the charge of the light brigade

Natasha Richardson, 1963 - 2009

Natasha Richardson, who has died, at 45, after a well-reported accident on a Canadian ski resort, was born into it. Natasha, like her sister Joely, was the daughter of the director Tony Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave (who in turn was the sister of Lynn Redgrave and the daughter of Sir Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson). Natasha made her movie debut at four in her father's 1968 The Charge of the Light Brigade, in which her mother played the female lead. After studying at London's Central School of Speech and Drama, Richardson began her career in earnest at the Old Vic, where she played such roles as Ophelia and Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In 1986, she appeared with her mother in a production of Chekhov's The Seagull. Although a famous name can help someone get a foot in the door in the entertainment business, it is not automatically a guarantee of a successful career, something that could be attested to by any number of people who probably owe me a dinner for not mentioning their names. But by the time Richardson made her mature movie debut, playing Mary Shelley in Ken Russell's 1986 Gothic, it was clear that she had the talent to back it up. Her first real chance to show what she could do on-screen came in 1988, when Paul Schrader cast her in the difficult title role of Patty Hearst. In her review in The New Yorker, Pauline Kael wrote that Richardson had "been handed a big unwritten role" and added, "She feels her way into it, and she fills it" and "always has something in reserve--you keep waiting for what she may show you next."

The Top Ten Uncompleted Movies, Part 2

APT PUPIL

Bryan Singer's adaptation was not the first version of this Stephen King novella. In 1987, British Director Alan Bridges had Nicol Williamson and Ricky Schroder in the leads of this story concerning a teenager discovering his elderly neighbor's Nazi past. Unfortunately, the film ran over budget and with ten days of filming left, the financing ran out and the film shut down. Accounts vary of just how much was left to shoot. Stephen King had reportedly seen a 3/4 rough cut and commented it was "really good" while the writers, Ken and Jim Wheat, reported seeing an assemblage of forty minutes' worth of footage. By the time financing was found to complete the shoot a year later, Schroder had grown too too old to continue in his role and there was no way to finish the film short of a full re-shoot.

David Watkin, 1925-2008

Cinematographer David Watkin has died of cancer at the age of 82, at his home in Brighton, England. Watkin developed his skills after joining the Southern Railway Film Unit as an assistant in 1948. He branched into work on TV commercials in the early 1960s, where he met the director Richard Lester. Lester hired him to shoot his 1965 film The Knack and subsequently worked with him on Help!, How I Won the War, The Bed Sitting Room and Cuba. In those movies Watkins demonstrated a mastery of a wide range of styles, ranging from the cinema-verite vaudeville of Lester's Beatles films to the Godardisms of How I Won the War, but their best work together may well have been in The Three Musketeers (1973) and its companion piece The Four Musketeers (shot at the same time as the first film but released separately a year later) and the 1976 Robin and Marian, with Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn as the middle-aged Robin Hood and Maid Marian. In those movies, Watkin, famous for his mastery of soft light, somehow achieved a romantic period look while incorporating his director's love of slapstick and visual clutter.