Tag: French New Wave

No Trees in the Street

Director – J. Lee Thompson – 1959 – UK – Cert. 12 – 96m

****

An essentially honest young woman living in her parents’ East End slum fails to stop her impetuous younger brother from becoming involved in the criminal underworld – one of two J. Lee Thompson movies out on UK Blu-ray, DVD and Digital

Framed by a contemporary story of plain clothes policeman Frank (Ronald Howard) trying to talk sense into a knife-carrying teenager (David Hemmings), this takes place in the East End street where the latter lives some 20 years previously. The name has changed: back then, Somerset Street was known as Kennedy Street. The policeman, who is local, has always worked this beat. 20 years ago, he was trying to prevent another young man from drifting into a life of crime.

That other young man is Tommy (Melvyn Hayes), who lives with his father, mother and older sister Hetty (Sylvia Syms) in fairly basic accommodation. It’s a poor area and honest work is hard to come by. Both brother and sister would like to find a way out, into a better life. Both have less than honest ways of doing so, in the form of local ‘businessman’ Wilkie (Herbert Lom).… Read the rest

Tags 1950s, a better life, abusive, accommodation, aerial photography, attraction, British, businessman, Carole Lesley, character study, crime, criminal, David Hemmings, East End, Elstree Studios, first starring role, French New Wave, gangland girl, good girl, Herbert Lom, honest, housing, J. Lee Thompson, Joan Miller, job, Kennedy Street, kitchen sink realism, knife, Lana Morris, Lee-Thompson Godwin/Willis, Liam Redmond, living at home, London, Melvyn Hayes, music hall, object of affection, older sister, on the beat, performer, plain clothes policeman, police beat, policeman, poor, poverty, pragmatism, production company, quirky characters, romantic interest, Ronald Howard, roots, screenplay, set, siblings, slum, smooth operator, Somerset Street, Stanley Holloway, stealing, straight and narrow, Sylvia Syms, Ted Willis, teenager, theatre, torment, troubled youth, UK, underworld, unemployment, unloading a van, unrequited love, waste ground, young offenders, young woman, younger brother

Features Live Action Movies

Nomad
(Lie Huo Qing Chun,
烈火青春)
4K Director’s Cut

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 15 July 2023
No Comments on Nomad
(Lie Huo Qing Chun,
烈火青春)
4K Director’s Cut
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Director – Patrick Tam – 1982 – Hong Kong – Cert. 15 tbc – 92m

*****

A group of young Hongkongers fool around with sex and search for a cultural identity – plays in the UK as part of Focus Hong Kong 2023 at BFI Southbank which runs from Wednesday, July 12th to Saturday, July 15th

Opening with a curious conversation in a typically cramped Hong Kong apartment between a man embarrassed about being a father and his own father advising against lowering interest rates before moving swiftly through an equally cramped scene with the dour and concerned families of a young teen and the coquettish girl he has got pregnant, this freewheeling, slices of Hong Kong teenage life drama moves swiftly on to the man’s son Pong (Kent Tong), a lifeguard at the local swimming pool who in a complete switch of tone fails to get a rowdy and playful group of girl swimmers under control with the result that they throw him in the pool and humiliate him by stealing his shorts.

Before that, Pong has a run in with a confident young woman Kathy (Pat Ha) who sits in and refuses to move from his lifeguard seat unless he physically lifts her down.… Read the rest

Features Live Action Movies

Contempt
(Le Mépris)

Director – Jean-Luc Godard – 1963 – France – Cert. 15 – 103m

*****

Review originally published in What’s On In London when the film was reissued in 1996 – out in cinemas in a 4K remaster from Friday, 2nd June and on 4K UHD, Blu-ray, DVD & digital from Monday, 26th June 2023

Made back in 1963 in the latter days of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (Le Mépris) anticipates J.G. Ballard’s seminal, 1973 novel Crash, subsequently and controversially filmed by David Cronenberg in 1996. Alongside a director in a film studio (Godard casts the great Fritz Lang, who famously made the silent classic Metropolis at UFA in 1926 before a subsequent career in Hollywood on westerns and crime thrillers), Contempt boasts a central protagonist obsessed by his wife’s sexual peccadilloes, not to mention bleak, domestic, modernist architecture and mythical car crash aftermaths.

The camera lingers lovingly over the latter to George Delerue’s unforgettable and heavily romantic score, but pays little attention to the actual moment of impact (even less than in Cronenberg’s Crash).

It’s one of Godard’s best films and possibly his most accessible. Director Lang struggles to film The Odyssey at CineCitta with unsympathetic producer Jeremiah Prokosh (a towering Jack Palance) who waxes lyrical about life and art while seducing Camille (a stunningly contemptuous Brigitte Bardot), wife of hired screenwriter Michel Piccoli.… Read the rest

Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Orchestrator
Of Storms:
The Fantastique World
Of Jean Rollin

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 4 March 2023
No Comments on Orchestrator
Of Storms:
The Fantastique World
Of Jean Rollin
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Directors – Dima Ballin, Kat Ellinger – 2022 – UK – 112m

***

The story of one of Europe’s most idiosyncratic and overlooked directors – on the Arrow Video Channel from Tuesday, February 14th

In the early 1960s when the French New Wave was taking off, the idea was to go out and make movies on the streets, an approach intended to inject them with freshness. That movement is present in the backdrop of this film, because while it was achieving a huge international profile, fledgling French film maker Jean Rollin who similarly wanted to go out and shoot movies without all the old formal constraints was being largely ignored by industry, critics and audiences.

Finance was always a struggle, and he soon found himself making features within European sexploitation cinema, where directors had a great degree of freedom provided they incorporated a certain amount of nudity and sex.

There were lean periods too where he worked directing softcore and hardcore porn to survive; aside from chronicling when these happened in his career, this documentary doesn’t go into them at any length. Overall, it takes a chronological approach to Jean Rollin to give some idea of his life, career and filmography.… Read the rest

Features Live Action Movies

Souad
(So’ad,
سعاد)

Director – Ayten Amin – 2021 – Egypt, Tunisia, Germany – Cert. 12a – 96m

***

Home truths are revealed about a 19-year-old, social media-obsessed, Egyptian girl in this small independent film – out in cinemas on Friday, August 27th

Starting and ending with a (different) young woman riding a bus, this slice of life drama takes a look at the lives of teenage girls in Egypt. The older generation live according to traditional, Islamic values, including the subjugation of women to men, while their younger counterparts like many Generation Z-ers around the world have more contemporary Western concerns.

For Souad (Bassant Ahmed), 19, it’s all about fashion, boys and looking cool on and off social media. Riding on the bus, she regales fellow travellers with tales of her boyfriend whose identity changes as she talks to the next woman sitting next to her. She visits a clothes shop and successfully shoplifts an item of headgear.

Having established her as either a teller of tall tales or a pathological liar, we see her giving her younger sister Rabab (Basmala Elghaiesh), 16 going on 17, a pretty unreasonable grilling when the later complains, understandably, that Souad is late picking her up.

When Souad unexpectedly vanishes from the story, her shaken sister travels to Alexandria to meet and get to know better her sister’s former boyfriend Ahmed (Hussein Ghanem) in an attempt to find out more about sides of Souad’s life she didn’t really know.… Read the rest