A Royal Night Out

After a quiet period during the Summer, at least in terms of our film club, we started our new season with A Royal Night Out - we hoped it would be a crown-puller, but we only managed a small audience although they were pretty thirty and bar takings were good.

In advance of the film I wondered if it was going to be a sequel to The King's Speech or a prequel to The Queen.  In the event it was neither, and although it was enjoyable with some good performances it was less real than the whole of the Harry Potter saga.

Here are my notes:

A Royal Night Out

UK 2014                      127 minutes

Director:                      Julian Jarrold

Starring:                        Bel Powley, Sarah Gadon, Emily Watson and Rupert Everett

 “…the Windsors are given a sitcom-style veneer of just-like-us approachability in A Royal Night Out – a largely fictional romp that plays as a slab of official palace history as rewritten by Enid Blyton. That may sound ghastly, yet Julian Jarrold’s film has cheerily naff charm in spades. Following the young princesses Elizabeth and Margaret as they shed their regal cocoon, joining the great unwashed for the VE Day celebrations, it’s speculative history jauntily dressed as a cut-glass entry in the one-wild-night teen subgenre.”

Guy Lodge

In a broadcast speech to commemorate VE Day on 8 May 1945 Churchill said “We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing”: in London there were three days of uproarious celebration and in Buckingham Palace George VI (Rupert Everett) and Queen Elizabeth (Emily Watson) reluctantly agree that Princesses Elizabeth (Sarah Gadon) and Margaret (Bel Powley) might be allowed to have a night out on the town in the company of carefully selected chaperones.

The initial premise of the film is correct, but the development of the plot is entirely fictional: in 1945 Princess Margaret was only fourteen, the princesses went out in a group of 16 that included military protection, and rather than attending a party at the Ritz the princesses were allowed only to mingle with the crowds that filled the roads around Buckingham Palace.

Justin Jarrold began his career on TV where he directed an episode of Coronation Street before moving on to directing episodes of Cracker and Silent Witness.  After directing several TV films he made his cinema debut with Kinky Boots (2005), following this with Becoming Jane (2007) and Brideshead Revisited (2008).  His most recent TV work has included Appropriate Adult (2011), a dramatization of the life of Fred and Rosemary West, The Girl (2012), about Hitchcock’s relationship with Tippi Hedren while he was making The Birds, and the mini-series The Great Train Robbery (2013).  He is currently working on The Crown, a TV series about the royal family.

Made in Dagenham

Another week and another screening.  Here are my notes:

Made in Dagenham

UK 2010                      113 minutes

Director:                      Nigel Cole

Starring:                        Sally Hawkins, Rosamund Pike, Bob Hoskins, Miranda Richardson and Geraldine James

Nominations and Awards

• Nominated for 4 BAFTAs including Outstanding British Film and Best Supporting Actress (Miranda Richardson)
• Another 8 nominations including nominations for Best Actress (Sally Hawkins), Best Supporting Actress (Rosamund Pike) and Best Supporting Actor (Bob Hoskins) at the British Independent Film Awards

“The unexpected thing about Made in Dagenham is how entertaining it is. That's largely due to director Nigel Cole's choice of Sally Hawkins for his lead. In Mike Leigh's Happy Go Lucky (2009) and again here, she shows an effortless lightness of being. If she has a limitation, it may be that she's constitutionally ill-adapted for playing a bad person”

Roger Ebert

Rita O’Grady (Sally Hawkins) unwillingly becomes shop steward at Ford’s Dagenham plant and then leads a strike of the 187 women sewing machinists, when they walk out against sexual discrimination and claim equal pay. The strike is successful and Barbara Castle (Miranda Richardson), as Secretary of State for Labour in Harold Wilson’s government uses it to promote what was to become the 1970 Equal Pay Act.

The inspiration for the film was a radio programme which reunited personnel from both sides of the strike many years later.  Steven Wooley as producer heard the programme and realised its potential as a subject for a film: the key historical events of the story are true, some individual elements of the original characters reappear in some of the strikers, while other characters are entirely fictional.

In the central role of Rita Sally Hawkins is superb: she made her name in a series of films with Mike Leigh, but the tone of this film, despite the potentially grim nature of the subject, is closer to Calendar Girls (also directed by Nigel Cole).  Philip French also suggests a comparison with a naughty Carry On film rather than to Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses, another film about a strike by women, this time by Latino office cleaners in Los Angeles.  

However the film is far more than a vehicle for Sally Hawkins: the cast includes established actresses like Geraldine James and Miranda Richardson as well as rising stars like Andrea Riseborough (Brighton Rock and Never Let Me Go) and Rosamund Pike (Pride and Prejudice and An Education).  Bob Hoskins earned good reviews for his role as a minor union official who is both mentor and friend to Rita and there is a superb cameo from John Sessions as a pipe-smoking Harold Wilson.

Despite the good reviews and numerous nominations for awards, Made in Dagenham had the misfortune to be released in the same year as The King’s Speech which in total won more than 60 major awards.

Here's the trailer:

The King's Speech

We start our new season with a somewhat inevitible choice next week.  These are my notes:

The King’s Speech

UK 2010                      119 minutes

Director:                      Tom Hooper

Screenplay:                   David Seidler

Starring:                        Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter

Nominations and Awards

• Won four Oscars (Best Picture, Director, Actor and Original Screenplay) plus eight nominations (including Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress and Cinematography).
• Won seven BAFTAs (including Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress and Best Music) plus seven further nominations.
• A further 56 wins and 75 nominations

“Although the film involves a man overcoming a serious disability, it is neither triumphalist nor sentimental.  Its themes are courage (where it comes from, how it is used), responsibility, and the necessity to place duty above personal pleasure or contentment – the subjects, in fact, of such enduringly popular movies as Casablanca and High Noon.  In this sense, The King's Speech is an altogether more significant and ambitious work than Stephen Frears's admirable The Queen of 2006 and far transcends any political arguments about royalty and republicanism.”

Philip French

In the early1930s the Duke of York (Colin Firth), the younger son of George V (Michael Gambon), was struggling to overcome a speech impediment with help from Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), an Australian speech therapist.  George V died in 1936, and his death was followed by one of those incidents when, in Alan Bennett’s memorable phrase “history rattled over the points”: Edward VIII (Guy Pearce) abdicated in order to marry the divorced Wallis Simpson (Eve Best) and the Duke of York, who had never even seen any state papers was crowned King just as Fascism was on the rise across Europe and Churchill was beginning to warn of the dangers of German rearmament.  Logue continued to work with George V and with his help the King was able to face the challenges of both his Coronation and the public speeches his position demanded of him, including a live broadcast in September 1939 on the outbreak of war.

David Seidler had lived in London during the Second World War and had subsequently developed a stammer from the stress that he had endured.  He had been inspired by the example of George VI’s struggles with his speech impediment and, having moved to the US where he became a scriptwriter in Hollywood, he decided to write about the King.  Lionel Logue’s son committed to give him access to his father’s notes, but only if the Queen Mother consented: she gave her permission, but asked him not to do so in her lifetime.  Seidler subsequently discovered that Logue had treated one of his own uncles, and from him learnt about the techniques that Logue used in his treatment.  From this original source material Seidler produced an initial screenplay that he subsequently turned into a play script, and it was after attending a reading of this that Tom Hooper’s mother called him with a simple message: “I’ve found your next project”.

Although depicting the key historical events of the period, the film makes some changes to enhance the dramatic nature of the story: the Duke of York started working with Logue ten years before the Abdication and the improvement in his speech was noticeable within months rather than years; during the Abdication Crisis Churchill had been a staunch supporter of Edward VIII; and far from distancing themselves from Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement George VI and Chamberlain appeared together on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, an act of endorsement by the King described as “the biggest constitutional blunder that has been made by any sovereign this century”.

The film received rave reviews for its acting, screenplay and direction. Colin Firth received his first Oscar and both Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter received Oscar nominations for their supporting roles.  David Seidler won his first Oscar in his mid-70s, and after a long and successful career as a director on TV and having only directed one other feature film Tom Hooper won Oscars for both Best Director and Best Film.

Here's the trailer:

A Single Man

These are my notes for the film we will be screening tonight:

A Single Man


USA 2009 (99 minutes)

Director: Tom Ford

Starring: Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Matthew Goode and Nicholas Hoult

Awards and Nominations

• Won BAFTA for Best Leading Actor (Colin Firth)

• Nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Colin Firth)

• A further 12 wins and 23 nominations

“...an indulgent exercise in 1960s period style, glazed with 21st-century good taste, a 100-minute commercial for men’s cologne: Bereavement by Dior.”

Peter Bradshaw

George Falconer (Colin Firth), an ex-pat English professor at a Los Angeles college in 1962 is struggling to cope after the death of his long term partner Jim (Matthew Goode) in a car accident. He plans to commit suicide and the film follows him over the course of his final day as he meets various people including Charley (Julianne Moore), a semi-alcoholic divorcee, and Kenny (Nicholas Hoult), a bisexual student, but these encounters force him to reconsider his decision.

The film is based on a semi-autobiographical 1964 novel by Christopher Isherwood that is set at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, i.e. before the sexual revolution of the late 1960s, when Isherwood was concerned about losing his young partner who wanted to move from Los Angeles to the more relaxed atmosphere of San Francisco. Isherwood’s decision to set the action over the course of one day was inspired by his admiration for Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, which took its structure from James Joyce’s Ulysses. Another critic noted the novel’s resemblance to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, even going so far as to suggest that its title could be Death in Venice, Cal.

Colin Firth received unanimous praise as well many awards for his performance in the film. In The Guardian Peter Bradshaw noted that the role of Falconer

“is such a perfect match for Firth’s habitual and superbly calibrated performance register: withdrawn, pained, but sensual, with sparks of wit and fun.”

He made his film debut with a lead role in Another Country (1984), but it was his role as Mr Darcy in the TV adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (1996) that brought him to international attention. Since this success he has appeared in a wide variety of films on a regular basis, ranging from art house to purely commercial, but it is A Single Man that has brought him his greatest critical acclaim to date. He has recently received rave reviews as well as predictions of future awards for his performance as George VI in The King’s Speech (2010) which will receive its first UK screening at the 2010 London Film Festival.

Tom Ford made his name as creative director for Gucci and YSL before setting up his own brand – Tom Ford – in 2005. In his new role he had dressed many of Hollywood’s leading men, and in parallel with his own label also established his own film production company. A Single Man is the first film that his company has produced as well as his first film as director.