Month: October 2023

Movie Review: “The Great Escaper” with Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson

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The two British icons bring a huge amount of joy to the heartwarming true story of Bernard Jordan, the 89-year-old veteran who snuck off to attend the 70th anniversary of D-day

By Peter Bradshaw

Michael Caine and the late Glenda Jackson bring their A games to this true-life heartwarmer about the 89-year-old second world war Royal Navy veteran Bernard Jordan, who in 2014 jauntily sneaked out of his seaside care home (where he lived with his wife Irene) on a secret mission to get aboard a cross-channel ferry and attend the 70th anniversary celebrations of the D-day landings in Normandy — having failed to get included on an official group excursion. He was dubbed “the great escaper” in the press although then, as now, the care home insisted that there was no question of forbidding Bernard from going, so there was no escape as such. Facetiously representing them as busybody elf ’n’ safety camp commandants – tempting though this might have been – could have landed the film in legal hot water.

Caine is Jordan, of course, bringing plenty of droll and lugubrious spark to the role, shuffling up and down the seafront, grumpily denouncing the trendy cyclists almost running him over on the pavement as “tossers” and letting the air out of their tyres. But he is arguably upstaged by Jackson as Irene, or Rene, who is sarky and sardonic to everyone, including her care worker Adele (an excellent performance from Danielle Vitalis).

She gets laughs in a way Caine’s character doesn’t, or not as much. Rene has to cover up for Bernard; she is, after all, in on his plan, and tells the nurses and managers that her absent husband is just out on a long early walk, giving Bernard enough time to get on the ferry before the alarm is raised.

There’s a huge amount to enjoy from these legendary performers: Caine and Jackson are a great double-act, despite being apart for much of the film, and the film imagines an interesting and poignant rapport between Bernard and an elderly ex-RAF officer on the ferry, sympathetically played by John Standing, who is heading for Normandy while crucified by a secret guilt. Caine has a bold flash of rage by the official graves at all the criminal waste of lives created by war.

Set against this, the flashback scenes of the young Rene and Bernard are less strong and a flaw in the film is that it somehow can’t help drifting towards an officially sanctioned sentimentality and even stateliness, rather like the BBC news coverage of the D-day celebrations of which we see a glimpse. It’s a kind of piety which the (excellent) lead performances are always working against. I’m inclined to wonder how many movie versions of Captain Sir Tom Moore and his legendary lockdown charity walk were once in development in the same vein, with the same present day/wartime flashback structure, but which now have had to be abandoned or radically reimagined.

Well, Caine and Jackson and their ineffable class give this film some real grit: it’s a wonderful last hurrah for Jackson and there is something moving and even awe-inspiring in seeing these two British icons together.

 The Great Escaper is released on 6 October in UK cinemas, and in May 2024 in Australia.

Source: The Great Escaper review – Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson exude ineffable class

Watch the Incredible String Band on German TV from 1970

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The Incredible String Band built a considerable following, especially in the British counterculture, with their albums The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, Wee Tam and the Big Huge. They became pioneers in psychedelic folk and, through integrating a wide variety of traditional music forms and instruments, in the development of world music.

 Record Review:  “The Gentle Good” by Gareth Bonello

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Gareth Bonello’s latest album sees him excavating his homeland’s folk classics, interpreting each with drowsy, melancholic voice, guitar, cello and piano

The Gentle Good

The Gentle Good is Cardiff-based folk musician Gareth Bonello, whose musical interests often take him far from home. He has explored the bardic connections between Taoist and druidic storytelling (on 2013’s Y Bardd Anfarwol), and the songs of Welsh Christian missionaries with the Indian musicians affected by them. But Galargan (“lament” in Welsh) sees him burrow into his national identity and history to excavate songs full of longing.

Recording in his kitchen and a cottage in the wild expanses of Mid Wales’s Elan Valley, Bonello has ploughed through the rich song collections of the late Meredydd Evans and Phyllis Kinney at the National Library of Wales, among others, then arranged the chosen tunes for voice, guitar, cello and piano, all played by him. Galargan begins with the softly yielding beauty of Pan Own I Ar Foreddydd (As I Was One Morning), where a blackbird “tuning on the branch” fascinates the protagonist, providing hope in dim light. Nid Wyf Yn Llon (I Am Not Happy) follows, which, with its Morrisseyesque title feels fittingly bleak. A song collected from a drunk prisoner by a jail warden in Dolgellau, its rhythms and melodies drip and pool like a particularly mournful example of Portuguese fado.

Bonello’s voice is as comforting as warm water and honey throughout, wrapping around lilting syllables and so many mesmerising, slow-moving moments. Great, too, is his intricate, woozy guitar playing, descending in golden thickets on Y Bachgen Main (The Slender Lad). Phosphorescent piano lines decorate Beth Yw’r Haf I Mi? (What Is Summer to Me?) as a boy mourns the loss of his love in the blazing sun. This drowsy, melancholic album is perfect for late summer, full of that specific kind of sadness some of us sense as the seasons pass by.

Source: The Gentle Good: Galargan review | Jude Rogers’ folk album of the month

“Village of the Damned” and the Power of Scary-Ass Kids

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By Kyle Anderson

We’re somewhat obsessed with movies about scary kids here at Nerdist. Mostly because little kids are just terrifying.

Yes, they’re cute and precocious and everything, but that’s how they lull you into a false sense of security. I mean, kittens are adorable, but if a bunch of them decided to gang up and attack you, you’d be terrified. But children can be sinister in a way tiny animals can’t, especially British kids, and dear heavens, alien British kids with telepathic control over people might just be the scariest of all. Which is why, even 58 years later, Village of the Damned is a paranoid classic.

Village of the Damned is based on the 1957 John Wyndham novel The Midwich Cuckoos, is the rare major studio production of a British sci-fi/horror film, MGM in this case. Its inherent Britishness–the gloomy weather, the thatch-roofed little village, the droll speech–makes it all the creepier, and the premise all the more unsettling. Like the later Spanish horror film Who Can Kill a Child?, Village ponders what you’d do if your children were evil. Not just normal evil, either, but otherworldly, unstoppable evil.

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The tiny village of Midwich, UK suddenly falls under a strange power, causing every inhabitant to fall asleep. Anyone who ventures inside the parameters of the village immediately fall asleep, including military people sent in to investigate. It’s a strange plague, but one that soon lifts, causing everyone to wake up. However, miraculously(?), each and every woman of maternal age suddenly becomes pregnant, and within five months, they all give birth, on the same day.

The children all have platinum blonde hair and seem to be preternaturally intelligent but lack any and all empathy or the ability to love their parents. They can communicate with each other over great distances and have some hold over people’s actions through their terrifying stare. So, obviously there’s some bad stuff going on. Professor Gordon Zellaby (George Sanders) is part of a council that is meant to determine what exactly these children are (his own “son” David being the children’s de-facto leader) and they learn Midwich is not the only village where this phenomenon occurred; in fact there are such towns all over the world.

Obviously there’s some alien shiz going on, but the movie does a tremendous job of only giving us the information we need. The story is not about aliens, it’s about children who are evil and seemingly unstoppable. The film’s director, German filmmaker Wolf Rilla, went to great lengths to make the children exceedingly scary, even when they aren’t doing anything particularly threatening. The blonde hair and cold faces is one thing, but the relatively simple trick of giving them camera-negative eyes when they use their powers is incredibly effective. He also had the child actor Martin Stephens, who plays David, post-dub his own performance, making David’s speech in the movie seem all the more unnatural.

Stephens has the distinction of being the creepiest kid in two of the best British horror films of the era. The year after Village, Stephens played Miles in Jack Clayton’s excellent Gothic ghost story, The Innocents. In that film, Stephens is one of two children living in a massive manor house under the care of a governess and who seem to be somehow controlled by the spirits of the former groundskeeper and previous governess. In both films, the young actor–who was around 11 when the movies were made–conveys an air of age beyond his years. Kids seeming wise can be used for cuteness, but can also, as in the case of these movies, give off the air of menace.

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But menace is nothing without follow through. Several instances in Village of the Damned feature the children making bad things happen to people. Especially for 1960, this level of screen violence is shocking. One man is made to drive his car at full speed into a wall, causing it to explode. The man’s brother, suspecting the children were behind it (what was your first clue?!?!) approaches the group of them with a shotgun. However, they can read his thoughts, and they make the group of adults nearby freeze while forcing the man to shoot himself. It’s a harrowing moment, and the film’s centerpiece of true horror.

And we mustn’t discount the importance of a good score to create mood. Ron Goodwin’s compositions for Village of the Damned are somehow able to combine the typical ’50s electronic sound synonymous with science fiction with traditional sounds of Gothic horror and a bit of plinking noises traditionally used for childhood or nursery music. It’s pretty phenomenal how effective it is.

Village of the Damned is only 77 minutes long but it manages to pack in the unease and outright terror from the beginning. It’s an alien plot that feels very personal and crueler. These are people whose children turn out to not even really be theirs, but the machinations of some alien plot. It’s got a high concept but the homespun, rural realness of the fictional village of Midwich makes it feel all the more immediate. No ships hovering over massive cities, but a slow and creeping invasion, far more insidious. The closest analog I have would be the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but even that seems too grandiose.

Children are terrifying. Little British alien blonde-haired kids with weird eyes? The most terrifying.

Village of the Damned is out on Blu-ray now from Warner Archive.

Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist. He is the writer of 200 reviews of weird or obscure films in Schlock & Awe.

Source: VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED and the Power of Scary-Ass Kids