter into a great artist, his heart beating with that of the nation in five masterly movies. First came two 10-minute patriotic-propagandistic films: The Heart of Britain (1941) (narrated for its American audience by Ed Murrow) and Words for Battle (1941), where Laurence Oliver reads from Milton, Blake, Browning, Kipling, Churchill and Lincoln. These were followed by the near flawless Listen to Britain (1942), a paean to communal music-making; Fires Were Started (1943), a feature-length...
Created in 1930 by John Grierson, the British documentary movement reached its apotheosis during the second world war as the Crown Film Unit. Its dominant figure was Humphrey Jennings, "the only real poet the British cinema has yet produced", as Lindsay Anderson put it in the influential 1954 Sight & Sound essay reprinted in the excellent booklet accompanying this outstanding second part of the BFI's three-volume collection of Jennings's work.
The war transformed the Cambridge literary scholar and surrealist painter into a great artist, his heart beating with that of the nation in five masterly movies. First came two 10-minute patriotic-propagandistic films: The Heart of Britain (1941) (narrated for its American audience by Ed Murrow) and Words for Battle (1941), where Laurence Oliver reads from Milton, Blake, Browning, Kipling, Churchill and Lincoln. These were followed by the near flawless Listen to Britain (1942), a paean to communal music-making; Fires Were Started (1943), a feature-length...
- 5/5/2012
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
Really, what's not to like about reissued rustic village shoot-'em-up, Went The Day Well?
Playing like some stiff-upper-lip, second world war, homefront version of John Milius's Red Dawn, it should delight us that Alberto Cavalcanti's Went The Day Well? is back in circulation once again. In its casting and its subversive storytelling, its 1942 setting offers a parallel universe wherein not only are the Nazis invading Britain and coldly massacring the Home Guard, but postwar TV battleaxes such as Thora Hird and Patricia Hayes are caught in cinematic amber as plucky young Land Girls vigorously sticking it to the filthy Boche (with axes, bayonets, rifles and household pepper). And the goose-stepping enemy are played by quintessentially English postwar actors, including Powell and Pressburger's phallocratic fave David Farrar and perpetual Pow Co James Donald, plus Alexander Korda's very own imperialist hero, Leslie Banks, as the head Nazi collaborator and local squire.
Playing like some stiff-upper-lip, second world war, homefront version of John Milius's Red Dawn, it should delight us that Alberto Cavalcanti's Went The Day Well? is back in circulation once again. In its casting and its subversive storytelling, its 1942 setting offers a parallel universe wherein not only are the Nazis invading Britain and coldly massacring the Home Guard, but postwar TV battleaxes such as Thora Hird and Patricia Hayes are caught in cinematic amber as plucky young Land Girls vigorously sticking it to the filthy Boche (with axes, bayonets, rifles and household pepper). And the goose-stepping enemy are played by quintessentially English postwar actors, including Powell and Pressburger's phallocratic fave David Farrar and perpetual Pow Co James Donald, plus Alexander Korda's very own imperialist hero, Leslie Banks, as the head Nazi collaborator and local squire.
- 7/3/2010
- by John Patterson
- The Guardian - Film News
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