The Screengrab : dennis potter

Not Readily Available on Legally Authorized Commercial DVD Release in the Continental United States: "Dreamchild" (1985)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 29 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

This fanciful British movie boasts one of the unlikeliest collaborations of the last twenty-five years, Dennis Potter and Jim Henson. Potter wrote the script, which is built on a culture-clash factoid from 1932: that year, the 80-year-old Alice Liddell--who, many decades earlier, had been Alice Hargreaves, the model for Lewis Carroll's heroine and the original audience for his Wonderland stories--sailed to the United States to visit Columbia University as part of the celebration of Carroll's centennial. (She died two years later.) Alice is played, by Coral Browne, as a grumpy, out-of-sorts old woman at odds with the new world and a trial to her hired companion, a waifish young girl named Lucy (Nicola Cowper). When they arrive in New York, the two women become attached to Jack (Peter Gallagher), a motormouth newspaperman who decides to serve as Alice's promoter. He also begins a romance with Lucy, which distracts the girl from her usual focus on her employer's every whim and leaves the increasingly befuddled Alice more unmoored than ever. Life is slipping away from Alice, and as it does, her memories, which are ever more indistinguishable from her fantasies, rise up to engulf her.

In flashbacks, we see the young Alice (Amelia Shankley) in her relationship with the Reverend Dodgson (i.e., Carroll), played by Ian Holm, which is based on shared love and affection but also creepy, and not just because Dodgson's feelings for the child may be tinged with sexual longing, but because the girl, acting on what she senses about him, can't resist flaunting her power over him by humiliating him and making him squirm. (Does one reason this movie hasn't made it to DVD have to do with the reluctance in the culture at large to view someone like Dodgson--a man who may have had desires that he channeled into creative work because there was no acceptable way for him to act on them in life--as something more sympathetic than a monster? Can Lewis Carroll co-exist in a world with Dateline NBC?) She also steps into the world of Carroll's books and has conversations with his characters--the Mad Hatter, the March Hair, the Gryphon, the Mock Turtle--that are often disorienting and upsetting. Henson's Creature Shop created huge puppets modeled on the John Tenniel illustrations from the books, and they are not cuddly. The Mad Hatter looks as if he'd taken a dose of radiation that only made him both stronger and meaner; the March Hare could bite your head off.

Like a lot of Dennis Potter's works, Dreamchild is a mixed bag, and there are times, especially in the scenes involving the endearingly mismatched young lovers, where the director, Gavin Millar, seems to not have a clue how to stage this stuff but is prepared to hold his nose, dive in, and hope for the best. But it's generally entertaining except for the sequences that are just downright stunning, and it builds to a remarkable scene when the aged Alice, thinking back on her cruelty towards Dodgson, is able to incorporate her better understanding of their relationship and forgive them both. It gives way to an equally remarkable ending, with the older Alice on a rock by the sea, reunited with both Dodgson and his characters. You can believe they're all still out there somewhere.

That Guy!: Bob Hoskins

Leonard Pierce — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:45:00 GMT

It's been a long time since we've seen a new entry for That Guy!, the Screengrab's sporadic celebration of B-listers, character actors, and the working famous. So who better to mark our return than one of the most enjoyable contemporary character actors? Robert William Hoskins, the short, broad Cockney from Bury St. Edmonds, is one of England's most beloved actors -- quite unusual given that he's never had an acting lesson and his first role came purely by accident. At the time, Hoskins was seeking a career as a writer, and supported himself, like most failed artists, by working odd jobs -- in this case, as a warehouse worker. Showing up drunk and a theater to collect a friend who was auditioning for the lead, he was clowning around in the audience and, mistaken for one of the hopefuls by the casting director, he acquitted himself marvelously in the audition and got the part. It cost him a friend, but it launched one of the richest careers in modern British cinema. At 5'6", stout, and with an unmistakable working-class accent and demeanor, Hoskins is rarely the best-looking man in the room, even when he's alone; but he's parlayed his unusual appearance and forceful personality into some electrifying roles. At first known for his ability to play intense and sometimes brutal criminals and assorted villains, he later convinced his agents that he was more diverse than his resume indicated and soon showed an exceptional gift for comedy as well, both verbal and physical. His big break came in 1980, when, after a number of high-profile television appearances, he netted the lead role in The Long Good Friday (about which see below); it proved to be a turning point in his career, and he's worked steadily ever since, rarely in a lead role but always worth watching (well, maybe with the exception of Super Mario Brothers). With both blockbuster films and small independent movies to his credit, Hoskins has proven his diversity, and even now, at age 65, he gets offers that men half his age would envy. Curiously, he has played a number of political leaders from the 1940s and 1950s in his storied career: Churchhill, Mussolini, Krushchev, and Soviet secret police killer Lavrent Beria. Of this phenomenon, Hoskins has said, with typical self-deprecation, "Most dictators were short, fat, middle-aged and hairless. Besides Danny DeVito, there's only me to play them."

Where to see Bob Hoskins at his best:

THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY (1980)

Hoskins' breakout film role came in this gripping, suspenseful gangster movie, which he earned by a stellar performance in Dennis Potter's fantastic television mini-series Pennies from Heaven. Playing Harold Shand, a short-tempered and violent British gangster, Hoskins is endlessly fascinating to watch: his character, used to being in complete control, is a textbook case of slow, angry boil as his world begins to completely unravel on what should be the occasion of his greatest triumph. Watching Shand fall to pieces as he thrashes about helplessly, trying to find out who is out to destroy him and why, is one the greatest treats the gangster genre has to offer.

MONA LISA (1986)

Once again returning to the well of British gangster films, Bob Hoskins chose wisely in taking the role of George, a down-on-his-luck ex-convict who, shunned by his former colleagues, can only secure employment as the driver for a high-priced call girl. In a role rife with sexual tension, danger, and class conflict, Hoskins shines as the shy but confident George, whose initial disdain for Cathy Tyson's Simone grows into respect and finally affection. Considering that he shared the screen with some genuinely great actors -- including Robbie Coltrane, The Wire's Clarke Peters, and Michael Caine as a sinister mob boss -- it's even more impressive how good Hoskins is in this; he secured an Oscar nomination as well as a BAFTA nod for the performance.

WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT? (1988)

In the role that ensured he'd have success in the United States as well as his native England, Hoskins got a chance to stick to the rough-edged hard men he was accustomed to playing while still having ample opportunities to show off his gift for physical comedy. In this Bob Zemeckis blockbuster (profiled recently in our look at the greatest animated features of all time), he plays Eddie Valiant, a hardboiled noir detective in a 1940s version of Los Angeles where cartoons are as alive as anyone else -- though Valiant wishes otherwise when he's called upon to defend the notorious Roger Rabbit, who's been framed for murder. His Golden Globe-nominated performance is still a delight to see; it's the rare actor who doesn't come across as a complete tool acting opposite a drawing, which is why we can always forgive him for Super Mario Brothers.

Le Bon Temps Roule!

Phil Nugent — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:00:00 GMT

It's Fat Tuesday, which marks the noisy, beer-stained conclusion to Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Sadly, most of you who visit this site are trapped at your jobs or classrooms right now, and while we could address ourselves exclusively to those now celebrating in the Pelican State, most of them are probably too drunk to read. We'll just settle for mentally sending them some love rays and hope those in the French Quarter remember that as soon as the clock turns to twelve tonight, those nice policemen on horseback whose job it is to clear the streets will start unsheathing their billy clubs. For the rest of you, we'll just remind you that there have been a number of motion pictures that tried to tap into the mysterious beauty and happy vibe of the city that care forgot. Most of these movies stank like week-old gumbo, but here's a few that might make for an enjoyable carnival day rental:

PANIC IN THE STREETS (1950)

This thriller starts out on the New Orleans docks, where a tough named Blackie (played by a hulking, gaunt-featured newcomer to movies billed as "Walter Jack Palance") murders a guy who's fresh off the boat who looks as if he's only got about five minutes to live anyway. When the coroner confirms that the dead man was suffering from pneumonic plague, Richard Widmark (as a U.S. Public Health officer) and a cop played by Paul Douglas have to track down Palance, his whimpering sidekick Zero Mostel, and anyone else who may have been in contact with him, while keeping things quiet so as to prevent a panic. The director, Elia Kazan, who a year later would make one of the great movies set in New Orleans when he transferred Tennesee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire to film, shot this movie in actual New Orleans locations, which means that, in addition to its virtues as a crackerjack entertainment — which are considerable — it also has the fascination of serving as a semi-documentary record of the city as it was more than half a century ago. Fun fact: shortly after directing Mostel in this picture, Kazan testified against him in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, thus helping to get the actor blacklisted.

HARD TIMES (1975)

This period piece, set during the Depression, was the first film directed by its screenwriter, Walter Hill. It's a vehicle for Charles Bronson, in what is almost certainly the best movie and probably the best performance of his '70s period as a top-billed international star; he plays a soft-spoken drifter who falls in with a gambler (James Coburn) and begins competing in bare-knuckle fistfights that are thrown together to give the locals something to bet on. You get a sense of what the leisurely pace of life does to you in New Orleans from this film: for an action movie, it has a unusually slow tempo, as if Hill were a little drunk on the atmosphere and needed to take care to remember to keep putting his next foot in front of the other in the right order. But it's so flavorful and lovingly crafted that it's never boring. Strother Martin, who wears a white suit and a moustache that make him look more than ever like Tennessee Williams's Mini-Me, plays Coburn's sidekick, who tends Bronson's wounds; he explains his unlicensed medical status by saying that "in the fourth year of my studies, a small black cloud appeared on the campus. I departed under it." (The young Becky Allen, a mainstay of New Orleans theater for many years, has a small, good appearance as his dinner date.)

Eighteen years later, another talented action director, John Woo, would come to New Orleans to shoot his first American film, Hard Target, starring Jean-Claude Damme (as "Chance Boudreaux"), who stumbles across an operation, led by Lance Henriksen, to organize The Most Dangerous Game-style hunts of displaced homeless men on the streets of the city. At one point, Henriksen tells someone that "it's no accident we're in New Orleans... There's always some unhappy corner of the globe where we can ply our trade." So I guess the filmmakers deserve some kind of credit for not sucking up to the local Tourist Board. Oddly enough, this was not the first movie that tried to account for Van Damme's Belgian accent by insisting that his character was supposed to be a Cajun.

THE BIG EASY (1986)

This fast-talking crime movie is one that New Orleans itself has always had a love-hate relationship with. It's a cartoon of the city's image, complete with crooked cops, weird accents (the hero, a detective played by Dennis Quaid, is meant to be Cajun-Irish), and such lines as, "Who do I look like, the Grand Marshall of the Mardi Gras?" But on its own endearingly unambitious terms, it's often a fun cartoon, with a memorable little turn-on of a bedroom scene between Quaid and Ellen Barkin (who, when Quaid sticks his hand up her skirt, unrolls her smile as if she'd been wondering all her life what was in there), and funny turns by Lisa Jane Persky, Grace Zabriskie, and local icon John Goodman. There's even a brief appearance (as an inexplicably surly magnet salesman) by Peter Gabb, who starred in a Tulane University production of John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves in which this writer played a nun, a performance hailed by one critic as having been "worth trying, I guess." This movie is especially worth seeing for Charles Ludlam's appearance as Quaid's lawyer, identified at one point as "da man dat got da governor acquitted." Ludlam, the founder of New York's Ridiculous Theatrical Company, was a god in his own specialized field of high-camp, Pop Art theatrical farce, but he didn't leave behind much on film, and by the time The Big Easy opened, he had died of AIDS. Though Ludlam was a Yankee, his joyously broad, eye-rolling cameo specifically captures the kind of fun that blossoms in New Orleans like few things I've ever seen.

TUNE IN TOMORROW... (1990)

This one's really freaky, and definitely a matter of taste. Fans of hardcore silliness will find a lot in it to like. Even its bloodlines are surreal: the screenplay, by the British novelist William Boyd (An Ice Cream War; A Good Man in Africa), is based on Mario Vargas Llosa's Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, which was set in Lima, Peru in the 1950s, but with the action shifted to New Orleans in the same period. It was directed by Jon Amiel, a British TV and movie director who was then fairly hot after coming off the Dennis Potter-scripted miniseries The Singing Detective, and who was on his way, after this film came out, to never being fairly hot again. It stars Peter Falk as "Pedro Carmichael", a radio soap-opera writer who takes a creatorly interest in the forbidden romance developing between hot-blooded man-child Keanu Reeves and the ripe, womanly Barbara Hershey. The movie, which really takes off in the sections where Pedro's radio show fantasies are acted out by a group of actors that includes Peter Gallagher, Elizabeth McGovern, Dan Hedaya (in an eyepatch), Hope Lange, Buck Henry, and local embarrassment John Larroquette, also features a terrific original score by Wynton Marsalis, who can be seen performing with his band in a nightclub sequence. If you ever get the chance, give it a shot: it sure won't remind you of much else that you've seen before.

YouTube Cabinet of Curiosities: Track 29 (1988, Nicolas Roeg)

Peter Smith — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

The popular line on Nicolas Roeg's directing career is that he cranked out a string of classics in the 1970s before sliding into irrelevance during the 1980s. I can't argue with this assessment of his 70s output, but the more of his '80s work I see the more interesting and undervalued I find it to be. Consider his 1988 film Track 29, long out of print on video and as yet unreleased on DVD, which I finally caught up with when someone helpfully posted it, in its entirety, on YouTube. The film stars Roeg's then-wife Theresa Russell, Gary Oldman and Christopher Lloyd, and was penned by the great Dennis Potter (Pennies From Heaven, The Singing Detective). It's a strange, uncategorizable work that I found fascinating, a film that manages to feel completely like a Roeg film AND a Potter film. I'm posting the first segment here — click the link for the rest, but only when you’ve got a couple of hours free to watch them all. (Hat tip: Andrew Bemis.)— Paul Clark