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An error has ocurred. Please try againThese movies date mostly from the 1950s, in my view the best era for westerns, but many of them don't get talked about much these days. Fans of the genre will be familiar with most of them, however they deserve to be more widely known and appreciated.
Reviews
The Night of the Hunter (1955)
Beyond disappointing.
This is a difficult one. I don't think my opinion of a movie has ever been so at odds with critical opinion. While there are many classic movies which I may not particularly like, I can generally understand why they are highly rated. That isn't something I can say about Night Of The Hunter.
Aside from the superb cinematography, and some of the music, it's technically a poor movie, and seems to fail on just about every count. It's poorly acted, directed, scripted, edited and paced. I really am at a loss to see how so many glaring and fundamental problems can be overlooked by so many people.
The biggest single issue for me is the standard of acting, which veers from passable (Gish, Gleason) to toe-curling (Winters) via unintentionally hilarious (Mitchum). As these people have given strong to excellent performances in other movies, the fault has to lie with Laughton's direction. Mitchum's performance is held up as a career best. I cannot begin to fathom this - the cartoonish nature of the character, the ridiculous lines he has to utter and the flagrant hamminess completely undermine any element of fear or suspense he's meant to generate. Villains are supposed to be at least plausible. Why not go the whole hog and tattoo "nutjob" on his forehead? Faced with this, it's no surprise Mitchum thought "to hell with it" and just turned it up to 11.
Winters seems completely at sea, probably because her character is so badly under-written that there's little she can do to communicate how and why she behaves as she does. The rest of the cast are simply cyphers meant to represent good or bad traits, rather than actual characters you might care about, the Spoons being particularly egregious examples. Gish, however, manages to breath a little life into her role, despite being saddled with some of the very hokiest lines.
It's clear Laughton had no interest in strict realism, which is no bad thing, but in order to work, this kind of stylised fable requires a certain lightness of touch. Unfortunately, almost everything in this movie, aside from some of its cinematography, is heavy-handed. The characters are pretty unbelievable even as archetypes, and much of what they say and do seems ridiculous. The result is bathos: many scenes are faintly risible, and more than a few are point-and-laugh. You don't feel for any of the characters because it never knits together as a drama, so all you end up with is a bunch of people acting. Badly.
Many people have spoken about the dark and unsettling nature of this film. I can see that this is its aim, but when Evil is presented as so obvious and so ludicrous, practically twirling his moustachios and laughing maniacally, it topples over into pantomime. It seems to me to completely misunderstand the nature of evil - its banality, its seductiveness and its plausibility. I'd say it's not particularly strong on the nature of Good either, which is faced with no difficult moral choices or dilemmas and ends up coming across as trite.
It's a beautiful film to look at, but so utterly disappointing on just about every other score.
Black Swan (2010)
More dead parrot than dying swan
This film consists of a number of stock characters going through their usual motions until an ending which is semaphored well in advance. Now this is true of many movies, but a well-executed film can still capture your interest even with these handicaps.
In this case, though, the characters are lifeless, not particularly well-acted and completely under-written. The script almost comes off like first draft, and is devoid of humour, wit or originality. So no one says anything interesting or memorable at any point, and none of the characters even begins to elicit your sympathy, or goes off-piste in an interesting way. The ostensible bad girl dresses in black and even has a tattoo of black wings on her back, ferchrissakes. She likes a drink, too, as well as some other naughty stuff. Or does she? Poor Vincent Cassel probably wins the photo-finish just ahead of Barbara Hershey in the most-clichéd character stakes.
The central conceit needed to be handled with a good deal of subtlety to make it work. It's actually dealt with in such an appallingly ham-fisted way that it made me laugh out loud several times. Hokey, I think, is the mot juste. Clearly, Aronofsky didn't have sufficient trust in his own abilities to make the point without B-horror movie special effects and truckloads of symbolism that smack you in the face like a wet kipper. Either that or he didn't trust his audience to understand the movie without battering them into submission.
Utter tripe.
Forbrydelsen (2007)
Overwhelmed by incredible sub-plots
Echoing what an earlier reviewer said about this, while it is in many ways wonderful television, ultimately I came away quite disappointed. The sheer length, requiring numerous plot twists of increasing ridiculousness and decreasing relevance, blunted the efforts of a fantastic cast and production team.
The standard of acting and direction were top drawer. The atmosphere, the characters, the relationships between them and their interactions were brilliantly drawn and executed. There were tons of compelling scenes. And the ending was satisfying and made sense.
Unlike, it has to be said, huge wodges of the intervening plot. It twists, it turns, it doubles back, it double bluffs, and most of it is just an enormous shaggy dog story. As time passes, you realise that a lot of the plot has a real bolted-on, ad-hoc feel, to the extent that you suspect they're making it up as they go along. The Holck interlude in particular, including Nanna working in the pick up joint was completely unbelievable and had that feel to it, yet it was the hinge that linked the murder and political sub-plots together.
I started to get that "Lost" feeling around episode 8, and by the time Lund was banged up for shooting Meyer, I started throwing things at the television. That whole section was utterly incredible. There's something particularly enraging when fully-formed, totally believable and brilliantly acted characters in a realistic milieu get saddled with duff plot which makes no sense. It undermines the painstakingly built-up realism which is the ultimate strength of this drama.
Too often, particularly towards the end, I was uncomfortably reminded, not of the Wire, Six Feet Under, Mad Men or the Sopranos - which it aspired to and sometimes matched - but sophomoric, high gloss, high concept crap like 24, CSI or Murder One.
Among the many loose ends and inexplicable actions which the reams of plot threw up, here's a selection (spoilers)
Why was Holck going to kidnap Lund? And why did he kill Olav? Why did the paedophile hold the old lady hostage? Why didn't Morten do a proper clean-up job? How come Troels got a taxi to the cottage, but the black car was seen outside? Why did Meyer not just name Vagn instead of talk about his sweatshirt? From what completely different universe did the suicide bid wander in from - it didn't make sense in terms of what had already happened and what happened subsequently and was beyond out of character. What and who exactly was Buchard protecting? Who was watching Sara and for God's sake, why? Was it really just to add to the atmosphere of paranoia? And how many sleaze-balls and nut jobs can one girl run across in a few months, in order to fill out the cast of potential suspects?
I hate to say all this because for the first 7 or so episodes, I managed to suspend my disbelief, and before the whole thing was overwhelmed by its own plot, it was fantastic.