Simon Wincer Top Ten

 1) Lonesome Dove (1989)

2) Free Willy (1993)

3) Snapshot (1979)

4) Phar Lap (1983)

5) DARYL (1985)

6) The Last Frontier (1986)

7) Against the Wind (1978)

8) The Lighthorsemen (1987)

9) Harlequin (1980)

10) Into the West (2005) 

Movie review - "Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man" (1962) **

 Adapting the Nick Adams stories wasn't a great idea - they are by nature episodic - though maybe it could've worked more as a "coming of age of Ernest Hemingway" type tale

Richard Beymer is hopelessly out of his element here - not dreadful just not capable. The role needed a really, really good actor - not just an actor, a star. Not sure who could've done it then. Paul Newman maybe even if he was too old.

But the script isn't great. Ten stories! Goes for over two hours!

Martin Ritt gives scenes in the vignettes to the guest stars - Paul Newman as a punch drunk boxer, Arthur Kennedy as dad, Dan Dailey as a drunk editor, Eli Wallach as a soldier. Most of them are not good. A lot of over acting.

Maybe could have worked if it had just focused on young Nick in the woods. Or Nick as a journalist. Or him having a romance in Italy. Together it felt lumpy. 

Movie review - "I Was a Spy" (1933) **1/2

 Part of Michael Balcon's attempt to make international movies off the back of Rome Express. This has great production values. Madeleine Carroll is a Belgian nurse who spies for England. Howard Marshall, younger and hunkier, is the Brtish spy who loves her. Conrad Veidt is the German who loves her - and cajoles her into bed. Marshall gives up his life for her.

The film lacked something. A consistent narrative maybe. It feels like a movie of scenes and moments. A few hands worked on it.  Maybe I'm cool in Carroll - someone with more empathy would've worked better.

It's fine. I wasn't that moved or engaged, that's all.

Movie review - "After the Ball" (1957) **

 Biopic about Vesta Tilley who I've never heard of and starring Pat Kirkwood who I've never heard of but both were big deals in England. It's very stock biopic, with bald exposition and musical numbers.  Tilley's life lacked drama - a lot of shows, a bit of World War One drama. She retires.

Romulus wanted to made it because it was a vehicle for Kirkwood and also Laurence Harvey who seems hamstrung in a hamstrung part as the husband/manager. No death, no reversal, no illness (they pump up an allergic reaction).

Some colour and. songs. Peter Rogers produced and it feels thrifty.  I mean it's period, and in colour but there's a lot of tight shots.

Movie review - "Aces High" (1976) **

 The sort of idea that initially sounds intriguing - Journey's End only with war pilots. You can see the appeal - a great piece of material, similar sense of doom, constant death, only they're out in the open. I can see why Nat Cohen greenlit it.

However the film doesn't work. 

In hindsight, Sherrif's piece is more effective when cramped and damp. This is too open. Maybe it could have worked. But there's no atmosphere. You never ( I didn't anyway) feel the desperation and impending doom or the sense that people are cracking up. Jack Gold didn't do much of a job directing. I had trouble telling characters apart. Compare it to say the 1938 Dawn Patrol - that was full of urgency and desperation. 

The emotional undercurrents aren't there. In Sheriff's play it's very clear - the young guy hero worships the older guy who is cracking up. There's an old duffer who in a great scene chats with the young guy before they go off on the mission. That's all missing here.

Part of it is the acting. This features three big stars-to-be of English cinema: Simon Ward, Malcolm McDowell, Peter Firth. None rise to the occasion. Firth is a blank slate. You can see why he didn't become a star - there's nothing there. Ward has a flashy role as a pilot who is cracking up but he can't do it. Neither can, more surprisingly, McDowell. Maybe McDowell could have played Ward's role - just ate up the scenery.

Howard Barker who wrote the script dismissed the film, saying the original idea was bad and that the final movie was basically public schoolboys flying over Surrey. This is mean, if true.

Plane fans will get a lot out of it. I think they'd have been better off remaking Dawn Patrol.

Movie review - "Diggers in Blighty" (1933) **

 Pat Hanna's second film with Hanna as director and Raymond Longford as "associate director". The first segment is a straight war story, played seriously - it feels directed by Longford. Then in comes Hanna and Joe Vallis and his stage mates. There's a subplot about a German spy (Longford), a romance subplot involving a nurse and an officer, as well as the comic shenanigans.

This is interesting as a cultural artefact more than as a piece of entertainment - the comedy bits feel like stage pieces inserted, which is fine, and the serious stuff feels like serious interludes in a musical.

There is plenty of cultural stuff - Aboriginal soldiers, soldiers being funny, references to the Battle of Hamel, etc.

Book review - "Wild Bill Wellman : Hollywood rebel" by William Wellman Jnr

 Not bad look at the life of the should-be-better-known director. I would've liked more personal insight and memoir of the writer's relationship him being his son. It waffles on a bit - for example there's a lot of plot recapping. The book could've done with a more vigorous edit.

Still, Wellman's an interesting guy - war service, great skill as a director. He seemed to make a classic every five films or so.

Movie review - "Lafayette Escadrille" (1958) **

 William Wellman's passion project, sometimes called his last movie even though he made Darby's Rangers after (it was released first because this was held up so Warners could launch a record label for Tab Hunter).

Hunter is fine in the lead. I know Wellman wanted James Dean and Paul Newman. Hunter isn't the issue. The female lead doesn't help but she isn't the issue either.

The problem is the story. I was confused why Wellman struggled to get this made til I saw it... it's about a man who goes to fly in France in World War One... then punches out a French officer and deserts and hangs out with his hooker girlfriend most of the time planning his escape. This, in a war film. Why would anyone want to go see that?

It's not the ending. (Changed from the original where Hunter was supposed to die.) Or the title. Or the stars... 

It was making a flying film about a flyer who spends most of the film trying not to fly.

That story is only fine if it's a subplot. Tell the story of a heroic pilot and Hunter is the best friend. Or three guys - make it a three guy movie like three girl movies.

There's only one big flying /fighting sequence at the end. It needed more flying. That final battle is the best thing about it but it's too short.

The support cast includes people like David Janssen and Clint Eastwood but so do a lot of old movies, some starring Francis the Talking Mule.

Movie review - "Nicholas and Alexandra" (1971) **1/2

 It's not a dumb movie, it's an elevated epic, tries to be smart, looks terrific, is well acted.

But Nicholas and Alexandra were idiots - suited for being amiable powerless monarchs not actual rulers, like Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. They could have brought democracy to Russia or at least saved their monarchy and avoided civil war, kept the country out of World War One. But they blundered on. So the film is a drag.

They're not active or compelling they're just dumb and useless. No exotic sex or action.

Tom Baker livens things up a little as Rasputin - Peter O'Toole, Sam Spiegel's choice, would've been better. All the solid British actors get wearying after a while - everyone's good but they're so dull. It feels like a BBC mini series. I kept wishing for some miscast American pop star to keep things lively.

There's no personal connection. James Goldman made the royals come alive in Lion in Winter but that was an interesting family. This has some family stuff but they are weighed under by all the characters. I couldn't tell the difference between the four sisters.  Alexi has some character but he's a horrible brat - when he tells off his dad towards the end it's like "shut up kid you got us into this mess".

Dr Zhivago had a relatable core - Omar Sharif torn between Julie Christie and Geraldine Chaplin.Lawrence of Arabia was about Lawrence and his relationships with Omar Sharif, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn. Ben Hur was Charlton Heston and Stephen Boyd/Jack Hawkins/Haya Harareet.

What's the core here? Kind of Nicholas and Alexandra and their family... but it keeps crossing to politicians like the Bolshevieks who are simply more interesting. You could've found ways to make the family interesting - differentiate them, give conflict - but they don't.

I liked John McEnery as Kerensky the leader in between Nicholas and Lenin. In part because he was blonde and looked different from the others. I googled the character - he married a Brisbane girl and spent some time here! Brian Cox is terrific as Trotsky. Ditto Michael Bryant as Lenin. But these characters are interesting. They really should've been the focus. Or else really dug into life in the Imperial court. They tried to have it both ways and ended up not nailing anything.

The finale where the family is killed is well done. They build up the suspense with the family waiting in the room - it's a terrific scene, drags out the emotion and gives a sense of what this film needed to be: dig into the little things, ram home the moments.

It feels like it should have done for ten hours.

Movie review - "Zeppelin" (1971) **

 A curio - a big-ish budget World War One flyer movie that seemed to come and go. Presumably inspired by the success of The Blue Max it was financed by one of the Gettys who dabbled in film production. I'm sure there's a story to this. There was about the film, on which five people died while filming a stunt.

Michael York and Elke Sommer are the stars although you'll recognise Peter Carstens and Anton Diffring and Marius Goring. The plot has York go undercover as a traitor during World War One - his family had connections a la Leo in The Departed. The Germans accept him quite easily- the Brits just give him a little wound - and then he's off on a mission to steal, uh, the Magna Carta. Why not just have "plans" or have them kidnap people.

Sommer is the wife of Marius Goring. She's on board the zeppelin but I don't think she figures out York is a spy, does she? Did I miss something?

This should be a simple story - undercover on zeppelin, get thing, try to escape with thing on zeppelin. But it's confusing and we're never sure what Germans know about York.

The opening sequence is odd with York going to a party and sleeping with Alexandra Stewart. I don't mean to be rude but was she sleeping with someone? Because her part gets forgotten. They should've started with York in Germany to help sell the spy stuff more. A better maguffin. Clarify the relationships.

The zeppelin scenes are neat. Big boomy thing. We don't get it until half way through.

Movie review - "Ryan's Daughter" (1970) ***

 The visuals are beautiful, even for a David Lean film - the cliffs, the wind, the coast, the town. The authenticity level is low. This didn't seem to matter for Lean's earlier movies but something about this one does - maybe it's because it's a 1970 movie, shot in Ireland, where there's heaps of good actors. And none of the leads here are Irish - Mitchum, Miles, Leo McKern, Trevor Howard, John Mills. Mills' village idiot performance now reeks of Simple Jack-ness.

Because the film takes so long to tell such a simple story the mind has a chance to wander and contemplate the casting. Robert Mitchum in the lead. Hmm... The producer thought Gregory Peck would've been better. Alec Guinness could've worked (he had an innate sexlessness - you'd understand his wife cheating on him). But as the film went on I warmed to Mitchum - he's big and lumbering and looks dopey, like a St Bernard. It's fine work.

Sara Miles in the lead... She can act, she's fine... I constantly got the sense though that they wrote this for Julie Christie. Maybe because I'd just seen Zhivago but that's what I felt. I can't criticse Miles' performance. I just wish Julie Christie had played it. Or someone with more... I don't know... va-va-voom.

Barry Foster is effective as an IRA man. It helps he has a juicy role, shooting policemen and importing guns, but he does have a great presence. So too does Christopher Jones. Too cool for school, yes, but he has a great look. His voice was dubbed but it doesn't matter. 

The townsfolk aren't really depicted with much nuance - the women are shrill harpies and the men yell.

I quite like this film. It was unduly criticised at the time. It looks gorgeous, even on the small screen - that storm sequence! I'll have to see it on the big screen one day. Dramatically it's satisfactory, building to a good old head shaving of the town harlot.

The main flaw is a super simple story is dragged out far too long for characters who aren't complex. Old low sex drive man, hot for it wife, traumastised soldier... we've seen these before. There's none of the freshness of Kwai's Colonel Nicholson or TE Lawrence, or the subplots of those films or the epic sweep of Zhivago who goes through so much and those colorful characters. 

What's there is fine, but just do it at two hours, guys.

Movie review - "Doctor Zhivago" (1965) ****

 A film that broke many rules for a blockbuster - it was set in Russia, about Russians, had a passive hero who just mopes around for three hours (compared to Lawrence, Ben Hur and company who got out and did stuff). Zhivago is always swept up in events - mum dies, World War One, Russian Revolution, bands of partisans. He's bailed out of trouble twice by Alec Guinness,  once by Rod Steiger, his wife and mistress seem to make decisions. The only decision he really makes is to cheat on his wife.

Of course it also had David Lean and his stunning compositions. And watching it again, Lara carries as much action as the real hero is Lara - she's the one who is loved by Tom Courtney's revolutionary, is raped by Rod Steiger, shoots Steiger, becomes a nurse, goes looking for Courtney.

And the film has real emotional sweep. I mean, it's full of nice people - Omar Sharif, Geraldine Chaplin, Julie Christie. Even tough Alec Guinness loves his half brother and tries to help him. Tom Courtney becomes ruthless but starts off idealistic. Rod Steiger is nasty, raping Christie, but saves her in the end.  Then there's this horrible war and revolution. The pettiness and meanness of the Bolshevieks is well depicted. You can't help feel sorry for Sharif being whisked away for two years by those partisans, and then separated from Christie, and dying of a heart attack calling out to her. Of course his life has compensations - doting wife and mistress, people looking out for him, a house to hide out with cool ice all over it.

Acting is consistently excellent - Guinness is terrific as a creepy commie, so too Courtney (I wish we'd seen his death scene instead of it being described), a restrained Rod Steiger, Geraldine Chaplin and Sharif moon. Klaus Kinski is electric in a brief appearance.

The X factor was Julie Christie - beautiful, smart, capable, fresh. Sharif's youthful romantic looks suit the part very well - he's better I think than original choice Peter O'Toole would have been. The Brits make good Russians.

It ticks the boxes of a successful epic. It has a simple storyline to follow - will Sharif root Julie Christie despite being married, will everyone avoid being killed - but all sorts of complexities around it. Plus cool stuff like the compositions - cavalry charges, cuddling in sleds, ice on the window, flowers.

Play review - "Post Mortem" by Noel Coward (1931)

 Coward never went to uni but this is the sort of play you write at uni/drama school - full of passion, and prentention without knowledge of life but it has its own integrity. It's not like anything else I've read of his. It consists of eight scenes - the first is in the trenches, a guy dies, then comes back as a ghost in 1930 to visit his mum, dad, ex, mates, etc. there's a lot of solioquies and it's written with passion and sincerity. I preferred it to the smugness of his keep the classes down works but can see why it's not often performed.

Movie review - "Cavalcade" (1933) **

 Times change. Noel Coward's play was very Britain focus but this faithful film version not only won the Best Picture Oscar it was a big hit.

It was hard work. And I didn't mind reading it.

There's plenty of money and production value. Everyone commits.

But these families. Diana Wynard, strolling around, elegantly suffering as husband goes off to war, and son, and the one son dies and then the other son dies but after he's shagged her ex-servant's daughter which is apparently not on. Why doesn't she get a job.

The dull husband (Clive Brook) who I was kind of hoping would die. 

The cockney servants who get uppity when they own their own business - one becomes a boozer and dies in an accident the other is mocked for thinking her daughter has risen in the world.

I didn't care about any of them. Maybe I was in a bad mood.

No star power. The cockneys popped up in The Adventures of Robin Hood.

Frank Lloyd directed this. Two Oscars. No one much remembers him now.

Maybe you had to be there.

I really thought I'd like this more than I did.

Movie review - "They Came to Cordura" (1959) **

 Odd choice for an epic from Columbia, who were presumably influenced by the fact they could have one of their great old stars, Rita Hayworth, a legend star, Gary Cooper, and Robert Rossen, who'd made All the King's Men (and I guess Island in the Sun had been a big hit). 

Set in Mexico during the Pancho Villa expedition, Gary Cooper is an officer who while supposed to have been a coward is shown to be brave and professional - but Cooper's inherent weakness and clear ill health (he looks crook) work for the part. Cooper is escorting a bunch of soldiers who have displayed bravery in battle and tries to figure out why they are brave. 

It's an odd concept - I get what they were trying to go for thematically, the set up is just a little odd (pulling out top soldiers during a campaign... I know they're trying to make PR out of it, it just felt weird).

The troops include Richard Conte, Tab Hunter, Michael Callan (in his debut), Van Heflin. Robert Keith shines as an officer desperate for medals and promotions, willing to blackmail Cooper - he gives the film a dash of venality and I missed him when he left early on.

This movie was so dull. Truding along in the desert. All the uniforms made everyone look alike. Cooper was creepy. I kept forgetting what the characters did. 

I appreciate its ambition. It failed to live up to that.

Book review - "Present Indicative" by Noel Coward (1937)

 Coward's greatest art work was his own life so it's no surprise this is a fun, witty account of his early life. It really should end with The Vortex which feels like "end of an era' although even then he'd had some success - but the stuff afterwards is also interesting. Some productions particularly hard eg Vortex the female lead quit. Sirocco resulted in him being booed. But such amazing success.

Movie review - "This Happy Breed" (1944) **

Amazing to think that in wartime they stumped up colour for a domestic drama without much spectacle - but such was the impact of In Which We Serve. Oh, there is some spectacle - a fun fair, a parade, some action during the General Strike, walking past the king's coffin - but it's not really needed, it could've been shot cheaply.

I didn't like this movie. In fact I hated it. 

I appreciated some of it. The opening shot with the camera panning down. The scene where someone is told of the death of a son and his wife off screen but the camera holds on the garden. (Why not show the accident, though?) David Lean was already very confident as a director.

But I couldn't care less about this family. These working class tories who unthinkingly support the establishment. A daughter's boyfriend dares to suggest changes to the status quo, worries about poverty and wages, and is mocked and sorted out. A daughter dares to want to be something more than a boring housewife and mother and is scolded by a horribly oppressive childhood friend (John Mills) who she doesn't like and her own parents, especially her dad, then runs off with a married man, which okay was scandalous, but the parents make it all about them. What a pack of whingers.

I'm sorry their son died and his wife but they sort of die for convenience and it doesn't seem to affect them too much apart from one scene.

Celia Johnson is good as the mother. Robert Newton feels all wrong as the father, as if he's slightly sending it up. Newton seems more interested in his friend Stanley Holloway than his wife, and he seems drunk telling her daughter to give up dreams, and complaining about the British people daring to want peace (you can make a good anti appeasement argument - but it's not done here).

John Mills is good even if his character is clearly controlling (the girl never says she loves him and then she later gives their kid to her parents to raise while she goes to Singapore!)

I recognise that people would feel differently if they knew these characters and lived through this period, but I felt they were wankers, and I haven't felt that about other Coward characters.

There's so many scenes where you go "why didn't they dramatise that" - the accident that killed the son, John Mills running into the daughter, John Mills spending time with the daughter.

This film sucked.

Movie review - "Break of Day" (1976) **1/2

 Pat Lovell and Cliff Green, coming off Picnic at Hanging Rock, teamed with Ken Hannam, coming off Sunday Too Far Away resulting in a movie that didn't do as well as either, though it has its pleasures, such as a loving depiction of small town.

It's about the impact on that town of a visiting bohemian, Sarah Kestelman, in particular on a young former Anzac (Andrew McFarlane). Both actors are fine... I think Kestelman needed to be better looking or sexier or something. Like he should have seen her bathing nude to start off with. That is blunt but the film needs an electric charge like that.

Beautifully shot and all that. Very much an "AFC film" like The Irishman and so on. I enjoyed so much time being dedicated to a cricket sequence at the end.

Nice performances in the support cast from people like Tony Barry, Maurie Fields,  John bell, Geraldine Turner. The film might've been more interesting told from the bohemians point of view - with bisexual Kestelman, war veteran Bell, etc. Downer of an ending with the reveal McFarlane shot himself in the foot to avoid more fighting at Gallipoli, and then seeing Kestelman has slept with Turner.

But not a bad film.

Movie review - "Reds" (1981) ****

 I feel Warren Beatty is a little overrated but you've got to give him points for this movie, a big budget Hollywood movie about American socialists during World War One. He doesn't quite nail it - the personal story is excellent but there's a lot of scenes of people in committee meetings yelling at each other.

Still, they're yelling at each other about communism, empathetically.

It helps that it's got movie stars and focuses on a love story between John Reed (Warren Beatty) and Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton), with their various squabblings and separations, and her fling with Eugene O'Neill (Jack Nicholson).

Random thoughts:

* when Beatty and Keaton have an argument about her feeling like a sideshow in his life and him encouraging her to do stuff I went "that's a chat Beatty has with his girlfriends and probably more than once, maybe even with Keaton"

* the real life narrator device works wonderfully 

* all acting is extremely good

* Warren Beatty tends to give the same performance (hesitant, pleasant) and he doesn't have the drive of say Jack Nicholson or Gene Hackman but you get used to this

* they actually could have made this cheaply just by keeping the actors indoors

* set design, photography, etc all excellent.

The film is proof that doing 72 takes on something doesn't necessarily make it better. All those dialogue scenes and communist party scene moments feel rewritten to death. It lacks a universal common touch of emotion.

But its ambition is fabulous.

Movie review - "Biggles: Adventures in Time" (1986) *1/2

 So frustrating! The classic movie where the producers lost their nerve along the way and leaned away from its source material when its source material is the best thing about it. There's a genuinely exciting airplane dogfight scene early on and the actor who plays Biggles is ideal.

And you know something? There's no reason why a time travel update couldn't have worked. But they don't lean into that either. Alex Hyde White isn't particularly 1986. They should have committed to that concept - have him as a full on yuppie who is very dependent on technology or something. But there's hardly any time culture clash. I kept forgetting Hyde White was from the future.

And to be frank Hyde White isn't very good. He never seems that involved in what's going on, there seems to be a delay in his reactions to things. In fairness that may be the editing/direction.

Really the Hyde White character should have been female. Then you would have inherent conflict because of the differing attitude towards women from 1917 to 1986 and you could have a romance, and a love triangle with that spy.

In one scene we meet this girl who Biggles had a fling with and a support character goes "oh that's a spy who Biggles fell in love with then she betrayed him and he got upset but now she says she wants to help." I want to see that movie!

It's confusing. The jumping between time feels random. A simple story is needlessly made confusing. I'd love to know what the proposed pre-Terminator script was like.