1940s
stephen.walsh
The Britten centenary will, among much else, inspire performances of his comparatively under-regarded instrumental works - pieces like the cello suites and the string quartets, already sampled in brilliant performances at last week’s Wye Valley Chamber Music Festival. But I personally remain an adherent of his vocal music, and especially of the Spring Symphony, which I first got to know – and vainly to imitate – as a Cambridge undergraduate decades ago. It was a treat to revisit this dazzling score on Friday, so early in the festivities, in an exemplary performance under David Atherton Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Jean-Luc Godard once said, "All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl". Aside from upping the ante to include a formidable arsenal of the former, Ruben Fleischer's Gangster Squad hangs its fedora on that wisdom. It might however have aimed a little higher, as its glamour-and-guns story is trimmed to the point of frustration. There's action aplenty but with a story told in quips and shorthand, this is the gangster movie as entertainment pure and simple.Gangster Squad is a heavily fictionalised account of the Los Angeles Police Department's post-war assault on organised crime, loosely based Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Blessed with the finest (and most infuriatingly catchy) soundtrack of any Christmas film, Vincente Minnelli’s 1944 movie-musical Meet Me in St Louis is a festive classic of a simpler, happier time. Small girls roam the streets in safety getting up to all kinds of wholesome mischief, bigger girls sing songs around the piano and fall for the boy next door. As a cinematic metaphor for the virtues of the small-town life it’s enough to make any commuter swap their season ticket for picket-fence.“We don’t have to come here on a train or stay in a hotel, it’s right in our own home town, right here Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In the early years of the talkies, they sure did a lot of talking, and no actor mastered the tricky art of gabbling on screen quite like the young James Stewart. The Shop Around the Corner (1940) was a perfect vehicle for the versatile but somehow always gawky all-American everyman who had starred most recently as Frank Capra’s leading man in You Can’t Take It With You (1938) and Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939).And it's all talk here. Ernst Lubitsch took a frothy 1937 stage play by Hungarian-born naturalised American Miklós László, known in English as Parfumerie, and turned it into a Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
It’s brash, jolly, stuffed with wildly politically incorrect language, double entendres and spoof-laden song and dance. But beneath its brightly painted face, its stockings, suspenders and corsets, its uniforms and bravado, Peter Nichols’ 1977 musical drama is revealed, in a production by Michael Grandage that is as sensitive as it is exuberant, to be both acerbically astute and compassionate. Well, as the leading lady, Acting Captain Terri Dennis puts it, “you can’t always judge a sausage by its foreskin”.That show-stealing role is inhabited to the hilt by Simon Russell Beale as the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Although Anthony Mann is best known for the five James Stewart Westerns (and one apiece starring Henry Fonda and Gary Cooper) he directed during the 1950s, it was the dour film noirs he made during the previous decade that made his name. Like Mann’s T-Men, Raw Deal, He Walked by Night, and Border Incident, Railroaded! (1947) was written by John C Higgins, whose pacey, violent stories owe much to the pulps.The opening is particularly impressive for being low key. A heist on a beauty parlour that’s a front for a gambling racket goes wrong when a cop is murdered by the masked robber (John Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Cole Porter’s musical spin on Shakespeare demands the fluidity, fizz and acidity of champagne. In Trevor Nunn’s revival, which transfers to London after a successful run in Chichester, it’s more like gelato. It has sweetness, and a rich abundance of detail, but it’s also thick, cloying, and somewhat bland. There’s plenty of stagey pizzazz on display, but it too often feels strained and soulless. The production lingers when it should zing, and despite some fine song and dance, it never conjures either the sexual heat or the showbiz buzz that should set it sparkling.The show takes place on and Read more ...
Graham Fuller
As the title suggests, It Always Rains on Sunday wasn’t one of Ealing Studios' famous comedies, but a film suffused with resignation and realism. That’s not to say the 1947 classic is monotonous: how could it be when it’s a bickering domestic drama, a panoramic portrait of Bethnal Green street culture, and a thriller that draws on French poetic realism and American film noir? And given its provenance, it does at least include a wryly comic story about petty criminals.It’s not hard to divine why the film’s director, Robert Hamer (better known for the elegant aristocraticide of Kind Read more ...
judith.flanders
The Royal Ballet’s autumn season began on Monday, but this was the eagerly awaited Swan Lake. Natalia Osipova, ex-Bolshoi, now principal with American Ballet Theater and the Mikhailovsky in St Petersburg, was making her debut as a guest with the Royal Ballet, partnered by Carlos Acosta.Osipova had, dramatically, left the Bolshoi for the smaller and less prestigious Mikhailovsky, to the puzzlement of many. But the Bolshoi streams its dancers: a certain type is classical, another is romantic, another – Osipova’s type – play soubrettes. Her Kitri in Don Quixote (first seen in London in 2007) Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This week a holy relic has gone on show in the British Library. The continuous scroll of the original manuscript of On the Road is a kind of ur-artefact of the Beat Generation. Typed up by Jack Kerouac in three weeks in April 1951, and 120 feet long, it underpins a central myth of the Beats: that a tight-knit counter-cultural post-war generation of young American writers were powered by nothing but inspiration (plus of course pills, nicotine and booze). They wrote the way jazzers performed - free-wheelingly, in the moment, without regard for the piffling orthodoxy of structure. Or as Kerouac' Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Do we really needed to hear more from Joe Lampton, the anti-hero of John Braine’s Room at the Top? His battle for social advancement and sexual self-expression has long since stopped holding up a mirror to society, you'd think. In fact we nearly didn’t hear more from him in this new BBC adaptation. Anyone turning on BBC Four one night in April last year expecting to watch would have been disappointed. Owing to a late-blooming rights dispute, the BBC decided on the day of broadcast not to go ahead. Now, 18 months later, with all legal ducks finally in a row, the first episode went out last Read more ...
geoff brown
Five million dollars: in the 1940s that was enough profit to make this Technicolor melodrama 20th Century Fox’s biggest box-office hit of the decade. Reaching cinemas in January 1946 on the heels of World War Two, John M. Stahl’s film didn’t offer audiences the conventional home comforts. Derived from a best-selling novel by Ben Ames Williams, Leave Her to Heaven tells a crazed story of obsessive jealousy, of a family and marriage wracked by sudden death, a violent abortion, and arsenic poisoning, all perpetrated by its scheming heroine – a beautiful shoulder-padded basilisk played with Read more ...