Jigsaw feeling… Rose of Nevada (2025), Out on 24th April

This is the kind of film you need to see in a cinema, it is the kind of film you need to work out for yourself and, it is the kind of film that doesn’t get made that often these days. Based on an idea from Mark Jenkin and his partner Mary Woodvine, Jenkin writes, directs, films, edits and then composes, and plays, the score. It’s the kind of film that could only have come from the mind of Mark Jenkin and builds on his impressive features Bait (2019) and Enys Men (2022).

 

As with those two films Jenkin uses 16mm film and a Bolex clockwork camera which only runs for 27 seconds before it needs rewinding. Jenkins develops the stock himself – surely that’s a new award category?! – and brings out incredibly vivid colours from the stock, almost hyper-real deep green and red-rusty textures, the reddest red since Jack Cardiff spun his camera for The Archers. This being 16mm, there’s a rough edge to this beauty which makes it vibrant and alive with the end of reel “spoiling” sometimes in the mix to blur the edges like a flash of sunlight caught in your eye or something you only thought you saw.

 

Made in Cornwall, silent style with no sound recorded live, Jenkin is able to completely control his sound-world too with the actors re-voicing their entire dialogue during the edit, along with foley and sound effects added along with his bleakly ambient score which reflects the visual in the most “silent” of ways. The texturing is for flavour and doesn’t encroach on the narrative working with the performances and the visuals to create an atmosphere you can not shake, even when it ends and you are typing away on the train home…

 

Jenkin uses repeated images, locations, events to tease out as much meaning as he is willing to present on first viewing. There is tremendous discipline here as the etched message inside the titular fishing vessel or its name plate are all part of the greater linear narrative which plays out whilst characters interact, gut fish, or refuse to give each other their proper names as the fishing village world tosses and turns like the ocean and the only stable environment is the boat itself as the three men go about the laborious and dangerous task of trawling for fish.

George MacKay

Having recently rewatched Jean Epstein’s Finis Terrae (1929), on the Eureka Masters of Cinema Blu-ray, I was also reminded of some of his technique with moments of when Jenkin slows down the action to reinforce the dream-like quality just like the French pioneer. Elsewhere the landscape and seemingly random details are focused on to pull the viewer into the moments and the mystery of the observable World. Its hypnotic and hyper-real… a trip into the surreal that marks our everyday existence.

 

The Rose is the enigma at the film’s start as it reappears at the quayside after being lost for 30 years. Soon this is being taken for granted as the owner, played by Jenkin regular Edward Rowe, and the widow of one of the men who had gone missing all those years ago, Tina (played by Rosalind Eleazar of Slow Horses fame), decide to put her back to sea. A crusty old mariner Murgey, played by Francis Magee, pops up and when asked if the owner knows him only says, you might do… and he might do at that. Names and knowing… it’s a muddle but, as in a dream things have a propulsion all of their own.

 

Edward Rowe, Mary Woodvine and Adrian Rawlins

We see a young father called Nick (George MacKay), collecting food for his elderly neighbours played by Adrian Rawlins and an almost unrecognisable Mary Woodvine who has been aged up to reflect the rigours of the 30-year old tragedy that led to the loss of the Rose’s crew and her son Luke. Her husband has just returned from laying flowers at the cliff where his son had jumped to his death thereby leaving the vessel one crew member down and, eventually doomed. For these two the tragedy has never stopped and the mother seems lost in her grieving time, moving in and out of focus submerged by the enormity of her loss.

 

Nick lives next door with his wife Emily and their child and, as the rain pours down on the village, we see him try to fix the hole in their kitchen roof, which is possibly, to coin a Doctor Who reference, a fixed point in time… and it’s not alone. We meet the others who are related to the lost with the other sailor’s grown-up daughters Jess and Linsey (both played by Yana Penrose) one of whom still wears his hat and, meeting the handsome new arrival Liam (Callum Turner, who is currently engaged to Dua Lipa I believe pop fans?) in the pub, gives it to him on a promise,

 

Callum Turner

A crew is found for the Rose when Nick decides he has to do something to pay for his roof and Liam, in need of money and a roof over his head, joins the team and away they go learning the ropes and the art of gutting a fish as Murgey – the old man from the sea - takes them back onto the waves... “Don’t worry lads, she always returns…” There’s a forensic depiction of the methods of trawl-fishing as they start to fill the Rose’s compact hold with mackerel, bream, bass and hake. The atmosphere is tense as the electronica broods and Nick already begins to sense that something is out of joint – namely time, as an etched warning to “get off the boat, now” disappears during the journey.

 

When they do return to port though the harbour does not look at all as they left it and it soon becomes clear that not only are they no longer in the present but they are being mistaken for the two men who disappeared along with the boat before either man was born. Whilst Liam is greeted by a younger version of Tina and her eldest daughter, there’s some arguing to be done but he styles it out – this is different for him than for Nick. Meanwhile the latter returns to find his family gone and that he is now being seen as the lost Luke by his now much younger neighbours.

 

They are lost in time and circumstances beyond their control and Nick’s hopes that, after every return trip to the sea things will revert to normal begin to look increasingly forlorn… They’re not just trawling fish the film is smuggling meaning and that’s increasingly perplexing as the mood builds and we wait for the moment of clarity…  

Perhaps this is a rumination on the essence of place, the echoes within The Stone Tapes or the ever-present past sensed by the pilgrims in Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale and in Peter Akroyd’s London? It certainly another work of hauntological exploration that plays on the feelings of the obliquely familiar: the walkers over our graves and the sense we can never quite pin down that our experience has always happened and is always happening.

It also has to be noticed that for a one-man-band (almost), Mr Jenkin leads a heck of a team with the performances universally excellent. George MacKay is the centre of most of the action and presents a terrified and unsettled man in the most visceral of ways; he's our conduit into this unreality and we feel his bewilderment at suddenly losing everything. How did it come to this and is this how we all wake up one day to find our lives unrecognisable, our lievlihoods destroyed and events elsewhere driving us to the edge.

There’s an entire Jungian analysis I was about to dive into but best you just go see the film and make your own minds up. It really is that kind of film…

 

Details of screening at the BFI and elsewhere are on their website.

 

British film is alive and weird and taking place with increasing frequency in Cornwall!  

Rosalind Eleazar

The past is another country. Daniel Farson’s Guide to Britain Volume 1, BFI Blu-ray

 

Liverpool, to my mind the strangest of all the cities of the North, not the nicest – hardly a word one can apply to Liverpool, hard drinking, hard living, hard fighting, violent, friendly and fiercely alive… if one had to sum up the so-called Liverpool sound in one word… I chose the word vitality.

 

This BFI Blu-ray collects together over a dozen documentary films from the remarkable Daniel Farson, who after joining Associated-Rediffusion, the first British commercial television company, in the mid-1950s went on to take his art in directions the staid old BBC couldn’t follow even though, to this day, these programmes inform, educate and entertain.

 

For me this set is worth getting for the film Beat City (1963) alone and, of course, I would say that wouldn’t I as it’s all about the music of Liverpool and not just the obvious mop tops.  The Cavern in its pomp, a “cellarful of noise” that, as William Fowler observes, has something of the energy of other joints central to movements such as New York’s CBGB’s and, indeed, Eric’s club which emerged in 1977 across the road in Mathew Street and where a young teenage me saw Magazine, Adam and the Ants, the B52s, John Cooper Clarke, Jilted John, Ed Banger and his Nosebleeds – possibly with a young Stephen Morrisey.

 

The introductory titles feature There’s a Place by The Beatles, such a powerful song from Lennon with wistful harmonica and tight harmonies from Paul, but that’s your lot when it comes to what we now know were the definitive act of the Beat Boom. Then, after some establishing shots of Liverpool, it’s straight to the graveyard of the city’s Anglican Cathedral where Daniel Farson, sat on a bench with a local and his howling dog, tells us “… this is not a film about The Beatles but the place they came from and the people they left behind…”.

 

Down we go to the heat and passion of the old Cavern where’s a roaring start with Faron's Flamingos singing their signature tune Do You Love Me, which Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, who they toured with, had the big hit with in 1963. A year earlier Decca executives had famously chosen Poole’s band over The Beatles when both auditioned… ah well. Here Faron’s band are performing live but a studio version is played over them as with most of the others featured.

 

Fifteen-year-old Chick Graham follows with Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow fronting The Coasters whose previous singer was Billy J Kramer. There’s lots of energy and Decca, eager to make up for their Mersey Mistake, signed them up soon after. Finally, we see one of Liverpool’s most established acts, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes performing I Can Tell. The band, whose former drummer was one Richard Starkey, were one of the first to play rock ‘n roll at The Cavern but, impressive though they were, failed to match the success of their sticks man.

 

Chick and the Coasters with the Cavern crowd

The energy remains but the atmosphere shifts as we see glimpses of the city behind the songs with documentary footage showing kids playing with abandoned cars, and in bombed out areas of the city at nowhere near the apex of its post war decline… There are some very interesting glimpses of a multi-ethnic city soundtracked by the Liverpool Lullaby sung folk and not Cilla-style over shots of King Billy graffiti and other reminders of the impact of the first huge wave of immigration after the Irish famine in the 1840…

 

After a trip to the alehouse to hear a couple of pub singers doing damage to Welcome to My World… we get to one of the era’s most successful groups, folk ensemble The Spinners, singing Jenny Get Your Oatcakes Done – absolute filth as Vic Pratt says in the commentary – the band were still touring until 2021 and were one of the mainstays of the British Folk boom. The MacDonald Sisters follow, Liverpool based teachers, originally from the Isle of Lewis who were the first female folk duo of note in Britain who, like the Spinners, had their own folk club.

 

We shift tone to the doo-wop stylings of The Chants, one of the earliest black groups in the UK, and featuring Eddie Amoo who was part of the trailblazing Toxteth band, the Real Thing including his younger brother Chris (my mate Nick lived next door to him just off Lark Lane). Then purer Merseybeat from the charismatic Earl Preston and the TTs and then Cy Tucker and the Friars – see what he did there? So many of these bands did the rounds in Hamburg as well as the ‘pool.

 

Gerry Marsden whose mum was very kind to my friend Irene when she bunked off school in search of George Harrison and/or a Pacemaker!

Talking of which, things reach a peak with Gerry and the Pacemakers, whom Squires thought would be the key act for the documentary, singing I Like It one of their three number ones from their first three releases – a record that lasted until Frankie Goes to Hollywood (I saw Holly Johnson playing bass for Margie Clarke at Eric’s, in the mid-80s. I wiped another tear as Gerry sings You’ll Never Walk Alone – a major song of the era and of continuing importance to Liverpool FC, through the wind and rain… and then a version of Nat King Cole’s Pretend which shows if nothing else, how hot and sweaty things got singing in those shirts, suits and ties.

 

The filmmakers had to contend with Mr Brian Epstein pushing his new act Cilla Black but they were more concerned with grabbing Gerry and the Pacemakers

 

The Blue Angel Club is our penultimate stop where Farson mentions that he met Paul and Ringo, who aren’t featured for Brian reasons, followed by a steel drum band playing at the Jacaranda Club which was owned by Pete Best’s mum if I remember correctly. As the Boys say, it’s almost criminal that this slice of Liverpool life has been so hard to see over the years and, as I said at the top, it is essential viewing for all beat fans and makes this a must-buy with all the stars!

 

Props also to Vic Pratt for mentioning Arthur Askey in talking about Liverpool’s sense of humour, sure there’s Ken Dodd and, some might say, Jimmy Tarbuck and Freddie Starr – who was hilarious live when I saw him as a kid – and who was also a Merseybeat singer and a decent actor in the intriguing Liverpool-based crime drama Violent Playground (1958), but Arthur is class and whilst my Mum disliked him intensely my Dad loved him. I thank you playmates!

 

The Vines aka The Big House: the start of many an evening in town and still serving pints to this day!

Is it wrong to be out of step? Dan Farson goes out to challenge people who hold odd views about life. Are these people just cranks or are they one step ahead of us?

 

Out of Step: Witchcraft (1957) as specialist in fringe beliefs, Mark Pilkington, comments, self-identifying as a witch today is by some margin more acceptable than back in the more ostensibly Christian 1950s. There’s a fascinating interview with Dr Margaret Murray, who was 92 at the time, a former suffragette – marching on Parliament with Emmeline Pankhurst in 1907 – later Egyptologist and anthropologist who branched out to the study of pre-Christian religions, becoming a leading authority in witchcraft which, after her time, underwent a revival in the 1960s. We see Gerald Brousseau Gardner, the Godfather of British Witchcraft and an associate of The Beast, Aleister Crowley, who put into practice much of Murray’s researched practices… Louis Wilkinson a non-believing friend of Crowley’s is last up and it’s interesting to hear a relatively dispassionate account of the Great Mage.

 

We all love a good conspiracy especially the people who run social media companies, and the next episode is full of them. Out of Step: Other Worlds Are Watching Us (1957) features footage from The Day the Earth Stood Still and was made some ten years into the UFO Age as Mark Pilkington points out in his expert Ufologist commentary. Pilkington also remarks how little has changed in the 69 years since this programme was made: “…the only thing that has changed is that UFOs now have the more serious sounding UAPs making them an appropriate topic for discussion in the United States Congress…”.

 

Daniel Farson posing a question...

The freaks are, naturally, far more interesting than those Keeping in Step but The Wedding (1958) and Stock Exchange (1958) give Farson the chance to point out the quirks of normality… which is where his observations really come into their own as “each week, Dan Farson meets a conventional point of view.” Example: “The three most exciting words in the English language are probably ‘I Love You’ and the four most expensive ‘Will You Marry Me’…” he has great fun at his subject’s expense and who could deny this cultural outsider his observations – his autobiography was entitled Never a Normal Man after all and if you popped into The Colony Rooms in the 60s you probably would have seen him with Francis Bacon but not in The French, where he was barred.

 

He's on this home turf for This Week: Soho Striptease (1958) which feels a lot sleazier than it looks as you’d expect given the restrictions of TV but even then it’s shocking. As Vic Pratt says in the commentary, the displays shown were pushing the bounds of decency as public demand drove the censor’s rules further with private membership clubs were decreed in 1957 as not subject to regulations limiting the movement of the performers. Farson was a member of the Gargoyle Club – not to see the shows but to enjoy the after-hours drinking.

 

This Week: Robert Graves (1957) is a fabulous compilation of production materials featuring Farson interviewing of one of the literary heroes of my youth, outsider, poet and writer of an essential memoir of the Great War in Good-bye to All That, I Claudius and a biography of his good friend TE Lawrence.

 

Studio setting for Mixed Marriages... no pressure.

People in Trouble: Mixed Marriages (1958) is a different matter entirely, dealing with a subject that was highly controversial at the time, coming out just before the Notting Hill race riots. James Wentworth-Day is the voice of establishment disdain who not only opposed mixed marriages but also, in an unaired episode on transvestism, voiced the opinion that all gay people should be hung. How representative of contemporary views he is worthy of additional research but here, as there, Farson does not accept his views – “I couldn’t disagree with you more but at least you do say what you really feel…” – and he lets the audience make up their own mind. People in Trouble… it’s sad then and it’s sad now and more so than one would have hoped until relatively recently.

 

I think you’ve got to give your hero worship to someone who deserves it. I’ve met a lot of the London smart set and they’re not very smart…

 

There are three Success Story shorts covering playwright Shelagh Delaney (1959) just 19 at the time and discussing her debut play, A Taste of Honey, and we see a clip featuring Murray Melvyn, Avis Bunnage and Frances Cuka, Shelagh is feisty and bats back all of the categories Farson throws at her, “angry young woman”, writer of a “sordid” play and her “overwhelming success” and so on. She’s something new, eloquent and Salford smart!  Quite a contrast to the next subject, clairvoyant and astrologer Maurice Woodruff (1959), from the sublime to the gorblimey! We start off with Mr Peter Sellars, then filming I’m Alright Jack and a regular customer of Woodruff’s… has to be seen to be believed folks!

Mr Farson in his natural environment

Finally, there’s pulp fiction author Hank Janson (1959) a pseudonym we now know was created by the English author Stephen Daniel Frances. Our Dan interviews Janson’s publisher who was sent down for obscenity and spent four months in prison for works of dubious art that he never read but were selling in their thousands. Sadly, being a “paperback writer”, his publisher says that Janson wasn’t a wealthy man although he wasn’t giving much away about the mystery of who he was. We also get to meet the books’ printer – ah the days of hot metal – who, Digital Kids, was key to the distribution of these works. Farson gets to meet the author in the Panama Club off Piccadilly but, unlike the dancers on stage, the author is overdressed to the extent to which he is wearing a mask.

 

There’s far more candour in an interview with Harry Webb from Cheshunt in Celebrity: Cliff Richard (1959). Cliff was still a teen and only a year after his genuinely classic debut hit, Move It (1958) and after featuring in the film Serious Charge (1959). He had just finished filming Expresso Bongo and comes across as pretty levelheaded and connected with Farson firing questions direct and quickly!

 

Pursuit of Happiness: People Apart (1960) is another slice of life meeting the full and part-time inhabitants of the island of Lundy a few dozen miles off the Southwest coast and a few miles long with no roads and just one hotel with bar and shop attached. Farson talks to a former TV executive who has moved there to find himself away from London and others who find the satisfaction of a simpler life in which everything you do is necessary, outweighs the inconvenience if isolation, lost friends and no broadcast news.

 

Harry from Cheshunt

Farson’s Guide to the British: Cats (1959) features a challenging discussion of the nature of our feline friends as Farson confronts the bizarre humans who find them loveable. Farson’s skills are to make even the seemingly prosaic controversial and at least a source for a good talk. There are some delightful shots of street cats in London where some 30,000 cats were being put down every year. Cats are for life not just for television.

These programmes are completely addictive and I look forward to Volume 2 in this rediscovery of this idiosyncratic tele visual journalist and the characters and sub-cultures of the time which otherwise might be drifting mistily into the past.

 

Special features

Newly remastered in 2K and presented in High Definition and Standard Definition

New audio commentaries on selected programmes by writer and publisher Mark Pilkington and the BFI’s Vic Pratt, Milo Holmes, Chantelle Boyea, Dick Fiddy, Dr Elinor Groom, Lisa Kerrigan and William Fowler

Beat City image gallery

Illustrated booklet - first pressing only - featuring new writing by the BFI’s William Fowler, Vic Pratt, Lisa Kerrigan and Milo Holmes, plus a new essay by Nic Wassell on the creation of the Associated-Rediffusion logo 

  

You can and must order your copy from the usual online sources or pop into the BFI shop now before the first pressing sells out. There is so much here that describes its time perfectly and in the slightly quirky manner of the quicksilver Daniel Farson!

A Liverpool Bobby, a colleague of my Dad's...

As a child I thought that King Billy must have run a gang out of Walton... took me years to work it out!

Identity crisis... Negatives (1968), BFI Flipside No. 053, Blu-ray

The trouble with you is you always want to be someone else, it’s a compulsion you have.

I’ve just watched the new Neil LaBute play* which uses a series of sexual relationships to deftly characterise a modern America in which nothing is as it seems and everything may or may not be transactional and following unseen rules too complex to state out loud. There is something in common with this film, director Peter Medak’s first feature and one that is unsettling, almost hard to watch, before ultimately revealing its true intent.

At its centre is the relationship between antique shop proprietors Theo (Peter McEnery) and Vivien (Glenda Jackson) which puts us on edge right for the start. For one thing they role play as the notorious Dr Crippen and his wife Cora/lover Ethel as the feeling takes them… This is very much Jackson on home territory, dominating with disdain and a vicious turn of phrase, leaving us unsure as to whether she is in character or within character. McEnery for his part is a most indecisive serial killer but clearly this is the point… when is a murder not a murder? When he is the victim or, and bear with me, a fighter pilot?

 

… when it comes to the action, you are a fool just like Crippen…

 

Dr and Mrs Crippen enjoy a moment

As Cora, Vivien relentlessly deconstructs her partner’s masculinity, and as Dr Clare Smith, historic collection curator at the Metropolitan Police Museum, points out in her interview on the disc about Crippen, Medak is clearly fascinated by British crime, with Jack the Ripper becoming the alter ego of Peter O’Toole’s character in The Ruling Class, and his films on the Krays and Derek Bentley. She provides excellent context on the characters Theo and Vivien play by detailing the extraordinary tale of the Crippen murder with the aid of clips of Donald Pleasance and Samantha Eggar in Dr Crippen (1962). Cora was indeed a dominant force in her marriage and her physically outmatched husband went to every length to support her ambitions on the stage… he found solace in the arms of the more diminutive Ethel but only after poisoning his wife, dismembering her and burying her in his basement.

 

It's an odd situation to base sex games on but original author, Peter Everett – who won the Somerset Maughan Prize for his book – who co-adapted the script with Roger Lowry, clearly knew what he was doing in his original tale of identity and the worlds we create for ourselves. Here the more defined personalities are the women and, as Dr Smith says, it is unusual to find a film of this vintage in which the projection of identity is focused on the male.

You always push me; you wind me up life a clock… 

Whatever the reasons, nobody seems happy in spite of all their trendy trappings and freedom to love how they like, is this the end of their relationship or the beginning of a darker turn? Like the shop they are surrounded and smothered by the past and cannot move without its direct consideration. If Hell was situated off the Fulham Road, this might well be it… an all the while, Theo’s father (Maurice Denham) lies in hospital dreading what he is convinced will be an operation he won’t survive. 

"All men are fools and what makes them so is having beauty like what I've got..." E. Wise

Then, as if the edge couldn’t get any sharper, into Theo’s life comes a German photographer, Reingard (Diane Cilento, so far away from The Angel who Pawned Her Harp…), who admits she has been following the couple for some time… and has a few suggestions to make to liven their sexual play time. She has her own “negatives” as she discusses meeting her father for the first time when she was 17 when, after appraising her, he tore off her dress leaving her naked. She wants to take positives of the couple but as with Vivien she is projecting a masculine fantasy onto the blank slate that is Theo, why a timid murderer and why not an heroic figure like Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron who shot down 80 allied planes in the First World War, honouring his victims with the casting of silver cups.

 

The battle for Theo’s persona rapidly escalates even though the two women are almost in alliance, but it’s a whirlwind of a film which is more about nuanced interpretation than a narrative straight line. Given their connection via Sparrows (see below) it’s interesting to see Stephen Lewis – who wrote that film – as a scrap metal dealer who sells Theo a Tiger Moth which is then planted on their roof terrace and painted in von Richthofen’s colours. Red… for anger and the mist of toxic masculinity descends on Theo and there is much to interpret and consider.

 

All I know is that talking about Crippen, Crippen, Cri-ppen… upsets you!

 

Mad about the Baron

Basil Kirchin provides the score including a winsome theme which is contrapuntal to so much of the human rage and conflict – some deceptively sweet sauce for the bitter battle especially when it’s used in a diegetic way as the camera pans up to reveal Glenda Jackson playing it on piano . Barrie Vince’s editing is whip smart throughout and whilst also providing visual counterpoints to the emoting, enhances the feelings of confusion and events moving out of joint with the character’s sense of wellbeing. He and Medak force the pace for the viewer and that’s something even modern viewers might find boggling in the cinema!

 

It's a very challenging debut and one that struggled to gain a release on completion but which we can now see as the foundation of Medak’s long career as well as being Glenda Jackson’s first film. She had been a member of the RSC with McEnery and he continued mainly in theatre and TV after films in the UK and France. Diane Cilento was well established as a film actress by this time – Academy Award nominated for Tom Jones (1963) and uses her experience to add so much sinister here, changing the direction and the mood with an impressive German accent.

 

This BFI release uses Severin Films super sharp 4k restoration and is the first time Negatives has been made available in any format in the UK and will be of particular interest to those who have followed Medak’s half century career on both the big and small screen – he directed episodes of The Wire and Breaking Bad as well as films such as The Krays (1990), Let Him Have it (1991) and classics such as The Ruling Class (1972) starring Peter O’Toole, Arthur Lowe and Carolyn Seymour (his second wife). He even found time to direct concert films for Pink Floyd and Peter Gabriel.

 

The most talented actor in her family...

He arrived in Britain from Hungary aged just 18 in 1956 and having begun his career with Associated British Pictures he gained experience in a variety of roles and worked on films directed by Anthony Asquith, Val Guest and others. In her booklet essay, the BFI’s Jo Botting says his experience on Joan Littlewood’s Sparrows Can’t Sing (1963) was particularly important in his development. As she says, he would later favour… “unconventional narratives with larger-than-life characters – so Negatives was the perfect debut.” Hard to get life larger than Glenda, Peter and Diane…

 

Long may he reign and there’s two recent interviews with him in the extra special features below – as usual with the Flipside, the BFI are spoiling us!

 

Newly remastered from the original camera negative by Severin Films and presented in High Definition

 

Audio commentary by Tim Lucas

 

Audio interviews with Peter Medak (2024, 89 mins): two interviews with director Peter Medak, the first by the late author and film historian Lee Gambin, and the second with Severin’s David Gregory which was conducted at the director’s home

 

False Positive (2025, 11 mins): a newly recorded interview with actor Peter McEnery

 

Editing Negatives (2026, 31 mins): an interview with Barrie Vince, the award-winning editor of Negatives, Smashing Time and Deep End

 

Positives From Negativeland**: Scrapbook from a Grand Debut (2025, 16 mins): Peter Medak takes us through his production material for Negatives, as well as A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, recalling his memories of each experience

 

The Doctor Will See You Now (2025, 24 mins): an interview with Dr Clare Smith, the historic collection curator at the Metropolitan Police Museum, who discusses the life and crime of Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen

 

Image gallery

 

And, with the first pressing only, comes a handsome illustrated booklet featuring new essays by Dr Josephine Botting and William Fowler with notes on the special features and credits

 

The Blu-ray is released on 16^th March and you can pre-order from all the usual places or queue up at the BFI shop next Monday!

*America the Beautiful is at the Kings Head Theatre until 21^st March, details available on their website!

**I see the reference to the "Krautrock" classic track from NEU!

Diane Cilento gets out of the VW opposite Stamford Bridge

Friends of Lulu… Focus on Louise Brooks, Flicker Fusion Blu-ray

The moving finger writes: and, having writ, moves on updating the spreadsheet of what could be, what is and what has now been seen…

With apologies to Omar Khayyam

 

Patience is a virtue even if so often it is throttled by hope but, no ifs or maybes, this release is all the Christmas we need for 2026 and is nailed-on as my home media of the year with mind-boggling restorations and contributions from some of my favourite silent people. This blog began with the purchase of a Pandora’s Box DVD in an old shop in Park Street, Bristol – an acquisition which, literally opened a Brook’s Box of fascination about an actress and a medium that led to what is now 16 years of reading, watching and writing.

 

There are well over a million words on here, this being the 1050^th post, covering well over a thousand films but it all began with Lulu and my subsequent search for all things Brooks including a spreadsheet of the films she made, which ones were available on home media, what else survived and what was lost. A lot of this was based on Barry Parris’ biography of Brooks and then the fabulous Louise Brooks Society website run by Thomas Gladysz – a living archive now in its fourth decade. Then there was the Silent London blog run by Pamela Hutchinson which listed screenings of Brooks’ films and opened up the world of silent film screenings and live accompaniment which is where I found Stephen Horne (also one of my wife’s oldest friends, coincidence or just Silent Magic at work?).

 

I never expected to see any of the four films featured in this set over the ensuing years but gradually the list of the lost has been reduced, at least to varying degrees. This brilliant new release fills in what there is of four films including Brooks’ first two and features music from Mr Horne, a visual essay from Ms Hutchinson and commentary, plus commentary from Mr Gladysz and others. These people who have been with me on this Lulu of a journey, all contributing to this celebration of what we now have and it is very much a glass overflowing at half full nowhere near half empty.

 

So, I really do thank you three as well as Flicker Alley and San Francisco Film Preserve for this set, which really does show how Brooks’ career got started, how remarkably composed she was even from the off and how she could steel scenes from the best of ‘em.

LB with John Harrington

The Street of Forgotten Men (1925) with Stephen Horne accompaniment

 

Herbert Brenon's off-beat melodrama has been fully restored with the odd gap being covered by new intertitles. It’s a very watchable and quirky film that centres around an unlikely community of professional beggars in New York City’s Bowery, some with hearts of gold, others less so. Our hero among these men and women is Easy Money Charlie (Percy Marmont who I’ll always root for after Manhunt with Torrence and Bow…) who uses his natural charm to make a lot of money from a phoney missing arm. In a sure-fire signifier of his good character, he has a dog, (played by Lassie, who had played a similar role in Tol'able David (1921) and more) who is killed by the jealous and less skilled Bridgeport White-Eye (John Harrington) who can fake blindness but fails to see the need for compassion.

 

 A dying woman entrusts her daughter Mary to Charlie’s care and he takes this responsibility seriously, begging a small fortune to make sure she never sees his day job as he buys them a nice house in the country and pays her way through private school. You wonder what else he could do if he really put his mind to it because, Buddy, he can easily share a dime. In time Mary grows up to be played by Mary Brian who, in turn develops a relationship with a well-to-do young attorney called Philip Peyton (Neil Hamilton, still four decades away from answering the Batphone as Commissioner Gordon in Gotham City… one of my favourite silents-to-talkies facts).

 

You’d think that after twenty years of highly-successful grifting, someone would have noticed the source of Charlie’s wealth and indeed someone has and it is, of course, our fake blind man who is seen in the beggars bar with a young moll at his table – it’s Louise and she radiates instant impact in her few moments on screen, instantly assured even at the age of 18 by which time she’d burned through the modern dance aesthetic of the Denishawn Company and vaudeville, dancing in the 1925 edition of the Ziegfeld Follies at the Amsterdam Theatre on 42nd Street. She’s recognisably the woman who would be Lulu but at this point she’s all potential with a curious hint of rebellious diffidence that you can’t quite pin down.

 

Easy Money fights White Eye for trying to blackmail Mary’s beau and she roots for her man with ferocity before it transpires that he does indeed have an eye condition; one too many blows and he may lose his sight for real. It’s a scrappy ending to a film that infuses its beggars with enough real life to make you care. 

Stephen Hornes' accompaniment carries a hint of contemporary poverty songs but is his own creation as usual. He has such an affinity for Brooks - and, well, all silent film to be fair - but he illuminates her brief appearance with a lyrical statement that connects us to the broader Louise-verse; complex and mysterious, always stylish and self-assured!

 

Brooksie in colour and not much else.

The American Venus (1926) with Wayne Barker accompaniment

 

Brooks’ second film appearance was partially in colour and it’s both a shame and a relief that just a fragment survives of our hero in all her tonal glory. This half-minute segment exists in a BFI 35mm celluloid and is stunning; the only glimpse we ever get of Brooks in her Hollywood pomp but she was more than enough in black and white.

 

Directed by Frank Tuttle, the film stars Esther Ralston, former Keystone Cop Ford Sterling (who would also feature with Brooks in The Show Off (1926) which is extant and on DVD) there’s also Lawrence Gray, Miss America Fay Lanphier, and young Douglas Fairbanks Jr as Triton to Ernest Torrence’s King Neptune (now that I’d like to see!). Ralston plays Mary Gray, the daughter of a beauty cream manufacturer (William B. Mack) who enters a national beauty contest to save her father’s business from falling into the power of a rival manufacturer, Hugo Niles (Sterling). Just to add extra complication Mary is engaged to his son Niles (Kenneth MacKenna).

 

Louise Brooks is very believably Miss Bayport and there’s enough on show to again see her screen presence even amongst the competition. What survives are three trailers with differing content and two short extracts both involving Sterling trying to hide a swimming costume-clad Brooksie from his wife and the colour clip which may well have made it to the final film. Maybe one day more will be found but until then these spectacular snippets will leave much to the imagination…

 

Brooks, William Collier Jr. and Dorothy Macaill

Just Another Blonde (1926) with Wayne Barker accompaniment

 

As the commentary from Kathy Rose O’Regan explains, 35mm nitrate elements of this film were found in the Czech Film Archive but, with the best will in the World, damage seeps in over the decades, especially to the end of each reel, which is more exposed. This means that what was a film well over an hour is left at some 32 minutes with the damage between the changes in reels and gaps in the narrative such as a spectacular plane crash near the end.

 

That said this is perfectly watchable and makes narrative sense as two pals, Jimmy O'Connor (Jack Mulhall) and Kid Scotty (William Collier Jr.) try to romance Jeanne “Blondie” Cavanaugh (Dorothy Mackaill, from Kingston upon Hull!) and Diana “Blackie” O'Sullivan (Brooksie) in and around Coney Island – the film was originally called The Girl from Coney Island in fact. There are some lovely scenes in Luna Park which appear to have been shot in the middle of the night with extras*. Of course, Coney Island is quite familiar from its appearance in many silent films including The Crowd, Lonesome, It and others and, much like in Maurice Elvey’s Hindle Wakes (filmed in Blackpool) it pays tribute to the working-class playground. Director Alfred Santell even attached a camera to one of the roller coasters much as Elvey did on The Big Dipper in 1928, that’s still in place although I don’t think Coney Island has retained much of its old fun fair?

 

The story is boys meet girls and Brooksie shows she is able to play against type as the bookish Blackie who, in between being a shooting gallery attendant, is seen reading Blondes Have More Fun. Well, as Jean Harlow asked in Red-Headed Woman… “do they?” Unlikely in LB’s case… The critics were critical and the audiences forgetful – in terms of remembering to see the film**, but it’s fun and I’m sure brought many memories for New Yorkers and the weekend denizens of “The Playground of the World”

 

Wayne Barker accompanies on these two and whips up a cohesive flurry of lines that place us solidly within not only the time but the films as they would have been, his imagination running along as is the whole existed and not just these precious parts. 

 

Hatton, Brooks and Beery - no one else is looking up.

Now we’re in the Air (1927), with Stephen Horne accompaniment

 

“History isn't always about quality and Now We're in the Air proves that all too well. We are grateful for this sunshine glimpse of Brooks' extraordinary presence and yes, that probably is "code" but, you know what I and Henri Langlois mean...”

Me, after the restoration screening in Pordenone in 2017.

 

If these segments of Now We're in the Air didn't exist we'd still fantasise about the rediscovery of a beautiful moment of Louise Brooks that was lost. We have just over twenty minutes (a third of the full running time?) to make sense of a comedy featuring Wallace Beery and Raymond Hatton – one of a number of successful movies they made as Wally and Ray in the same vein such as Behind the Front and We're in the Navy Now from 1926. Brooks plays twin sisters, Grisette beloved of Wally and French, the other Griselle, Ray’s choice and a German.

 

As Thomas says in the commentary it was probably Brooks’ most commercially successful film and she shines brightly out in those glimpses we have, a twenty-year-old novice taking another care-less but convincing step to stardom. Now we’re in the Air showed that Brooks had genuine watchability and radiance especially alongside Mr Beery who she would later appear with in Beggars of Life.

 

As Pamela says, these early films are the foundation of Brooks’ career and her subsequent status. It’s not the quantity but the uncanny quality of their star makes them very special indeed: the biggest comeback kid in movie history, not in terms of box office but in her enduring influence and actual star power.

 

Stephen's assured Brooksiment reminds me of one special night at the Kennington Bioscope when he played for LB in the silent version of The Price of Beauty: there was something in the air that night - I think we all saw Brooksie through his playing. We recognise her too in the writings aand commentary of both Pamela Hutchinson and Thomas Gladysz - she is reanimated not just by these restorations but by their skill and our imagination.

That limited-edition spot gloss slipcover... 

There are a number of additional features to bear in mind if you are still considering whether to buy… although I can’t think of why you anyone would need further persuasion. 

Restoration Demo – This includes a detailed description of the restorations along with an explanation of the restorers’ art and terms of reference: the aim being to preserve the original elements as they should be.

Audio Commentaries – Hand on heart these are some of the most Informative audio commentaries including Brooks-ologist par excellence Pamela Hutchinson on The Street of Forgotten Men, then with author and film historian Thomas Gladysz and Kathy Rose O’Regan on Just Another Blonde, and with Gladysz and Robert Byrne on The American Venus and Now We’re in the Air. It’s interesting to hear both Gladysz vast subject knowledge mixed with the expertise of the restorers.

 

Looking at Lulu - this extended featurette from film historian Pamela Hutchinson is one of the best visual essays I’ve watched and reveals so much about the context of these films and their importance in Brooks’ career trajectory. Content enriching expertise!

 

Image Galleries - Featuring production stills and promotional material

 

Booklet Insert - With an essay by Thomas Gladysz and restoration notes by Robert Byrne

 

English closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing, as well as subtitle tracks in English, Spanish, French, and German

 

Blu-ray Authoring by David Mackenzie of Fidelity in Motion

 

It has All Region Encoding (A, B, C) so you can play it anywhere in the World!

 

There’s also a limited-edition spot gloss slipcover which is only available at the Flicker Alley website and select indie retailers SO, for the full set head over to their website now to order: I guarantee you will be enthralled and more in love with silent film than ever before – I shall personally underwrite this promise!

 

To recap, this is a collection of the extremely unlikely, made exceptionally watchable with the most expert and caring of restorations. It is not everything that might have been but… in this World, it is enough and we should be very grateful!

 

That’s not to say that I wouldn’t want a volume two Blu-ray set covering say restored versions of Love ‘em and Leave ‘em, A Girl in Every Port and Beggars of Life but… one step at a time!

 

Additional reading… collect them ALL!

 

Thomas Gladwysz on Brooksie and two of the above films.

 

Two of PH's works on two of my top ten films... more to come!

*More details of locations on Thomas Gladysz’ LouisBrooks Society website!

 

** Also quoted on the LBS site: Eileen Creelman reviewing for the New York American. She referred to the “fifth-rate story” but did admit there were “a couple of amusing characterisations”.

 

Pamela Hutchinson's new book, The Curse of Queen Kelly will be available on 27 March – Gloria Swanson’s birthday! It's published by from Sticking Place Books - details here - or click on the cover below.

Nurturing nature… No Blood Relation (1932), Kennington Bioscope

Without noticing it I’ve now being attending the Kennington Bioscope for over 11 years and there is always something to learn every time I go: something that will delight and move me in unexpected ways as well as historical-cultural insights you don’t get in the same way or at least with the same frequency. The KB formula is flexible and based on a freer programming schedule than most other cinemas, and tonight was no exception with a first half celebrating the 130th anniversary of cinema in this country – RW Paul and the Lumiere brothers both projecting film programmes on the same day – February 20^th in London – and a main feature from Japanese director, Mikio Naruse, that just blew our collective socks off with its style and quality.

 

To start at the ending, No Blood Relation (生さぬ仲), is the oldest surviving feature-length film from a director who ended up making so many more over the next three decades and whose work is certainly less well known than his contemporaries like Yasujiro Ozu. They have different styles but Naruse is just as effective in dealing with the human condition and in foregrounding women in emotional narratives that address timeless questions about their role in contemporary Japan as it evolved into a more militaristic and industrialised country.

 

Naruse intimate film acknowledges the cultural clash as well as the changes in relationships as a successful film star, Tamae Kiyooka (Yoshiko Okada) returns home after six years away. Okada was the star of Ozu’s Woman of Tokyo (1933) and led a dramatic life herself and would defect to Soviet Russia after the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 with her lover, the acting coach and activist, Ryōkichi Sugimoto. She had already been the subject of industry scandal but would now remain in the USSR until her death in Moscow in 1992.

Yukiko Tsukuba, Toshiko Kojima and Jōji Oka

Back in Naruse’s film she is greeted by dozens of photographers and hundreds of admirers before finding her brother, Keiji (Ichirō Yūki) who helps her escape the hubbub and find a suitable hotel. He we have just seen working with a street thief, Gen the Pelican (Shozaburo Abe) in a slapstick strip scene in which a casing mob search the young man only for his pal to have taken the purse in question. This is played for laughs but their criminality will soon aid Tamae’s plan to be reunited with her daughter.

 

The scene shifts to that daughter Shigeko (a remarkably assured performance from young Toshiko Kojima) as she plays with her toys and with her adoptive mother Masako (Yukiko Tsukuba) who is married to Tamae’s former lover and is the child’s natural father, Shunsaku Atsumi (Shin'yō Nara). The two split after the baby was born as the actress was more interested in another man and her career and so Atsumi, his mother Kishiyo (Fumiko Katsuragi) and now his new wife have raised the child.

 

Shozaburo Abe and Ichirō Yūki

It's going to get worse, but Atsumi’s day is already going badly as he has been declared bankrupt; a fact that gets him little sympathy from his mother who has got used to the wealthy way of living. He receives an unexpected offer to rescue the business and is crestfallen when he meets the potential investor, Tamae, who had left him holding their baby as she moved on to another life with another man. Her offer is simple but unacceptable: let me have my daughter back and I will save your business and your honour.

 

Despite his clear lack of business acumen Atsumi stands strong and gets arrested as a result of his business mismanagement. As the investigation proceeds the tug of love begins in earnest as Tamae bribes his mother to help her kidnap Shigeko with the aid of her brother. But the child will not be swayed and nor will her adoptive mother who is far more connected than her biological mother.

 

Yoshiko Okada

She is helped by her husband’s handsome pal Masaya Kusakabe (Jōji Oka who is just so cool in Ozu’s Dragnet Girl!) who is a martial artist and heroically coded, giving the bad guys a beating but otherwise trying to negotiate between the two mothers. Ultimately it’s a tale of the desire for parenthood and the love that can only be nurtured. Timeless in its way and riveting till the end.

 

Accompaniment was provided by John Sweeney who improvised a sympathetic concerto that was entirely within the film, filling out the emotional lines with fluidity and steadfast commitment to some wonderful emoting on screen. Naruse expert, programmer Dr Kelly Robinson, introduced and gave us a summary of the director’s career and highlighted his use of camera movement and pull-ins to maximise the emotional impact of his characters, it’s a startling technique and sets him apart from Ozu and others of the time. He’s certainly someone I want to see more of and this year’s Hippfest (18^th to 22^nd March!) will feature another of his films, Apart from You (1933).

We kicked off with Ian Christie and those magnificent men and their projection machines. First up on 20^th February 1896 was a performance at the Marlborough Hall in Regent Street – now remodelled as the Regent Street Cinema - arranged by the Lumiere’s, or rather their enterprising father Charles-Antoine, which was presented by multi-skilled theatrical Félicien Trewey, a frequent collaborator of the boys who specialised in making funny hats and, indeed, we saw a film demonstrating this. There had been earlier screenings in France and their most famous film, Train Entering Station, was almost certainly not part of the programme until later in the year.

 

The films we about 50ft long and lasted some 50 seconds but still a step forward in the recording of life and entertainment. The films included Le Débarquement du congrès de photographie à Lyon (1895) as well as Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895) which had been shown in the French screenings but no one really knows the programme for Marlborough Hall, although these early films were more likely than not. Surprisingly the brothers were not really interested in moving pictures and it was their father who thought they could improve on the equipment of the time and they had moved away from motion pictures in 1905. Their company issued about 2,500 films and, astonishingly all have been preserved and now restored. They are however, closely guarded by the Association frères Lumière and rarely screened… which is maddening, n’est pas?

 

Finsbury Technical College

Far – far – fewer of RW Paul’s films are extant and yet we can see him advancing the art of direction and narrative in ways that his technocratic colleagues from Paris did not. His programme took place in Finsbury Technical College, Britain’s first technical college opened almost exactly three years before on 19^th February and eventually to become part of Imperial College. Paul was an electrical engineer who developed his camera with the legendary Bert Acres – the pair had no option given Edison’s approach to IP… hoarding patents as well as necessity, is truly the mother of invention!

 

Paul produced 800 films and all that we have are just 83… he was an innovator and famously created the first two-shot film which Ian has restored to show a man waiting outside a museum and then looking at exhibits inside it. One small step for the cameraman but a huge one for film-kind… and there’s an HG Wells sidebar here in that the two talked about using Paul’s camera to create the effects described in HG’s The Time Machine. It sounds like Virtual Reality way too soon… neither man had the time to complete the project at the time.

When is a car not a car? The ? Motorist (1906)

 

Ian chose a variety of Paul’s films as, again, the exact programme is not known. What we could see was more narratively rich, humorous and – dare I say it – more genuinely “cinematic” than the Lumiere’s work. But it was all stunning, 130-year old life flashing in front of us and all illustrated musically by John Sweeney’s wonderful accompaniment.

 

Another one of those special Bioscope evenings. The place is haunted by the ghosts of cinema past as well as the nerds of cinema present and future. The elements intermingle and the results are always inspiring!

 

Félicien Trewey in a hat!

Spending time with HG Wells and Georges Méliès...