Movies

Dr Strangelove review — Steve Coogan impresses but it’s oddly stolid

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Oliver Alvin Wilson, Steve Coogan and Dharmesh Patel in Dr Strangelove MANUEL HARLAN
Oliver Alvin Wilson, Steve Coogan and Dharmesh Patel in Dr Strangelove
MANUEL HARLAN

By Clive Davis

The comedian plays all four main characters with aplomb, but this reboot at the Noël Coward theatre in London could have done with more creative flourishes

At the end, as we shuffled out of the auditorium, a wickedly funny Randy Newman song, Political Science, played over the speakers. The mischievous call to set the world free by dropping nukes made an ironic coda to Vera Lynn singing We’ll Meet Again.

It also made you wish the show’s co-adaptors, Armando Iannucci and Sean Foley, had applied a few more creative flourishes to what is, all in all, a stolid remake of the classic Stanley Kubrick Cold War satire.

Don’t get me wrong: this is still a decent star vehicle for Steve Coogan, who outdoes Peter Sellers by taking on four rather than three of the main characters. As well as portraying US president Merkin Muffley, RAF Group Captain Mandrake and the sinister title character, he straps himself into the cockpit of a B-52 bomber as Major Kong, the gung-ho pilot intent on carrying out the order to lay some megatons on the evil Russkies.

It’s a reboot that will appeal most of all to Coogan fans who aren’t familiar with the film, which celebrated its 60th birthday this year. If you do know the original, it’s fun to hear some of the slivers of extra dialogue added by Iannucci and Foley after scrolling through Kubrick’s notebooks and drafts.

All the same, set designer Hildegard Bechtler’s war room is never going to look as imposing as Ken Adam’s James Bond-like screen creation. And if the scale model of the B-52, flying high over a video backdrop, gives the second half of the show an undeniable kick, the rest of the production looks cramped in the confines of the Noël Coward.

Still, Coogan handles all the roles with aplomb. His Mandrake is a bumbler with more than a hint of King Charles, and he brings an aura of playful menace to Strangelove, who, in contrast to the film’s villain, is instantly plagued by robotic tics.

How is the star manoeuvred into his many costume changes? Iannucci and Foley — who is also the director — solve that problem by inserting time-killing ploys and a presidential stand-in. It’s all a little distracting.

While I’ve often complained that video imagery sometimes seems to be pushing flesh-and-blood actors aside in the West End, this is one venture where a little more hi-tech trickery would have been welcome.

Giles Terera gives us a breezy impersonation of General Buck Turgidson, the manic hawk who cheerfully runs the numbers on a nuclear holocaust. No one could ever improve on George C Scott’s original, but if you’ve never seen the movie you’ll still be impressed.
★★★☆☆

Source: Dr Strangelove review — Steve Coogan impresses but it’s oddly stolid

Audio: Actor Tom Courtenay was first to sing “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter”

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Herman’s Hermits’ pop hit “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” was originally sung by acclaimed actor Tom Courtenay in The Lads, a British TV play of 1963, and released as a single in the UK.

Most of us outside the UK are familiar only with Herman’s Hermits’ version, which rose to number one on the charts in May 1965.

Tom Courtenay 1962 on the set of ‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner’

Courtenay came to prominence as in actor in the early 1960s with a succession of films, including The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), Billy Liar (1963), and Doctor Zhivago (1965).  He received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for the film adaptation of The Dresser (1983),

The song was written by another British actor, Trevor Peacock, who was also a song and screenwriter.

The brilliant “Tammy” sequence from Terence Davies’ “The Long Day Closes”

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Thanks to Terence Davies’s distinctive filmmaking style, The Long Day Closes doesn’t quite feel like any other motion picture. This intensely moving, ethereal reverie on a brief happy period of the director’s often sad childhood in Liverpool during the fifties moves in and out of different moods and sensations, rather than laying out a straightforward narrative. His films may come across as stream-of-consciousness, but Davies actually meticulously sets up every shot and music cue in the first draft of his scripts. Often, his plans are ambitious, as is clear from the following magnificently realized scene. Set to Debbie Reynolds’s 1957 hit song ”Tammy,” it is a virtuosic cinematic symphony, composed of incredible high-angle shots of a movie theater, church, and schoolroom, graphically matched to express the importance of those three locations in Davies’s youth.

Source: Criterion Collection

‘The Hudsucker Proxy’: The Coen brothers’ Underappreciated Screwball Comedy

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The Hudsucker Proxy poster art by Nate Gonzales

Despite getting mixed reviews and being a box office flop, The Hudsucker Proxy remains a funny and intelligent entry in the Coen brothers’ filmography.

By Koraljka Suton

In 1981, three years before he and his brother Ethan made their directorial and screenwriting debut with Blood Simple, Joel Coen worked as an assistant editor on Sam Raimi’s first feature film The Evil Dead. The Coen brothers and Raimi quickly became friends and, after discovering that they share a love of 40s Hollywood comedies, the trio started working on one such script together. This creative process continued over the course of the following years, as the three filmmakers collaborated on the screenplay for Raimi’s second film Crimewave (1985) and even moved in together during the post-production of Blood Simple. But although the script for the screwball comedy The Hudsucker Proxy was finished in 1985, production would have to wait, because, as Joel himself said, the movie would be expensive and he and his brother were not as popular yet, having just made an independent film. And so, the Coens shelved it for the time being and went on to make Raising Arizona (1987), Miller’s Crossing (1990) and Barton Fink (1991).

Despite none of them becoming hits (Miller’s Crossing and Barton Fink even flopped at the box office), the latter went on to win three awards at the Cannes International Film Festival (Best Director, Best Actor and the Palme d’Or), garnered three Academy Award nominations (Best Supporting Actor, Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design) and opened to much critical acclaim. All of this resulted in Joel Silver, producer of films such as Lethal Weapon (1987), Predator (1987) and Die Hard (1988), deciding to buy the shelved screenplay for Silver Pictures and pitch it at Warner Bros. With a $25 million budget thanks to several production companies backing the project and the Coens being allowed complete artistic control, The Hudsucker Proxy could finally see the light of day in 1994. And even though the gestation period was a long one, it was well worth the wait.

Unfortunately, neither critics nor viewers thought so upon the film’s initial release. The Coen brothers’ fifth feature and their most expensive film up until that point, bombed at the box office (earning only $11 million) and the reviews were largely mixed, accusing it of prioritizing style over substance. Be that as it may, The Hudsucker Proxy was in competition for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival (and lost to none other than Pulp Fiction) and would eventually go on to attain a cult following.

Because while it is true that the film is highly stylized, it in no way lacks substance. The Hudsucker Proxy opens to the scene of one Norville Barnes (played by Tim Robbins), preparing to jump from a skyscraper window on the last day of 1958. This was, in fact, the very first image that the screenwriters came up with. And from there they just had to decide on the whys and hows—why he was there to begin with and how they were going to get him down. What they did was take us back to December 1st 1958, the day Norville’s rise and subsequent fall began.

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