Instead of using one or two professional cameras he could use several IPhones from different shooting angles to generate a very fluid movement and energy to the story. There may be limitations of the kit especially outdoors and in long shots but if the story is mainly an “internal” one this may not cause any problems. In theory, anyone with a decent camera phone could do the same and there are many experiments on YouTube to testify to the effort. However, when a director of his standing says he is going to do it we all should sit up and listen. The results should be interesting in the very least given his track record so far with shocking and disturbing material.

In the same year came one of the best of the recent westerns. Glory was the story of the first black regiment to fight for the North in the civil war and how they overcame prejudice from their own side to gain respect and dignity for blacks in America. Directed by Edward Zwick, it lit the tinderbox for the careers of a young Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman and told a moving story about the difficulties faced by them and the young white officer charged with leading their regiment.  The ending always brings a lump to my throat when I see it. Oscar glory followed with 3 gongs for best supporting actor (Washington) and best cinematography (Freddie Francis).

Westerns became cool again. The next year we were treated to Dances With Wolves (1990), a stirring Kevin Costner western, looking at prairie life from the point of view of the native Americans and a disaffected cavalry officer. Costner collected 2 Oscars for it and went on to make other westerns but never reached the heights that he did with this film. Open Range was a return to form but Dances With Wolves was the pinnacle.

Clint Eastwood successfully returned to westerns in 1992 both acting in and directing Unforgiven. This film was a gritty and realistic account of how Clint’s character is paid to avenge the disfigurement of a prostitute. It is a character-led piece with occasional bursts of explosive and bloody action. The supporting cast are pitch perfect and some of the myths of the west are exposed. It won 4 Oscars including best picture and best director.

Gettysburg (1993) directed by Ronald F. Maxwell recreated the famous civil war battle and gained many admirers for its attention to detail and stirring battle scenes. It also spawned a prequel – Gods and Generals (2003) – showing the events leading up to civil war.

So the western is alive and well and can still thrive in the mainstream. When Spielberg does mini series about westerns (Into The West) and old stories can be reinvigorated to reach a new generation then it will always have a place in Hollywood.

The most famous mutation of the traditional western was the spaghetti western. These were films made largely in Europe (Spain being the most believable location to double as Arizona or Texas) by Italians mainly that created an identifiable sub genre with its own characteristics.

Important directors on the world stage came out of this movement such as Sergio Leone and Bernardo Bertolucci. Leone put his case forward as one of the world’s great directors with such films as the Fistful of Dollars trilogy and Once upon a Time in the West, a candidate for the greatest western of all time. Bertolucci, at this stage in his career was involved as a scriptwriter for Leone and emerged later on as a fine director in his own right outside the western genre.

There were scores of spaghetti westerns made during the period 1965-1980. They were recognisable for their stylistic differences to the traditional westerns. In particular, the use of closeups of the characters’ expressive faces usually dripping with sweat or smoking a cigarette before an explosively violent scene ramped up the tension in these westerns. The villains were colourful and hideous and psychopathic. No horrific act was out of their range. They even made that Hollywood western stalwart, Henry Fonda, into a steely-eyed child killer in the epic Once Upon a Time in the West.

Heroes were not the archetypal heroes of old westerns. They were much more complex. More like anti heroes. Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name in the Fistful of Dollars trilogy typifies this. He is probably the least disagreeable character in the film but is no angel himself. In Once Upon  a Time in the West the main protagonists are symbols more than characters telling the painful story of the opening up of the west. None is without sin but there is a chance of redemption by the end for some of them.

Spaghetti westerns are violent and sometimes unpredictable interms of plot and ending. One notable example of this is The Great Silence directed by Sergio Corbucci. It is sometimes referred to as the Alpine western with its backdrop of mountains and snow and is a very dark tale with a completely miserable ending. No heroes riding off into the sunset here. Very little light relief during the film aswell. Italian directors were definitiely experimenting with stories, characters and visuals to create unique films that could still be called westerns.

No self-respecting spaghetti western was complete without a quirky yet mesmerising soundtrack from Ennio Morricone that emphasised the difference between this western and the traditional Hollywood western. Sometimes beautiful and evocative, sometimes downright irritating, Morricone’s soundtracks make the spaghetti westerns even more distinctive.

The western was also influenced from further east, Japan. Hollywood film makers saw the upsurge of spaghetti westerns and knew they would have to up their game. So they looked for new storylines and John Sturges used Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai as the template for The Magnificent Seven. Both of these films were successful in their own genre. Leone used the basic plot of Yojimbo directed by Kurosawa as his base line for A Fistful of Dollars. And yet Kurosawa openly acknowledged his regard for John Ford’s westerns. So chicken… egg?

Despite all the critical acclaim given to westerns, all was not well. By the mid 1980s the western was dead as a genre. Nobody was making significant western films. What happened? I’ll talk about that next time.

But the western started to become more of an art form in cinema when John Ford made his Cavalry trilogy in the forties and fifties. They coined the term “horse opera” and could be seen as works of art. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Fort Apache and Rio Grande all  had the panache of a director at the top of his game with action and the western genre.

However, the most important film he made was The Searchers bringing out a performance by John Wayne, his long time leading man, which is the best of his career. The Searchers also uses the interiors and exteriors to suggest danger and isolation both physical and psychological with a strong performance by the supporting cast. It explores the issues of racism, friendship, loss and grief within the boundaries of the the western genre. It is probably the most complete western film of all time – strong in story, cinematic image, action and acting.

Perhaps the most over-looked and under-rated John Ford western is My Darling Clementine. Someone described it as more of a poem than a story. More lyrical in pace and narrative. It was a retelling of the gunfight at the OK corral but uses pacing and imagery to provide a unique beat to the film. A gem of a film by a master director.

And who can forget John Ford’s initiation into westerns with Stagecoach giving an young and then unknown actor called John Wayne his big break.

Later period John Ford westerns such as The Horse Soldiers, Sergeant Rutledge and Two Rode Together did not hit the heights of the earlier films although there was a brief return to form in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. He did direct the civil war segment of How The West Was Won and finished his westerns with Cheyenne Autumn, an unusual film of its time that looked at the west from the point of view of the native Americans. This was ground-breaking in its day.

A John Ford western could be characterised by ravishing visuals of the landscape with Monument Valley providing the inevitable backdrop in many of his westerns. Dust and desert, sunrises and sunsets, rousing soundtracks and music, exquisite action and horsemanship, strong story lines and usually some humorous scenes to counter balance the serious and dangerous aspects of the film. He blended it together to produce moving and rousing entertainment and, some would argue, high art as well. He is one of the first “auteurs” as he had his own signature on most of his films. That indelible stamp influenced many directors that followed and was the baseline of development for the western genre.

Post John Ford westerns started to diversify but all owed a debt of gratitude to Ford for setting the benchmark by which westerns were to be measured.

This post just sprang to mind as I have watched a few classic films recently that serve to illustrate the point very well.

James Cameron does an incredible job with “Aliens”. We see the lifeboat craft drifting aimlessly in space with Ripley and the cat (Jonesy, I think) still in suspended animation. The door is then burnt open as they are rescued by a deep space salvage team. As Ripley recuperates on a space station near earth, Cameron uses an inventive dream sequence to wrong foot the audience. Ripley’s mind is messed up and we begin to empathise with her immediately particularly as no one seems to want to believe her about the existence of the alien monsters. It’s like a pantomime response but very effective. The rest of the cast are saying they don’t exist while Ripley and the audience are effectively shouting “They’re behind you!”. We’ve seen the previous film, we know what they can do. Even worse to come, as Ripley is “on trial” for destroying the Nostromo and she loses her pilot licence. How unfair, we say. And she finds out that she has been in hypersleep for around seventy years. Her child has grown up, lived a full life and died before she returned. How terrible for her. We are hooked! And then she finds out that the planet where the alien craft crashed is now colonised by a group of terraformers including families with children. This provides the motivation for Ripley to return to the planet as an advisor (and her need to regain her pilot’s licence).

All this is played out very skilfully through fleshing out the back story with some emotional twists to provide the setting for the rest of the film and draw the audience in for the ride. Excellent.

Another good example of a stunning first twenty minutes is a film I have mentioned before in these posts – the remake of “Dawn of the Dead” directed by Zak Snyder. All of the George Romero fans know what is about to happen but the way it is achieved is quite stunning. We see the horror unfolding through the eyes of the nurse (Sarah Polley) as she is coming to the end of her shift at the hospital.  This is inter-cut with newsreels of unrest in the world gradually expanding into anarchy. We’ve all seen news items with video of riots and conflict before. But it quickly shows us that the anarchy is due to a mysterious infection. The nurse unwittingly goes about her routine and leaves the hospital just as patients start arriving with the infection. As she leaves the hospital we see the legs of a man sticking out from an ambulance. Is he infected? Is he dead? No, he’s just resting before the next call out. Phew! The audience starts feeling for the safety of the nurse. Something bad is happening. We know but does she? We want to shout out to warn her.

Cut to suburbia and her car driving back home. Nothing yet to suggest anything abnormal although the tension has been ramped up through the unease felt earlier. She has a conversation with a little girl. But there is a tangible unease established. She is the innocent about to be threatened. She arrives home and goes to sleep with her husband. All is normal until they are woken up by a hungry zombie who just happens to be the little girl she talked to before. Her husband is bitten and turns into a zombie and in turn tries to bite her! Talk about a maiden in peril. She manages to narrowly escape out of the bathroom window and get into her car only to be confronted by a scene of utter carnage and mayhem with neighbours shooting, killing and eating each other, cars crashing and fires breaking out all over suburbia.

The scenes are so effective because that is so like our home, a comforting if boring environment to return to at the end of a hard day’s work. Yet again we are drawn into the story with great skill. In this film,  our “little castle”, our homely comfort blanket has been ripped to shreds at the beginning of the film and we are empathising with the nurse, frightened and at a loss to know what to do next. The rape and mutilation of our home life is shown graphically in the film in a series of scenes as the Sarah Polley character tries to drive out of her suburban estate. Neighbours with guns shooting at anything, homicidal zombies chase the living to taste their flesh, cars collide and crash. There is even an aerial shot (with CGI) showing the mayhem from the air. Will she survive, or won’t she? Who will save her? Or, how will she save herself from this insidious disaster? Brilliant set up for the rest of the film.

Perhaps, one of the most brilliant beginnings to a film must be “Apocalypse Now”. In the opening sequence over the credits, we are shown a patch of jungle with instrumental music from the Doors (The End) playing on the soundtrack. It evokes an oriental and exotic feeling. We hear helicopters whizzing overhead and suddenly the jungle bursts into flames. We know, without a spoken word, we are in Vietnam in the late 1960s early 1970s. Brilliantly concise use of images and sound to set the scene for the movie. If that wasn’t good enough we are treated to a second sequence where the back story is narrated by the Martin Sheen character, a burnt-out special forces assassin on the edge of sanity who, as we find later can only find normality and comfort when on a “mission”, in this case the assassination of a renegade American colonel leading a native army against the North Vietnamese. There are many questions asked in the film about who is sane in a world of insanity and this beginning sets the scene beautifully for the journey to the heart of darkness.

One last and very different example is “Babel” – a recent film which weaves a story that spans a number of different countries and cultures. It intrigues the audience. It starts several seemingly unrelated stories cutting between them and as an audience we begin to feel curious about where this is going. Each story is interesting in its own right but we are not asked to empathise with the charcters involved. It is more intellectual. How are these stories connected? The director gradually unveils the connections throughout the film in very clever ways but you do not know the whole story until the end. It uses the audience’s collective curiosity to establish commitment and interest in the film.

Getting the audience involved as early as possible through emotion, curiosity or clever use of visuals and symbol can set the tone for the rest of the film.

“Interesting” doesn’t come near to describing this film of extremes. It is an assault on the senses, a real shocker in the true sense of the word. I don’t know whether I liked it or not but I will certainly not forget some of the scenes in the film in a hurry.

To pigeonhole it, I suppose you might call it a revenge thriller. You have to admire its bravado and confidence in the cinematography and acting. The premise of the movie is that the central character has been imprisoned in a room for 15 years and it follows his escape and his attempts to find out who imprisoned him and why. If you can suspend disbelief at the start it becomes a roller coaster of a film charting the effect on him of regaining his freedom and his eventual search and revenge on his captor.

There are scenes of extreme torture, memorable fight sequences, graphic sex and one scene where the central character eats a live octopus! The tentacles were still wriggling around his chin during the scene. And there is a twist involving incest near the end which heightens the extreme nature of the film.

The acting is very good. “Over the top” works very well in this film and seems normal. It is not a film for subtle acting. The screenplay on the face of it should not work as it is unbelievable and it is difficult to empathise with most of the characters. The plot is convoluted but if you can stay with it (I got lost a couple of times but regained it later) it has a feel of “Seven” about it especially with the late realisation of a horrific act.

There are some wonderfully realised scenes during the film, quite bretahtaking really. Some of the earlier scenes showing his madness during captivity and the 2D fight sequence as the “hero” fights his way through a dozen or so thugs to reach the end of a corridor show a very creative visual force behind the film. This force is ever present during the movie and is surely the work of the director Park Chan Wook.

Why is it that Asian film directors are so adept at creating such gut-churning violence and shocks? And then Hollywood does a remake that sanitises the film to make it palatable for western audiences. The shocks are not the “jump out of your seat” variety but more the “why would you ever consider showing THAT!” variety.

But with Old Boy you have a director who is clearly gifted in translating the implausible narrative into a coherent set of images and scenes that draw you into the film. You have to admire the creative force that spawned this movie, his confidence with the extreme subject matter and his mastery of the film making arts.

Whether you like the movie… well that’s another matter.

]]> http://films.davesinfocafe.com/old-boy-asian-extremism/feed/ 0 http://films.davesinfocafe.com/southern-comfort/ http://films.davesinfocafe.com/southern-comfort/#comments Wed, 07 Jan 2009 04:34:37 +0000 Dave http://films.davesinfocafe.com/?p=169 Every so often I see a film on TV that I remember from long ago that surprises me. Southern Comfort is one such film that I feel is a hidden gem. Not only has it got much to offer cinematically speaking but it has balls and attitude.

Southern Comfort is a film that follows the (ultimately tragic) exploits of a troop of National Guardsmen on a training exercise in the swamps of Lousianna as they upset some local Cajun hunters and pay a shockingly high price for their misdemeanours.

The troop is a standard mix of rednecks, loners and bureaucrats who are better at warring with themselves than the enemy. There are no big stars just an ensemble of excellent character actors – Keith Carradine, Fred Ward and Powers Boothe most notably – who carry the story forward in a believable fashion. Tension abounds from the beginning as the disparate troop argues and fights within itself. A tragic encounter with some local Cajun hunters leaves them fighting for their lives as they become the prey.

The tone is set from the start as the beautifully evocative slide guitar soundtrack by Ry Cooder creates a mood of foreboding and alienation, something tragic is coming our way. (He does something similar in Paris, Texas). This complements the stunning cinematography of the swamps creating an oppressively claustrophobic stage for the action to be played out. Its timeless and directionless and alien to the city boys in the troop. All the troop wants to do is get outta there but which way?

The director is Walter Hill, a director most famous at this point for his controversially violent film The Warriors which traces the attempts of an urban gang to get back to their own turf across town. During the film they have to cross other gangs’ turf and survive to reach their goal. One could argue that Southern Comfort is a grown up riff on that story with the troop entering (and messing with) Cajun territory. Certainly the violence meted out is quite graphic and resonant with the Warriors. But there are more levels to the film than that. It can be seen as a post Vietnam analysis of the USA, a country with lots of divisions and arguments and opinions and attitudes struggling to come to terms with resolving conflict. It could be seen as an allegory of Vietnam itself with an arrogant army going into an alien landscape and coming up against a very different culture and getting a very bloody nose.

The ending is not surprising in what happens but the way that it happens. The two remaining survivors of the troop eventually come across a Cajun village. Up until now the Cajuns have been represented by the partially seen hunters. Now we see the Cajun everyday life of the village and the hospitality afforded to the troopers. Nevertheless the troopers are wary discovering that the hunters have returned to the village to finish them off. So after a game of cat and mouse they fight and kill the hunters and hobble off down the road out of the village until they meet an army vehicle.

The peculiar thing for me about this ending is that the film seems to be saying that Cajuns are not all bloodthirsty killers by portraying the village life and the obvious enjoyment. It could also be saying that the Cajun everyday life is a warm and cuddly myth because when the fight for survival in the village begins everything carries on as if nothing is happening! No one seems to be perturbed about shots being fired and the troopers obviously sustaining knife wounds. What does that say about the local populace? Mixed messages I think and puzzling to me any way.

Nevertheless, in the final analysis it is a gripping action thriller with overtones of so much more and whilst not getting into the great film category Southern Comfort has much to commend it.

I watched The New World the other night on TV and found it spookily like his previous film The Thin Red Line in many ways. Stylistically, there are many similarities. The mobile camera work, the beautiful photography of the natural world, the long takes, the sometimes-fractured continuity, the occasional character voice over of innermost thoughts, the sun-and-sky-through-the trees visual motif that almost acts as punctuation for the film’s narrative.

I found the film quite engaging albeit very long. The narrative is told through the probably mythical love affair between Captain John Smith and Pocahontas and is more like an epic poem than a narrative-driven piece. Smith is portrayed by Colin Farrell as an non-conformist outcast who escapes death at the hangman’s noose and the native tomahawk and who becomes more at ease with the native way of life than the European settlers’ grim existence at Jamestown. Pocahontas, played by newcomer Q’orianka Kilcher is the young and enchanting native princess who falls in love with him. Both experience major changes and dilemmas that bring them together and then force them apart. The film’s actions revolve around their central relationship for the most part until Smith is called back by the king to explore for a North West passage.

While the film is woven around the facts about the precarious co-existence of the settlers and the natives there are big themes being explored here. Is the industrial European culture any better than the indigenous aboriginal culture? Clearly, Malick doesn’t think so as he portrays the settlers as unwanted intruders into a kind of Garden of Eden. The beautiful shots of the natives fishing and in their daily lives, seemingly at one with the natural world, contrast vividly with the settlers grim, muddy and argumentative existence inside walls of their own making in the early part of the film. But whose world will prevail? The natives help the intruders survive their first harsh winter through gifts of food thinking that they will leave within the year. When it is clear they are staying the natives adopt a different stance and attitude and bloody battles erupt. The natives fear they will be overrun by the newcomers. It is a statement about imperialism and colonisation.

The love affair between Smith and Pocahontas is shown in long tracking shots of them walking through meadows and playfully getting to know each other through touch and other senses. No unnecessary sexual scenes here. Just the hint, the mood, the nuances created by the length of time they are shown together. Later, as difficulties beset the relationship the distance between them widens and the colours drain. Beautiful mood creation.

As Pocahontas is ostracised by her people she is taken in by well meaning settlers who show her their ways. Eventually she travels to Europe and we see her start to appreciate the beauty and culture of England and understand it and be at peace with it. Malick shows us that the formal beauty of an English country garden can be just as ravishing as the wild forest, streams and meadows of the new world. This was Pocahontas’s new world. On her death at the end of the film Pocahontas is citizen of two worlds accepting the differences and seeing beauty in each.

In some ways, The New World is a search for beauty both visually, emotionally and intellectually and the triumph of beauty over mere squalid existence. The film flows gently and rhythmically like a stream (apart from the odd violent episode) and does not conform to a typical Hollywood format where all things are resolved in the ending, all loose ends tied up neatly and the audience go home satisfied. It leaves you thinking. It leaves you with a sense of the changing moods and perspectives of the time. It leaves you with some powerful visual images of outstanding beauty and wonderment. More a cinematic poem than an historical film. It is probably a film that will mature slowly and may even provide a better Director’s Cut than most.

Why am I raving on like a lunatic about this non Hollywood, German film director whose most famous films are so idiosyncratic and away from the mainstream? Not because these two films generally crop up in most film critics top 20 films of all time. Not because both films contain the acting talents of Klaus Kinski, one of the most charismatic and spell binding (not to say unpredictable) presences on celluloid. No, you just have to watch the films to find out how special they are.

I had seen Aguirre, Wrath of God, many years ago and it left an indelible impression on me. I just had to see it again. The story is based on a real event about a group of conquistadors fresh from defeating and enslaving the Incas in Peru and their search for El Dorado – the fabled city of gold – in the Peruvian jungles of the Amazon. The opening scene of the Spanish conquistadors trudging down the mountain into the Amazon jungle through the clouds is deliberately long with an electronic musical score and it sets the tone and pace for the rest of the film. As they trudge through the mud down into the jungle you have feelings of foreboding, that the jungle is ready to devour them physically and metaphorically. The canon gets stuck, the horsemen get caught in the jungle vines, the river looks menacing. Its not long before the nobles are arguing amongst themselves, and power struggles erupt with the hunch backed Aguirre plotting and conspiring. The expedition starts to devour itself and descend into madness.

What is so good about the film is the intensity of it. Kinski, in particular, is electric as the morose, treacherous and violent nobleman who eventually leads the doomed expedition further in to the jungle and madness. The cinematography is breath-taking with the merciless jungle and the raging river becoming major characters in the unfolding tragedy. It has epic pretensions but the encroaching jungle makes the film close in on itself. The conspiracies and power struggles are shown at close quarters. It explores the relationships between the classes – between the noblemen, the soldiers and the slaves. As it is based on the only surviving account of the expedition by a priest, there is also an examination of the realtionship between the state and the church. It looks real because it is real. The hardships were actual hardships for the actors. They really are miserable! No CGI or special effects here. Reality filmed well can be just as stunning. Long takes, no flash bang editing here. It sucks you in by osmosis. It gets under the skin. The finale shows the rapidly-unravelling raft floating down the river with the few remaining survivors after the indian attacks and the camera swoops in and flys in circles around the stricken craft whilst Aguirre rants at the jungle, the river and the dead bodies that surround him. An incredible death spiral image. Wow. If you can overcome the German dialogue and the sub titles I urge you to watch this film.

Just imagine. Immediately before Aguirre, Wrath of God, was Fitzcarraldo, an equally esoteric and eccentric piece of quality cinema. It has many of the features of Aguirre, Wrath of God. Kinski is on acting duty again but playing a much different character – an eccentric Irshman called Fitzgerald who buys a plot of rubber plantation land in the inaccessible Peruvian jungle. Everyone thinks he’s mad because he has no way of getting the rubber out of the impenetrable jungle. This is a much more uplifting story of one man’s insistence that the impossible can be made possible (with a little help from your friends). The jungle and the river are once again major players but not so malevolent this time and beautifully filmed. There are long takes and deep focus shots of the steam boat sailing around the bends of the river at normal speed against the majestic backdrop of the jungle. There are long takes of the steam boat actually being mechanically hauled over a steep piece of cleared jungle  over to the next river. This is actually happening. You have to marvel at it. Herzog, however, manages to make it seem fantastical at the same time. And the operatic score perfectly compliments the film. It symbolises civilisation of the wilderness as we see the indigenous tribe buy into Fitzgerald’s dreams. And the music teeters between tragedy and triumph as they overcome the various obstacles put in their path. Not only does he manage to make his money from rubber but he also satisfies his passion for opera as he builds the first opera house in the jungle.

F53yUsgVuL0

Quite simply the images in this film, as in Aguirre, Wrath of God, burn into your skull. Once seen never forgotten. Iconic images you will not see the likes of elsewhere. Both films march to the beat of their own drums. They are multi-layered and complex but worth investing time in to stimulate your mind and your senses. In the current parlance, these are two films to see before you die.

However, his first appearance was several years earlier in a small but pivotal cameo role in the first adaptation of Red Dragon called Manhunter. It was directed by a little known director at the time who was famous for creating the US cop series Miami Vice – Michael Mann. Many years later, after the success of the Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal, a big budget remake of Red Dragon was made starring Edward Norton, Ralph Fiennes and Anthony Hopkins reprising his role as Dr Lecter.

But which was the better film?

Manhunter was a low key but stylish film on a relatively low budget. So no famous movie stars only good actors propelling along a spare and tense script. The audience is a key member of the film crew here as they are required to use their imagination throughout the film to fill in the gaps as you are told but not shown the grisly goings on. All the audience sees is the aftermath in all its gory detail. It is also a puzzle which engages the audience. How can they find the Tooth Fairy in time before he kills another innocent? The film is ground breaking as it introduces us to the techniques of forensic criminal investigation used by the FBI. I would go so far as to say that it is the forerunner of the CSI TV series. Heck, you’ve even got the actor who played Will Graham in Manhunter – William Petersen – as the head of the original CSI unit!

Manhunter is stylish too. Many film conventions are broken here. The scenes with Lecter are shown in his brilliant white prison cell. Glaring light and white backgrounds. Most monsters emerge from the dark. This one is shown in the light. Lecter himself is an educated, manipulative man who would not be out of place in a board room or a university. The architecture of the prison/ secure facility where Lecter is held is interesting again all white but labyrinthine. You see Graham trying to get out but seemingly going round and round. Is it a representation of Graham’s mind, is he going insane? There are lots of glossy Miami Vice-like touches in the beach house scenes as well.

But the key to this film is the script. It is maybe not the most faithful adaptation of the book out but concentrates on the key storyline to produce a gripping film. There is no scene that does not have a function, no dialogue that does not propel the story onward. A masterpiece of conciseness. The audience are willing participants in filling in the gaps. The technical forensic stuff is real and not presented for dummies. It is restless and sparks into life at the appropriate moments. The story works and the climaxes are satisfying.

So is it better than the big budget remake? My view is a resounding yes. Red Dragon boasts actors with a high pedigree and another performance by Anthony Hopkins as Lecter. But we tend to see in our mind the Lecter from the Silence of the Lambs. If you compare the performances by Hopkins and Brian Cox (Lecter in Manhunter) they are different but equally chilling in their own way. Cox is almost brash and arrogant and not very menacing until you see what he can do in the scene where he finds out Graham’s home address. Hopkins is charming and menacing but we know already what despicable things he can do from the previous films and this detracts a little from the menace. It’s almost like meeting an old friend again. We’re not frightened merely eager to see what he’s been up to! Red Dragon is possibly a film too far for Dr Hannibal Lecter.

For all its production values and good acting Red Dragon is a bit of a yawn. Red Dragon may be a a more faithful adaptation of the book but it’s too long and loses its tension several times. We are after all working in a different medium. We see the moment when Graham discovers Lecter as the serial killer and the reason why he left the FBI. The grisly scene is shown it all its technicolour glory as Graham is sliced up by Lecter but is it any scarier or better than the few terse references in Manhunter. In my view, less is more and the Red Dragon scene seems gratuitous.

In trying to spend more time looking at the Tooth Fairy’s character it drains the story of its lifeblood. Our monsters need to be unknown to make them scary. This also knocks the point of view out of whack. Which character is driving the film? Graham or the Tooth Fairy or Lecter? The script and story meander along looking for the directions to the end. For those of us who have seen Manhunter we know the story, we know the ending, we have the route map. We just shout at Red Dragon to get on with it.

At the end of the day I find Red Dragon a bit redundant. Why was it made anyway? Hollywood bosses trying to build a franchise from the Thomas Harris books? For those of you who have not seen Manhunter and or Red Dragon get them from your local DVD rental and check it out for yourself.