THE PAWNBROKER (US 1966) movie **1/2 score **1/2

Thin and rather obvious study of a slum-district New York pawnbroker who lost everything during WWII….except his own life. The movie is set in the present, and Rod Steiger is quite effective as the concentration camp survivor.

The movie begins with Steiger dreaming of life in Germany before the Nazis took away his home, his wife, his children, his parents, his freedom…..and his spirit. A scene of pastoral bliss, shot in slow motion, shows Steiger and his family enjoying a peaceful day in the meadow. The music is appropriately dreamy, string-heavy and bitter-sweet and one has a sense of foreboding. THE PAWNBROKER is shot in black and white, accurately reflecting Steiger’s desperate existence and perfectly capturing the contemporary urban slum-setting, but this flash-back sequence may have benefited from being in colour to further accentuate the contrast between his life before the war and after.

The dream cuts off suddenly, and we see Steiger in present-day America snoozing on a lounger in his sister-in-law’s garden. Gone is the youthful exuberance and love of life of Steiger’s dreams….we now see an empty, withdrawn, middle-aged shell. Eventually, after nearly ten minutes, the opening credits roll as we see Steiger driving through the streets of New York to his workplace accompanied by some urgent but pretty redundant jazz. Qunicy Jones’ score covers a good deal of musical territory, but he never quite sinks his teeth into the movie’s agenda…..the music is a little too superficial (like the movie itself), though the final scene in the movie is well-scored, as the disparate elements of the score are violently flung together.

Steiger’s life is not a happy one….he merely exists…..and he is constantly tortured by memories of his experiences in the concentration camps….director Lumet inserts frequent flash-backs of what is in Steiger’s minds-eye.

Despite the emotive and worthy subject, the movie is only partially successful….it is so relentlessly 60’s in its dated attitude, ponderous nature and simplistic symbolism and constantly fails to capture the full horror of what Steiger is going through…..though of course, it would be impossible for any movie to even hint at the true horror that victims of Nazi persecution must have gone through. As a movie, it neither entertains, nor does it inform, nor does it move the emotions as it should. A more vivid illustration of Steiger’s nightmare existence was needed…..as it was, THE PAWNBROKER was very tame and sketchy. Indeed, the story may have been far more effective had it been condensed into half an hour. All in all, THE PAWNBROKER is a typically dated 60’s movie….from our perspective, the movie is somewhat lame, and rather dull…..overall, the movie is best described as impotent.

BALLAD IN BLUE (GB 1964) movie *** score ****

Ray Charles stars as himself, in this touching tale of a little blind boy and his friendship with the legendary performer. Paul Henreid not only directs the movie with some assurance, he also co-wrote the sentimental story, and even makes a brief Hitchcockian appearance towards the end the film.

Most of the action takes place in London, and the movie begins with Ray performing at a school for blind children. It must be said that much of the acting is very stilted, particularly at the beginning of the movie. However, with the appearance of the fine British actors Tom Bell and Dawn Addams, the movie becomes far more fluid and dramatic. The movie never becomes too gooey however, and the harsh realities of blindness are fully explored.

THE ELUSIVE PIMPERNEL (GB 1950) movie * score ***1/2

An absolute shambles, redeemed only by superb colour photography, great location work, and Brian Easdale’s witty score.

The trouble with David Niven’s Pimpernel is, there is very little difference between his fop and his hero….either way he is totally unsuitable for the role.

The Daily Express review perfectly sums up Niven’s performance “Niven plays the Scarlet Pimpernel with the sheepish lack of enthusiasm of a tone deaf man called upon to sing solo in a church.” Yes, a comment that could be applied to most of Niven’s career. The New Yorker said of Niven’s performance as Bonnie Prince Charlie in the 1948 movie of that name, “The picture is not lacking in moments of unconscious levity, what with David Niven rallying his hardy Highlanders to his standard in a voice hardly large enough to summon a waiter”.

Cyril Cusack and Jack Hawkins are also undone by THE ELUSIVE PIMPERNEL’s innumerable inadequacies.

Stick to the 1934 original, with a superb Leslie Howard as the apparently foppish Englishman who rescues French aristocrats from the guillotine during the early days of the French Revolution. Raymond Massey makes an excellent villain also. In fact, the New Yorker in 1976 said of 1934’s THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL, “One of the most romantic and durable of all swashbucklers”.

PHANTOMS (US 1998) movie *1/2 score **

Rather like watching someone else play a computer game such as Resident Evil…..and about as interesting, PHATOMS is just too stupid for words.

After a promisingly spooky start, the movie descends into a derivative and lacklustre retread of a hundred other (often better) monster-movies. The special effects are rather good, but far too repetitive. You see one writhing petroleum tentacle, and you’ve seen ‘em all.

Peter O’Toole stars, and manfully struggles with the weak scripting and his own advancing years. The rest of the cast, including Ben Affleck, are only mediocre.

THE IRON PETTICOAT (GB 1956) movie **1/2 score ***

A watchable though subdued ‘comical’ reworking of NINOTCHKA; Bob Hope and Katharine Hepburn work well as a team.

Soviet Captain Katharine Hepburn lands her jet at an American airbase in (West) Germany, and Bob Hope is assigned to prove to her the wisdom of Western Democracy. To do this, Hope takes her to London, where Russian embassy officials, including James Robertson Justice, David Kossof, Robert Helpmann, and Sid James desperately attempt to apprehend Hepburn and send her home.

The Ninth Gate - C (hated the ending, and the music seemed inappropriate at times.)

L.A. Confidential - A (a great movie!)

The Devil's Own - A- (another great movie!)

SNAKE EYES (US 1998) movie * score ***

ha ha.

Even by De Palma’s dismally low standards, SNAKE EYES is surprisingly obtuse, easily ranking alongside SCARFACE and BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES as one of the most howlingly awful movies ever made…..but, at least it provides dozens of unintentional laughs in the process.

Okay, so the production values are fine (though the sound effects are way overdone) and the music score is a good example of a successfully CMS composition that is not necessarily pop or jazz orientated.

But everything else about SNAKE EYES is utterly abysmal. Nicolas Cage is useless as the bent-cop who becomes a national hero, and the rest of the cast (including Gary Sinise) give particularly amateurish performances. The plot development is moronic…..each twist and turn being even more absurd than the previous one.

THE CULPEPPER CATTLE COMPANY (US 1972) movie ***1/2 score ***

It was an honour and a privilege to view THE CULPEPPER CATTLE COMPANY, it being the first Jerry Bruckheimer-produced movie, a man who is responsible, in partnership with the late Don Simpson, for the cream of 80s cinema. I also see the genius of Bruckheimer as one of the principle reasons for Hollywood’s spectacular recovery during the 1990s from the marginalized, narrow-minded and simplistic depths of 60s and 70s cinema. 90s Hollywood, spearheaded by such movie-classics as CON AIR, ARMAGEDDON, and THE ROCK (the CASABLANCA, GONE WITH THE WIND, and CITIZEN KANE of the 90s), has seen a return to the all-round entertainment value of 30s and 40s cinema….. indeed, Bruckheimer, with his championing of the CMS-excellent composer (primarily the Zimmer School – Purveyors of Excellence), has also been directly responsible for furthering the development and sophistication of the art of composing music for film and Bruckheimer + Moroder = Oscar.

THE CULPEPPER CATTLE CO is a romantic children’s Western, distinguished by stunning photography, a well-chosen cast, and a relaxed and easy-going nature. Tom Scott’s score, along with the insertion of various portions of Goldsmith’s FLIM FLAM MAN, serves the movie well. Plenty of attention to detail makes this tale of a young lad’s (Gary Grimes) ‘coming of age’ in the old West a most rewarding experience.

During the movie the lad sings “Rock of Ages”, a hymn that crops up all over the English-speaking world. The "Rock of Ages" and the cleft in the rock are not merely symbolic phrases; they are to be found at Burrington Combe, here in Somerset, England, just eight miles from where I live, where the composer of the hymn hid one day from a violent thunderstorm. Augustus Montague Toplady, an eighteenth-century clergyman who was the incumbent of a small chapel near Burrington, was walking through the gorge when the storm came up. Crouching in the cleft of the rock to escape the sudden downpour, he was moved to write the hymn that was to become one of the most famous in the English language.

Augustus Toplady: Rock of Ages.

Rock of ages, cleft for me.
Let me hide myself in thee.
Let the water and the blood.
From thy riven side which flow'd.
Be of sin the double cure.
Cleanse me from its guilt and power.

History is all around me. Yesterday, after my day’s work on the dustcarts, I went for a ten-mile walk through the country lanes and across the meadows surrounding my farmhouse. At one point, just four miles into my walk, I came across the site of the Battle of Sedgemoor (1685), the culmination of ‘The Pitchfork Rebellion’ that has the distinction of being the final ‘aggressive’ rebellion by Englishmen against the Crown. In this instance, the Protestant forces of the Duke of Monmouth (mostly from West Country towns and villages, such as Taunton, Gloucester, Bristol, and Glastonbury) took up arms against the Catholic King James II (New York was named in honour of James II, when, as the Duke of York, he took the colony from the Dutch in 1664). Despite Monmouth’s rebellious West Country army mainly comprising pitchfork-wielding farmers, much damage was inflicted on the well-disciplined forces of the King….thus, in victory, the King’s men were brutal in their treatment of the surviving rebels; many rebels were hanged and left for the crows.

However, a large number of these West Country rebels escaped to North America, many ending up in Massachusetts and other parts of New England. Such were their numbers, the English West Country accent greatly impacted on the development of the North American accent heard in Canada and the USA.

In any event, James II was deposed three years later in 1688 in what became known as the Glorious (or bloodless) Revolution. The vast majority of Great Britain was Protestant, but the king was not, therefore many eminent Englishmen invited the Protestant Dutchman William of Orange to jointly rule England with his wife Mary II (daughter of James II); James II was the last Roman Catholic to rule England. Having a Dutch king and a Dutch-sympathetic wife ruling England had a profound effect on English cultural progression; the later German ‘House of Hanover’ had a similarly Germanic effect on British development. Incidentally, the Protestant Orangemen of Northern Ireland, named themselves in honour of William of Orange (William III of Great Britain), as a tribute to the man who finally rid the English crown of Roman Catholicism.

I thought it was actually pretty good, in spite of, or maybe because of being overshadowed by The Sixth Sense. There's even one genuine scare, but the plot goes in all directions. Still entertaining though, but it might have worked better as a half hour Twilight Zone. Don't know how the Richard Matheson story is.

I've been getting an education, and have watched many old Hollywood classics recently on video: The Grapes Of Wrath, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Best Years Of Our Lives etc. This is a whole new world, though I've seen plenty of old horror films. John Wayne in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance looks a bit like Glenn Strange as the Frankenstein monster.

SEALED CARGO (US 1951) movie ***1/2 score ***

Cracking WWII adventure has Gloucester fisherman Dana Andrews uncovering Nazi submarine operations along the New England and Canadian coastline.

Andrews’ trawler happens across a wrecked Danish square-rigger….only its Captain (Claude Rains) remains on board….but all is not what it seems.

MISTER ROBERTS (US 1955) movie *1/2 score **1/2

Tedious, childish and tame sentimental US Navy comedy adapted from a successful stage-play; a popular movie in its day, with a fine cast including Henry Fonda (reprising his stage role) in the title-role, James Cagney as the obsessive ship’s Captain, Ward Bond, an Oscar-winning Jack Lemmon, and the great Williams Powell making his swan-song movie appearance.

SISTER KENNY (US 1946) movie **** score ***

Well-crafted Hollywood biopic of Australian nurse Elizabeth Kenny’s lifelong struggle to gain establishment acceptance of her methods of treating polio during the early years of the 20th century.

Rosalind Russell is excellent as Kenny, as is Alexander Knox (who also co-scripted) as Dr McDonnell.

The story begins at a barn-dance in New South Wales, where Kenny receives a gift from the grateful locals for her services as a bush-nurse. A little later her sweetheart (Dean Jagger) returns from service with the British army in Afghanistan to find Kenny caring for several children who have gone down with polio. Jagger is very good as the strong and understanding army Captain who comes to realize that Kenny will never find time for marriage, such is her devotion to nursing.

Owing to Kenny’s revolutionary methods of treatment, all of the children she cares for fully recover; news soon spreads to the medical authorities in Brisbane. Despite having an ally in Dr McDonnell, the establishment, led by Dr Brack (an excellent performance from British character actor Philip Merivale) resists the implementation of Kenny’s methods, concluding that the established methods of treating the condition, which usually leaves the children recovered but crippled for life, should continue to be practised.

The rest of the movie traces Kenny’s increasingly desperate attempts, over the course of decades, to gain establishment acceptance of her methods. Following the rejection of her ideas by a Royal Commission in Australia, Kenny takes to England and then to America to attempt to break the medical establishment’s resistance.

The movie goes to great lengths to give an even-handed account of events. Though the medical establishment’s intransigence is frustrating (to say the least), Kenny herself respects such scepticism toward her methods as, on balance, the necessary protection of the interests of the patient.

Australia, Australia…..lasting monument to British colonial endeavour. Historically an integral part of the British Empire, Australia is now a member of the Commonwealth of Nations. Australians are in many respects fortunate in that they do not share their continent, which is only a little smaller than the United States, with any other nation. Extremely remote from mother-England and their traditional allies and trading partners, it is some 12,000 miles from Australia to Great Britain via the Indian Ocean and the Suez Canal, Australians are becoming rather more interested in the proximity of huge potential markets in Asia and in the highly competitive industrialized economies of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

Australia couldn’t be further from the mother-country, and yet our bond is as strong as ever. In our modern age it is easy to forget the severe practical difficulties that British adventurers experienced when they first colonized Australia. Australian society is regarded in the wider world as essentially British, and until recently that was exactly the case. The ties to Great Britain were scarcely affected by immigration from other sources until the mid-20th century, although local concentrations of Germans, Chinese, and other ethnic groups had been established in the 19th century. However, by the 1990s the make-up of Australia’s people began to become far more complex, with large-scale immigration from Europe and Asia.

Despite the ongoing dilution of Australia’s original Anglo-Saxon component, the British monarch still maintains symbolic executive power (as in Canada and New Zealand), and Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain is represented throughout Australia by the governor-general.

THE SIEGE OF THE SAXONS (GB 1963) movie ** score **1/2

Penny-pinching production values sink this Arthurian tale of the Saxon invasion of Celtic/Roman England during the 6th century AD. Ronald Lewis makes a most uncharismatic Robin Hood-type hero, and the rest of the cast, including Ronald Howard (Leslie’s son) is second-rate.

However, such movies do make one ponder one’s past.

The English are a truly mongrel breed…..the most ethnically and culturally diverse people on the planet, apart from the ‘modern’ nations that England created through colonialism…..Australia, Canada, the USA, etc.

The English language itself is drawn from a variety of sources, and its vocabulary has been augmented by importations from all over the world. The English language no longer identifies the English, for it is the main language of Wales, Scotland, Ireland, most Commonwealth countries, and the United States. The primary source of the language, however, is the main ethnic stem of the English, the Anglo-Saxon, who invaded and colonized England in the 5th and 6th centuries. Their language provides about half the words in modern English vocabulary.

The British Isles were first peopled by migrant tribes from the continent of Europe and, later, by traders from the Mediterranean area, and the most notably by the Celts. It is from the English Celt, that the Irish, Scottish, Cornish and Welsh peoples developed. Then the Roman occupation came, and, up until the Saxon invasion in the 5th century AD, England was primarily Roman/Celtic. Earlier at this thread I talked of Burrington Combe, which is where the composer of the hymn ‘Rock of Ages’ was inspired. Combe is an old English-Celtic word for valley. The various invasions by the Danish and Norsemen during the early centuries of the first millennia also impacted strongly on the ethnic make-up of the English. However, it was the Anglo-Saxon (German) invasions of the 5th century AD that were to influence England’s cultural progression more profoundly than even the Romans. The history before the Norman Conquest is sketchily documented, but what stands out is the tenacity of the Anglo-Saxons in surviving a succession of invasions. They united most of what is now England in the 9th, 10th, and 11th centuries, only to be overthrown by the Normans (Scandinavians) in 1066. For two centuries French became the language of the court and the ruling nobility; yet the English language prevailed and by 1362 had re-established itself as the official language, at which time the modern-day Englishman or Anglo-Saxon was born. Church Latin, as well as a residue of Norman French, was incorporated into the language during this period. It was subsequently enriched by the Latin and Greek of the educated scholars of the Renaissance. The seafarers, explorers, and British empire builders of modern history have imported foreign words, mostly from Europe but also from Asia and Africa. These words have been so completely absorbed into the language that they pass unselfconsciously as English. Thus, the English, it might be said, are great anglicizers.

The English have also absorbed and anglicized people of alien race, from Scandinavian pillagers and Norman conquerors to Latin churchmen. In the royal line, a Welsh dynasty of monarchs, the Tudors, was succeeded by the Scottish Stuarts, to be followed by the Dutch William of Orange and the German Hanoverians. For the Scots, the Welsh, and the Irish, English became their main language. England provided a haven for refugees from the time of the Huguenots in the 17th century to the totalitarian persecutions of the 20th century. In recent decades there has been large-scale immigration from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, posing seemingly more difficult problems of assimilation, and sadly restrictive immigration regulations have had to be imposed that are out of key with the open-door policy that had been an English tradition for many generations.

To be counted English, it has never been necessary to be of purebred English stock, and indeed, there can be few English who are.

For centuries, while Great Britain was building its global empire, people have emigrated to the British Isles from all over of the world, some to avoid political or religious persecution, others to find a better way of life or to escape from poverty. There are three times the number of Irish living in the UK than in the Republic of Ireland itself, but one must remember that Ireland, up until very recently, had been effectively ruled by England for the best part of a thousand years. Britain has a large Jewish population, many arriving toward the end of the 19th century and in the 1930s. After 1945 large numbers of other European refugees settled in Britain. The large communities from the West Indies and South Asian subcontinent date from the 1950s and 1960s. There are also sizeable groups of Americans and Chinese, as well as various other Europeans, such as Greeks, Russians, Poles, Serbs, Estonians, Latvians, Armenians, Turkish Cypriots, Italians, and Spaniards. Since the early 1970s, Ugandan Asians and immigrants from Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Sri Lanka have sought refuge in Britain. Peoples from all over the former British Empire, from Australia to India have now made there home in Great Britain.

BURN! aka QUEIMADA! (1968 France/Italy) movie **** score ****

Marlon Brando gives a superb and convincing performance as English adventurer Sir William Walker – the personification of perfidious Albion – intelligent, ruthless, cunning, driven, duplicitous, and very charming.

This tale of 19th century colonial exploitation is all the more harrowing and powerful because of its authentic depiction of the sheer ruthlessness and the irrepressible strength of British Imperial ambition. Such lame, soft, historically-whitewashed, diluted and politically-correct movies as LAST OF THE MOHICANS (1992) and BRAVEHEART failed to impart a true sense of time and place and the real hardships and challenging situations that did exist, because they relied too heavily on weak and diluted politically-correct 90s sensibilities. It is a common mistake of filmmakers to make historical movies with character motivation driven by modern ideals, and depicted with modern-day attitude. Life was unimaginably tough and harsh in the colonial days, but with LAST OF THE MOHICANS (for instance), any impact that the movie may have had was lost because the filmmakers largely ignored the bigger political and historical picture, and also they attempted to play down the effectiveness of the British army and the colonial militia by having the Indians inflicting a far too high proportion of casualties on the army. In the real world and in the harsh and cold light of day, the exact reverse was true. The British authorities and the British American militia decimated the native Indian in North America whilst in return suffering a relatively tiny proportion of casualties…..the makers of LAST OF THE MOHICANS basically white-washed history, instead of owning-up to the true damage that the British Empire did to the North American Indian (and the Western movie genre continued the misrepresentation of the historical facts by exaggerating the success that the North American Indian had in conflict with the pioneers in the 19th century as a justification for the Americans’ retaliatory actions and gaining of territory). Thus, LAST OF THE MOHICANS had a childish simplicity and a ‘world of make-believe’ feel…..all that was missing was Mickey Mouse and Margaret Hamilton pedalling her broom-stick.

THE PATRIOT provides a good example of why this wishy-washy, white-washing of history, half-baked and politically correct approach to filmmaking fails. You see, virtually everyone accepts that the British American colonists were justified in their rebellion against the English Crown; but when a movie goes completely overboard in unfairly demonizing one side of the conflict (in this case the British authorities) by fabricating atrocities on the British side and by deifying the Americans, it actually makes many people begin to question the Americans’ justification for rebellion, and a study of all of the facts surrounding the American War of Independence will reveal that the war wasn’t good versus bad, it was far more complex than that. I’m not just talking about things like the fact that Tarleton never wore a red-coat because he actually commanded a legion of Loyalist cavalry and skilled wilderness guerrillas that wore green…..no, I’m talking about how THE PATRIOT implies that after the American Revolution, previously ‘put-upon’ slaves lived happily ever after…..this is an insult to all of those African-Americans who continued to suffer under slavery for eighty years after the British recognized US independence, and continue to this day to fight for true equality. The British Empire outlawed slavery sixty years before the United States, an act that directly inspired Latin American countries - despite Britain’s absorbing British Guyana into the Empire and the occupation of Buenos Aires in 1810 - to gain independence from their ailing mother-countries Spain and Portugal. In fact, during the first half of the 19th century the British Royal Navy enforced a blockade of its West African territory to prevent American slave ships from rounding up more African people destined for the American south.

Anyway, getting back to BURN!, Brando is despatched by the British to a Portuguese colony in the West Indies to undermine Portuguese authority by inciting rebellion amongst the huge slave population, thus allowing the British to gain control of the island colony and the valuable sugar-crop that went with it.

This movie perfectly illustrates that even though the British Empire enveloped one quarter of the globe, its influence and power extended well beyond its official boundaries and well into China, South America and many other parts of the world. Following the decline of the Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese empires in the 17th century and the French empire in the 18th century, Britain not only was able to extend its Empire to gain control over most of the West Indies for instance, the British were also able to take control of many European colonies that ceased to be protected by their waning mother-countries. The British were often able to do this with the minimum of military effort, but the maximum of diplomatic persuasion – that often amounted to holding a figurative knife to the throat of the colony.

BURN! tells the story of one such ‘enterprise’…..and the enormous suffering and loss of life that it caused. The movie’s narrative is so clearly defined, and the characters are so definite and believable in their motivations, that maximum impact is made by the filmmakers. Brando arrives at the West Indian Portuguese colony and immediately goes about sabotaging the island’s 300 year-old peace. He robs banks, incites rebellion, informs the Portuguese authorities of rebel movements, and plays one side against the other……all on the instructions of Her Britannic Majesty’s Government. Soon the island is turned upside down, the Portuguese colonists are pitted against the formerly docile slave population. In the end, Brando manages to force the colony to become independent of Portugal, thus opening up the colony and its rich sugar-crop for the British…..job done.

But, ten years later, the independent nation, now governed by a mixture of Portuguese rebels and former African slaves, is actually run by the British Sugar companies…..the Royal Navy sees to that. However, the policies of the ‘British’, despite building a hospital and fifty miles of roads, are not to the satisfaction of the people of the former Portuguese colony, and a new rebellion begins against the puppet government. Brando returns to attempt to appease the rebels through his usual methods of charming duplicity…..but this time fails, and calls in the British army. The effect on the island and its people is devastating…..the British, under Brando’s command, employ scorched-earth tactics against the rebels…..the results of which are horrifying.

Morricone’s scoring is superb - his usual heady mixture of choral work and pop-styled orchestral passages. Many of the jungle scenes are scored with such percussive smoothness, orchestral dexterity, and thematic strength, that it made me realize just how poorly conceived and conservative Goldsmith’s score to MEDICINE MAN was.

By the way, contrary to Maltin’s review of the movie, the 1987 film WALKER, with Ed Harris, is about a completely different William Walker. The William Walker in the Ed Harris movie was an American adventurer who got involved with Central American politics.

BURN! succeeds on many levels, not least in its depiction of the British (especially Brando’s character) as real people…..and not the one-dimensional, foppish, supercilious, crypto-homosexual stereotypes that movies like LAST OF THE MOHICANS, BRAVEHEART and THE PATRIOT insist on pummelling us with.

This actually makes the actions of many British Imperialists far more horrifying…..because we see them as ordinary people, like you and me…..people with wives and children, people with good grace and manner, people with the same weaknesses, conscience, and scruples as anyone else…..that’s what hammers home the true toughness and rigours of life in colonial days…..basically, it was shoot, or be shot.

Many modern politically-correct filmmakers fail to illustrate that although it was tough for the British colonists, pioneers and armies serving abroad, it was even tougher for the indigenous peoples whose culture and territory Britain violated – a fact that movies like BURN! and the superior 1936 version of LAST OF THE MOHICANS ram home without compromise.

THE CHAPMAN REPORT (US 1962) movie ** score ***1/2

Laughably old-fashioned drama focusing on a survey of sexual habits amongst suburban housewives carried out by the titular Dr Chapman. Another fine example of how many 60s and 70s movies have dated far more horribly than many of those movies of the opening decades of ‘talking pictures’, THE CHAPMAN REPORT now serves only as quaint reminder of the unenlightened state of society in the 60s. You see, sex is no longer a taboo subject in the year 2000, so this movie, that may have been considered daring and possibly titillating in its day, is now rendered utterly obsolete by modern society’s open attitude towards sex.

That said, production values are fine, Cukor directs with assurance, and there is a fine cast headed by Efrem Zimbalist Jr, Shelly Winters, Claire Bloom, Glynis Johns, Jane Fonda, and Henry Daniell, to name but a few. Perhaps the most successful element of the movie, was Leonard Rosenman’s excellent jazz score…..once again he proves himself to be a particularly versatile and accomplished film composer.