His real name was Nigel. Nigel John Dermot Neill. He changed it to ‘Sam’ a few years after he got to New Zealand, because Nigel was not a good name to have in the playground. Typically, there’s a joke buried in there, because his first seven years had been in Omagh, Northern Ireland, where his kiwi father Dermot was serving in the British army. The playgrounds of Christchurch and Dunedin proved harsher than those in Omagh, apparently.

Sam Neill’s death earlier this week (13 July 2026) in Sydney, aged 78, was sudden and upsetting. He died from pneumonia, according to his agent, Philip Grenz. That was part of the upset. I had read about his battles with an aggressive form of non-Hodgkins lymphoma, but he had announced in April that he was cancer-free. Three months later, we have lost one of the great quiet achievers of modern cinema - an actor so unactory in personality and technique that it often seemed like he wasn’t acting at all. He was beloved of many for that quality of modesty, which seemed always to be part of his nature, not just his work. He valued ‘truth’ above all in acting - most actors say that, but few worked harder for it.

I met him once, briefly, at a film industry do in Sydney about thirty years ago. I told him I had recently visited his vineyard near Queenstown. I can’t remember what he said so much as the way he said it: he was quiet, gracious, pleased that I had been there. More like a handsome farmer than a big shot. I learned later how much that land in Central Otago meant to him. He was already one of the bigger stars of his era - certainly from the south - but he seemed almost shy. Very few stars are shy. Even that word ‘star’ seems to hang uneasily on him. He was a star; he just behaved as if nobody had told him. I think celebrity offended him.

I watched him again last night in the first Jurassic Park (1993), the film that propelled him into the big time. He had made a lot of films by then, including The Hunt for Red October (1993) and The Piano (1993) but working with Spielberg puts you on another level, especially in terms of fees. His role as Dr Alan Grant recognised that essential modesty, but also the humour and irony he brought to his work, even in BLT’s - big, loud, trashy movies, as JP certainly was.

Paleontologist Dr Grant was sceptical from the start: he didn’t like the smell of hubris and money emanating from British billionaire John Hammond (Dickie Attenborough), nor the oily odour of the American mathematician played by Jeff Goldblum (never trust a man who wears a leather jacket in the jungle). Grant is between the two powerful cultures, something every Australian and New Zealander understands. We tend to suspect both - the old world lies of one, the new world lies of the other. But Dr Grant needs the benjamins for his dinosaur dig. Antipodeans also recognise that fundamental vulgarity, the fiscal power of the north. We gotta play nice.

At the same time, Dr Grant was unheroic. He had been resisting Laura Dern’s desire for a child. When Hammond’s two annoying grandchildren were being attacked in the tour car ahead of him, before the velociraptor scenes at the lab, Dr Grant waited the longest time before emerging from relative safety to help them. There was something less than gallant in him. A sort of ruthlessness, which Spielberg turns into a cruel joke when Neill grabs the dead 10,000 volt wires and pretends to the children that he is being electrocuted: he is writhing for humour, while they scream for his life.

Spielberg had spotted that quality of grit in Sam Neill’s other work, where he is sometimes guarded or hidden. He often played spies and Russians; these were men who had professionalised their recessive self, either for preservation or advancement. Neil specialised in men who kept quiet, sometimes building to the point of explosion, whereupon violence might follow - as in The Piano, where he wielded the axe on Holly Hunter’s fingers, or My Brilliant Career (1979), his Australian breakthrough under director Gillian Armstrong, where he turned nasty after Judy Davis rejected his proposal. His modesty had its limits, in other words. When he blazed, you had to duck.

This could be sexual rejection or something bigger, as when he shakes Meryl Streep in Evil Angels, the Azaria Chamberlain movie, a news helicopter prowling overhead. “I don’t know what God wants any more. You know, how could he take our daughter? I thought I knew the answer but I don’t.’

As Michael Chamberlain, we saw a fundamental decency fractured by life. Neill had met and stayed with Michael and Lindy Chamberlain, in preparation for the movie. He had no doubts about their innocence. That commitment came through in his performance.

Sam Neill was never a professional kiwi, chained to his nationality, but it was essential to understanding his work. He thought that New Zealand was crucial to his formation. On an episode of the ABC’s Australian Story a few years ago, he talked about the effect on a young boy of leaving Northern Ireland to come to the land of his forefathers. He said something interesting about the nature of actors.

‘I think in many cases one is doomed to become an actor, from a very early age, and that is often because you have been displaced in some sort of way… and we were taken from the UK as children, back to New Zealand.’

‘It was like a different planet. Every plant seemed different. All my friends were completely… they sounded different, they acted differently. I was a very British shy boy, who stuttered very badly, in a New Zealand playground where these things were a liability… I was easily bullied and picked on, and I survived that by, I think, becoming a New Zealander. I learned how to perform as something else. I was in the shadows quite a bit, probably observing what other people were doing, how they’d act, how they’d stand, how they behaved towards each other and I think that was a very formative experience for me.’

An indifferent student, he stumbled through an arts degree in Christchurch, then completed it at Victoria University in Wellington. He was part of the theatre group at both universities. That was a turning point: he had found something he was good at, something that made him feel good inside. He talked in later life about occasional bouts of depression, something for which he never sought treatment. It became one of many things on which he was outspoken. For a quiet man, he could be quite voluble.

New Zealand had no real feature film industry in the early 1970s. Pursuing an acting career seemed impossible, so he joined the National Film Unit, where the next generation was learning the craft on documentaries, of which he made several. That was valuable experience: a film actor needs to know what the camera sees. He was in the right time and place. Roger Donaldson cast him in Sleeping Dogs (1977), a key flm in the revival of the New Zealand industry. He was noticed.

He moved to Australia soon after, where there was more work. He didn’t make many kiwi films after that, but some of those he returned for were memorable, like Gaylene Preston’s Perfect Strangers (2003), in which he played a sexual obsessive. Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016), directed by Taika Waititi, gave him classic kiwi role: a grumpy old fart with a shotgun. He had become a sort of National Actor, representing a certain part of his own culture, despite the fact that most of his achievements had been overseas (or maybe precisely because of that).

At the same time, Australia grabbed him as one of our own, as we tend to do with New Zealand’s best exports (Phar Lap, Russell Crowe, John Clark). It was no stretch for Neill, who loved Australia from the moment he arrived in the late 1970’s. After doing time in the trenches of episodic television, Neill could pass for any number of nationalities, including Australian. In Death in Brunswick (1990), one of the best unsung Australian comedies of that time, he and John Clark were hilarious as two Melbourne bozos trying to hide a body in someone else’s grave. Being outsiders made them good observers.

Still, Australia was not big enough to hold him either. After Jurassic Park, he could pick and choose his roles. The dinosaurs were a gift that kept on giving.

Any appreciation of Neill’s appeal must include sex: he was dishy as they come to women, at any stage in his long career. Young, clean-shaven and smouldering, as in Reilly: Ace of Spies (1985); older, slower and bearded, as in nearly everything he made in the last ten years of his life. His appeal to men was different and not quite as ‘animal’, which may be one reason he did not take the job as James Bond. I think men sensed a certain vulnerability - the very thing that women loved. Bond can’t really be vulnerable, or he couldn’t be, then. Timothy Dalton took the role instead. Disappointingly.

Sam Neill had an interesting face for a leading man: his broad cheekbones could take a lot of light and his eyes were so very versatile - but he wasn’t quite conventionally gorgeous, like Brad Pitt or George Clooney (I’m sure many fans will disagree). He had a square slavic face, like a box or a painting, but everything was well-proportioned for the big screen. A huge forehead, a straight up-and-down jaw structure that projected strength; a mouth like a slit in a canvas, part of his taciturn effect. He could look dreamy or dopey, depending on where the cinematographer put the light. That was a great asset for comedy, which he did exceptionally well. He rarely did straight romance, but it came in the suitcase. He was a spunk.

What were his greatest roles? There are plenty to choose from. Making Alan Grant real was a triumph, given that the critters were always chewing the scenery behind him. His Northern Ireland hard man copper in the first two series of Peaky Blinders (2013) was chilling. I loved him in Red October, as Sean Connery’s brave offsider, and in Evil Angels, where he tried to right some wrongs in a country’s perception of the Chamberlains. He was superb in The Dish (2001) and Little Fish (2005) and Dean Spanley (2009), all of them in his Au-NZ mode. Damned if he wasn’t good in almost everything, even if the project itself might not measure up. The man had class and grace, and apparently, no side. He was as nice off-screen as on, according to his friends. Farewell Sir Nigel.

CAUTION: spoilers ahead. Turn back now if you don’t wanna go down that road.

….

When it came out almost 30 years ago, I watched Fargo with a sense of pleasure and pain. The cold seeped into your bones from this whitest of white films and the snow made the violence more shocking - all that red on white. But then there was the comedy, which was folksy and funny and a little harsh. These mid-westerners seemed to talk real funny, yar? It was clear that the Coens, brothers Joel and Ethan, were taking the piss - hardly for the first time - but this was closer to home. They grew up in these parts; these were their people. I remember wondering if they’d ever be welcome back in Minnesota after this tale of murder most foul.

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Turns out the accent and attitude have a name: Minnesota Nice. Minnesotans are noted for it. They’re polite and welcoming, eschewing verbal confrontation, which is why that ‘yar?’ at the end of a sentence is pervasive. It’s an invitation to agreement, yar? It’s the opposite of New York dialect, which is abrupt, abrasive and ‘fuck you too’. That ‘yar’ took Frances McDormand to an Oscar for best actress as Marge Gunderson in 1996.

Fargo is more about what lies beneath the pleasantries. It’s Minnesota Not-So-Nice. In fact it’s Minnesota Downright Nasty - a film of cold hearts in a cold place. If there is a colder, whiter film in American cinema, I can’t think of it. The snowy landscape is a huge part of the film’s appeal but Fargo is actually about toxic masculinity: stupid, venal men who betray each other and their loved ones, while they try to make or take money in the old rough-hewn American Way - with guns and axes and violence. It’s Cormack McCarthy’s territory, relocated from Texas, with snow instead of dust. Fargo is another frontier movie: might makes right in the deep white. There are frequent references to American history and business practice. I hadn’t quite unpicked those until I watched it again last week.

The film was shot in North Dakota and Minnesota in the winter of 1995, just over thirty years ago, when Bill Clinton was president. The British cameraman Roger Deakins did some of his best work. Carter Burwell supplied a lowering score. Fargo premiered at Cannes six months later, in May 1996, in competition. Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies took the Palme d’Or but Joel Coen took home an award for best direction. At the Oscars in March 1997, both Coens received the award for best original screenplay. Warners had passed on the project, which was funded with $US7 million from London’s Working Title and Polygram. The worldwide box office was about $US60m - modest but satisfactory. By way of comparison, Independence Day, the top grosser of that year, pulled in $US817m. Fargo has only grown in reputation since then. Might it be their best film?

Joel and Ethan Coen have often troubled me as artists. When I was reviewing for Australian newspapers - from 1984 till 2024 - I often criticised their snarky tone, which smacked of arrogance. It was something of a blind spot, I’ll admit. I loved their comedy, but they made lack of sincerity a virtue, which tended to obscure the idea that their films actually had ideas. Mostly dark ones about their own culture. I often wished they would come out from behind that screen of irony, but then they wouldn’t be the Coen Bros. The distancing is part of what makes them popular. It’s not just a posture for comedy. It’s a whole-of-life attitude, a sense that only schoolmasters and parents take things seriously. Smart people wear irony like an old tee-shirt and the Coens have always been the smartest alecks in the room, with a lot of tee-shirts.

This winking at the audience only became a thing in the 1960’s. Studio films before then would rarely allow it. I sometimes wonder if the generation that grew up watching their movies on TV rather more than on the big screen had a different idea of the worth and weight of movies. Spielberg and Lucas saw a sandbox to play in: Scorsese saw a church in which to suffer, but also to desecrate: if God is watching, why doesn’t He stop me?

There is no god for the Coen brothers. They have declared their atheism, but as any Catholic or Jew can tell you, it’s not that simple. The Supreme Being in Fargo is Marge Gunderson, the police chief of Brainerd, who’s seven months pregnant as the movie gets underway. Marge is one of the most unusual heroines in cinema - a slow-talking gentle soul who radiates kindness and compassion. She trusts people, even though she’s chief of police. She comforts the afflicted, in the scene with a former schoolmate who’s having a breakdown (Mike Yanagita, played by Steve Park). She’s even sympathetic towards perpetrators, speaking in gentle words, coaxing them to own up. She’s a good person - although how she remains a small person, given the amount of food she and her husband consume, is a mystery. Fargo is a smorgasbord of calorific excess.

An early morning call summons Marge to a crime scene - three dead bodies in the snow. She almost throws up, but it’s morning sickness, not the bodies. Marge is no dummy. She just plays one, because she’d rather be thought a dummy than a cynic. People underestimate her, which gives her an advantage. Her accent is part of her defence against the horrors of the world, as is her love for husband Norm (’Sonofa’) Gunderson, played so well by John Carroll Lynch. He paints bird pictures, hoping to get one on a stamp. Woken by the phone call, he won’t let Marge go to work without eggs. ‘You gotta eat a breakfast, Marge’. He’s pretty much the only decent man in the film.

So much innocence in a Coen brothers movie might seem disconcerting but there are precedents. The baby kidnapping couple in Raising Arizona were innocents; so is Donny, Steve Buscemi’s character in The Big Lebowski, the film they made after Fargo. The three leads in O Brother, Where are Thou? are innocent criminals, verging on simpletons. The line is often a little blurred in their films.

The Coens grew up in a middle-class suburb on the outskirts of Minneapolis/St Paul, so Fargo is at least partly autobiographical, but I think the autobiography is in the form of attitude, a sense of wonder, horror and derision. In Fargo, they ask how the world can be so beautiful and pure, so white with snow, yet so depraved as to arrive at the ‘foot in the wood-chipper’ scene - the moment to which the whole movie leads.

This horror actually happened: in November 1989, Richard Crafts, an Eastern Airlines pilot, was convicted of murdering his wife Helle, a Danish American flight attendant, and disposing of her body with a wood-chipper. This took place in Connecticut. The Coen brothers fudged that in the opening titles - ‘This is a true story. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987’. They didn’t. The wood-chipper is the only connection. All the rest is invention, a cocktail of horror, humour and hokum, held together by McDormand’s radiant performance.

Marge does not appear until 32 minutes into the film. She was not the lead when the brothers started writing. That was the Steve Buscemi character, Carl Showalter, one half of the criminal duo hired by Jerry Lundegaard (William H Macy) to kidnap his own wife Jean (Kristin Rudrud), for the ransom money. Carl is not a natural-born killer, more a nine-to-five gangster. He can handle a gun but he likes a glass of champagne, a hooker and a Jose Feliciano show. He is appalled at the violence of his partner Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare), the chain-smoking blonde demon who accounts for most of the bodies.

You can see how Marge grew larger in the writing: the film needed someone strong enough to carry us through the depraved shambles. As the snow establishes the implacable brutality of a northern winter, Marge provides an equally implacable sense of resistance, of what it takes to survive it - common decency, in her case. And a good car, because decency won’t keep you warm. For that, the Coens gave Jerry a new ‘burnt umber’ Oldsmobile Ciera to deliver to the two kidnappers, as part of the ‘deal’. This handover is the only scene set in Fargo - which is in North Dakota, not Minnesota. Why name the film after that town? The Coens thought it sounded better than a film called Brainerd.

Why is Marge pregnant? It’s a key question. It makes her seem both more peculiar and more vulnerable. How come she’s still working at such a harrowing job with two months to go? No-one asks that question: it’s a small-town, so who else is going to do it? Certainly not her offsider Lou (Bruce Bohne), who’s thicker than a Brainerd fog. But there is more to this pregnancy: Marge is a giver of life, while most of the men are death-dealers. (Or a car-dealer, in the case of William Macy’s fabulously emasculated Jerry). They love money more than life itself and the movie despatches them one by one, with old-Testament wrath. Harve Presnell, who plays Wade, the father of the kidnapped Jean, is already rich, but he won’t part with a million bucks without a fight, even if it risks his daughter’s life. Nor will he sit back and loan Jerry the $750,000 he needs to make a killing on a real-estate deal. Wade offers Jerry a demeaning finder’s fee for introducing him to this ‘sweet deal’.

In betraying both his daughter and his son-in-law, Wage brings about his own death in a snow-covered parking lot. These are the elements of tragedy, but the Coens make us feel nothing but derision. Wade got what was coming, for being such an arsehole. But wait, there’s more! Wade doesn’t realise that Jerry has also tricked him - the kidnappers think the ransom money is only $80,000, but Jerry has told Wade the kidnappers want a million. Carl will then betray his partner in crime, Grimsrud. Big mistake.

Why is Grismrud a Swedish immigrant? The practical answer is that the Coens wanted to give Peter Stormare a role, but there’s another possible reason. This wintry part of the US was settled in part by Scandinavian men with ambition and axes. Enormous fortunes were made here in the 19th century by cutting down trees. That’s why we see repeat shots of the statue of Paul Bunyan, standing tall and stolid on a plinth outside Brainerd. This statue was fake, made for the movie. Paul Bunyan is himself a mythical figure, a giant lumberjack who was probably invented by 19th century loggers to amuse each other with tall stories. Why did the Coens go to this trouble of making the statue? Was it to introduce the idea of the axe, so they could turn it to a different purpose later in the movie? That seems likely but it also creates a thematic link between the ruthless capitalism of Wade Gunderson and the pursuit of profit of these hardy old loggers.

I suspect that is also the reason they cast native American actor Steve Reevis as Shep Proudfoot, the Indian who puts Jerry in touch with the two criminals. Proudfoot ‘vouches’ for Grimsrud from their acquaintance in jail. That’s a funny idea, given that Grimsrud is a complete psycho-killer: at least he comes with good references. Proudfoot’s presence raises the question of who lived here before the Swedes - and what was left after the lumberjacks cut down the trees. As I said, the film hums with historical references.

What is Fargo actually about? It’s clear that al this toxic masculinity comes at a high price for the culture. I’m not sure the brothers were thinking about that, but it’s there on the screen. There is also Marge’s speech at the end, when she is transporting Grimsrud back to town, after shooting him in the leg at Moose Lake. She is trying to make sense of it herself. She lists the trail of bodies - ‘and for what? For a little bit of money. There’s more to life than a little money, you know. Don’t ya know that… And here y’are… and it’s a beautiful day…. I just don’t understand it.’

Grimsrud says nothing, but he’s listening. As they pass the Paul Bunyan statue, he looks directly up at the mute giant with an axe. Why? Does he see his own likeness or some kind of grotesque inspiration in the legend? It’s a long way back to the American Dream from here.

Fargo is very much a film about America, but so is every film the Coens have made. America is their special subject - its violence, its strangeness, its bathos. Those themes are timeless. No wonder the film has lost neither its sting nor relevance in the 30 years since they made it. And remember, you gotta eat a breakfast, yar?

He was Strat or Strats to his friends, and there were many of us. He used the singular form when he reviewed movies for Variety - the industry bible - but Margaret Pomeranz always called him Strats. I stuck with that plural when I met him in 1984.

I had just started reviewing movies for The Sydney Morning Herald. I was a ‘proper’ journalist, having worked as a feature writer and foreign correspondent and political reporter, until I developed repetitive strain injury (RSI) during the 1983 federal election. I started writing about movies because I loved them, and because I could write reviews by hand and phone in my copy. I had some idea of what was required from reading Pauline Kael in The New Yorker, but David wrote me a letter after my third week of reviewing, to say he liked what I was doing and to keep it up. We had never met. It was an act of kindness, because I did not know if I was writing shit or shinola. We shook hands a few weeks later at an industry party and remained friends for the next 41 years. Alas, no more. David has ankled this life, to use Variety slang for leaving a movie early - something he almost never did. He died this morning, Thursday 14 August, 2025, in hospital near his home in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. He was 85.

I had been expecting it. We had lunch in Sydney in January last year, just before the funeral of Eddie Cockrell, our American friend, the only person I knew who could rival David in knowledge of cinema and film lore. David was in no condition to come down from the mountains but he insisted. His wife Susie Craig made it happen. He was on a walking frame, blind in one eye, his sight very much reduced in the other, but the marbles were all there and the appetite for a good lunch. David’s idea of a good day was three movies per day, preferably things he had never seen. He told me he was still glued to the screen, even though he had to draw himself very close to make out what he was seeing. It was a cruel fate for a man whose eyes had been both the tools of his trade, and the guiding lamp for his life.

David and Margaret celebrate their first year on air at SBS with The Movie Show.

Most Australians only know him from The Movie Show, in which he and Margaret Pomeranz became a legendary part of the Australian family, a sort of ‘national couple’. The show ran for 18 years on SBS from 1986-2004, and then another ten years on ABC, rebadged as At the Movies with Margaret and David. There was never a moment’s romance between them but it was clear they were devoted friends while also being gentle rivals, challenging each other in a way that made people want to see the movies they talked about. It was an inspired partnership, which came about largely because SBS wanted to balance David’s high-falutin’ film-criticky gravitas with someone who was as passionate as he was, but more audience friendly. They were like Astaire and Rogers, equal but different - and she wore the better ear-rings. Margaret was actually the producer of the show, so David’s boss. She knew more about television than he did, but she also knew a lot about film, particularly Australian film. She had helped her husband Hans establish Spectrum, a film editing studio in Sydney where many of the new Australian films of the 1970’s would be cut. Margaret brought warmth and heart to the show. David brought a dogged belief in cinema as an art form, an essential enrichment to one’s being, and something worth fighting for - and he had fought that fight. Few Australians know that he was instrumental in persuading Don Chipp, then Australia’s Minister for Customs, to bring in a system of classification for films, rather than allowing a faceless censor to ban them - or even worse, simply cut out the dirty bits. That change to a classification system happened in the early 1970s, after David, as director of the Sydney Film Festival, had waged a ten-year war against film censorship. For that alone, he qualifies as a national treasure. He continued that fight long afterwards, insisting that an R-classification be added, to stop the continuing (if infrequent) resort to banning.

David was born on September 10, 1939, nine days after the start of the Second World War. His family were grocers in Trowbridge, Wiltshire - and had been since about 1830. While his father went off to war, young David was sent to live with his grandmother in Hampshire, further from air raids. She adored movies and infected him with that love. I have often wondered if those six years of war gave him the sense that life in the dark was better than life in the light. The world he saw in movies was big and exciting and dramatic, but also a safe place - an escape portal for a boy with only limited understanding of what was happening outside the cinema. After the war, David was expected to join the family business; he did so for a while, but it was never going to hold him. He came to Australia in 1963 as a ‘Ten Pound Pom’ - assisted by the Australian government’s migration scheme. He was intending to stay a few years, but never left.

Australia was a young person’s country, and David was only 24. Within three years he was appointed director of the Sydney Film Festival, a remarkable rise in such a short time, but David knew how to make friends and accrue influence. He ran the festival for 17 years, during which he established important relationships that helped put the SFF on the international map. He would spend long periods of the year wandering solo around Europe, finding new directors and cementing his friendships with the Titans. He was on a first-name basis with most of the European auteurs and every director of a major film festival. I did not fully appreciate that until I took over as the SFF director in 1989, after Rod Webb had succeeded David in ‘83. It was an eye-opener to see David function at one of the A-list festivals - Cannes, Berlin, Locarno, Venice - and eventually Toronto. He knew everybody, but he stayed above the fray of petty egoists, of which there were many. David didn’t play power games; he was already powerful, because people trusted his opinions. He took pains to introduce me around, something he did not need to do; he helped me find my feet in a larger pond than I was used to. He liked doing it: I was a sort of protege by then.

Former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, former Minister Don Chipp and friend at the opening of the film festival, 1983. Credit: SFF

…

Part of his power came from his position as a senior reviewer for Variety. Most of these critics were American or British, not Australian. They were a clannish, fractious mob, all gifted with strong opinions. David was an elder statesmen in their ranks - although it was impossible to do that job and not make enemies. He could make or break a film internationally, not just in Australia, and occasionally did so. I never thought he took great pleasure in a bad review, but nor did he resile from the task. He had his favourites, and was sometimes too loyal to them. Occasionally I thought he was entirely wrong about a film - Romper Stomper being the most obvious example. He called for the burning of the negative, such was his reaction to the film’s racist violence. I thought he was missing the wood for the trees: something in the culture had produced this violence and it was worth looking at what that might be. It was hardly a recruiting film for skinheads, but David seemed to want a more clear-cut condemnation. The film’s director, Melbourne-based Geoffrey Wright, famously threw a glass of red wine in his face at a party in Venice after that review. David took it in his stride: all part of the game.

After he left the SFF in 1983, he began a long and fruitful association with SBS, the
relatively new Special Broadcasting Service. He advised the powers that be to allow him to select and screen classic films free from censorship - uncut, he demanded - and set about drawing up the list of films that they should buy rights for. No TV channel had ever taken non-Hollywood seriously before this - and none has since. David presented two classic films per week through most of the 1980’s and ’90s, introducing a generation to the cinematic canon: Fellini, Satyajit Ray, Kurosawa, the Eastern Europeans, the young kitchen-sinkers from Britain, the nouvelle-vaguers from France. Unless you lived in a big city, near one of the few city art houses, belonged to a film society or attended the festival, it was hard to see these films. David made sure that SBS bought the rights of all the great works of the canon. He would then introduce them with his usual suave television persona - unflappable, urbane, authoritative. It is no exaggeration to say that he educated several generations of young Australians - the young hopefuls who saw his programs at the SFF grew up to be George Miller, Peter Weir, Phil Noyce and Gillian Armstrong. He gave the kid in Broken Hill or Bunbury who dreamed of a life artistic a window to the great works - far more than they could get from their local video shop. Bill Collins did the same thing before him, but Bill’s domain was the golden age of Hollywood (which David also adored). David’s sphere was Europe, India, Japan: he took us onto bleak beaches in Sweden where men in dark cloaks played chess for their lives, in stark black and white. He also took us to films where pretty French actors wore very few clothes. It was a thing in the late 1960s. Nobody had ever seen some of the stuff he got away with late in the night on SBS.

At the same time he began writing film reviews for The Weekend Australian, teaming up with Evan Williams, for a partnership that lasted as long as that with Margaret - close to 30 years. He never treated me as a rival, though we worked for different organs. He was always bigger than that. He had begun buying DVD’s of all the great movies - thousands of them - the basis of his daily viewing in the Blue Mountains. He was always willing to share, if I needed to see something obscure.

David and wife Susie, 1988. Credit: SFF

….

Around the Bicentennial year of 1988, he started teaching a film course at Sydney University’s Centre for Continuing Education. Every Thursday night, for about three or four hours, he would take a band of faithful students through some particular aspect of world cinema, usually with one complete screening, selected from his extensive DVD collection. He did this with few breaks for the next 38 years - yet another generation educated by his need to spread the good news. He gave it up only a few years ago when his health began to fail, appointing Claude Gonzalez, who had been the producer of At the Movies on ABC, as his successor.

David was both a kind man and an ambitious one. He liked power, but used it wisely, like a knight at the court of King Arthur. Instead of chivalry, he practiced cinema, opening the eyes of anyone who would listen to the glories of an art form that was barely one hundred years old, and needed protection. He did not dispute that movies were fun - how could he, when his favourite movie was Singin’ In the Rain, fun itself. But he believed they were capable of greatness too, and the highest emotion. We all did and some of us still do, despite the crash in movie quality of the last few decades. He was like Norma Desmond in that respect: he remained big, as the pictures got small.

We shall not see his like again. For millions of Australians, he opened our eyes. For me, he helped to shine a light. Wherever he has gone, he will have friends waiting to greet him. ‘Federico, how nice to see you. Now tell me Ingmar, what are you working on? Have you seen Akira?’

David Stratton with a few old mates at the International Film Festival of India in 1977: Akira Kurosawa, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Satyajit Ray on his left. Credit: SFF

In 2003, when the American Film Institute drew up a list of the greatest movie heroes and villains, Liberty Valance did not even make the top 50 bad guys. A gross injustice, I say. If Nurse Ratched and Hal 9000 made the grade, why not the man who personified everything that was wrong in the Old West - at least ‘south of the Picketwire’ - and may I say, some of what’s wrong now, 'east of the Potomac’.

John Ford made The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance on the Paramount lot in late 1961. He was 67 years old - the same age I am now - and one of the most famous directors in the world, with a career that already spanned almost 50 years. He seems to have had a lot to get off his chest. John Kennedy was president and the times were soon to be changin’. Otto Preminger had defied the McCarthy witch-hunterss in January 1960 when he announced that he had hired former communist Dalton Trumbo to adapt the screenplay for Exodus. In August, Kirk Douglas announced that he too had hired Trumbo to rewrite Spartacus two years earlier - albeit in secret. The era of the blacklist was crumbling, but Ford was never one to blow with the wind. Ornery could have been his middle name.

Ford scholar Tag Gallagher has called Liberty Valance ‘an old man’s movie’. I think that’s right, but in a good way. It’s a moral lesson drenched in old-time American values like rectitude, honour, loyalty and generosity, all of which are threatened by a hoodlum called Liberty, played by Lee Marvin. Liberty Valance, the man, is to goodness what the current American president is to modesty. Liberty would happily drag any of those American values off its horse and pistol-whip it. He’s bad to the bone. In Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles, made 12 years later, Harvey Korman spits out a fabulous list of all the bad guys he wants assembled - ‘rustlers, cut-throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperadoes, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, half-wits, dim-wits, vipers, snipers, conmen, Indian agents, Mexican bandits (deep breath); muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswagglers, horse thieves, bull dikes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, bush-kickers, and METHODISTS!’ Liberty Valance may be missing but he’d qualify for most of the job descriptions. At the time, we laughed because Mel Brooks’s list seemed so outlandish. Now it sounds like a description of Donald J Voldamort’s Cabinet.

Ford didn’t much care for the political witch-hunts of the 1950s, but he was hardly a political radical. His politics were deeply sentimental, mixed up with patriotism and romanticism, a longing for the past and fear for the future. At times he was a conservative Republican; at other times, a liberal Democrat. His idealism was only matched by his cynicism - which may explain why he drank so much. Both sides of his nature are evident in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a film that celebrates the Old West even as it tears it down. Ford examines the mythology that he did more than any other director to create, and finds it wanting. In that sense the film is both a civics lesson and a form of self-criticism. Ford the iconoclast loved the rough-hewn values of American democracy, where drinkin’ and fightin’ and rowdy conventions provided a pageant of human behaviour. Ford the moralist hated the lies and corruption behind that political process. That is the subject of the movie - how a legend produced a big man, and the legend was a lie.

Watching it again, in these dark times, it’s hard not to notice the ambiguity of Ford’s view of America - and how far America has come from the ideals of that time. At its most benign, Liberty Valance is a film about the civilising aspects of law and order. The man who thinks he shot Liberty Valance is a towering example of a good man. That may by why Ford cast Jimmy Stewart, whose American goodness was only topped by Rin Tin Tin.

Stewart’s character Ransom (‘Ranse’) Stoddard represents the coming of order, and thus, the passing of the rowdy vitality of the Old West. John Wayne’s character Tom Doniphon represents that vitality, but with a moral backbone. Lee Marvin, as Liberty, dispenses with the backbone. He’s just low-down outlaw scum, a man who enjoys hurting people and has trouble controlling that urge - a psychopath. When Ford made the movie, Kennedy was asking Americans to heed their better angels, to ‘ask not what your country can do for you’ etcetera. Here was a movie that showed, at least on a surface reading, that good had defeated evil in the making of America. Or had it?

It’s hard to ignore the attractiveness of Lee Marvin’s depiction of a bad man. His cruelty is part of the spectacle of the movie. It’s implacable, but tinged with a devilish kind of humour. Liberty is stylish, dangerous and very, very sexy in Lee Marvin’s performance - and he gets to wear the best clothes, courtesy of Edith Head’s costuming. You can’t take your eyes off him. Goodness may be its own reward, but badness is having more fun, it seems.

It seems odd to say it, but I think Liberty Valance is one of Ford’s most autobiographical films. It’s partly about the attraction of violence as a form of freedom. Perhaps that’s why the character’s name is Liberty (yes, I know, Ford did not name him - the original 1953 short story was by Montana-based writer Dorothy M Johnson). Ford looks at cruelty here with the eye of one who knows its contours: he was capable of great cruelty himself. He loved to terrorise and humiliate his stock company of actors, even the ones he loved most, like Wayne and Harry Carey Junior. He is reputed to have ridden Wayne hard on this movie, taunting him with his lack of service in the Second World War and his failure as a college athlete. Ford was a bully, as so many of the great film directors were, in an era when they could largely get away with it. I think Ford was attracted to the no-holds-barred ferocity of Liberty Valance.

Stewart plays a man of peace, an eastern lawyer who refuses to pick up a gun, even after he is repeatedly assaulted and humiliated by Valance. Ransom Stoddard is a man of virtue in a place where no-one has much use for it. That struggle is foundational in the Western, as it was foundational in American life. Ford was born at the end of the 19th century, when the west was already won - and lost. Buffalo Bill was riding in a tent show as early as 1882. Ford came to Hollywood in 1914, where his older brother was already a successful actor, and ‘Jack Ford’ was soon directing short westerns. The aging Wyatt Earp was a frequent visitor to John Ford’s sets in the silent era. In that sense, Ford had primary sources for some of his stories. Henry Fonda would eventually play a sanitised version of Earp in My Darling Clementine, one of Ford’s most romantic films.

The western was in decline when Ford made Liberty Valance. The Second World War had broken its spell. American power had never been greater, but the western no longer explained the world, as it had become, to Americans. Ford’s westerns of the late 1940’s are some of his best but they have an elegaic tone - as in his cavalry trilogy (Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Rio Grande). The man who helped to invent the western was now mourning it. From 1950 to 1959, Ford largely abandoned the genre, except for The Searchers (1956), perhaps his most famous and ambiguous film - a paean to the white pioneering families of the west and a stunning indictment of their racism. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a sort of companion piece, a summary of Ford’s disillusion with the illusions of the Old West, in which a man builds his whole life on a lie.

The film is told largely in flashback, at night, in the town of Shinbone. We don’t know where this is, except that it is out west and ‘south of the Picketwire’. The Picketwire is a real river in southern Colorado, apparently a mispronunciation of ‘Purgatoire’. Ford never names the territory, except to make it clear that it is a territory wanting to become a state. In fact, that is part of the civics lesson - a controversial part, as it adds a 20-minute political rally at the end that some critics found unnecessary. Not me. I say that last 20 minutes ties Ford’s political agenda together the way the rug tied the room together in The Big Lebowski.

Most of Ford’s films since the war had been in colour; not this one. Except for a couple of scenes of the railroad, and the ranch house that John Wayne is extending in the hope of attracting a bride, the film takes place in rooms in the town, in a series of set pieces. Ford was famous for his use of landscapes, specifically those of Monument Valley. There are no great vistas in Liberty Valance. It’s a chamber-piece, a western with almost no horses. Who’d have thought?

Ford simply returns to the basics of story: two protagonists, one antagonist and a mystery to solve. He takes the western indoors and after-hours here, to where men eat and drink, read newspapers, talk shit, engage in politics and flirt with girls. As so often with Ford, a young woman is at the heart of the meaning.

Vera Miles - Miss Kansas of 1948 - is Hallie, Tom Doniphon’s sweetheart. She is half of the film’s conscience, its heart and soul. She is also the ‘territory’ that John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart will fight over, in a purely symbolic way. Hallie is uneducated, but full of life. She is kind, hard-working, funny and unsure of her own intelligence, because she can’t read. Stoddard starts a class to teach her to read and half the town joins in. Ranse schools them about the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and the democratic system. At the back of the class, like a sentinel, stands Pompey, the only black man in the film - and the other half of the film’s conscience. Woody Strode had starred in Sergeant Rutledge for Ford two years earlier, a role that gave him immense exposure. Here he plays John Wayne’s hired hand but he’s also his friend, even if Wayne call him ‘my boy Pompey’. Strode’s presence in a number of scenes changes the meaning of those scenes. Civil rights had been a topic for Ford long before the Kennedy administration came to power. At the political convention late in the film, Pompey sits on the stoop outside the door, looking baleful. He doesn’t say a word. Ford placed him there for a reason, to show that Pompey is just a bystander to this great new democratic process. He can’t go inside and vote.

Tom Doniphon watches uneasily as Hallie learns to read. He accuses the lawyer of trying to take her away from him. Stoddard calls that a damned lie. He doesn’t know yet that he’s in love with Hallie too. It’s a love triangle, in that sense, but a rather beautiful one because it’s so recessive. Ford rarely brings it to the forefront: it happens in the shadow of a real and present danger - the rampant threat of Liberty Valance, a man who knows no higher emotion than ‘I want…’

Valance is a bully’s bully - ‘a no-good gun-packing murdering thief’, as Jimmy Stewart declares after his first beating. We’re never told how Valance got that way: it doesn’t matter to Ford. Valance is the product of a place in which brutality is a currency. It has corrupted the population of Shinbone; everyone puts up with it, out of fear. Stoddard can’t understand how the people have become so pliant. John Wayne is the only one who doesn’t fear Valance. In fact, he’s itching to take him on.

Violence erupts in the first scene, as Valance and his pals hold up the stage coach on which Stoddard is travelling. Valance becomes enraged when he discover’s law books in Stoddard’s luggage. He tears out pages and thrashes him with them. ‘I’ll teach you law - western law,’ he cries. Stoddard is cowering on the ground, off camera. Ford only shows us Valance’s rage, as he belts him with a short-tailed whip attached to a long leather bludgeon - a fairly obvious sexual symbol. Lee Van Cleef has to haul Valance off before he kills the lawyer. The reason for Valance’s anger is clear: Stoddard is educated.

Social life in Shinbone revolves around a saloon and a cafe. Unusually for Ford, more scenes take place in the cafe than the saloon. Peter and Nora Ericson (John Qualen and Jeannette Nolan) are Swedish immigrants who serve steaks that would kill a vegetarian. Hallie is their waitress. They are kind and gentle folk - exceedingly proud of their new country and their citizenship. Ford’s family were Irish immigrants: he makes a point of valourising Peter and Nora. Their cafe is the film’s hearth - a rowdy centre of community, where Ford gets to observe the highs and lows of humanity. Stoddard becomes part of the Ericson’s cheerful circle of affection. With no money, he pays his way by washing dishes and bussing plates. He even wears an apron, a picture of gelded masculinity. John Wayne makes fun of him until Liberty Valance swaggers in, calls Ranse a ‘waitress’, then trips him up as he carries a huge steak to Doniphon. Bad move to interfere with another man’s beef.

The film is couched as a long flashback - Stoddard’s recollection of events 30 years earlier. The opening scenes, with Stoddard returning by train to Shinbone, are set around 1908. Stoddard is now a distinguished US senator who looks like becoming the next Vice-President. He has come for a funeral. The editor of the local paper demands an interview. That’s when we learn that the funeral is for Tom Doniphon. Hallie is now Mrs Stoddard, so we know from the start who won the fight for her hand. At the funeral parlour, Pompey sits in vigil next to the coffin.

According to Ford, Doniphon is the film’s lead character, not Stoddard. That’s maybe a line ball. Part of what makes the film so watchable is the competition between three stars at the height of their powers, working with a master story-teller. Ford is one of the most gifted directors in the history of the medium and he had lost none of his edge. The high contrast black and white is ravishing. Ford said it was an artistic choice; the cinematographer William H Clothier said the studio just wanted to save money. We can be grateful that they did: there are few films that use the lack of colour so well. Ford also said that the climactic gunfight, where we learn who did shoot Valance, would not have worked in colour - an intriguing comment. Why not? We need to look at a still from the big moment to see why. It’s a spoiler but then, if you haven’t already seen the film, you’ve probably not got this far in my brilliant appreciation of the film’s riches (irony alert).

Look at the lighting in the shot below as Stewart walks to the showdown against Valance. The rim light on his head and shoulders is almost pure white, emphasising his loneliness in this moment. The light catches the gang in the Mexican cantina, cowering behind the door, suspended by the tension. They are us, the audience, who cannot look away. Now imagine all this in colour - all the drama and clarity becomes muddied. In black and white Ford can direct our eye wherever he wants - the hanging lamp, the election hoarding, the gun in Stewart’s hand. Colour would only confuse things.

Monochrome also gives contour to the faces, which allows for more subtle performances. Look at this shot of John Wayne, just after the shot above. He is watching from the wings - and the shadows are dramatically significant.

There are two Tom Doniphons here. One is the good man in the light, the other is the righteous killer in the dark shadow who’s looking forward to tangling with Valance. That’s who Tom is looking at here, just before the shooting starts. The light bisects Tom’s body, but there is enough light on his face to see the hatred in his eyes. He has been spoiling for this fight since the restaurant scene, and probably before. He doesn’t like bullies. Ford uses light to amplify meaning here. Colour photography would not have had the same impact. There would have been detail in the shadows rather than full black. If the studio really did force him to use black and white to save money, he made the most of it.

The Woody Strode character Pompey is one of two major characters who are not in the original Dorothy M Johnson story. The other is the drunken newspaper editor of the Shinbone Star, Dutton Peabody, played by Edmond O’Brien. Both tell us something about what Ford was trying to say. I think Peabody is John Ford’s jocular version of a self-portrait: a hopeless drunk with a good education, a romantic spirit and an acute sense of morality. His newspaper writing is vivid and spurs Stoddard to take up the cause of the townsfolk, against the big ranchers. They oppose statehood. They don’t want fenced farms and the law. For them, the lawless open range is a freer and more lucrative place of business. They hire Valance as their enforcer, which takes the film deeper into politics, where it has been heading all along. Valance is now more than a simple hoodlum; he is the vicious tool of big money. One of his first targets is Peabody, whom he beats to a bloody pulp as his goons destroy the newspaper office. So much for a free press. Valance then tries to intimidate a town meeting into voting for him as one of the delegates to a coming convention on statehood. Liberty never makes it to the convention. The injuring of Peabody incenses the once-peaceful Stoddard. He picks up a gun.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is thus a somewhat contradictory film about might versus right, education and the law against gangsterism and intimidation. However high-minded, it’s still resolved with a gun - two guns in fact. From 63 years later, it has lost none of its prescience and power - in fact, I think it has become more relevant to our times.

Valance targeted the mechanisms of a free society and the democratic process - first he shut down the press, then he intimidated the voters with threats of violence. He didn’t just ignore the law, he ripped up its pages and stomped on them. He was a bully, a braggart, a showoff and yet, a bit of a coward when faced with the mighty John Wayne. Valance did not appeal to anyone’s higher nature, only their fears. Sound like anyone we know?

When Ford made the film, Valance represented an ugly negative, the worst that the culture could produce. His values were despicable. One year after the film came out, John Kennedy was dead in circumstances that echoed the mystery of the film: were there two shooters or one? The American war in Vietnam was escalating. American idealism would be torn apart in that decade, bringing Richard Nixon to the presidency. John Ford even voted for him. In that sense, perhaps, nobody shot Liberty Valance. The rough justice of the film was just a playground illusion. The most famous line in the film comes near the end when the 1908 newspaper editor (Carlton Young) declines to print the story that the elderly Ranse Stoddard has told him, even thought it’s true. ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,’ the editor says. Ranse wants to admit that his whole career is based on a lie, but nobody wants to know. I can almost hear the chuckles coming from the West Wing late at night: ‘What a loser’.

Fritz Lang was a good liar. Even in Hollywood, where he faced Olympic-level competition, Lang’s lies were of podium standard. His biggest lie, the one that still lingers in writing about his career, is that he fled Germany a few hours after Goebbels asked him to become the chief of all German film production. That, of course, meant Nazi-approved production. This was supposed to have happened in March or April of 1933, in the Propaganda Minister’s imposing and cavernous offices on Wilhelmsplatz in Berlin.

Lang was by then world-famous - not just for Metropolis, his dystopian vision of a future in which technology has corrupted the human race - but for M, in which Lang makes us sympathise with a child-killer (Peter Lorre) who’s pursued by a mob. Lang was rich, temperamental and affected (he liked that his monocle scared people); he was used to getting his way, at least when making films. He was less adept at dealing with Nazis.

Lang’s version of his meeting with Goebbels was like a scene from one of his German films. He talked about his steps echoing through the wide halls of the ministry building as he walked to Goebbels’ office; how his whole body perspired as the ‘charming’ Goebbels apologised for having to ban his latest film - The Testament of Dr Mabuse. The minister then stressed how much the Fuhrer had loved Metropolis (1927) and Lang’s epic two-part silent, Die Nibelungen (1922-24). According to Goebbels - as remembered by Lang - Hitler had said: ‘Here is a man who will give us great Nazi films’.

Lang’s maternal grandmother was inconveniently Jewish, but Goebbels reassured the Austrian director. The party decides who is Jewish and who is not, said the Rechsminister. And were you not raised a Catholic in Vienna? And did you not fight for the Motherland in the last war? We can make you an Honorary Aryan, said Goebbels (in Lang’s telling).

Goebbels then proffered the great temptation - would he head up the new agency overseeing all German film production? Great power, great influence, great money - what’s not to like? It was at this point, Lang said, that he realised he had to get out - not tomorrow, but today, on the night train to Paris. He kept glancing at the clock as it ticked past three, then four o’clock. The banks would all be closed; how would he get his money out? Tick tock tick tock… sweat, sweatier, sweatiest. Finally freed from the meeting, Lang rushed home and gathered what cash he had stashed in the house. The amount varied, according to when he told the story: 500 marks, 3000 marks, 5000 marks. He sent his man-servant ahead to buy the train ticket. At the last minute, he boarded the overnight train for Paris, but he was not yet safe. What if they searched him? He stashed wads of money in hiding places on the train. The next morning, he was in Paris. He had escaped - with, at least, some cash.

According to Patrick McGilligan’s forensically detailed biography (Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast, 1997), the director first told this story for publication ten years later, in Hollywood, when he was promoting the first of four anti-Nazi films that would revive his American career. This was 1942 - a few months after Pearl Harbour had forced the Americans into the war. He retold it many times, changing and embellishing the details, until it became part of the lore of Lang.

We now know different. Lang’s own passport survives. It shows he did not finally leave Germany until July 1933, more than three months later, and that he came and went - to Paris, to London, back to Berlin - several times in those months. Goebbels’ ministry diary survives: it does not mention a meeting with Lang in March or April of 1933. This does not destroy the whole fabric of the story, but it does punch a few holes in it. Lang did flee Germany, just not when he said he did; Goebbels probably did offer him the big job, because others recalled Lang asking them whether he should take it. That in itself is damning, because it means he was considering throwing his lot in with the Nazis. The late Pierre Rissient - a friend from much later - told McGilligan that Lang did not make up his mind to leave until he had a new deal in Paris with the already-exiled German Jewish producer, Erich Pommer, who had been the initial producer on Metropolis.

'I never bought the Goebbels story,’ David Overbey told McGilligan. David was an American critic who became a close friend of the director in Los Angeles. ‘For one thing I heard him tell it in greater and greater detail. There were no inconsistencies ever in his telling, but by the time I heard it for the eighteen millionth time, I thought it was a piece of stagecraft - the aria in the opera. The colour of the carpet as he walked into Goebbels’ office would change. It depended on who he was selling it to, and what audience’.

Overbey told me some of these same stories. We became friends at the International Film Festival of India in New Delhi in 1989, after I took over as director of the Sydney Film Festival. David was by then an elder statesmen of the festival world - a senior programmer at Toronto, and one of the selectors for Critics Week at Cannes. He knew everybody. He took me - who knew nobody - under his wing: ‘you must meet this person but don’t trust that one - and never even speak to that one!’ We would meet at various festivals, but always in Berlin in February - not far from where Fritz Lang had met Goebbels.

David Overbey, in characteristic pose, with Gauloises.

In Los Angeles in the late 1960s, David had been an academic and journalist, keen to interview and write about the legends of the industry. Lang was already well into his ‘70s. David used to drive him to various colleges in California, when the director had been booked to speak to film students. The mornings of these visits would usually be taken up with Lang seeing a prostitute. He kept a little black book of phone numbers. Fritz liked a blowjob before lunch, David said, with characteristic mirth. McGilligan confirms the preference: ‘It is less hard work,’ the director liked to say. For whom, one might ask?

The young Lang had a penchant for prostitutes even before he left Vienna, late in 1910. McGilligan writes that they were for him ‘a shrine at which to prostrate oneself and worship.’ That’s an interesting way to put it: it’s clear that Lang had a curious relationship with the many, many women in his life - somewhere between dependance and derision. Did he even like women, I wonder? He was highly sexual. He loved women in the hundreds, one at a time. He loved turning unknown actresses into stars, but that can also be seen as a desire to control. He had affairs with some of the most fabulous women in movies - including Marlene Dietrich, Kay Francis and Miriam Hopkins - but they never lasted long. He was often a beast to those who loved him, like Thea von Harbou and Lily Latté, with whom he had long relationships. He was hugely dependant on them and yet often scathing in public, even as he pursued his latest conquest. He was also a renowned bully on the set, especially of actresses. He tended to toady up to the powerful and punch down at the subordinate, writes McGilligan.

Lang created one of the most fabulous female images in cinema - the robot woman in Metropolis - while torturing the young actress who played her. Maria the robot gets burned at the stake in the film’s climactic scene. Lang insisted on real flames licking the toes of the scantily-clad Brigitte Helm, who was 19 and new to movies. Inevitably, the flames ignited her dress at one point, and had to be quickly extinguished. Lang’s crews were often appalled at his treatment of women, but he also tortured his male actors. Herr Lang was an equal opportunity bastard, in that sense. A megalo-mytho-maniac, of sorts. No wonder Hitler liked him.

Lang was also a political neophyte, at least in Berlin. He was wary of Nazi ideology, but had little ideology of his own, at least in political terms - and to be fair, nobody really knew in 1933 how far Nazism would go. On the other hand, many of the Jews in the film business had already fled. Fritz Lang was Jewish enough to know that he would face trouble if he stayed. He made one film in Paris with Erich Pommer - Liliom - then sailed for America with David O Selznick, in the middle of 1934. Lang was now under contract to MGM, the first of many studios at which he would build and then burn his bridges.

Brian Donlevy hides from you-know-who in Hangmen Also Die!

By the time he came to make the four anti-Nazi films - Man Hunt (1941), Hangmen Also Die! (1943), Ministry of Fear (1944) and Cloak and Dagger (1946) - Fritz Lang had become a fervent anti-Fascist and a dabbler in leftist causes. That made him suspect for the powerful right-wing forces in America. In 1940, his name had appeared on a list of secret Communist sympathisers, who were said to be trying to further the Russian cause in Hollywood. Bogart and Cagney were on the same list, compiled by John L Leech, a functionary of the American Communist Party, and shown to a grand jury in Los Angeles. Lang immediately put out a strong denial: ‘A few years ago I was accused of being a Nazi… As a fugitive from Nazi Germany, the charge was ridiculous. This charge is even more ridiculous. I hate Hitler - I hate Stalin - I hate all dictators and dictatorships!’

The commie hit-list was a harbinger of dark things to come in Hollywood, but the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour interrupted the witch-hunt. Hollywood now went to war. To a large extent, studio production became an arm of American propaganda. Studio heads liaised directly with the government’s new Office of War Information about the types of pictures the country needed. This became comical at times: even Tarzan went to war, in Tarzan Triumphs (RKO, 1942). Joe E Brown foiled Nazi agents in a bowling alley in The Daring Young Man (Columbia, 1942). Cartoons, musicals and gangster movies all put on the uniform. Many actors and directors actually put on the uniform, enlisting to fight. Not Lang. In 1942, he was 51. Where exactly would a Teutonic control freak with a monocle fit into this man’s army?

Lang’s career was in the doldrums before he made Man Hunt - a fairly clumsy thriller about an English big game hunter on the run in England from Nazi agents. He had been out of work for almost two years after You and Me (1938) - a quasi-musical that laid a giant egg at Paramount. In 1940, Zanuck hired him to direct The Return of Frank James, a western; then another, Western Union. Having alienated half of Hollywood since his arrival in 1934, Lang was now on his best behaviour, keen to show he could direct a commercial script on time and on budget. The war gave him a renewed purpose. Being anti-Fascist was back in fashion. Lang was keen to play his part. It would be foolish to think the attempts to label him as both a Nazi and a Communist had no effect on him. Emigrés were vulnerable, even in Hollywood. How better to prove his loyalty to America than to make pictures that showed what the Nazis were really like?

Hangmen Also Die! is perhaps the best of Lang’s anti-Nazi movies, but whether it is effective as propaganda is debatable. It’s blunt, gripping and hard to misconstrue: the Nazis are awfully nasty. They must be defeated at all costs. But therein lies a problem: audiences don’t generally like being lectured. ‘The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds,’ said the OWI’s first director, Elmer Davis, ‘is to let it go in through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realise they are being propagandised.’ Lang deals with this by making propaganda a part of the film’s subject.

The assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in May 1942 was worldwide news. Heydrich was then the ‘Protector of Bohemia and Moravia’, the former Czechoslovak territories annexed by Hitler in 1939. Heydrich was extremely senior, and just as brutal. One of his nicknames was ’The Hangman’. Hitler sent him to Prague to crack down on the rebellious population. Czech workers were deliberately slowing military production. As the film opens, in a grand 18th century salon in the royal palace, Nazi officials upbraid the Czech leaders for the ‘slow-down’ propaganda appearing in the Skoda factories. We see cartoon leaflets urging workers to obstruct the work. A Czech official explains, carefully and timidly, that it might help if the Nazis paid the workers enough to afford food. A Nazi officer then sweeps into the room, jodhpurs quivering, and announces: ‘Ihre exzellenzen, der Reichs-potato’. At least that’s what it sounds like. It may well have been one of Fritz’s little jokes, to substitute ‘potato’ for ‘protektor’. The film at this point rings with dark humour at the Nazi’s expense.

Heydrich then appears in full regalia. He is played by the impressively named Hans Heinrich von Twardovski, a prominent silent film actor - and gay man - who had fled Germany before Lang. He strolls in with a malevolent half-smile animating his thin, vulpine face. He looks like a vampire on day release. Heydrich is enjoying the fear in the room, symbolised by the sea of outstretched right arms. He stops in front of a fat man with an eye-patch, a Czech general who has saluted the old-fashioned way, with fingers to the temple, rather than the stiff arm. Heydrich drops his leather-bound cane at the man’s feet, glaring until the general picks it up and hands it back to the sneering Reichs-potato.

Actually, you don’t need me to describe the scene, as the full film is available on Youtube. You can watch it below*. Be my guest - then come back here for the rest of this scintillating commentary. I guarantee there is a point to all this meandering.

OK, from here on, I will assume you have watched some or all of Hangmen Also Die! There will be spoilers.

A distinguishing feature of that opening scene is Lang’s dark humour, from the self-satirising portrait of Hitler in trench-coat, right hand cocked on hip, to the way that Heydrich returns the Hitler salute, with the merest wave. That says ‘I can do the salute however I like but you better do it right or I’ll have you shot’.

The film quickly becomes more threatening, which is really the point. This is a study of what people do under pressure - and as that, it remains remarkably timely and effective. Lang is interested in how ordinary people respond to intimidation, a theme that never gets old. The people of Prague know the Nazis don’t issue idle threats: they will do what they say. In this case, they take hostages, demanding that the people give up the assassin of Heydrich. They soon start shooting those hostages. Some of the population call on the assassin to hand himself in.

The plot is exquisitely savage. Pretty young Masha Novotny (Anna Lee), sees one of her countrymen being chased through the streets by Nazi soldiers. She is not part of the Resistance, but she is a proud Czech. She misdirects the soldiers, allowing the stranger to escape. That action will cost her dearly.

Lang does not show the attack on Heydrich. No-one in Hollywood yet knew the real story anyway but that’s probably not the reason. He does it so that we do not have more information than poor Masha. She sees a man being chased. This man, played by Brian Donlevy, needs her help. She might have withheld that if she knew that he had just shot Heydrich. (In fact, Heydrich’s killers were two exiled Czech army officers trained in England by the SOE - the Special Operations Executive).

Her actions brings the fugitive Donlevy character into her home, where her father, Professor Novotny, sees that this man is likely to be the assassin. The professor is played by Walter Brennan, a surprising but inspired bit of casting. Brennan was well-known to American audiences as a colourful figure from westerns, often portraying gabby hayseeds.

Here he is immensely dignified and brave, a man of towering integrity. Brennan gives the most soulful performance in the film, in powerful contrast to the gangster Nazis.

Lang then gives us a range of others who stand at different points on the spectrum of bravery - from Resistance fighters to the stoic old vegetable seller, Mrs Dvorak (Sarah Padden), who dies after a Gestapo beating. By this point, the Nazis are no longer figures of fun: Lang makes us see their true colours, the unrestrained ruthlessness at the heart of their project. He also shows that there is also a spectrum of treachery among the Czechs: the Nazis don’t have to work hard to find collaborators. The brewer Czaka has infiltrated the resistance in order to betray them to the Gestapo. Casting Gene Lockhart - usually a jovial comedic presence - is another clever stroke. Lockhart uses his jolly image as cover with the audience, as well as the people of Prague.

Gene Lockhart - looking worried.

Lang took great pains in building a plot and this one keeps getting deeper, as the reprisals start. In fact, those reprisals were much worse than we see - perhaps as many as 5000 executions. We don’t know how much Lang knew of the real reprisals, but it wasn’t hard to guess. We do know now that some of the Czech leaders tried to stop the plot to kill Heydrich, fearing that the price would be too high.

You will have noticed a screen credit for story by ‘Bert Brecht’. The famous playwright had arrived in Hollywood July 1941, as part of a new tide of German exiles. Lang welcomed him warmly. They began discussing idea. As soon as they heard of the assassination of Heydrich, they started work on Hangmen Also Die! The process quickly degenerated into acrimony, especially when veteran writer John Wexley joined the team. Wexley eventually claimed sole credit; after arbitration, Brecht had to accept a story credit. The whole process confirmed his distaste for American capitalism. It is difficult now to know how much Brecht contributed, but there are surely some familiar echoes, in the sympathetic portrayal of workers and Resistance fighters.

Who really cares about this film now, more than 80 years later? Let me offer a reason. Hangmen Also Die! is about civilian resistance to intimidation and it’s not like that has gone away. Indeed, I can’t think of a time when crude intimidation has become so much a part of the daily news. I am not just talking about the tariff-monster. Those around him are like cutouts from Lang’s film: toadies, bullies, liars and wreckers in expensive suits. One of them even showed us his best Nazi salute at the inauguration.

Lang himself was tempted by Goebbels, before he saw the blood red future - and Lang was rich, famous and powerful. Hollywood - that bastion of liberalism - threw everything at Trump last year before the US election. It didn’t work. The movie mavens then pulled in their heads. In January, they were conspicuous in their lack of support for The Apprentice - the film that dramatises Trump’s formative years. They were right to be afraid: vengeance is Trump’s favourite sport, after golf. The roundups and deportations of the poor and dispossessed have already started. Who’s next? Remember that famous poem by the German pastor, Martin Niemöller?

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

Fritz Lang wasn’t a communist either. Nor a Nazi. He may have been a bastard and a bully but he was also a perceptive observer of the darkness in the human condition. Hangmen Also Die! has many of his bone-chilling touches, especially in the concluding scenes, which reinforce the callousness of the Nazis, laughing as an old man is gunned down on the steps of a church. The fact that this is Czaka the traitor, killed by Gestapo thugs, is pure Lang. We almost feel sorry for Czaka. Lang then cuts to the machine-gunning of the hostages, including the professor. As mourners visit the mass graves of the dead, we hear a stirring song, proclaiming ‘No surrender’. That had been the original idea for a title. I don’t know whether the film was effective as war-time propaganda - but I do think that the depiction of the dark mechanisms of tyranny still packs a punch.

…

*All of these films are available free on Youtube, except for Ministry of Fear, which is available on The Internet Archive.

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It can’t be easy being Walter Salles. It’s not his fault that he is the heir to a Brazilian bank, the largest in Latin America. Forbes says he’s worth about $US4.5 billion - but that makes him only the third richest film-maker in the world. Hint: the other two prefer fantasy worlds and music by John Williams*.

Being rich is not necessarily good for a film-maker: it can take away the drive to get things made. I can’t say that it has had that effect on Walter Salles. He has made only ten features in a career that spans 35 years; on the other hand, he never has to make a film in order to eat. When he does make a film, we can be sure he really wants to.

His considerable reputation rests on two great movies - Central Station (1998) and The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), and perhaps also his second feature, Foreign Land (1995). After directing Kristen Stewart and Garrett Hedlund in an adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in 2012, he didn’t make a film for 12 years. On The Road was sensual but timid. Reading between the lines, the experience may not have been a happy one for him. Salles has said his English was not subtle enough to make that film, in which the English language is so important.

He likes to work on documentary projects after each feature, and he takes more time than most directors. He says he needs to be sure before he adopts a project. In 2015, he read a Brazilian memoir called I’m Still Here. In the book, Marcelo Rubens Paiva told the story of his family’s fortunes after his father - a former senator - was abducted in 1971 by the military dictatorship. Salles took seven years to develop the film, interrupted by COVID, but the wait has been worth it. I loved Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries, but I think this is better. It’s more personal, both politically and culturally, and more committed. Salles is fully invested in it, for reasons we’ll get to. It’s as much a film about contemporary Brazil as it is about 1971, when the country was six years into a dictatorship that would last 21 years.

The story is true. I knew nothing about it going in, but it feels from the start like an autobiography. The family is large and raucous, living in an airy villa opposite a beach in Rio. There are five children - four girls, one boy - aged from about ten to nineteen, and the house is full of music and light. We see the records spinning on the turntable, with local and international hits, the curtains fluttering with the sea breeze, friends coming and going.

Everyone is talking and yelling and running, living their dreams and dramas. It’s so idyllic and sun-drenched, so well-remembered, that I assumed this might be Salles’ own family, recaptured in memory. It’s not, but that sense of immediacy is not imagined: Salles was there at this time with that family, as a friend of Lula, the middle of the five children.

Salles spent much of his early life in the US and France, where his father was posted as a diplomat. When the family came back in 1969, Walter Junior, aged thirteen, would often visit the Pavia’s house. It was full of joy and informality - very different to his own home, he has said.

The parents, Eunice (Fernanda Torres) and Rubens (Selton Mello) are sophisticated and well-off. Rubens is an architect and a former senator. They are opposed to the dictatorship, but it hardly impinges on their active, happy home. Until it does. Some of their friends are leaving the country; Rubens and Eunice send their eldest daughter to London after she is questioned at a roadblock. Eunice fears she will get involved in campus politics if she stays in Rio. The inference is clear: opposition is dangerous. It’s clear that Rubens is involved in political work at night, but he keeps his wife out of it. And then they come for him. In a quietly under-played scene, Rubens smiles at the children as he is taken away by men who never identify themselves. Daddy will be home soon, says Eunice, as the little ones fret.

The movie has distinct sections in three different periods, each with a different texture and look. Before the abduction, the house is light and airy; after it, there is a process of subtraction. The windows are shut, the curtains drawn, the light subdued. The camera even stops moving, as Eunice tries to find out what they have done with her husband. When they come for her as well, we go with her into the nightmare. In the last part of the film, set much later, the light and air return, for reasons I won’t go into. The venerable actress Fernanda Montenegro, the real mother of Fernanda Torres, makes a small but significant appearance in this section, playing an older version of Eunice. It’s a family affair, all round.

The film is held together by a suite of astonishing performances. Fernanda Torres is no surprise; she was a star in Brazil even before Salles cast her in Foreign Land in 1995. Her nomination for an Oscar for this new performance was more than justified - although she did not win.

She is Mother Courage here - afraid but dogged, quietly insisting that she will not be cowed. She has a magnificent stillness and dignity on screen, like a Greek statue. The children swirl around her, needing love and reassurance - and because Salles has spent a long time establishing their credibility in the early scenes, we go with them as a family. Indeed, we are inside the house, rather than looking from the outside. Achieving that kind of intimacy is one of the reasons I think this may be Salles’s best work. It brings him home, with a subject he cares about. He was there, next to these children as they went through this trauma. He is there now to show us what they went through - all of them, including Eunice. It’s a haunting film for these times: they felt they were safe too.

Salles’ specialty before this was road movies - a form of escape. I’m Still Here is the opposite. It’s a ‘home’ movie, a movie about what should have been a safe place. It’s a political act to make such a film in Brazil, so soon after the rise and fall of the appalling Jair Bolsonaro. The Brazilian right don’t much like the movie - no surprise. They tried to organise a box office boycott, which failed. Admissions passed five million in Brazil last month (February 2025). In typical fashion for the Academy, I’m Still Here was nominated for three Oscars, including best picture, which it did not win. Instead, it came away with ‘Best International Feature Film’ , a consolation prize that will help it find a bigger audience around the world. It deserves to. This is one of the best films of the year.

___

*One is called Stephen, the other George.

Sunday, March 2

Popeye Doyle is gone. As I write, the airwaves are full of speculation about the horrible details of Gene Hackman’s death, rather than the man’s stellar career and achievements. In death, he has become a tabloid frenzy; in life, he was just one of the best who ever stepped in front of a movie camera. I loved him on screen. Seeing him and his wife torn apart as a two-minute news item breaks my heart - even if I am and always will be a newspaper guy.

He was never the biggest star, but he was unusual in that he was a character actor who became a star. The bigger male stars, like Clint Eastwood and Warren Beatty and Richard Gere, all wanted to work with him, because he could carry more than his load. Whoever he played, he would be reliable and real, and he could enliven any scene. The public knew that too: he guaranteed a certain level of quality. Even if the movie was bad, Hackman would be good.

When I started reviewing movies in 1984 for The Sydney Morning Herald, Clint Eastwood was the reigning urban tough guy (west), but Hackman was the urban tough guy (east). The French Connection, set in New York, came out in October 1971 and made him a star. Dirty Harry, set in San Francisco, came out two months later in December, and had a similar effect on Eastwood’s career. It was the Era of the Lawless Cop, although the two actors had very different styles - and Hackman was always a committed Democrat, while Eastwood was a noted Republican.

Hackman was heir to the crown of Jimmy Cagney - not just tough, but mean. Popeye Doyle was a sonovabitch, a New York cop of the worst kind. ‘Never trust a nigger,’ he said to Roy Scheider in that movie, after they had beaten a black dealer to a pulp in an alley. I rewatched the film last night here in Australia and the line is no longer there: someone has quietly edited it for modern times, an act of corporate vandalism. Hackman hated saying the line himself, but said later that he knew it was right for the character. He also told interviewers that he disliked the violence of his role - so much so that he went to the director Billy Friedkin on the second day of shooting and asked to be replaced. Friedkin refused, probably because he knew that Hackman had more anger in him than any actor in the business. His whole career was built on anger and discipline - the anger set the fire, the discipline controlled the burn.

Eugene Allen Hackman wasn’t a tough guy like Bruce Willis or John Wayne, where the violence was mostly righteous or cartoonish, and built on their perfection as physical specimens. Hackman didn’t look like a matinee idol. He looked more like your car mechanic, with hooded eyes and that enormous forehead exposed by a receding hairline (and what hair - like steel wool on a billiard ball!). Great movie stars generally have beautiful eyes and directors make sure we see them. Hackman had piercing little eyes that would disappear with his sinister smile - and you could barely see what colour they were because his swollen brows kept the light from hitting them. An oil painting, he wasn’t.

What he was, was the guy you’d fear to be around if someone pissed him off - hard as nails and meaner than a junkyard dog. In movie after movie, the anger blazed. No-one erupted better. He was forever shouting in big films of the 70’s and 80’s - like The Poseidon Adventure, where he played a preacher trying to save the survivors of an upturned ship. Much later, he would underplay the aggression, whispering a line so that it would curdle your blood. In Eastwood’s Unforgiven, playing the sadistic sheriff Little Bill, Hackman horsewhips Morgan Freeman in the jailhouse cells. Freeman is tied to the bars like a runaway slave. Hackman approaches from behind, putting his face next to Freeman’s ear, his chin on Freeman’s naked arm. In a very quiet and intimate voice, he tells him he’s going to hurt him real bad. Hackman does it with a startling look of sorrow on his face, like he pities this man he’s about to torture.

Little Bill was one of the best roles of his career, partly because Bill thought he was a good guy. We see him beat three men almost to death on screen - and one of them does die - but Bill was just keeping the scum off the streets. This was the great mixing of the streams - west and east together, with Eastwood as a man trying to leave killing behind, and Hackman as a man who has found that a badge allows him to kill at will.

The role earned Hackman his second Oscar. He had won best actor for The French Connection; this time, he won best supporting actor, but it was the dominant role in the movie. Eastwood had to persuade him to accept the job. Hackman was avoiding violent roles - apparently after his daughters asked him to. Eastwood convinced him that the film was about the cost of violence for men who use it - which was true. It’s still a great movie on that theme.

Hackman could never outrun his association with violence. It was his forte. He had risen on the tide of violent movies in the 1960’s. His performance as Buck Barrow, brother of Clyde Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) showed that he had honed his technique in the decade since he joined the Pasadena Playhouse in 1956. He had done his share of waiting tables in New York, along with his room-mates Dustin Hoffman and Robert Duvall. Hackman had also had more life experience than many of his generation. In 1946, aged 16, he lied about his age to join the US Marines. He was posted to China, where the Chinese Revolution was still playing out, and then Hawaii. His Marine Corps mugshot shows a face full of attitude and aggression - and perhaps a few bruises. Some of that may have come from his parent’s breakup when he was 13. His father simply waved at his son as he drove away, abandoning the family.

Hackman (born 1930, in San Bernardino, California) claimed to have known by the age of ten that he wanted to be an actor. He said that he had loved the tough guys in movies, particularly Cagney. No surprises there, nor was that exceptional for an American boy growing up in the Depression. A number of acting teachers told him he’d never amount to anything - which is curious. What could they not see that we could all see later? The rejections just made him more determined.

Hackman has always been called an ‘everyman’, as if that explains his appeal. I see the point, but there is more to it. He was not a pretty boy like Redford or McQueen, but he wasn’t Ernest Borgnine either. He could be very attractive, depending on the character, because of his firm jaw and direct gaze - and because of that marvellously supple voice, which could go from honey to chainsaw in a moment. His smile was perhaps the most dangerous weapon in Hollywood for a time: it came out when he was at his meanest, about to kill somebody or beat the shit out of them. It was a cold smile, derisive and cruel. It could be very effective in comedy: Lex Luthor was a comedian in his hands, as well as the greatest criminal mind of his time.

The public loved him in Superman and its sequels, but Hackman did not. He so disliked his performance, he said, that he gave up acting for a while. He could afford to, given what they paid him, but he was also somewhat sanguine about bubblegum movies. He had always been serious about his art, and Lex Luthor seemed to offend his self-image. Hackman had also developed a reputation for being difficult when he was not happy in a picture - which was often, around that time. He said later that he decided to lighten up. He played Luthor again in two sequels. A man’s gotta eat.

I loved him in most of the films above, but there were so many more. Until 2004, when he quit films, he never stopped working. The less obvious gems would include the ski coach he played in Downhill Racer in 1969 and the basketball coach he played in Hoosiers (1986, aka Best Shot on imdb). In Under Fire in 1983, he and Joanna Cassidy were seasoned war correspondents in Africa, then Nicaragua. They were also married, albeit loosely. Nick Nolte, as a photographer, is also in love with her.

The movie puts Hackman in the support role, at a time when he might easily have said no. It’s also the only film I can recall in which he plays the piano and sings. (I read that there were two Steinway grands in the house in Santa Fe - presumably one for his wife Betsy Arakawa, a classical pianist, and one for Gene…)

It was rare for Hackman to do romance, but he often played a man brought crashing to earth by love. In The Firm, based on the John Grisham novel, he was a corrupt lawyer who regrets the man he has become, especially when he falls for a good woman (Jeanne Tripplehorn playing Tom Cruise’s wife). In The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), he played a dying man trying to rekindle his broken family relationships. Sometimes, he played men for whom violence and sex were entwined: he was a politician in both No Way Out (1987) and Absolute Power (Eastwood again, 1997) who kills a lover and then tries to cover it up. Both were chilling portraits of power.

It’s hard to choose a favourite among his roles. He’s incredibly concentrated as Popeye Doyle, a rocket-fueled demon fighting the drug importing French smoothie, played by Fernando Rey. He was good in so many thrillers, especially those of a political bent - like The Package (1989) and Enemy of the State (1998). He was hilarious in Get Shorty (1995) as a B-movie director. And there was the towering achievement of Little Bill in Unforgiven, a role that demonstrates Hackman at full power and intelligence. ‘Intense and instinctive’, as Eastwood said in tribute to his friend.

I will remember him forever in The Conversation (1974), in which he plays Harry Caul, a surveillance expert caught up in a a murder intrigue in San Francisco. Harry is one of Hackman’s most recessive roles, or maybe the word is repressed. Francis Coppola coaxed the kind of performance for which Hackman was not noted - an internal and quiet dialogue with his conscience, in a film that was about taking responsibility for your work. This was sympathetic Hackman - a startlingly honest, exposed performance, with almost no shouting.

Hackman was for a long time the hardest working actor in Hollywood. He could do anything, from light comedy to tragedy, and he was never less than watchable in what he did. Was he the greatest of his generation? A lot of his peers thought so. It hardly matters whether you would prefer De Niro, Pacino, Hanks, Hoffman, Duvall or Nicholson - or indeed Hopkins, Heath Ledger or Ed Harris. We don’t have to choose. Hackman left us so much work to enjoy - and by those films, I will remember him. Fuck the headlines.

Nothing quite prepares you for Wadi Rum, in the southern desert of Jordan. It looks like… well, you already know that, from those spectacular shots near the beginning of Lawrence of Arabia, when Peter O’Toole rides a camel past towering grey stone monoliths, while singing ‘I’m the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo’.

Even as spectacular as Lawrence is on a big screen, it doesn’t compare with being there, bedding down for the night in a capacious Bedouin tent under a million stars. Nor indeed, waking up cold in the middle of the night, dying for a pee, and realising you have to walk 50 metres to one of the rankest toilets in Jordan. Such is the life of international jet-setting film critic on pilgrimage. This was in 2009, when my partner and I toured Egypt and Jordan.

Having achieved my immediate aim, I ran back across the sand and snuggled up under a weight of nylon blankets, all of which featured Disney characters. If I had dreamed of the Little Mermaid crying ‘No prisoners, no prisoners’ that night, who would have blamed me?

I first succumbed to David Lean’s epic 1962 film around 1990. I watched a restored print from the UCLA Film Archive on the almost wide-enough screen at the State Theatre, the glorious 1929 movie palace that was then, and remains, the home of the Sydney Film Festival. I had not long taken the reins as director of the festival and this was a gift: who wouldn’t want to screen a gorgeous new print of such a classic? Luckily no-one asked if I had ever seen it.

I’ve seen it many times since. Each time, I wonder why I find so compelling. I mean, it’s not exactly reliable as history nor wholly credible as human drama. It tends toward bombast. As for the casting, the make-up department must have been kept very busy applying the fake noses and dark greasepaint to the likes of Anthony Quinn and Alec Guinness, both playing Arabs. In that respect, it seems old-fashioned, even with Guinness’s immaculate Arab-English accent - copied from Omar Sharif, according to Kevin Brownlow’s excellent biography of David Lean.

And yet, I swoon. The technical achievement is breathtaking: the images of the desert, the soundtrack, the way the film is put together. There is the unutterable pleasure of watching the best in the business do their best work. Then there is Peter O’Toole, giving one of the most astonishing performances ever put on film - not to mention the supporting actors. Omar Sharif, in his first outing with Lean, gives a heartbreaking rendition of a man who comes to love Lawrence as a brother, only to have his love betrayed. The film needed someone to balance the shimmer of O’Toole’s performance, as he flies too close to the sun. Omar Sharif brings that authority; he at least does not need face-paint. We grow to love ‘Orrens’ through his eyes. We weep through his eyes when it all falls apart.

In Australia, the restored version is on Foxtel - although if ever a movie deserved a first viewing on a big screen, this is it. Let’s assume I am right and the film really is one of the greatest ever made. Is that universal? Is it still relevant to kids who’ve never heard of T. E. Lawrence. Why should they care? Do they like it in Mecca and Medina, I wonder?

I can’t answer that last question. I’ve seen discussions on internet forums that suggest the film is not universally loved in the Arab world. Neither is Lawrence. He is sometimes labelled a British spy who had very little impact on the Arab campaign for independence. That’s partly true: Lawrence was a foreign military adviser to Prince Feisal, not an Arab leader. He may have been a brilliant strategist but he did not win the war for the Arabs. Still, Feisal did ask Lawrence to stay on as one of his advisers at the 1919 Peace Conference, after the war. That would imply a level of trust. It might be as wrong to write him out of the history as to overstate his role in it.

Let’s assume Lawrence is unreliable as history (italics indicate the movie, not the character). Very few movies are. Homer isn’t entirely reliable as history either, but people still read him. Lawrence is a very British exercise in myth-making, and somewhat self-serving, but it’s also a critique of the British empire. On a wider level, it’s a movie about decline and fall - of empires, civilisations and traditions. On a personal level, it’s the story of one magnificent, flawed individual - a story form that Homer invented.

‘Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. Many cities did he visit, and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was acquainted; moreover he suffered much by sea while trying to save his own life and bring his men safely home…’

So begins The Odyssey. Lawrence can’t find his way home either.

I think the film’s appeal has something to do with its sensitive portrayal of failure. Lawrence’s personal tragedy is that he discovers that he isn’t divine. He thinks he might be, even before he goes into the desert. The Arab War confirms that illusion, giving him the world he craves - an Arab fiefdom - then takes it away. Lawrence then realises that he is not quite human, either. He has tried to unite the Arab tribes. He has tried to change, or at least ignore, the colour of his skin. He has even tried to commit suicide by fighting. He fails at all of these. By the end, he has failed at every level of humanity. He cannot return the love of those who love him, nor find solace in the fact that he tried to do something good and worthwhile - to wrest the Arabian peninsula from colonial domination. Worse, he knows that many have died because of him. Did he wreck the train, or did the train wreck him?

The line between epic and grandiose is thin. The difference is in the failure. Failure has more emotion than success, more grandeur. Lawrence was one of the last great movie tragedies before Hollywood all but abandoned the form. No studio would make it now. It makes too many demands on its audience. ‘It’s a downer, man…’

The power is also in its reality - which is not to say realism. It is rooted in real events, even if it is not always historically reliable. The cultures it examines are centuries deep, be they English tribes or Arab tribes. Each thinks of the other as primitive. The movie was prophetic about this clash of cultures. We are still living with the consequences of these events.

This connection to the real is out of fashion in modern cinema. Movies got smaller, as Norma Desmond warned in Sunset Blvd. I don’t mean that the epic has disappeared from our screens. Star Wars was epic, and there have been many others in the 63 years since Lawrence, but the epic is now so entwined with fantasy that the real is on the run. Lived experience - the profound sense of knowing that the story being told actually happened in some form, here on earth - is no longer a high value currency. All the world is no longer a stage; nor do we care if the players are even human. T. E. Lawrence was there in Wadi Rum in 1917; I have seen the ruins of a house he occupied. Compare this to Dune - a recent and much-lauded desert epic - in which the greatest thrill is a giant worm that plunges in and out of the sand like a mutant form of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. (Apologies to Douglas Adams). The thrill is puny by comparison, at least to me.

We can now fake anything we want on screen, so we do. Even before the fresh horror that is AI, movie effects had become so realistic that trust had retired hurt. Nothing we see on a screen now can be taken at face value: not a photograph, nor a sunset, nor a human face. With Lawrence, we still had the sense that this happened, or something like it. And in David Lean’s hands, the ‘something like it’ became magical, a sprinkling of what he called his ‘bloom’ - his particular form of cinematic ambition, here mixed with blood, war and sand.

For such a big film, it begins modestly. The early scenes in Cairo establish that Lawrence is a likeable figure - an affable young man, even if he is barely a soldier. He may be insolent and incompetent and incapable of taking orders, but he’s also funny and charming. This is crucial, given how far events will take the character. We have to remember that he was once this shy archeologist. He is making maps for the army, based on his knowledge of the Arab territories. He’s bored stiff and a bit of a show-off: he burns his own fingers with lighted matches for fun. ‘The trick is not minding that it hurts.’

He loves the Arab cause and the Arabs, but there is no sense that he is itching to go to war. He simply wants to attain the desert again - the place no Englishman ought to love. He likes it because ‘it’s clean’. Dryden, the diplomat played so smoothly by Claude Rains, sees his potential but offers a warning: ‘Lawrence, only two kinds of creature get fun in the desert - Bedouins and gods and you’re neither…’

How wrong he is. In the course of his transit towards violence, Lawrence comes to believe that he is indeed a kind of god, in the Greek sense - above the moral laws of mankind, able to dispense death and lead others towards it, a warrior with no use for mercy or compassion. When he realises what he has become, he tries to go back, but there’s no way back. That is his tragedy.

David Lean uses a very famous cut to begin this transition: Lawrence lights a cigarette for Dryden, then holds the flame close to his own face. As he puffs out the match, Lean cuts to an astonishing shot in the pre-dawn desert. The screen is bisected by two slabs of colour - the deep dark of the land in the bottom third, a blood red sky above, at a ratio of two thirds. We wait, as the sun peeps up over the horizon - tick tock - and then we wait some more, as Lean introduces Maurice Jarre’s score. The music builds from nothing, swelling and rising in pitch, until it resolves into the magnificent, bombastic theme: ‘Daaa dar, de daa dee dee daaa dar’. After a full 30 seconds, the shot dissolves to two enormous dunes, framed between two distant buttes. Two specks appear high up on the dune. Men on camels. This shot lasts even longer - about 34 seconds - to allow the music to wash over us, but also to rupture the sense of time. We are not in a different time zone, so much as a different century. Desert time. Bedou time. The fiery furnace that Dryden promised, where life is reduced to its essentials. Water and shade.

One of Lean’s greatest effects in Lawrence is this elongation of time and space - the sense of the infinite space of the desert, and the rupture of movie-time - which is to say, the usual rhythm of cutting. Lean was before the war the highest paid editor in the British film industry - a master of the knife. He was steeped in the way movies were cut in the 1930’s and 40s - but his movies of the fifties are different, especially Kwai and Lawrence, where the takes are longer. Lawrence was too big for one editor, so Lean brought in a young Anne V. Coates - who would become one of the greatest editors of her generation. She credited Lean with teaching her to be bold, and to ‘hold on to shots’.

‘I don’t think I would have held on to those shots in the desert as long as he did. He was brave like that,’ Coates wrote afterwards.

If editing is like breathing, Lean moves to deeper breaths as the picture moves into the desert. The most famous of these is when Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif) appears at the well, from which Lawrence and his guide have just drunk. We see Ali only as a puff of dust at first, a black speck coming toward us. Instead of cutting to his arrival, Lean lets the camera roll. He interrupts the long ride in with reaction shots from Lawrence and his guide, but it takes an eternity for Ali to arrive, on a magnificent camel bedecked with long tassles. The time underlines the difficulty of knowing enemy from friend in the desert, building tension. When the guide runs for his pistol, Ali shoots him from afar without hesitation - from off screen. Ali arrives, dismounts, and a rattled Lawrence asks him why. Sherif looks puzzled. ‘This is my well’.

Sherif then asks the Englishman his name.

‘My name is for my friends,’ he says, a deliberate insult. Sherif turns and remounts his camel. ‘None of my friends is a murderer,’ Lawrence bellows, haughtily.

By the end, all of Lawrence’s friends are murderers, and so is he.

David Lean came fully equipped to this story. Several had tried and failed to bring it to the screen, but Lean had all the gifts - a great sense of dramatic poise, that feeling for what would make a scene come alive, both visually and thematically, and a highly emotional response to this most powerful landscape, such that he felt he had to make something to match the grandeur. His eye for scale and depth was much more ambitious than his peers, and of course, he had an instinct for how powerful a single edit could be - that match cut to the desert. Critics often describe him as a technical master but I think that sells him short. Emotions achieve power in his films because they are stifled. He was English, after all. Englishness is his special subject.

He had triumphed with The Bridge on the River Kwai, a film drenched in sweat, cruelty and madness, but that was four years earlier. Lawrence would take him further into the darkness of men at war, and in particular, British men at war. Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness) in Kwai was fictional. T. E. Lawrence had actually lived. Nicholson went mad trying to stay within the bounds of his discipline as a British officer; Lawrence goes mad by jettisoning all the bonds of birth - he goes native, the greatest sin among those who built the British empire. And in one sense, he becomes ‘uncivilised’ - tribal, like the Arabs. Lawrence of Arabia is partly about what that word means - uncivilised.

On the journey to meet Feisal, before the scene at the well, Lawrence and the guide Tafas (Zia Mohyeddin) camp out under the stars. The innocent Tafas probes for details of who Lawrence is. He finds it hard to believe he is a British officer, from Britain.

Tafas: Truly?

Lawrence: From Oxfordshire.

Tafas: Is that a desert country?

Lawrence: No. Fat country, fat people.

Tafas: You are not fat?

Lawrence: No. I’m different.

It is not hard to see that Lean was making a sort of autobiography in Lawrence. He too was different: his parents were Quakers, but David (born 1908) appeared to be a dullard at school, barely able to read or write. He did not attend the cinema until 1921, aged thirteen, which was a revelation, but he was not completely unprepared. When he was ten, an uncle gave him a camera - a Box Brownie. David the dullard found he had a talent for making and developing photographs - a process he found magical. His home life was miserable: his father Frank abandoned the family in 1923 for his mistress, and his mother succumbed to depression and tears. She was haughty, prudish, conservative and foul-tempered - traits that David Lean struggled with in later life. The isolation of his childhood created that sense of difference, of being an outsider in British life - something that he could certainly see in the character of T.E. Lawrence, and probably in the character of Colonel Nicholson. Lean and Lawrence were both from England, but not quite of it. Lean found he had looks and charm, and those took him a long way in the film industry. Thomas Edward Lawrence found his escape in archeology in the desert, which he pursued for several years prior to the outbreak of the first world war.

By the time Lean began work on Lawrence in 1960, he was 52 years old and among the most accomplished directors in the British industry. His range as a director was broad: In Which We Serve, This Happy Breed, Blithe Spirit and Brief Encounter in war-time, his glorious adaptations of Oliver Twist and David Copperfield in the late 1940s, then Hobson’s Choice and Summertime in the 1950’s. His crews were a mixture of seasoned talent (cameramen Guy Green and Jack Hildyard) and young talent (like Anne Coates and designer John Box). He had become an expert director of actors, even the most capricious and crapulous, as the 28-year-old Peter Seamus O’Toole already was, even before he was a star. And Lean could cope with the challenges of Sam Spiegel as producer - a man as devious as he was brilliant.

Unlike T. E. Lawrence, Lean loved women - serially and compulsively. He liked to be in love with a new woman when he was making a film, usually at the expense of the woman to whom he was actually married. On Lawrence, that new woman was Barbara Cole, a New Zealander whose first husband had been killed in the war (she walked out on her second after he was unfaithful). She went to Jordan as ‘continuity girl’. She resisted Lean’s attentions on the set for some time. Once she gave in, the affair lasted seven years. Kevin Brownlow quotes an older Lean as saying that sex was terribly important for his creativity. ‘If you want to make a good movie, get yourself a new, wonderful woman and that movie will be fifty if not seventy percent better than it would have been if she hadn’t existed. It lights everything up.’

Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? Lean was not Robinson Crusoe in that respect. A disturbing number of male film directors have had an almost vampiric sexuality - a need for adoration and domination. Lean’s desires were perhaps more needy. It may be a cliche but Lean seems to have been in love with being in love: he drew energy and optimism from love, both the physical act and the state of grace. He was married six times, like Henry VIII, but in Lean’s case, most of them remained friends. He retained a gentle shyness that some women found very attractive. It seems odd that he was drawn to Lawrence - a masochist who could not express love - but then, a man who had six wives and cuckolded most of them does not seem like love’s deepest thinker either.

Lawrence is an extraordinarily sensuous movie. It stimulates the senses before the intellect. The key to that is the desert. Lawrence loves the desert and the Arabs the way that Lean loved movies and women - without caution or self-control. Lean too was overwhelmed by the desert, when he came looking for locations in 1960. He thought he would find vast flat vistas, but Wadi Rum is mountains and dune, stone and sand, colours and shade. He was stunned. Wadi Rum matched his romanticism, his longing for exotic places and adventure. It was a long way from South Croydon, where he spent much of his unhappy childhood.

The script for Lawrence of Arabia is based largely on T E Lawrence’s own book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, published in a short form in 1926, then in a longer version in May 1935, shortly after Lawrence died in a motorcycle accident in Dorset. The first screenplay was by Michael Wilson, an American who had adapted the novel that became Kwai. He was blacklisted by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in 1951 - the same year he won an Oscar for his work on the script A Place in the Sun. That must have been some year. Wilson had flirted with communism in the 1930’s. He joined the Marine Corps during the war. After blacklisting, he moved to France and continued to work in secret on scripts. Kwai won an Oscar he could not accept, as his name was not allowed on the credits.

Sam Spiegel hired Wilson to adapt Seven Pillars. Relations with Lean soured when Wilson failed to produce what Lean wanted. Wilson walked off the project and Spiegel brought in Robert Bolt, a young English playwright who had recently had a hit on the London stage with A Man for All Seasons. Bolt had also been a communist and a soldier too, having served in the British army during the war. It’s useful to note that Lean did not serve during the war. Film-making was a ‘reserved occupation’, meaning he could claim exemption. Lean proved Churchill’s point in 1942, by making In Which We Serve, one of the most stirring propaganda films of the war. They also serve…

From the start, Lawrence was to be both hero and anti-hero. Wilson’s notes on the real Lawrence, quoted by Kevin Brownlow, include this description: ‘In trying to serve two masters, Lawrence betrayed them both… With his inheritance of western culture, he could never really hope to submerge himself in an alien and primitive culture… did he not serve to introduce into the Arab world the very evils from which he had fled?’

Wilson took a dark view of Lawrence’s character and the legend around him. Lawrence fulfilled a need, after the first world war, for a shining symbol ‘to prove that chivalry and nobility had not vanished’.

‘The contrast between the legendary figure and the actual man is the meat of drama… our picture should unveil a mystery,’ wrote Wilson.

That is why Wilson’s script started with Lawrence’s death and funeral in London, where we hear a range of views of the man. That part survived Bolt’s rewrites. In effect, Lean begins his own exercise in myth-making by declaring that the old legend of Lawrence is a myth. No-one at the funeral has the same view of Lawrence.

‘Nil nisi bonum,’ says a weasel-faced vicar to Colonel Brighton (Lawrence’s former superior officer, played by Anthony Quayle), as they look up at his bust on a plinth. ‘But did he really deserve a place in here?’

Others speak of his greatness, his unknowability. The American newspaper reporter Jackson Bentley (Arthur Kennedy) declares to an English reporter: ‘He was a poet, a scholar and a mighty warrior’. After the reporter leaves, Bentley adds to a friend: ‘He was also the most shameless exhibitionist since Barnum and Bailey’. Bentley is a fictionalised version of Lowell Thomas, who did more to establish the legend of Lawrence than anyone else.

The movie Lawrence is not a good Englishman. For those who would polish their boots and their moustaches each morning, he is not sound. Lawrence sides with ‘the wogs’, against his own kind. In 1961, when Lean was making the film, Britain was still struggling with the pains of decolonisation across its former colonies, especially in Africa. Nasser of Egypt had humbled France and Britain seven years earlier when they tried to grab the Suez Canal. Was it one of the unstated ambitions of Lawrence to restore some pride?

The Bridge on the River Kwai offered British audiences that sort of flattery. Colonel Nicholson may have been a military maniac, but the British POW’s were men of substance, in the face of beastly Asiatic cruelty - whistling as they died of malnutrition. Lawrence offers a darker story. If the Arabs ‘are a little people, a silly people, greedy, barbarous and cruel,’ as Lawrence hurls at Ali, the character played by Omar Sharif, at the well, the English are shown to be worse - liars, hypocrites and cheats. Lawrence’s insult comes back to haunt him at the end of the picture, when Ali expresses his disgust at the massacre of a retreating Turkish column. Lawrence has drenched himself in blood: his degradation is complete. So much for ‘civilisation’.

In terms of the racial politics, the movie aligns with the old British empire dogma that east is east, west is west. Lawrence discovers that skin colour is destiny. He has tried to outrun his whiteness, by donning Arab robes. His capture by the Turks changes his mind, in a traumatic way that’s overtly sexual. In Dera’a, the sinister Turkish officer played by Jose Ferrer pinches the white skin of Lawrence’s naked breast and says, admiringly: ‘Your skin is very fair’. Orrens sees red and retaliates, earning himself a savage beating - and possibly a sexual assault. Recovering in a cave, Lawrence tells Ali he must return to England. He repeats the Turkish officer’s gesture, pinching his own skin in the same spot.

‘Look Ali, that’s me. What colour is it? That’s me and there’s nothing I can do about it.’

Of course, Lawrence does not return to England. Goaded by his British superiors, he vows to lead the Arab army to Damascus - to give it to them, as he promised Feisal at the beginning. He accepts the mantle of greatness that he has tried to deny. He accepts that he is to be both god and demon.

Robert Bolt treats this dualism as point and counterpoint. If he is the composer, then Lean is the conductor. Peter O’Toole, in a crazily brave performance, is the orchestra, playing most of the instruments, with rousing support from Anthony Quinn as Ouda, the fierce tribal leader who fully inhabits his majestic false nose. Ouda is all instinct, as Lawrence is all intellect. ‘I am a river to my people,’ cries Ouda, to rousing cheers. Lawrence doesn’t know who his own people are.

Sigmund Freud stands at the back, clapping soundlessly. Ouda is the wizard of Id. Orrens is the super-ego, at war with his own death instinct.

The Englishman who does great deeds abroad was a mainspring of the literature of empire - seemingly a well that never ran dry. Robert Clive, Livingston and Cecil Rhodes inspired fictional adventurers like Bulldog Drummond and Alan Quatermain at the turn of the 20th century - swashbucklers and rule-breakers who would in turn inspire the invention of James Bond. These men were the spearheads of empire for the newspaper readers of Britain - a propaganda tool of immense power in justifying the empire’s legitimacy, if such justification was needed. None of them would have considered giving Arabia back to the Arabs once it was taken, but that is what the movie Lawrence commits himself to.

It’s true that the real Lawrence wanted the Arabs to have control of a large territory, including Syria, after the war - but he probably knew all about the Sykes-Picot agreement, by which Britain and France had secretly agreed to carve up the area between them once the Turks were defeated. Lean and Bolt fudge when he knew, to keep Lawrence above the politics. The diplomat, Dryden, represents the perfidy and double-dealing of old Albion. Lawrence, with his love of the ‘filthy wogs’, is a sort of anti-colonialist for the 1960’s, foreseeing the end of British colonial domination and empire. He is also a rebel, the kind of Englishman that audiences could cheer for in 1962, when all kinds of wartime values were up for revision. The Beatles were about to break into the charts. Harold McMillan, born in the previous century, was in the last year of his term as prime minster. A new generation of actors and writers was making waves - and O’Toole was like nothing anyone had ever seen. The eyes, the eyes… Some of the close-ups in Lawrence are so ravishing that you could think Lean was in love with O’Toole, rather than Barbara Cole. Lean gives the same close-up treatment to Julie Christie’s blue eyes in the film he made next, Dr Zhivago.

O’Toole carries the movie with astonishing confidence and grace, balancing all the layers: the foppish linguist, the liberator, the traitor to the ways of an English gentleman and soldier, the anti-colonialist and finally, the young god, who knows he is capable of great and terrible things. Then we have the fall, the realisation that being a god - someone who can take a life with relative ease - is not so easy.

That fall begins after the taking of Aqaba, an astonishing feat of endurance and military daring. Lawrence then makes an epic journey back to Cairo to report, crossing the Sinai with his two faithful boy-servants - only one of whom makes it.

Lawrence’s sexuality has been ambiguous from the start. These two cheeky low-caste lads are there to carry that idea. We can see that Lawrence grows to love them, but in what way? Does he even understand his own attractions? Lawrence left Cairo in the uniform of a British officer. He returns as ‘Orrens’ in soiled white Arab raiment. He scandalises his fellow officers by taking his remaining boy-servant to the officer’s bar for a lemonade. General Allenby (Jack Hawkins) is more welcoming. He now believes that this man is special. His success with Feisal against the Turks has been astonishing. Lawrence is still covered in desert sand when he meets Allenby. O’Toole looks traumatised. He tells Allenby that he does not want to go back. That he has killed two people - two Arabs.

Lawrence: One was a boy. That was… yesterday. I led him into a quicksand. The other was a man … that was… before Aqaba, anyway. I had to execute him with my pistol. There was something about it I didn't like.

Allenby: Well, naturally…

Lawrence: No, something else.

Allenby: Oh, I see. Well let it be a warning.

Lawrence: No… something else.

Allenby: What then?

Lawrence: I enjoyed it.

That’s a pivotal moment in the script - an admission of a dark secret - if war is hell for most men, it’s a kind of paradise for others. Lawrence is about a man discovering that he has crossed over. War movies rarely admit that some men love war. They willingly, hungrily, borrow the action and spectacle, but they do it behind a veil of pacifism. David Lean, at least, had the honesty to admit it, thus to chart its impact on this one man. Lawrence’s progression into bloodlust becomes the dominant idea of the second half of the movie. It will cost him everything, except his life.

‘I enjoyed it,’ is the start of Lawrence’s demise as a human being, and the beginning of his rise as a killer - and military leader. He can not be both humanist and warlord; he chooses the latter. The violence elevates his sense of destiny. In the famous attack on the Turkish train, where Lawrence parades on top of the carriages as Ouda’s men carve up the civilian passengers, we see what lies ahead.

What does all this matter now, 63 years after the movie came out, and more than a century after the first world war? In one sense, it doesn’t. Lawrence of Arabia is a glistening artefact, a powerful mythic version of a history that seems almost quaint. Films became much more violent after this; action become more exciting, with a shark in the water and star-fighters whizzing about in the sky. George Lucas realised that fantasy was much more powerful than history as a form of entertainment - but history never really goes away.

In 2001, Osama Bin Laden unleashed his own form of the Arab Revolt on New York. The attacks on the Twin Towers changed the world we live in. The decades since then have been about nothing if not a clash of cultures. Lots of people agree with Lawrence’s angry insult at the well: the Arabs are ‘greedy, barbarous and cruel’. How then are we to see our own reflections, in the wake of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and Gaza?

Lawrence of Arabia ends pitifully, with a broken man in a jeep, en route to a ship that will take him back to England. His dreams for the Arabs have been betrayed by the great powers in Damascus, and the fractured politics of the Arab tribes themselves. There is no Arabia for Lawrence. He has lost everything - his honour, his sense of purpose, his superiority, his godliness. He has lost the values that defined that word ‘civilised’. Maybe that’s what keeps me returning to this movie - the sense that it is about the roots of where we are now, and what we have become. What’s that old line of William Faulkner’s? ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’

ends

Who the hell is Bob Dylan, anyway? Is there any other artist who has mythologised, fabricated and reinvented himself more than The Artist Formerly Known as Bobby Zimmerman? Even just the vocal range in which he chooses to sing on any given project is a mysterious thing. There’s the reedy, folkloric, almost sweet voice of Blowin’ in the Wind, when he was shiny and new; the vowel-bending, aggressive voice of Like a Rolling Stone a few years later - ‘Once upon a tiiime, you dressed so fiiine’. And lately, there’s the goose-honking Dylan of recent tours, who sounds like he dines on rusty nails and bleach.

The changes are part of the long long years of success, I guess. No-one knows what he’ll do next. It’s the opposite of Neil Young or Van Morrison, who found their voices early and largely stuck to them - creating variation by other means. Morrison still has an extraordinary range of expression within his boundaries; Dylan just doesn’t seem to have any boundaries. For some, that refusal to conform was thrilling; for others, it just sounded like Dylan couldn’t make up his mind about who he actually was. Hold that thought.

That quicksilver quality is shaky ground on which to build A Complete Unknown, but that’s where director James Mangold pitches his tent. And boy, does it pay off. This is one of the greatest musical biopics ever filmed - and one of the most mysterious in its wiles. It’s thrilling, emotional, daring, unpredictable, and above all, hard to pin down - just like its subject. I still don’t quite know how Mangold pulls it off. That’s a good thing: easy to read movies are boring. Musical biopics are even more so, most of the time, because they’re so judgmental: see the artist rise, see them fall in a vortex of drugs and excess, leading to death and never-ending fame; take the pledge when you get home.

Mangold occupied the cliches with his entertaining but limited Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, but this one doesn’t descend into needles and dope - it’s more of a cigarettes and whisky kinda show, with some herbal addition. Dylan comes, sees and conquers, floating through a haze of pot, tobacco and beer. Or to be precise - he comes to Greenwich Village in 1961 as a penniless neophyte, sneers at what he sees and sets about changing it, and burns everyone who loves him - especially the women. ‘Sylvia Russo’ , a character inspired by Suze Rotolo, takes him in and gives him her heart to trample; Monica Barbaro, who plays Joan Baez, takes him abed and promotes him, only to finally tell him ‘you know, you’re kind of an asshole’.

She’s right, but he’s his own asshole. This Dylan, played by an astonishing Timothée Chalamet, never loses sight of where he’s going - which is to where no-one has gone before. It’s one of the film’s clever ideas - that whoever he really is, Dylan arrived fully formed, aware of his own talent, without need for affirmation. It’s not quite true - he desperately wants approval of the hospitalised Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) - but Chalamet projects a sense of destiny from that first cold day in New York. In no time, Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) adopts him, Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler) represents him and John Hammond (David Allen Basche) records him at Columbia Records. It wasn’t that easy in real life, as Dylan makes clear in his book, Chronicles Volume One, but no matter: the early rise isn’t the real story for Mangold. It’s the confidence and self-awareness and the chimeric personality that fascinate him. It’s the refusal to be what anyone else thinks he is or wants him to be. Dylan lies about his origins from the start, inventing a fictional self who rode in on a freight train after years in a travelling circus. You can see the same Dylan in the early films about him - always hidden, shape-shifting, deflecting those who try to pin him down or biting the heads off old-fashioned journos who want a straight answer. Mangold effectively captures the fuck-you arrogance of this monstrous talent, without trying to explain where it comes from. He may be a coal-miner’s son but you won’t hear about it from his lips, unless he puts it in a song.

You may have heard that Chalamet plays his own guitar and sings all his songs in the movie. So do the other actors, playing Baez and Seeger. All of them are superb. The accuracy of their performances is, er, shocking. Chalamet wears Dylan’s voice like a glove; his guitar playing is real and honest - unfaked, nuanced and expressive (which is really hard to do as Dylan’s guitar playing is distinctive). Four years of preparing for the role, through COVID delays and writer’s strikes, has allowed the kind of accuracy I’ve never seen in any musical biopic, but so what? If I want to hear Dylan in that period, I can watch concert footage or Don Pennebaker’s ground-breaking film of his UK tour, Don’t Look Back. Does Chalamet’s facility with an old guitar account for the emotions that welled in me when he first starts to sing? It does not. There is something else going on here.

Now we get to the mystery. Being exact isn’t enough; it has to become so good that it recedes into the background, and the scene becomes more important than the playing. It’s drama, not karaoke. The film is adapted from Elijah Wald’s book, Dylan Goes Electric, which I have not read. Mangold adapted the book with the venerable Jay Cocks, who has spent a good chunk of his life writing movies for Martin Scorsese. They craft a mountain from what might be seen as a mole-hill - all events leading to the night that an audience of folkies at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival booed their hero when he came on stage with a Sunburst Stratocaster and an electric band, rather than his twangy Gibson SJ-200. I know that this moment has a momentous significance in terms of musical history - the night Dylan signified to an amplification-challenged audience that he could not give a rat’s arse what they demanded. He was in charge of his own talent, take it or leave it. The times really were a’changin’. In the movie, this climax had me smiling all the way through: Mangold treats it like physical comedy, with fisticuffs and flaring nostrils and cries of ‘Judas’ from the audience. It’s hilarious, at least to us now. What were they getting so upset about?

Here, I think, is another part of what the film is getting at: the corruption of the audience, rather than the talent. Mangold shoots many of the on-stage scenes so that the audience is the villain of the piece. Once his records start to sell, girls tear at Dylan’s clothes in the street, or rip his glasses off as he passes. Men punch him because of the impact he has on their girlfriends. Other musicians have to stop playing when he walks into their gig - which would be really annoying. This is hardly a new idea but it has rarely been filmed with such clarity: you, meaning we, are just as much a monster as he, meaning him. At Newport, Mangold shoots the crucial scene of Baez and Dylan singing It ain’t me Babe as if the audience is irrelevant - a dim and out-of-focus background to their intense foreground. This duet has such musical and sexual power as to make the eyes moist - and that’s not the first time I felt that way here. The crowd is fickle and venal. At one point, Dylan talks about how often he gets asked ‘where do the songs come from?’. He says something like, ‘what they mean is why didn’t these songs come to them?’ That’s a profound moment: what’s the point of trying to keep them/us happy, when we/they are so proscriptive and conservative anyway? If they love Dylan for his music, why would they hate him for changing it?

I suspect the movie will not work for all ages, just most. A couple of hip young things told me yesterday they didn’t feel it, but their parents loved it. That’s bound to be true: Mangold turns the period into a glowing nostalgic place, a creative cauldron where ciggies and petticoats and politics make a heady mix. The world of Greenwich Village was new and bright and gleaming… even if it wasn’t, or not quite like this.

Nostalgia is cheap, but this kind of nostalgia is pricier - it comes only with the immense love and care that Mangold lavishes on the performances. He takes us back. The imitation of the music is so good that you stop thinking of it as such. We are transported. Of course, that time was never so innocent: some Americans were lynching black people and others were killing Vietnamese, and JFK. There was a reason these songs of protest caught our ears. The world needed changin’. The timing is acute: this movie spirits us away from the horrors of here and now, the rise of the tech oligarchs and the Orange Turd, the useless wars in Ukraine and other parts. Of course, it might also lead to some uncomfortable questions: if protest songs worked to make a better world, how come we are in this shitty present? The answer, my friends…

Since my chances of becoming a cardinal are about the same as me playing full forward for Geelong - that sainted team of men! - I was keen to see this fictionalised account how the chosen few - currently 139 cardinals - come to elect a new pope.

Disappointed, I was not: Conclave is an enjoyable romp through pontifical politics, with a touch of spice for effect - and a sober reminder that whatever else it is, the Catholic church is a fellowship of Men, with a capital M. It’s hardly alone in that - most other religions are similarly masculine in their hierarchies - but it’s a central and implacable fact of this movie. You need a set of testicles to get into the Sistine Chapel for this gig; whether you’ll still have them after the process is over is another question. It’s a rough contest. There have been plenty of cries from the faithful that this depiction of a fictional contest is fanciful - which kinda misses the point. Conclave is about more than white smoke.

Much of the surface stuff is observation of process and procedure. We see how the cardinals eat, sleep and vote; how they are dressed by teams of support staff, seemingly unable to do it themselves; how teams of nuns cook and clean and fuss over them, with Isabella Rossellini in a small but rich role as the mother superior. All of this has a delicious sense of voyeurism, like peeking behind the curtain at a richly-coloured fancy dress party for old men.

More significantly, we get a version of how the cardinals might behave when the doors and windows are locked and they have to elect the leader of what is still one of the most powerful institutions on earth - ‘the holy Roman and Apostolic Church’, as we used to say when I attended mass as a practising Catholic and believer. I am neither now. I left the church 50 years ago, and my sense of its shortcomings has only increased in the meantime. If my view of the movie is from the outside, it is also the view of someone born inside who continues to have friends within, both nuns and priests. I have great respect for the work some do at a practical level.

For me, almost none of the technical business of the movie needed an explanation, but that might not be true for those brought up outside the church. If you don’t know what the Curia is or that there are still those who want to bring back the Latin mass, you might watch Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci pacing around in red and purple robes and think, what century is this?

As Dean Lawrence, it falls to Fiennes to conduct the Conclave after the Holy Father has expired in his rooms in the Vatican. Lawrence is a man in crisis: his faith has deserted him, especially when he tries to pray. The HF has told him, dispiritingly, that there are two types of priests - shepherds and managers - and he is not a shepherd. That’s the pope’s way of saying you need not apply for the top job. Nor does Lawrence want it… or does he? One of the key words of the film is ‘certainty’: Lawrence tells his fellow cardinals that uncertainty is a good thing in a pope. Too much certainty leads to abuses, he tells them. So we are left guessing whether he really does or doesn’t want the ring. Fiennes is nothing if not an expert at portraying both sincere doubt and buried ambition. His performance is as tortured as you would expect.

The openings scenes clang with doors and windows closing: it’s an aggressive soundscape, calculated to put us on edge. The rooms in this part of the Vatican are dimly lit, the cardinals moving like bright red ghosts along marbled corridors. All the cracks quietly gather for the fray, in scenes that are pictorial but also tinged with visual humour, and a sense of spectacle. Once they are sequestered, the movie stays locked in, as they prepare to do battle. The fight is both spiritual and temporal: as one of them says, the only proper choice for pope is someone who doesn’t want the job.

The front-runners are clear: the cadaverous Tremblay (John Lithgow), presumably a Canadian, whose ambition knows no bounds; the machiavellian arch-conservative Tedesco (Sergio Castellito), who wants the papacy returned to Italy. It is ours, like the World Cup, he thinks. His American rival Bellini (Tucci), liberal to the core, is determined to block Tedesco and the dignified African, Adeyemi, who wants to jail all homosexuals. No-one asks the obvious question of whether he would start in the Vatican.

The film is directed by Edward Berger, a German, whose work on All Quiet on the Western Front was impressive. His work here is no less startling: it’s a tightly controlled drama, with an intense effect on our senses, and utterly absorbing from the first frame. The script, by Peter Straughan, is a textbook example of how to adapt a novel - that being by the English writer Robert Harris (Fatherland), and published in 2016.

The less said about plot the better. There is a superb twist near the end that I didn’t see coming: it concentrates the meaning and resonance with great effect. It starts out as a film about Ralph Fiennes’ crisis of faith, with a strong premise: could a man who has lost his faith become pope? It ends with a much wider conception, to do with the church’s attitudes to women - perhaps the biggest challenge that Rome is now facing. Just a few months ago, Pope Francis reaffirmed the Church’s opposition to the ordination of women. The drawbridges have been raised, the battlements manned (pun intended). If women are to invade this citadel, they will get a fight from these old men in funny hats. The Catholic Church was not built in a day; nor will it change in this century if these old men can see to it.

Predictably, Catholics online have complained about blasphemy and insult, and reiterated the claim that there is a conspiracy by Hollywood to ‘get’ the church. That’s a not-very subtle form of anti-semitism, based on the largely wrong idea that Jews still control Hollywood and that ‘they’ all think as one big Catholic-hating organism. Yes, there are plenty of Jews in the movie business; there are also quite a few Catholics, Moslems and quite probably, a few Rastafarians. The movie industry is not a single-cell organism; it’s an unruly thing, responding to stuff that’s in the air - and the church’s affairs are always in the air. It’s fair enough to see exaggeration in the film’s machinations and manouvering around the vote, but that’s to miss the wider point. The film asks questions that many of the flock - and quite a lot of clergy - are also asking: when is the Catholic Church going to enter the modern world and embrace real reform? When is it going to recognise that the sexual scandals that have all-but wrecked the church in some countries (Ireland in particular) are not an aberration but the result of the church’s own structure; and when will it finally understand that women must enter the Citadel if the church is to survive?

I expect many will disagree, both with me and the movie. Go ahead - but see the film first, before you bring dem guns.

Postscript: My friend and ex-Herald colleague Paola Totaro - a seasoned source of good reporting on Italy and many other things - wrote an excellent and detailed piece in The Australian on January 19 that pointed out a few things I should have mentioned: cardinals over the age of 80 are not allowed to vote, and the reigning pope has a large influence over who gets to vote. Fascinating to see what the machiavellian Cardinal Pell was up to in the days before he went before the heavenly judge. Read her excellent piece on her pages on facebook if you can’t get beyond the paywall.

David Lynch has died, at 78. I was never his biggest fan, but I respected his nuttiness and visual flair, and the weird mysticism I talk about below. I wrote this piece ten years ago for Spectrum in the Sydney Morning Herald, to coincide with an exhibition on his work. It’s a little idiosyncratic, but he would have understood that: he was nothing if not that. I said what I wanted to say, but I could have been more generous about Mulholland Drive, which has stood the test of time. Writing this longer piece gave me a new respect for his creative energy. I have always been wary of anyone who declares himself an artist before he has done the work. In his case, he wasn’t kidding: the work just grew and grew in confidence and daring. I can’t think of another director who has been so successful while retaining his creative energy - except perhaps David Lean, to whom he bears a striking resemblance, even down to keeping the top button on his shirt fastened. But Lean was less of an iconoclast. The movie business usually forces the weird ones into submission or banishment. Lynch was able to keep going, partly because he kept out of the fray. He could always just paint. Only now, as conventional has become ‘art’ in Hollywood (Dune, anyone?), can we now tell the wood from the trees… a metaphor he might have liked.

Notes on DL

August 2015

Let’s talk about David Lynch. Lend me your ears - preferably detached, like the one Kyle MacLachlan finds in the grass at the start of Blue Velvet, sometimes acclaimed as Lynch’s masterpiece - though not by me. I think it’s a bit overwrought, but I am not Lynch’s biggest fan.

At least I wasn’t when that film came out in 1986. I have grown into him since then. I had been writing film reviews for about two years and I thought Lynch was trying too hard to invoke the devil in an American context in Blue Velvet. It was creepy and oddly pulpy, but overcooked. Millions disagreed.

It was hard then to see the wood from the trees, and the fact that trees would play a huge role in his films; hard to see that his embrace of pulp fiction was ahead of, and would have a major influence on, younger directors like Quentin Tarantino (another ear cutter) and the Coen brothers, and older ones, like Kubrick; hard to see that his use of music and his long collaboration with composer Angelo Badalamenti would produce such a rich series of soundtracks; even harder to imagine that he would revolutionise the small screen with Twin Peaks, a 33-hour TV series that broke every taboo. American TV has never been the same. And Twin Peaks returns next year, in a newly minted nine-part series directed by Lynch.

By 2002, I had changed and so had the effect of Blue Velvet. I still found it unconvincing as a portrait of evil – even with Dennis Hopper’s reputation as a crazy man – but MacLachlan’s character Jeffrey was more unsettling. I had been looking in the wrong place: the movie is about Jeffrey’s descent into the underworld, more than the people he finds down there. And Jeffrey is David Lynch. You can tell that because his top button is done up.

More than most directors, Lynch has his quirks and trademarks. Neck security is a big one: he was known to wear three ties at once in his early days. It made him feel more secure. He hates ants, or at least the way they invade your house. One of his paintings had live ants devouring a lump of roast beef that he glued to the canvas, alongside a dead bird and a rat. The ants made the surface of the painting move.

He’s like Hitchcock in that sense, fascinated by his demons, although nowhere near the craftsman. That’s not to say Lynch isn’t capable of good technical film-making. The Elephant Man (1980) and The Straight Story (1999) are beautifully crafted, conventionally structured movies, but most of the time, Lynch just doesn’t care about technique. He’s not like those who make movies because they love the very smell of film (like Brian De Palma). When he started, Lynch knew little about cinema; even less about literature.

Film was a way of making his paintings move, an experimental aid to his art, picked up while studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in the late 1960s. It was only when he realised what it could do – in sound and music, as much as image – that he became hooked. He has never stopped painting and he enjoys a reputation as a visual artist (see box), but film allows him to follow Jeffrey into the underworld. For Lynch, that is the subconscious, where dreams come true, usually in the form of nightmares.

His films are a form of autobiography – odd for a man who refuses to talk about their meaning. In every movie, there is at least one character based on him. In his first feature, Eraserhead, which is both more troubling and original than Blue Velvet, the central character played by Jack Nance is Lynch, more or less directly.

A timid man with enormous hair and top button done up finds himself stuck in a dingy room with a crying baby, his child, except that the baby looks more like ET’s deformed brother. The man eventually kills this creature after the mother walks out. There is a tiny woman performing on a stage hidden in the room’s radiator and a beautiful femme fatale across the hall who takes him to bed. The bed turns into a pool of milky white stuff in which they submerge. It’s brazenly strange, but also tender and shocking and terribly moving. Once discovered, it played for years in midnight movie houses around the world, including Australia.

Lynch made it over six years while he was an on-again, off-again student at the American Film Institute’s Centre for Advanced Film Studies in Los Angeles. Its origins are all in Philadelphia – he calls it his real ‘Philadelphia Story’. His first child Jennifer was born there (with club feet), and he and his first wife Peggy separated there, partly because of his infidelity. In his mid-teens, in the Pacific Northwest, Lynch had decided he wanted to be a painter and live the Art Life – as defined by one of his heroes, the American artist Robert Henri, in his book The Art Spirit. This required a monastic devotion to one’s own state of consciousness.

‘The art comes first,’ says Lynch, ‘In the Art Life, you don’t get married and you don’t have families. You have studios and models and you drink a lot of coffee and you smoke cigarettes and you work mostly at night. Your place smells like oil paint and you think beneath the surface of things and you live a fantastic life of ideas. And create stuff’.

That’s what he did in Philly, until he realised that he had a family and no money and no freedom (and low-lifes breaking into his house). He moved west. The AFI governors gave him a fellowship and a long rope. Lynch built a set in the garage of an old mansion owned by the AFI and began filming Eraserhead. He was so poor that he had a paper route, returning $48 a week. He often slept on the set, in the bed we see in Eraserhead. The film wasn’t finished until 1977, six years after he arrived in LA. In that year, George Lucas finished Star Wars and Martin Scorsese did New York, New York. No-one had heard of David Lynch, and no-one was making movies in quite the same way. That’s still true.

All of Lynch’s cruel world is there in Eraserhead: the fascination with bugs and decaying industrial landscapes, the misery of marriage and the terror of parenthood; the threat of women, especially the sexy ones; the horror of daily life without art, the attraction of adultery, the dark infernal poetry of things like fire and pools of black oil; the slow rhythms; the horror of ‘precious bodily fluids’, usually regurgitated or flowing from wounds. There is also the brilliant, dense use of sound, an area in which he excels, and the beginnings of his love affair with music. Lynch has produced two studio albums of his own music, unrelated to his films. He also loves woodworking and making furniture (lumber is in his blood).

Where did all this weirdness come from? No-one is quite sure. Lynch had a happy childhood, in a series of logging towns in the Pacific Northwest. They are the models for Lumberton in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks (the town) – places where good cherry pie is easy to find, the kindness of strangers is normal, and white picket fences do not come with irony. When his parents saw Eraserhead and Blue Velvet, they asked him what they had done wrong.

He was born in Missoula, Montana, January 20, 1946 (he turns 70 next year), a city flanked by two mountains (or twin peaks). His father Donald came from a poor farming background but gained a degree in forestry. He married Edwina (Sunny) Sundholm from North Carolina and the family moved back west to Missoula, then to Sandpoint, Idaho, Spokane, Washington and Boise, Idaho. David spent long hours with his father in the forest, as Donald researched arboreal diseases. This childhood was happy, although the boy harboured fears: of insects and leaving the house, because ‘bad things’ can happen outside. ‘The world outside, it’s too random. I lose a bit of control thinking of the world outside,’ he told Greg Olson, in the authorised biography, David Lynch: Beautiful Dark. ‘There is a goodness like those blue skies and flowers and stuff, but there is always a force, a sort of wild pain and decay, accompanying everything’.

The malevolent forces are always there in his paintings and photographs, often as shadows. In his films, the dark is ambiguous. Laura Dern’s first appearance in Blue Velvet, even though she is the sweetest character, is from a deep darkness outside her comfortable house.

Lynch was raised Presbyterian, which may account for his strong sense of good and evil, but he is more interested in eastern religions. He discovered Transcendental Meditation in his late ‘20s, during a period of personal crisis. He has meditated twice a day since then.

‘It takes you to an ocean of pure consciousness, pure knowingness,’ he writes in his book Catching The Big Fish. ‘But it’s familiar; it’s you. And right away a sense of happiness emerges – not a goofball happiness, but a thick beauty.’ He says it sharpens his senses. ‘The joy of doing increases. Intuition increases. The pleasure of life grows. And negativity recedes’.

Those last three words are fascinating. Where does the negativity recede to? Why, into his films, of course, in characters like Leland Palmer (Ray Wise), the incestuous villain of Twin Peaks, the 1990 TV series that opened the door to today’s flood of high quality American television (often of a very dark nature).

Twin Peaks is virtually a continuation of the themes of Blue Velvet, with Lumberton renamed. It’s much funnier, at least initially, as Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost observe big city FBI guys making fun of the yokels; then it becomes a descent into hell on earth. Lynch tells us that he’s remaking Blue Velvet (BV) with the first shot: a robin, sitting on a branch. That was the final shot of BV, except that the robin had a bug in its mouth. In the final stages of BV there is also a car chase and a shot of the highway at night, from the low viewpoint of a car’s grille, yellow lines streaking at us. That becomes the opening shot of Lost Highway, Lynch’s 1997 psychological thriller starring Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette. There’s a character called Dick Laurent in that film: DL, get it?

In a sense, Lynch’s films are mostly of a piece, a continuous line of images, rather than stories, most of them reverse-engineered from dreams. Many of the films started as images that leapt into his head unbidden and unexplained: the lipstick lips of Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet, for instance. The image comes first, then he tries to work out a story. As if painting, in fact. He is less comfortable with words.

Making sense is not important. Indeed, not making sense is the point: we have to interpret, and some things are inexplicable. If Lynch will be remembered for one great contribution to cinema, it is the way he has been able to bring a sense of lingering, unresolveable mystery back into movies and television, to re-embrace the sub-conscious. He has allowed audiences to retreat from the concrete and rediscover that we like it (although Mulholland Drive in 2001 and Inland Empire in 2006 left a lot of us befuddled).

Much of American movie narrative has been in the opposite direction: find the answer, solve the problem, fix the world. Lynch doesn’t fix anything, even when he gives us a villain who dies in the end. The ants are still there, beneath everything, burrowing away, about to enter your house, your bed, your eyes and your ears.

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Image: Laura Linney and Sean Penn in Mystic River

It is the year 2025: long enough to come up with a list of some of the greatest films since 2000. No-one else will think all of these are great. Some will say none of them is great. I say all of them because this is my list. Agree, disagree, or write your own list. I will add and subtract at whim, as I see new movies and rethink others. I will probably add more lists from earlier centuries to disagree with.

These are 12 great movies from the last 24 years - with a few lines from when I reviewed it, or what I think of it now. The date given is the year I reviewed it, not necessarily its year of production. These are listed chronologically, from 2000. I will list where you can watch these right now if you’re in Australia - but of course, these links will quickly go out of date so you will have to hunt by google if you’re reading this later than January 2025 - and not all of them are available even right now. Some are free, some cost a few bucks. Let me know what you think of them - or feel free to give me both barrels.

Road to Perdition – USA, Sam Mendes, 2002

A gruff Tom Hanks goes up against Paul Newman, as an Irish American crime boss, in an utterly compelling road movie set in the 1930s. The road leads to Chicago and the Chicago mob. David Self provided an elegant adaptation of the original graphic novel; Thomas Newman contributed one of his best scores. Sam Mendes delivers an elegaic, brittle tone that works in contrast to the wide open spaces that Hanks - as Michael Sullivan - traverses in a series of stolen cars, after the murder of his wife and youngest son. He travels with the surviving son (Tyler Hoechlin), who’s trying to cope with crippling grief as well as the realisation that his father is a gangster. Any movie that has Stanley Tucci, Daniel Craig and Jennifer Jason Leigh in supporting roles gets my attention. No-one is what they seem here. I watch this at least once a year.

Available on Disney+, Prime and YouTube

…

Mystic River - USA, Clint Eastwood, 2003.

(Note - this review is 20+ years old - so it does not include reference to the films Eastwood has made since 2003, some of which are pretty damn good).

Mystic River is Clint Eastwood's best movie since Unforgiven in 1992. It probably won't be as popular, because he's not acting in it and it's not resolved with the neat purity of a gunfight, but it crowns his long career as a director. He made Play Misty For Me 33 years ago: 23 movies later, at age 73, who expected him to make something this taut and uncompromising?

The film is a wintry drama, partly about a murder, set in Boston. It's outside the Hollywood mainstream, even for Clinton Eastwood Junior, whose choice of material is sometimes unpredictable. It's 137 minutes long, methodically paced, but superbly economical. There is no ramping up with fast cutting or steroidal music (Eastwood wrote some of the score himself). The direction is monastically unobtrusive.

It's as if Eastwood's taciturn cowboy persona has become a directing style. His old-fashioned American rectitude mocks the way most studio movies are now made: he's old school and getting more so. Mystic River is a lesson in visual probity. Not surprisingly, the studio (Warner Bros) saw it as a chance to be cheap. Eastwood says he worked for scale wages, in order to get it made, just as he did on Play Misty for Me. That's an indication of how much he wanted to do it.

Available on Stan, YouTube and Prime

…

As it is in Heaven - Sweden, Kay Pollak, 2006.

This is one of the best things to come out of Sweden since Abba - a completely charming, disarmingly frank, robustly opinionated and sweetly tuneful film about a small-town choir, a famous conductor, and the redemptive power of singing.

It's both a feel-good movie and a feel-bad movie, a strange combination that seems very Swedish. That's part of what makes it distinctive: it has that sense of gloom about human nature that cold countries often have, combined with a determination to root it out of the culture. The way to do that, in writer/director Kay Pollak's view, is to fill the lungs and empty the churches.

Available free on YouTube.

…

Winter’s Bone - US, Debra Granik, 2010

Winter's Bone is set in the Ozark mountains of southern Missouri. Given what Hollywood has done to these people over the years - the drooling inbreds of Deliverance, the comical rubes of The Beverly Hillbillies - you'd expect them to welcome a Yankee film-maker with a barrel of buckshot, yet Debra Granik (Down to the Bone) managed not just to get their trust, but to make a film that is unlikely to be accused of flattery.

Most of the characters in the film are involved in criminal activity. They're hard-faced, dirt-poor and some are meaner than a junkyard dog, yet the film never loses sight of their humanity. It's an unfliching picture of a part of America that's forsaken and forgotten; what it ain't is for sale. That may be why they let Granik and her crew in (after months of careful negotiation). Winter's Bone vibrates with a sense of community, history, and resistance to imported values. The key crime here is to go against 'our ways'. That will get a person killed.

Doesn’t appear to be available by streaming. You may have to buy the DVD or BlueRay.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - UK/France/Germany, Tomas Alfredson, 2012

George Smiley is the spy we would all like to believe in: sober, sensitive, analytical, slow to anger but sharp as a fox, battered but honorable. He gave intelligence a good name, rescuing the conception of a spy from the tawdry ‘glamour’ of Fleming's James Bond.

Even for his creator, David Cornwell, writing as John le Carre, Smiley was an idealised creation. That may be why he has come back in this superb adaptation, 32 years after the definitive portrayal by Alec Guinness in the 1979 BBC series. Intelligence needs some good press, especially in England. Gary Oldman comes to speak truth unto power, in that sense, by reminding us of why we need good, objective intelligence services.

Foxtel, Binge, YouTube and other streamers

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Leviathan - Russia, Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2015

Leviathan is a brutal Russian masterpiece. The Russian minister for Culture doesn’t like it, especially since his department put up part of the budget, because it shows Russia in a bad light. Really, that just makes its arguments about the sorry state of the country that much more believable.

The story takes place far from Moscow, which helps to widen the accusation. Leviathan is about a country in decline, bereft of leadership, descending into chaos and corruption, even in the furthest corners of the land. At the same time, it’s much bigger than that, in terms of character and scope. Corruption is hardly new. The question is what happens to someone who is prepared to fight it. What then happens in the police station, the courtroom, or the church? Who will stand beside this man?

YouTube and Apple TV

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Mad Max Fury Road – Australia/US, George Miller, 2015.

No one does action better than George Miller - who will turn 80 in March 2025. This description is from a column I wrote in 2015.

The really interesting thing about this new movie, made by a 70-year-old with the heart of a teenager, is that it offers a chance to reform the big, loud action movie – which is in dire need of it. Superheroes and CG effects have brought action low, even as they have made a gazillion dollars for the studios, by packaging action as an artificial series of stimulants in the manner of video games – like electronic prodding by computer. Plot, action, kinetic energy and the skills that were necessary to do action before the age of computers have all been forgotten. Directors now ‘do it in post’. Capturing action in camera is becoming a lost art, partly because it’s easier and safer to do it by computer. Mad Max also uses CG effects – rather too many for my liking – although Miller has said it is less then ten per cent of the film. But it’s his return to the first principles of action, as learned from Buster Keaton, that is winning so much love.

Available on YouTube and several streaming services.

…

Spotlight - US, Tom McCarthy, 2016.

Wisely, the movie is not about child abuse. It’s about how a newspaper, The Boston Globe, had the guts to go after the Catholic Church in a town full of Catholics, knowing that their own heavily Catholic readership would not like it. It’s about the way the Catholic Church, a powerful institution in Boston (as everywhere), tried to conceal the knowledge that almost 250 of its priests were implicated in child sexual abuse – some of them repeatedly, in other dioceses, before they were given new positions supervising children in Boston. And it’s about a depressing question, one that faces every newspaper journalist: could this story still be done now? How many of the world’s great newspapers can still afford to run a unit like Spotlight, the oldest continuous investigative unit in the American media, founded in 1970?

Prime and Apple TV

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Son of Saul - Hungary, Laszlo Nemes, 2016

Saul, a sonderkommando in Auschwitz, finds a teenage boy in the pile of bodies. He is still alive, but not for long. He believes this is his son. He determines that he will be buried, not burned. He must find a rabbi to say Kaddish, the Jewish funeral rite. In a place designed for obliteration of the body, he must preserve this one body, an idea as profound as it is futile.

It’s hard to overpraise Son of Saul. It is one of the greatest films ever made. Just when it seemed that cinema was spent, incapable of reinvention, lost in trivia and meaningless sensory stimulation, Laszlo Nemes has revived it by tackling the hardest story anyone could tell, in a way that has never been done – and in his first film. The sense of seriousness and driving rage behind its invention, the utter force of Nemes’s desire to understand what it was like for those who were there, and to honour them by refusing to adorn the story with false messages of hope and survival, make this a monumental achievement.

Prime and Apple TV

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Corpus Christi - Poland, Jan Komasa, 2020

It’s the story of a troubled young man who pretends to be a priest in an isolated region of Poland. I know, who wants to see such mainstream fare, but bear with me. This one plays out like a western - a stranger comes to town, transforming the moral landscape. It’s Shane, with more vodka and fewer horses. It’s as Polish as a cabbage roll, yet startlingly universal.

Polish cinema has punched above its weight for a long time, for reasons that are complex and contingent upon history. The quality has waned at times since the liberation from Soviet domination in the late 1980s. There were always great writers, directors and talent, but money for production became scarce. And ‘freedom’ was hard to get used to for artists who had found much of their purpose in opposing state repression…

Apple TV

…

My Name is Gulpilil - Australia, Molly Reynolds, 2021

This one had me at the first shot. David Gulpilil, in winter coat and mittens, walks down a country road. The camera is about 50 metres behind him and his gait is slow. Then we see why: he’s following an emu, which was obscured by his body. When the actor stops and turns back up the road, the emu does too. They move in step, as if in a duet. He just smiles, as if to say ‘of course we are’.

My Name is Gulpilil is the actor’s fond farewell, his valediction, his living obituary. At around 67 - he’s not quite sure of his age - he has lung cancer, and a number of other ailments. They will take him out soon, he tells us a number of times. He seems to want to say he’s OK with that: he has had a charmed life as a dancer, actor, singer, story-teller.

(David Gulpilil died in Murray Bridge in November 2021, aged 68, shortly after the film came out).

Foxtel, Netflix, Prime and Apple TV

…

Drive My Car - Japan, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2022

At any one time, the number of film-makers who believe deep in their bones that film is capable of producing great art, and who go for it, is small. So when one comes along, we’re entitled to get excited. Ryusuke Hamaguchi, take a bow…

For many, three hours of Japanese subtitles will dissuade them, but let me assure you, it’s tougher than that. The film is based on a short story by Haruki Murakami and it moves at glacial pace. It’s mysterious, impenetrable, creeping forward on many fronts like a lava flow of ideas and nuance. I mean, who needs it? It’s also throat-catchingly beautiful, as sad as a funeral, and wise in a way that few films ever aspire to be. Novels sprawl, music expresses the inexpressible, theatre can thrill: a movie with the ambition and gall to steal from all of these as it creates its own world, is pushing its luck. Thank heavens for film-makers who push their luck.

Stan, Prime, Apple TV

Check back in a few weeks for part two….

I wrote this piece 18 months ago when I quit The Sydney Morning Herald after four decades of reviewing and writing about movies (and other things). I thought at the time it would be the end of my movie writing - but it’s never the end. In the old days of actual newspapers - by which I mean those old fashioned ink-on-the-fingers, printed-on-paper, made-with-‘hot metal’, before-computers-type-newspapers - we would write MTC at the bottom of each page of seven-ply copy - it means ‘More to Come’. The picture below is me in the biobox at the State Theatre about 400 years ago, when I was director of the Sydney Film Festival. I can’t remember who took it - maybe Bobby Pearce, who was one of the best photographers I ever worked with at the SMH. When this was published in August 2022, it had a different ending - the page editor didn’t like the implied finality in the line about ‘the band stops playing’. I reworked it with that famous stage direction from W. Shakespeare - ‘Exit pursued by a bear’. ‘Turn on the lights’ was my original ending. Maybe the bear is funnier.

On being a film critic no more

by Paul Byrnes

As this is my last piece as a film critic for this newspaper, I am looking forward to some sunlight. I have spent much of the last 38 years in the dark. Some of my readers would agree. I can’t guess how many films I’ve seen, but certainly more than 10,000. For some people, reviewing movies is their dream job; others wonder how I could stand it. For me, it was like being Toto in the Wizard of Oz. I wasn’t always sure of what was going on but Dorothy, look at the Technicolor!

I was 27 when I started writing about movies. I had been nine years at the Herald, joining as a cadet from high school in 1976. I had not expected to specialise in film. I had been a ‘real’ journalist, working in police rounds, courts, politics, industrial rounds, with postings in Melbourne and Brisbane and two years as the Herald correspondent in Papua New Guinea. I loved everything about newspapers and still do.

Like many colleagues, I developed Repetitive Strain Injury when desktop computers came in. The editor Eric Beecher, knowing I was interested in theatre and film, suggested I try film reviewing. That meant I could work offline, with pencil and paper. I ended up falling into the job by being in the right place at the right time with the wrong injury.

I was not qualified for the job, but such was the way of newspapers in the last century. I was prepared in one sense: I had read a lot of Pauline Kael, the much-loved, often controversial reviewer for The New Yorker. I learned what I know from her. In the game, those influenced by her are called ‘Paulettes’. I am happy to wear the label. Kael would throw her heart and soul into the response to a film. She was never dull and she always worked harder than her readers. She said once that if her readers could think of it themselves, they wouldn’t need her. Wise woman.

My first review appeared in this newspaper in April 1985. It was Another Time, Another Place, with Phyllis Logan, directed by Mike Radford. All I can say about it is that I got better. I soon realised that the job was not to tell people whether they would like a film: how would I know? Never trust a reviewer who says ‘Go see it, you’ll love it’. What I tried to do was tell the reader how I felt about it, as honestly as I could. The word ‘I’ is generally avoided in newspaper work but it is essential if you are writing about a medium in which emotional impact is the currency. I learned to write about what I saw and how I responded. I learned to report on myself, as well as the film. When I reviewed the first Nightmare on Elm Street, I wrote about how the terror ripped through my whole body. I was anything but objective. I learned to leave out most of the plot, because readers hate too much story. The reader will judge whether they are interested in the film; that wasn’t my job. A good critic is someone you can read whether or not you want to see the film.

Of course, this works best when your responses are strong. Readers don’t want wishy-washy. They want forthright opinions, expressed in clear and entertaining prose. It doesn’t really matter what that opinion is, but it does matter how you write about it. The reader will know if you pull your punches. There’s a rude saying about opinions, that everyone has one, like a certain body part. That’s true, but you can’t write with that body part. Your opinion has to be cogent and independent. You have to write like your opinion matters, even if it doesn’t. You have to be persuasive about the differences between shit and shinola.

In Almost Famous, a film I love, the Lester Bangs character gives good advice to the young rock critic: ‘Be honest and unmerciful’. You need a sharp set of tools, by which I mean an aesthetic framework, and you cannot be friends with the film-makers. They have a right only to the same brutal honesty. That said, you must also be flexible. I learned more from the films I did not understand than the ones I did. The great ones always have something mysterious.

It doesn’t matter if the reader agrees with you. I’ll tell you a secret: even I don’t always agree with me. When I reread something, I see my younger self, struggling to work out my position on life, the universe and everything. I know I got it wrong many times. I didn’t like much of the output of the Coen brothers at first. They were too arch, too smarty-pants, too patronising of their own culture. Now I can’t get enough of films like The Big Lebowski and O Brother Where Are Thou? And to be clear, there is no such thing as a right view.

It follows that you can’t run with the pack. The most popular films are rarely the best films. If you try to please a group of readers - let us say, those under 30 who love gaming - you will betray your own principles if you go soft on a film you despise. Most of the superhero ‘franchises’ fall into that category for me. I have argued for some years that Hollywood has lost its way by chasing the kind of profits that only a few blockbusters can deliver. The small well-made film has disappeared - or it had, until Netflix came along. The major studios are not in the shinola business. What baffles me is how well they have convinced the worldwide audience that BIG, LOUD AND STUPID is worth paying for.

So one definition of what I have done for the last 38 years is to see a lot of bad films so you didn’t have to - but that’s not quite true. The big movies are like the Death Star - impervious to one plucky X-wing fighter like me. They were fun to write about, because the style and polish of blockbusters evolves like an amoeba, but James Cameron never needed my advice. I keep wondering if AI might actually improve the quality of movies. It’s a brave new area to write about.

It may also be true that movies have lost some of their place in our lives. When I was young, it was hard to see the great films. You had to go to film festivals, join a film society and watch a lot of the old stuff presented by Bill Collins and David Stratton (bless ‘em both). After thousands of hours, you might call yourself a cineaste and that was a cool thing to be. There are still those who do that, but the parade’s gone by - at least on the big screen. I do love what the streaming services have done, reviving the concept of adult drama, but even there, the vision is narrow. Almost no-one caters for classics and if you don’t tackle the classics - just as in literature and music - you’ll never know how good a medium can be. Yes, some movies of John Ford, Charlie Chaplin and Federico Fellini are available on the internet. It is also true that the cinema, the most powerful medium ever invented for communication of human emotion, has forsaken that role by concentrating on films that grab you by the seat of the pants rather than the heart or the head. A film like Dune was a dispiriting encapsulation of that failure. Millions adored it. I saw more evidence of the slow death of the medium.

That’s one of the reasons I am quitting. No-one wants to hear that it was better fifty years ago, even if it was. And when you write from the feeling that the best is behind you, it’s time to stop. I still love movies and I always loved writing about them. Beautiful, passionate films are still being made, but you’re more likely to see them at home. And it’s harder to find critical voices you can trust. The number of new voices on the internet is vast. Some are terrific writers, but very few critics can make a living at it now. I was one of the last and luckiest of that breed - the full time newspaper critic. It was a privilege to be able to devote myself to the craft, but most newspaper critics have gone the way of newspapers. In the US and the UK, hundreds of critics have been ‘let go’. Even in France, where the idea of the serious critic was honed and hardened, few can make a living that way. I am leaving the stage before the band stops playing. It has always seemed more like fun than work and I am grateful for all the fish. So goodnight and good luck, dear readers. Can someone please turn on the lights?

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