Reviews

From a 21st century perspective this film benefits from its location shooting in the Liverpool of the late 1950s. Of particular interest are the landmark Art Deco Gerard Gardens flats with their magnificent main entrance, all sadly swept away in the 1980s.

Unfortunately, little else is as noteworthy. The storyline is weak and incoherent, with the interminably drawn-out ending arriving completely out of the blue. Screenplay and much of the acting are equally unhappy, with the poor kids being landed with some particularly gruesome dialogue. Stanley Baker was a fine actor, but he had to wait for Blind Date (1959) and Hell is a City (1960) for vehicles to do his sympathetic detective role justice.

No doubt its heart is in the right place, but this is a ludicrously bad movie. We have no idea why Forrest was held in such near-universal adulation, particularly by the newspaperman O'Malley who seems to have had little difficulty seeing through Forrest's European counterparts.

The dialogue is terrible - stilted and highfalutin from the outset before heading downhill, with Tracy and Hepburn making speeches ostensibly to each other but in fact to us.

Pleasure comes late in the piece when it starts to work as unintended comedy, Christine's death being in the Little Nell class of guffaw-inducing departures.

With its clunky dialogue, dodgy acting and funereal pace, this revenge 'thriller' would appear to have little going for it. What drags it out of the ordinary is its wonderful sense of location. This is way ahead of its time - it would be another 7 years before 'Room at the Top' ushered in that brief period of gritty social-realist dramas that would make the inner city landscape so familiar to cinema audiences. In 'The Long Memory', the desolate mudflats of the Thames estuary are used to brilliant effect to convey the spiritual desolation of Davidson, while the run-down streets and shabby domestic interiors of Gravesend vividly conjure up the dreariness of 1950s Britain.

Asked to explain the almost total absence of the homoerotic element of his novel, screenwriter Gilbert Adair has cited the need for the three main actors, who are heterosexual, to feel 'comfortable' in their roles.

One thinks back to the generations of gay lead actors and actresses who managed to convince audiences of their attraction to co-stars for whom they can have felt nothing. This particular skill is known as ACTING - a skill apparently not expected of the pampered little darlings here.

Not that they looked particularly comfortable, anyway, in their protracted cavortings. Perhaps, given the illustrious name of their director, they expected to find themselves in something more reputable than the slice of kinky soft-core porn on display here.

Perhaps the most objectionable feature of this overrated film is its sneering, superficial view of Japan and the Japanese. Coppola's take on this appears straightaway in Bob's journey from the airport through the garishly-lit high-rise desert which is all we are shown of Tokyo to the ingratiating group of welcomers awaiting him at the hotel. But the point is hammered home in scene after tedious scene of Japanese speaking incomprehensible English (and even - good grief! - no English at all), Japanese behaving like idiots, Japanese in endless karaoke sessions, and shot after shot after shot of all those soulless big buildings! An alternative to this view of Japan is restricted to Charlotte's visit to Kyoto, a sequence so brief that if you'd blinked you'd have missed it.

What a dreary contrast all this is to Edward Zwick's 'The Last Samurai', which, despite its share of Hollywoodisms, shows a genuine interest in and respect for the country in which it is set.

Lucas Belvaux's recent superb 'Trilogy' comprised crime thriller, love story and comedy - now Anthony Minghella has disastrously mixed all three into one movie.

Yet things get underway so promisingly, with the painfully reticent beginnings of the relationship between Ada and Inman being intercut with war scenes and the start of Inman's odyssey back home.

But the jarring arrival of Ruby (played by Renee Zellweger in an apparent pastiche of Bubble in the BBC TV sitcom Absolutely Fabulous) throws the movie off balance and it never recovers.

Poor Kidman - another dud role to follow Virginia Woolf in 'The Hours'!

Although Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in their prime probably couldn't have rescued this turkey, the inadequacy of the two principal leads hardly helped the cause. At least Clooney looked as if he knew what was required of him and gave it his best shot, but as for Zeta-Jones...

In those curious scenes where she hobnobbed round the pool with the rich divorcees, the first thing one noticed was how attractive she was compared to the other women. The second thing, unfortunately, was that the actresses playing these other women knew how to act.

One of this interesting film's strengths is its powerful suggestion of mood. But how authentic is its portrayal of early 1950s Glasgow? The 19th century 'second city of the empire' was still largely intact at this time, although in desperate decline, its tenements and civic buildings jet black with grime. Still to come was its reinvention as the 'city of architecture and culture', the tenements and industrial relics largely swept away, the survivors carefully cleaned and spruced up.

The film's attempt to recreate Alexander Trocchi's city (the novel appeared in 1954) is assiduous but unconvincing. The buildings are too clean, the canal too obviously the modern, recreational waterway. The bar interiors and customers are likewise not quite right. It is not enough to give the all-male clientele cloth caps and emphasize the bareness of the interiors - the raucous vibrancy of the city's bar-oriented culture fails to come across.

And the problem goes beyond this. The characters don't look right for the period. McGregor and Swinton in their manner and bearing belong to 2000 not 1950. Only Therese Bradley as the Swinton character's slatternly sister looks as though she could have stepped out of Frederick Wilson's 'Floodtide' (1949) - now there's a film to tell you what Glasgow was like then!

In the annals of movies that afford rich entertainment in ways totally unintended by their makers, The Fall of Berlin occupies an honoured place.

The story, the vicissitudes of a soldier at the front and his sweetheart in a German forced labour camp, is juxtaposed with sequences of Stalin and Hitler conducting the war.

Stalin, wise, kind and, of course, a supreme military leader is a hoot, but it is Hitler who rivets and enthralls. In scenes overdrawn to the point of parody and beyond, all livid blues and menacing shadows, actor V. Savelyev delivers a performance that should have had him sent to the gulag for upstaging his fellow despot. In his final, hilarious scene, his dog Blondi is despached by a spiked canape delivered by Eva Braun during their wedding breakfast - surely the cinema's finest death scene!

10 out of 10!