1950s
Graham Fuller
Robert Wise directed the 1959 bank heist thriller Odds Against Tomorrow after the classic film noir cycle had ended, but it's an exemplary noir nonetheless. In its day it was an important transitional work – a race-relations allegory, less well-known or hopeful than Stanley Kramer's 1958 The Defiant Ones, that played its part in the burgeoning Civil Rights movement. Harry Belafonte initiated the project for his production company and hired the blacklisted screenwriter Abraham Polonsky to adapt the novel by William P. McGivern (author, too, of The Big Heat). The loot Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's remarkable that the story of Seretse Khama, the king of Bechuanaland, isn't more popularly known, though Amma Asante's film may change all that. The movie opens in a smoggy, gloomy London in 1947, where Seretse (David Oyelowo) is completing his studies in law prior to returning to rule his homeland. Momentous change is in the air in the post-war world, as Europe struggles to rebuild and Indian independence signals sundown on the British Empire. Seretse encounters filing clerk Ruth Williams (Rosamund Pike) at a London Missionary Society dance, where their eyes meet across a crowded Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Ewan McGregor has been judged unworthy of adapting Philip Roth in the US. But his directorial debut is finely crafted, and powered by visceral emotion embodied in one of his best performances. As Seymour “Swede” Levov, he’s an All-Jewish-American hero, living the 1950s dream, till the 1960s bring it crashing down. His beloved daughter Merry (Dakota Fanning, pictured below right) is the agent of his destruction, in a one-sided generation war unusually seen from the straight-edged parents’ side. McGregor, here a kinder artist than Roth, cares about the father and daughter with a painful Read more ...
Saskia Baron
In case one thought that turning hit TV shows into movies was a 21st century phenomenon, here comes a restoration of The Small World of Sammy Lee to prove that film-makers were at it back in 1963.Writer-director Ken Hughes's noir drama started off as Sammy, a tense, one-hour, one-location television play made in 1958. Its small screen success allowed Hughes to hire the incomparable documentary photographer Wolf Suschitzky as his DP and cast musical star Anthony Newley for the feature film version. Newley plays Sammy, a small-time hustler in Soho, dodging the bookies' heavies who are chasing Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s 58 years since “Britain’s answer to Elvis Presley” had his first top 10 hit and now he’s back, and back to his roots, with a new CD, Just… Fabulous Rock ‘n’ Roll, released by Sony with whom, at the grand old age of 76, he has signed a lucrative new contract. And don’t mock. It’s a terrific album: 15 classic songs including a “duet” with Elvis Presley, without whom.Recorded at the Blackbird Studio in Nashville, where the likes of Dolly Parton, Sheryl Crow, Hank Williams Jr, Taylor Swift and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers have worked, it’s produced by Steve Mandile of country quintet. Sixwire Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Peter Morgan can't get enough of Her Majesty. Ten years ago he wrote The Queen (with Helen Mirren starring), in 2013 he brought us the stage play The Audience (Dame Helen, again), and now he's written all 10 episodes of this first series of Netflix's royal juggernaut, The Crown.The long-term strategy is for The Crown to tell the story of the Queen from her wedding in 1947 to the present day, which producers Left Bank Pictures reckon will take six seasons. Stepping into the royal shoes is Claire Foy, whom we first meet as she prepares for her wedding to Philip Mountbatten (Matt Smith, pictured Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
True to its title, Pool of London is one of the great London films. More than this, it included British cinema’s first – albeit chaste – interracial romance and convinces as film noir. Filmed in 1950 and released in February 1951, it was passed by the British Board of Film Censors for screening with no cuts. But it did get an “A” certificate, which meant children had to be accompanied by adults. This no children’s film, though.Merchant seamen Dan MacDonald (Bonar Colleano) and Johnny Lambert (Earl Cameron) arrive in London on the freighter Dunbar, which docks on the Thames in the heart of the Read more ...
David Nice
"That cursed mist" may hide the French from the crew of the HMS Indomitable and cause far more deadly damage to moral certainty. But clarity and strength are the assets of Orpha Phelan's new production for Opera North: no gimmicks, superb company work and three principals for the battle of good and evil all equal to their dramatic challenges at a level I haven't seen for decades.Britten and his co-librettists EM Forster and Eric Crozier pose some challenges in their adaptation of Melville's story, all well handled here: there's a bit too much moralising, especially about avenging angels and Read more ...
David Nice
Nobody said that a 70-minute audience with the undead was going to be easy. You can read Samuel Beckett's Texts for Nothing in your own time, pausing for thought, leaving off, coming back. When as compelling an actor as Lisa Dwan chooses not just to read it but to perform a selection for the first time, there's nowhere to hide – either for us or for her.Beckett runs cosmic circles around a state of being not quite in this world, of seeking a body, a head, a mouth, to express his stream of consciousness; paradoxically, in the theatre, you've got them all, in the shape of Dwan's utterly Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Super Furry Animals front man Gruff Rhys is a quietly prolific talent. Every few years or so, there’ll be another album, complete with the kind of thought-through concept that gives lift to his literate and expressive story songs and colours them with context.“Literate” is word very much at the centre of his latest project, a soundtrack to the 2014 film Set Fire to the Stars, which details Dylan Thomas’s time in New York in the 1950s. Recorded around the same time as Rhys’s wonderfully expansive ode to another Welsh traveler to the Americas, the explorer John Evans, American Interior, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
For the final show in his year-long stay at this West End address, Kenneth Branagh has chosen to revive and star in John Osborne’s 1957 play. By doing so, he finds himself once again treading in the footsteps of Sir Laurence Olivier, who originally created the role. It’s not the first time he’s shadowed the legendary actor. In 1989, he played Henry V on film, and then also the great man himself (in the 2011 film Marilyn and Me). But can Branagh make this Angry Young Man period piece, which is both an attack on the British government’s handling of the Suez Crisis and a love letter to the music Read more ...
joe.muggs
If last night made anything clear it's that some things are still some way beyond the reach of hipster reappropriation. The audience in Hyde Park for Carole King was 99% white and middle-aged, with the very few younger people scattered about appearing to be teenagers there with their parents. Within that, though, there was a broad spread of class, and – reflecting the appeal of King's Tapestry album at the time of its release – everyone from grizzled old hippies to a whole legion of straight-as-a-die mums and dads of the kind who have probably only bought half a dozen other albums since the Read more ...