IMDb meta-data is 11 minutes, rated 6.6 by 63 cinemtizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
Verdict: Charming.
In Appalachia an eleven-year old Gene dreams of the stars on the 1938 autumn evening when on the radio Orson Welles broadcasted The War of the Worlds. Gene’s share-cropper father, beset by the Depression, struggling to eke a living from a hard scrabble farm, aided by his emaciated wife, hounded by a foreclosing bank, all of them stunted by malnutrition, encourages Gene to dream of the stars. Touching.
‘I got all misty,’ Dobie. If there is an explanation for the title, I’d be glad to learn it.
The parents stepped straight out of the photographs in James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), once read never forgotten. Yes, I know this book has been subjected to a pygmy attack of late. It is never too late for pygmies to sup on the dead.
TVDB meta-data is runtime 90 minutes each in 42 episodes, rated 7.4 by 4232 cinematizens.
Genre: Police procedural.
Verdict: Low key.
Peter Haber as Martin Beck
Good cop, bad cop, and many others. Martin Beck is slow and careful while his off-sider is mercurial and trigger happy. Sounds clichéd because it is, but it works in small doses in this long-running series from Sweden. How many Swedes are left after the body count in each episode? The first I watched had six deaths, and a lot of guns. More violent and gruesome than I like, but low key in that the characters to do not yell at each other, as is so common in Yankee krimis, mistaking noise and guns for drama.
There is usually a lot of out and about in Stockholm for eye candy, and a lot of use of drones. My two brief visits to Stockholm consisted mainly of hotel rooms, conference tables, meetings, and reports, leaving me with little idea of its geography of the many islands and bridges.
The plots involve biker gangs, Russian mafia, immigrant vendettas, corporate corruption, and the usual vices of screenwriters: drugs, money, and prostitution. That dearth of narrative originality is offset by the production that makes much use of expensive location shooting (from public parks, pleasure boats, old churches, bars clubs, glitzy corporations, and more) and nearly everyone in Sweden appears on camera as an extra. However, the repertoire company of leading actors from Sveriges TV is so small I recognised a good many of them from other roles. Still, the acting is superb, especially from the inner circle of coppers. A flicker in eye, a purse of the lip, a twitch of the shoulder tells much in these intense productions. No Yankee yelling is needed, nor any of the sanctimonious speeches common in Brit TV. Instead Beck sighs, and moves on.
Beck and Mikael Persbrandt as Gunvald Larsson
There is some light relief from Beck’s intrusive, genial, and persistent neighbour, Grannen who gives Beck the benefit of his advice on alcohol, women, sports, dining, travel, and more when they meet in the elevator, hallway, lobby, or adjacent balconies of the apartment building. As part of a mandatory staff development exercise, Beck was once required to write down the names of three people who mean a lot to him. The first two were easy: his daughter, and grandson, but it took him all day to realise the third was Grannen – the look on Beck’s face when he wrote that down is a treasured memory. Grannen is a Beck-opposite: extravagant, thoughtless, carefree, flamboyant, intrusive, daring….
Ingvar Hirdwall as Grannen
Beck is played so low key at times he seems to be catatonic, whereas the hyperactive Gunvald is always ready, willing, and able to kick in a door, even if it leads to the toilet in police HQ. The man knows how to make an entrance. Beck, on the other hand, seems to suffer from low blood pressure and move ever so slowly. Indeed he has brandished a weapon only once in the ten episodes I have seen to date. He didn’t shoot…because Gunvald did it first — no surprise there.
Beck’s talents lie in managing the team of detectives and in interrogation where he is a hard man to fool. Don’t play poker with this man. He reads the tells very quickly. (If you don’t know what a ‘tell’ is, then don’t play poker with anyone.)
The stories are interesting but the resolution is often magic, making it more trip than arrival. However, they are strong on the motivations of characters and what a mystery that makes us to each other.
Some of the earlier episodes come from one of the ten-novel sequence of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (1965-1975) whence Beck originated (though many other characters from the novels are omitted, notably Lennart Kollberg). But many of the episodes are not derived from that source, just as well, because I found the last five or six Sjöwall-Wahlöö novels suffocatingly preachy with ideology supplanting humanity as the soapbox came out and human interest waned. But speaking of soap, I have to say that the episodes after Gunvald was written out have tended toward soap operas with the backstories taking over in continuing and endless, pointless melodramas: Will Emma leave Oscar? Will quiet Jenny get a new hair style? Will work-alcoholic Ayda take a day off? Will loquacious Claes ever shut up? Stay tuned for these and other equally trivial problems.
Equally, in the latter episodes the boy toys get bigger and more prominent. Every five minutes Beck calls out the SWAT team to knock down doors, blow up rooms, and swarm over a place, usually too late to find anything. But the SWAT members put on a choreographed show.
Other films have been made from the novels, including an earlier Sveriges production Beck (1993) in nine episodes with a different cast, and also the feature films The Laughing Policeman (1973), The Man on the Roof (1976), The Man Who Went up in Smoke (1980), and Roseanna (1967). This last film was based was the first novel of the series and is a personal favourite out of the ten books. The film version of The Laughing Policeman is set in San Francisco with Walter Matthau as the Beck substitute and loses everything in the transition, while The Man Who Went up in Smoke is an English production with a woefully miscast Derek Jacobi as Beck.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1hour and 31 minutes, rated 6.4 by 1,853 cinematizens.
Genre: PI.
Verdict: Enticing.
Set in contemporary Switzerland with nary a cowbell in sight, the depressed, dreary, downcast, and dull Aloys goes about his business of spying on people. Jealous wives hire him to videotape their husbands’ suspicious activities. Worried parents put him onto adolescents who may be using drugs. Insurance companies wanted evidence of deceits about disabilities. Deans want dirt to lighten the payroll. (Well, they do.) The work sounds more interesting than it is.
Aloys is robotic, though Robby had more personality than does he. His only friend, his father, just died, and he is now even more lonely, but, no, he does not vicariously live on his subjects. Indeed, he is strictly professional in his all his dealings. He is all but silent as he mopes around the tower residences where many of his subjects live, and where he himself lives when he is not riding buses through the Alpine mists.
He does catalogue and review his vast collection of surveillance tapes, and that seems to be his only pastime when not out filming more. He doesn’t enjoy it or do it for pleasure, but he does it obsessively, because there is nothing else to do. This is not a man looking for human contact, quite the reverse. In an elevator car at his residential tower Aloys pretends not to be there, or shrinks in on himself, when someone else enters.
This ordered, monotone world is interrupted with a suicide attempt by one of his neighbours, and then begins a game of telephone tag with a woman who is neither client nor subject.
It doesn’t sound like much but it works.
The actors are so ordinary, the set is so drab, the weather is so miserable that almost anything would be a relief. Yet in a way it is uplifting and positive by the end. I came across it by chance on SBS On-Demand when I was looking for, but not finding, Real Humans Season 2. Films from Switzerland are scarce and I had just read a solid krimi set there so I was primed, and I liked the enigmatic summary, so I took a look.
I found the four commercial breaks annoying, and they put me off further viewing on SBS On-Demand for a while.
IMDb meta-data is twenty episodes of 60m, each rated 7.9 by 6,067
Genre: Sy Fy
Verdict: Cogent.
In a contemporary Sweden android Hubots are the norm for simple repetitive jobs, companions for the elderly, and counter staff to deal with the idiocracy. The Hubots are very, and I mean very, life-like but their programming is limited, however, there are hackers who for a price can breach those limits. Got it? Even the Asimov Laws can be hacked down!
(Think of this marketing pitch: Get your own Hubot look-alike and program it to attend budget meetings with the dean, insufferable training courses on nuclear waste disposal and playground safety for professors, and Department boards dominated by the least productive individuals. Where do I get mine?!)
Some people ignore the Hubots, others object to them, and still others find them threatening, while most happily benefit from the services they provide without a second thought. In this world we meet several individuals and families who cope with and react in different ways to the Hubots they encounter. A warehouse store-man fears losing his job to a doll, an estranged wife finds a Hubot a better companion than her alcoholic and volatile husband, a career woman finds a Hubot has unlimited energy and patience in dealing with her children, a teenage boy wonders if the Hubot maid is fully functional, an elderly man finds the Hubot carer assigned to him is a nag about diet and medication and with which he cannot bargain, a pensioner grows so emotionally dependent on his old model Hubot that when it breaks down he grieves without end, a pastor sees them as another example of God’s children but her flock does not…. While others despise these PacMen and Women.
We also meet, and we meet them first, a band of ferrel Hubots with their leader Leo, who judging by his Hollywood shadow, is a human. We also encounter two police officers who specialise in recovering erratic Hubots, tracking down ferrel ones, and arresting illegal hackers who re-program legal Hubots to satisfy paying customers in a thriving blackmarket. There is not much of a problem and the police work is slow and methodical.
Juice break at the warehouse.
The Real Humans are a loose group of anti-Hubots who stick decals on windows, shout slogans, wear red hats (oops just made that up!), and some arm themselves with rocket launchers and automatic rifles against the day when….? Well, who knows, but it is always comforting to have a bazooka under the bed in case agents of the deep state come to haul one back to the looney bin.
And all is not what it at first seemed to be.
It is uncompromising in presentation, so pay attention. Unlike painfully didactic Yankee television designed for the attention-deficit audience of Pox News, there are no internal summaries when one character explains to another what is happening, nor any labels of time and place, or title cards to focus, or recaps with each new episode. Nor is there any of the sanctimonious preaching so predictable on Brit TV. Little is explained as the narrative unfolds, but it seems that in due course all questions will be answered for those with the eyes to see.
I have seen the ten episodes of season one but cannot lay hands on the next ten from season two with English subtitles. Little help, please.
IMDb meta-data is 13 minutes, rated 7.3 by 164 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy
Verdict: Satisfying.
Nigel is a grumpy old man and content to remain that. My audience identification was immediate. The usual tropes follow but they are so well done that it works. His closed shell opens a crack, and the patient robot enters…slowly. Maybe I am a sucker for this motif since I liked Robot & Frank (2012), too, when so many did not. Though Robot in Robot & Frank did conspire in a bank robbery. It must the Isaac Asimov effect.
Another short winner from DUST with the ever versatile Timothy Spall as the reclusive Nigel. It can be found on You Tube.
IMDb meta-data is 3 hours and 53 minutes in four episodes, rated 7.0 by 866 cinematizens.
Genre: Krimi.
Verdict: A slow burn.
One of the most thoroughly investigated murders in history occurred at 11:20 pm on downtown street in Stockholm on the night of 28 February 1968. While leaving a movie theatre with his wife, Olof Palme, incumbent prime minister of Sweden, was shot dead.
In this film a senior police officer nearing retirement agrees with a cabinet minister in his last term to review the case decades later, and so begins the research into the files, parking tickets, the few photographs before smart phones, the endless and contradictory witness statements, thought experiments to re-act the crime, timing of comings and goings, sifting the thousands of reports seeking the reward, sorting out the reliable from the unreliable, testing witness chains, and the growing feeling that someone has obstructed the effort when…. (where did parking ticket receipt go?)
Layered over all that is another investigation into neo-Nazi influence in the police and security services though it evaporates from the story. It is complicated, and yet it is also simple: Someone pulled the trigger.
It is full of references to unnatural practices with reindeers and Lapplanders to give it Swedish authenticity. Viewer discretion is advised.
In one marvellous scene a disagreeable police officer whose alcoholism has seen him relegated to manage a warehouse of lost property until he can be retired, realises the best place to hide something is….right there in the lion’s den. But will anyone listen to this slovenly sodden man? That is capped by the last lingering camera shot at the end. Stay with it. There is no padding in this production: every word, every look, every shot integrates into the story.
Detectives at work detecting.
By the way, ‘Pilgrim’ was a Security Service codename for Palme.
In all it is brilliantly produced, directed, and acted, but sometimes hard to follow with the cross-cut timelines, and cryptic dialogue. Miss a title card with the date, and you are lost. Still such an uncompromising approach made this viewer pay attention.
For those who must know, the solution is banal. No vast conspiracy. Just one angry man who latched onto a chance opportunity, and had the means to do so.
By following a piece of string, I have been reading a lot about Sweden lately and was reminded that I had seen this series, so I went looking for it, thinking I could watch it again and get more out of it now that I know some of the context from the reading. I did and I did.
IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 45 minutes, rated 8.0 by 4727 cinematizens.
Genre: Sherlockiana.
Verdict: Inert.
The Granada Television production of the Holmes Cannon from 1984 to 1996 was heralded as complete and faithful to the originals in forty-one instalments. (It was thus not complete with seventeen remaining.) It is certainly true in this case that the screenplay seems to follow the text with few cinematographic additions. Conan Doyle may have been honoured by such fidelity, but as a viewer he would have noticed how mechanical is the result. While on paper the reader suspends disbelief and there is movement in the narrative, on the screen it seems episodic, or worse, a sequence of still-lifes to display the period furnishing and costumes and not much else. N.B. that the story was written in episodes as a serial and it shows in this production.
None of the supporting characters are developed though the ingenue performance of Dr Mortimer with his dog is good it seems out of place. How could that young man had not have noticed Miss Stapleton until the heir came on the scene. Moreover, he does not capitalise on the great line about the footprint for the Sherlockians. It comes out nearly as an afterthought. I blame the director for that, not the actor. And how is it that this pet dog offers no clue to the hound?
Neither Miss Stapleton nor her sinister brother/husband gets much chance to perform. She looks confused most of the time and I guess that is in character but it got to be monotonous and he looks perplexed, not the mercurial charmer he can be made.
Likewise, the blustering litigator is a cipher despite the actor’s bellowing, though the role of his daughter is restored to its rightful place in the story. (She is usually omitted.)
But most of all, THE MOOR is rendered null and void. What the camera could do with it is left out in favour of the text, and that is a great shame. The 2002 version with Richard Roxborough in the lead does a superb job of making THE MOOR the dominant character in events, even more than the Hound.
Edward Hardwicke offers Dr John Watson as a mature, capable albeit literal-minded man who warms himself in the reflected glory of Holmes. While Jeremy Brett as Holmes was wonderful in the first episodes in this series. British born and bred, yet he was a new face to Brit telly, having lived and worked in Canada and the USA, and he obviously relished playing one of the most enduring British icons, but here he seems off-colour, though perhaps I am biased by knowing the hell he went through in his private life about this time. Ghouls may read about that trial on their own time. His career (and his life) drew to a close shortly after this interrupted and incomplete series ended.
Viewers at the time might have just seen a version of The Hound from 1983 with Ian Richardson in the lead. Stay tuned for my trenchant comments on that in due course.
IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 45 minutes, rated 8.0 by 4727 cinematizens.
Genre: Sherlockiana.
Verdict: Inert.
Hound of the Baskervilles (1983)
IMDb mea-data is runtime 1 hour and 40 minutes, rated 6.6 by 1129 cinematizens.
Genre: Sherlockiana.
Verdict: Foggy.
The Hound gets another workout in this misty production with little to remember from it.
Ian Richardson as Holmes is condescending and superior. Donald Churchill plays Watson as Nigel Bruce without the avuncular charm. Brian Blessed injects some energy into a still life of a movie.
The major characters of The Moor and The Hound are obscured by the fog machine run amok.
But notice this, in Holmes’ study at Baker Street 221B there hangs on the wall near the door a picture that seems to be of a Turk in uniform. A very similar picture is to be seen in many episodes of the Jeremy Brett productions, including that of the Hound of 1988. I found myself more interested in this coincidence than in the narrative.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 9 minutes, rated 5.6 by 126 cinematizens.
Genre: Spy
Verdict: energetic
Post war a woman sees a man she encountered during the war and knows to be a spy. Impetuously she sets out to tackle him with the subtlety of sledgehammer. She is aided by a hotel house detective who is comic relief, well, comic anyway, and also a former boyfriend counter spy. The boyfriend is too good to be true, but is.
Cuthebertson
The spy is after the plans — is it always plans? — of an atomic-powered tank, which mercifully we never see. Ever reliable West Australian Allan Cuthbertson plays a by-the-book soldier toward the end. Cuthbertson had served the RAAF during the war in Air Sea Rescue in the Solomon Islands and New Guinea campaigns. After that playing solider must have been a lark.
I rather hoped the title indicated a bit more wit than slapstick, but not to be.
IMDb meta-data is runtime the longest 49 minutes ever recorded, rated an astounding 3.6 by 137 monkeys at keyboards.
Genre: Old Dark House.
Verdict: Fail.
In a remote, suitably gloomy Scots castle our cast gathers to read the script with growing disbelief. Because most of the chaps are in uniform it must be wartime, but you’d hardly know from the dialogue.
Soon enough the number of guests at Castle Gloom decreases and the simple working class retainers blame the Phantom, which is never explained, but we do see someone lurking about in a robe and cowl with a skeleton mask waiting for Halloween.
Danger Man is unavailable so this is a case for oxymoronic Army Intelligence. There is a confused and confusing love interest, an immature boy-soldier, a dour laird, an aloof and icy ladyship, and all those uniforms. With a touch of realism the AI investigator spends all his time in the local pub.
Phantom lurks.
Turns out one of the uniforms is a Nasty Spy who is – sit down and take a deep breath – the father of the youngest son. Wait, father! How did that happen? [In the usual way.] And the son has in his possession secret plans for deep-fried Mars bars! The Scots’ secret weapon!
It gets worse. Much of the dialogue is spoken by the actors with their backs to the camera. This is a technique that makes expensive synchronisation between audio and video unnecessary. When it is not used, it is apparent that the dialogue is indeed out of synchronisation.
Released on 19 February 1948 with a thud, even as a quota quickie this must have been shelved. None of the players is noted for anything else on the IMDb. Most of them have but a few credits and for several this is the only one. Good career move. Quit.
About half the run time is distance shots of the exterior of the heap and some murky interiors. Dashed were my hopes for an Old Dark House with secret passages, cobwebs, sliding panels, spring loaded walls, and spy holes.
Not to be mistaken for the lost 1932 film of the same title, though losing this one would be a service.
