Film Reviews
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Whistle Down the Wind (Bryan Forbes, 1961)
Drama with Hayley Mills, Alan Bates, Bernard Lee & Norman
Bird.
Stylistically, Whistle Down the Wind treads the centre between the
sentimentalism of postwar British cinema and the stark realism of the sixties.
The bleak Lancashire countryside is photographed with great ambience by Arthur
Ibbetson (The Railway Children, Willy Wonka and the
Chocolate Factory).
The story has three children discovering "Jesus" in their barn, and follows
their attempts to keep his presence a secret from the adults. Underneath the
events of the film is a journey of faith and doubt and puzzlement. There is a
quite deliberate ambiguity, I think, that left me wondering whether the film
was cynical or positive about the virtues of childlike faith.
The children turn in believable performances, including Hayley Mills, whose
presence works surprisingly well, despite my suspicion that her star persona
might add a touch of artifice to the production. The rest of the child cast
are made up of real Lancastrian schoolchildren, so the thick northern accents
and quaint idioms are all quite genuine.
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Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Mel
Stuart, 1971)
Musical fantasy with Gene Wilder, Jack Albertson, Peter Ostrum, Julie Dawn
Cole, Denise Nickerson, Paris Themmen, Roy Kinnear, Diane Sowle, Leonard Stone
& Aubrey Woods.
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Wizard of Oz, The (Victor Fleming, 1939)
Musical fantasy with Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr, Jack Haley, Frank
Morgan, Margaret Hamilton & Billie Burke.
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Young Frankenstein (Mel Brooks, 1974)
Parody with Gene Wilder, Marty Feldman, Teri Garr, Kenneth
Mars, Cloris Leachman, Peter Boyle & Madeline Kahn.
This is the most consistently funny and inspired of Mel
Brooks's comedies. A parody of the Universal Frankenstein series of the 1930s
and '40s, it features a brilliant performance by Wilder in the title role,
supported among others by British comedian Feldman as a humpbacked assistant
(a cross between Dwight Frye's Fritz and Bela Lugosi's Ygor), Mars as
Inspector Kemp (an homage to Lionel Atwill's Inspector Krogh), Boyle as the
Monster, Leachman as housekeeper Frau Blucher (with shades of Judith Anderson
and Gale Sondergaard), and Teri Garr and Madeline Kahn as a naive laboratory
assistant and Frankenstein's fiancee, respectively, both looking utterly
sumptuous. The cast have a riot with a great script. Look out for Gene
Hackman's irresistibly funny cameo, too.
The expressionistic shades and eerie tones of Gerald Hirschfield's lighting
and photography capture perfectly the mood of the Universal series, and Wilder
and Brooks's screenplay draws wittily from every aspect of the original films.
While hilarious, it pays respectful homage to the Frankenstein films rather
than getting cheap shots at their expense.
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Zelig (Woody Allen, 1983)
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