1950s
Tom Birchenough
Truth is pursued in different ways in Alice Childress’s groundbreaking 1955 Trouble in Mind, and its play-within-a-play story of rehearsals for a Broadway show fully mines the range of theatrical opportunities, for much comic as well as rather more serious purpose. On the one hand, it’s the decade when method acting was becoming all the rage, which has the (white) director Al (Jonathan Singer) bamboozling – and sometimes plain manipulating – his (largely black) cast into bringing extra power to their performances.But the other level at which Childress explores the concept of truth is more Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Oh dear. I thought that this was going to be one of those exciting fantasy films that livened up TV on weekend afternoons in my childhood, and that there would be kitschy special effects and ludicrous dialogue. But no, it's not 20,00 Leagues under the Sea, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad or even Dr Doolittle. It's a turgid plough through a Jules Verne yarn which doesn't even introduce a freaky creature until almost 50 minutes into the storyline, and then it's just some poor old lizards matted into a drab seaside set. Journey to the Centre of the Earth frankly doesn't deserve the full Read more ...
Liz Thomson
As pretty much everything but a plague of locusts is visited upon this grim old world, an evening in the company of Neil Sedaka is the greatest of pick-me-ups. At the Royal Albert Hall on Monday, as his UK tour drew to a close, the capacity audience clearly felt uplifted, borne aloft on a raft of enduring songs and the evident enjoyment of the man who wrote them.Sixty years ago this year, Sedaka made his first appearance on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand and signed a recording contract with RCA. Since then he’s written some 600 songs, the latest so recent he needed the lyrics propped up on Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In Jean Grémillon's final fiction film The Love of a Woman, Marie Prieur (Micheline Presle) arrives on the Breton island of Ushant to replace the tiny settlement's aging Dr Morel (Robert Naly). While showing Marie her new digs and surgery, Mme Morel (Madeleine Geoffroy) compliments the lady doctor on her youth. Marie sighingly replies that she is 28. Quel horreur!Ninety-five now, Presle was 31 when the film was released in France in 1953. It is no discourtesy to say she looked closer to 35 – Marie is an attractive, dignified woman who performs her work with a quietness and authority that Read more ...
mark.kidel
Many of the best Westerns, that quintessentially American genre, are rooted in a Christian view of the world: the dark forces of Satan pitted against angels, saints and the figure of Christ the Redeemer. In Terror in a Texas Town, Joseph H Lewis's last movie, made in 1956, the conflict between good and evil is laced with strong anti-capitalist undertones, perhaps not surprisingly given that the script was written by the blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, with whom Lewis had made his most famous film, Gun Crazy, in 1950. In a small Texas town, a wealthy and ruthless entrepreneur, McNeil, Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Labels have their uses but they can also be a blight. The works of the Scottish playwright James Bridie – with their regional accents and domestic settings – bear many of the hallmarks of so-called Kitchen Sink drama but didn’t make the canon. Not grimy enough, perhaps, not English enough, and certainly not angry enough. The playwright is better remembered as a founder of Glasgow’s Citizens’ Theatre and the Edinburgh Festival.All power to the Finborough then in its campaign to save Bridie’s writing from terminal neglect. Last year saw the first production in 70 years of Dr Angelus, a play Read more ...
Richard Bratby
The CBSO is justifiably proud of its association with Benjamin Britten. There’s rather less proof that he reciprocated, dismissing the orchestra as "second-rate" after it premiered his War Requiem in 1962. Throughout the 1950s, he’d repeatedly promised to write an orchestral work for Birmingham, only to renege on the deal after the orchestra’s then chief conductor Rudolf Schwarz moved on to the BBC in 1957. What the CBSO did get from Britten, in September 1954, was the world premiere of an unwieldy Symphonic Suite from what's generally agreed to be one of his patchier operas, the 1953 Read more ...
David Nice
Hitting the essence of a Fellini masterpiece in a different medium is no easy task. Try and reproduce his elusive brand of poetic melancholy and you'll fail; best to transfer the characters to a different medium, as the musical Sweet Charity did in moving the action of Le notte di Cabiria from Rome and environs to New York. The film version even managed to find in Shirley MacLaine an equivalent to the unpredictable charm of Giulietta Masina, Fellini's wife, a great actor. But no one can really rival Masina’s most compelling role, the waif Gelsomina sold to a travelling strong man in La Strada Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Wow! An unconventional opening for a book review maybe, but ‘“wow!” nonetheless. Subtitled "How Skiffle Changed the World", this is an impressive work of popular scholarship by the singer, songwriter and social activist whose 40-year (and counting) career has embraced folk, punk, rock and Americana, and various combinations of those genres. It has also seen him anointed as an heir to Woody Guthrie, the late great journalist and song-maker, the Dust Bowl balladeer who, more than half a century ago, wrote a song about a little-known racketeer landlord whose mercenary tactics would lay the Read more ...
David Nice
Men playing boys playing girls, women and men, all female parts convincingly falsettoed and high musical standards as backbone: Sasha Regan's single-sex Gilbert and Sullivan has worked a special magic on Iolanthe and The Pirates of Penzance, HMS Pinafore and now The Mikado, not so much. Energetic song and dance are still in evidence. But this time a hard-worked scout-camp setting – located, as advance publicity tells us to expect, some time in the heyday of Enid Blyton – brings very little to highlight Gilbert's immortal preoccupations with class and hypothetical sadism.Familiar Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We’ve recently seen how Formula One heroes Ayrton Senna, Niki Lauda and James Hunt can become box office gold, in the form of Senna and Rush. Roger Donaldson’s profile of New Zealand race ace Bruce McLaren is more for enthusiasts than a wider public, but for anyone interested in the sport it’s an illuminating portrait of a gifted F1 pioneer who has lapsed somewhat into obscurity since his death in 1970, aged 32.McLaren’s name still adorns the Woking-based team that has produced champions like Senna, Mika Hakkinen and Lewis Hamilton, but today’s technocratic monolith in its Star Trek Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Initially, Madame de… feels as if it might wear out its welcome. What seems a wearisome exposition on how privileged people with too much time on their hands fill their hours with vacuity gradually turns into an incisive discourse on the power of the emotions behind the facades fashioned for polite society. Towards the end, it’s clear that even the most seemingly shallow of people can be swayed by unexpected passions. And at the end: blam, an astonishingly powerful pay-off.Reviewing Madame de… in 1954, when it was released in the UK as The Earrings of Madame de…, Lindsay Anderson (whose Read more ...