Pa.

LA RICOTTA, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s tragicomic episode of ROGOPAG, is a substantial piece of work. It’s good enough to place at the start or finish of the film, but perhaps its downbeat conclusion argued against renaming the film either PAGOROG or GROGOPA,

During the filming of the crucifixion, a lowly extra or bit-part player, Mario Cipriani, troubled with hiccups, struggles to get something to eat on location after giving his lunch to his starving family. Orson Welles plays the film’s director. Although we’re on location in familiar-looking extra-Roman scenery (maybe on the road to Ostia, where PPP placed Fellini’s CABIRIA, and where he would meet his own death twelve years later), the scenes from the film within the film are shot on a stage at Cinecitta in ravishing colour.

Here’s a funny thing: did PPP have a bigger budget than his fellows? Rossellini is unable to afford foreign locations; Godard shoots on the streets, has no production design save a newspaper. Pasolini has colour, period costumes, a large supporting cast, Laura Betti, and Orson Welles as the film’s director. A clue may come from an exchange reported when JLG interviewed RR: “Is it necessary to spend the whole budget on the film?” asked Godard. “You spend what you have to,” replied Rossellini, “the rest is for you and your family.”

Pasolini, a decent actor and striking presence, should really be playing the director himself, who quotes Pasolini, but I guess casting Welles allows him to satirise Hollywood, even of OW is hardly a typical embodiment of that town/attitude. Also, Welles is funnier than Pasolini could have been. The repeated shot of a morose Welles alone in his chair is extremely amusing. And I haven’t generally been a fan of PPP’s comic stylings. I’ll never forget the ghastly Chaplin pastiche in THE CANTERBURY TALES, an example of a totally mismatched talent failing to grasp the aesthetic he’s aiming at. (Ken Russell, who one would have thought equally distant from CC, manages slightly better in LISZTOMANIA.)

We do get undercranked footage with shrill fast-forward music, but it’s used really as interstitial material and is not actively unfunny. And applying the comic touch a tad heavily works, I think, since this is all headed for tragedy, so you get more of a tonal clash this way. I feel, in a way, that Pasolini’s sensibility and whole outlook is anti-comic: the joking in this film is mostly cruel sport made of the bit-player, mockery by the rest of the cast and crew, and the film only joins in this comedy as a distancing device, not because it finds him funny.

Equating comedy with bullying is reductive, but there is some element of truth to the accusation. Bullies always try to use humour, though the resulting laughter is tinged with fear — people laugh along because they don’t want to be the next victim.

I like the idea of directors nodding to one another in their own work: Gregoretti will include a Pasolini gibe in his concluding chapter here, but PPP’s tribute to Fellini is more ambivalent. “He dances,” says Welles, thoughtfully, when asked his opinion by an annoying reporter. A questioning look. “yes. He dances,” repeats the scowling Buddha.

PPP starts the piece with an onscreen text and narration by himself in which he affirms the significance of the Bible and the passion of Christ, lest anyone think he’s mocking it. Which would be an easy conclusion to jump to — (really fun) Italian pop music playing while extras dance, the accident of a real fatality interrupting the Calvary tableau, the grumpiness of actors and crew undercutting the solemnity of the scene being shot, Christ’s deposition being interrupted when the body is dropped — this is all aimed at the faux-seriousness of religiose movie-making, I guess, but it has blasphemous side-effects. Surprisingly, this movie proceeds THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST MATTHEW in release, but PPP must already have been at least planning his own big Jesus picture.

Pasolini wasn’t above mistreating extras himself, according to my spy on the set of CANTERBURY TALES, whose veracity I cannot confirm. Reportedly, when the money ran out and the background artists could not be paid, the director insisted “You do it for the art,” provoking derisive laughter. When my spy heard that PPP was leaving his AD to shoot the movie while he filmed hardcore porn in a nearby castle, the spy volunteered for what is known as a meaty role, but was unable to, er, perform, and, in fleeing an enraged Pasolini, tumbled down the castle stairs and broke his arm. I think this story SHOULD be true, but I can’t vouch for it.

I’m always sensitive to the uses Welles is put to in films, but I didn’t find anything to get upset about here. PPP makes him a villain, the representative of capitalism, but also a sensitive artist (the film he’s making looks nice!). You could imagine him getting on well with Lang’s character from LE MEPRIS, and he gets the film’s summative line, the moral lesson. Films shouldn’t have moral lessons delivered in summative lines, but the Welles character’s complicated, compromised position in the movie undercuts his sympathy for our deceased hero, which (mostly) takes the curse off it.

Forbidden Garden

Thanks to Bavafan1 for recommending Fred FORBIDDEN PLANET Wilcox’s 1949 version of THE SECRET GARDEN (produced by Clarence Brown), which begins as a Gothic horror for kids before gradually lightening until the titular garden can be portrayed in lush Technicolor.

From our point of view, the film’s more abrasive elements — nobody is sympathetic for ages — were an attraction. But then, perversely, George Zucco turns up and gets to be hearty and endearing, a surprise for him. The starting point is a deserted colonial estate where the adults have all been wiped out by disease or fled, leaving only Margaret O’Brien, orphaned and abandoned. Good, grim stuff.

Wilcox does some cool things throughout, particularly a subjective camera track-in towards Herbert Marshall (Monster from Id POV?). Disappointing that the transition to colour is managed with a simple cut. The effect is arresting, and I guess he didn’t want to replay his studio’s previous trick, the pass through the doorway in WIZARD OF OZ (managed with a sepia-painted set and stand-in). Still, I can immediately think of one good alternative, tracking laterally through the garden wall from b&w exterior to vivid interior, using the darkness of the intervening wall as transition point.

The kids are great, though O’Brien and Dean Stockwell can’t sound convincingly English, at least not consistently, but they’re very charismatic, as is the elfin-faced Brian Roper as Dickon, the working-class lad.

What keeps Wilcox from being major, I think, apart from his small number of films, is that while he can pull off arresting effects, he doesn’t always choose the right spot for them. I recently passed up a chance to buy one of his two Lassie films secondhand, and now I regret that.

THE SECRET GARDEN stars ‘Tootie’ Smith; Doctor Wellington Yueh; Ginger; Gaston Monescu; Mrs Higgins; Mrs Eynsford-Hill; Katie Nana; Admiral Boom; Colonel Dent; Professor Moriarty; Inspector Lestrade; Inspector Gregson; Basil Hallward; Uncle Arn; Mrs Cunningham; Wendy Darling (voice); Sir Roderick Femm; and Madame Zimba’s crow (uncredited).

Run of the House

We finally caught up with SEE HOW THEY RUN, actually only a year or so after its release.

I was drawn to the movie for slightly unusual reasons, I suspect. Of course the idea of a period English cosy crime whodunnit set in a detailed reproduction of 1950s theatreland appealed to me, and the casting of Saoirse Ronan Sam Rockwell Adrien Brody Reece Shearsmith Shirley Henderson appealed.

But I was interested in the fact that one of the real-life characters who turns up in the movie is Edana Romney, writer-star of the Cocteauesque gothic thriller CORRIDOR OF MIRRORS. Including her seemed a clue to a weird and idiosyncratic sensibility.

This is the film’s one major disappointment — Romney appears for the very uneccentric reason that she was married to producer John Woolf (Shearsmith), so she plays the role of jealous wife, or rather Sian Clifford, who plays her, plays her playing it, and her accomplishments in the cinema are ignored.

Actually, this relates to another, more minor disappointment — how can you do a murder mystery with John Woolf in it and neglect the fact that his producing partner was his gay brother James? There could be a good plot twist in that.

The racially-blind casting which is now dominant in the UK occasionally sets up curious questions — Woolf is shown carrying on an affair with his P.A., played by Pippa Bennett-Warner, who is Black. There’s a blackmail attempt, but the racial angle plays no role, is never mentioned, as it surely would be in the early 1950s. Shoehorning diversity into heritage cinema is surely a good thing: pretending race isn’t a social factor, and that things weren’t worse in the past, is not unambiguously good. The solution? Be brilliant. And write more actual Black characters.

Otherwise this is good fun. Ronan and Rockwell make a great team and Mark Chappell’s plotting and dialogue are both clever enough to pull off the necessary laughs and surprises. It all needs to be, in some hard-to-define way, 10% better to fully achieve the KNIVES OUT cosy place pleasure it’s aiming for, but we found it very pleasurable.

Director Tom George has seen a lot of Wes Anderson, which makes for, as we know, a bold and graphically pleasing style. He throws in a bunch of splitscreen stuff which doesn’t much help and tends to kill a sense of period. Indeed, the one thing that might have helped him — he’s cast the thing brilliantly, down to the smallest butler — would be a greater awareness — or influence from, because he might have been aware — of 50s cinema. Merging the Anderson effects with a dash of Powell & Pressburger (THE RED SHOES for backstage drama), Wendy Toye (THREE CASES OF MURDER and THE STRANGER LEFT NO CARD for Peculiar Crimes), and any other pertinent films of the approximate period (GREEN FOR DANGER, AN INSPECTOR CALLS, SAPPHIRE?) would have given the film more of a unique personality — I know it’d have done it by imitation, but I don’t think one should imitate only the obvious contemporary things that everybody else is already imitating, and Wes Anderson is definitely that. Plus, he’s easy to do.

I was idly thinking the other day that GOSFORD PARK is, as far as I know, the only film in which Stephen Fry works. And he shouldn’t, since his character is several notches more comedic than anyone else’s. But through some weird alchemy it hangs together perfectly. Well, SEE HOW THEY RUN might best be described as a film where everybody is at the level of sitcom silliness that Fry achieved. And this works, of course, because it’s consistent, but it’s less memorable because of that. The only character who shifts the balance into drama, momentarily, is the killer, and I can’t give him away. He’s very good, I hope we hear more of him, and I felt his character deserved more sympathetic treatment, even if he is clearly a homicidal maniac. Nobody’s perfect.

Someone called Harris Dickinson plays Richard Attenborough (right), seemingly without any reference to the real Dickie, or else he’s very bad at impersonation. But he’s a very good comedian — everything he does is funny. Pearl Chanda plays his sensible wife, Sheila Sim. Our disappointment at Adrien Brody’s early exit was assuaged by frequent flashbacks, and he’s very fine as always. Paul Chahidi is very funny as a butler named Fellowes (a GOSFORD jab), and the poet-comedian Tim Key turns out to be a good actor too. David Oyelowo camps it up and Shirley Henderson continues to be British cinema’s secret weapon, secret for too long.

And yes, I consider it a Christmas movie as it is a cosy crime film, a period movie, British, and contains snow, both “real” and stage.

SEE HOW THEY RUN stars Jo March; Chuck Barris; Salvador Dali; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; Papa Lazarou; Margaret Goff; J. Paul Getty III; Agent Salmakia; Shannon Dumania; Princess Olga; Sith Fleet Officer; Hammerhead Captain; General Charles Motomba; Side Kick Simon; and Moaning Myrtle.