1930s
Marianka Swain
In his otherwise unremarkable 1932 debut play Dangerous Corner, JB Priestley employs a promising framing device that hints at the kind of metafictional experimentation found in works like Stoppard’s The Real Thing or Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. I should hasten to add that Priestley does not deliver on this glimmer of promise – in fact, the frame is merely used to emphasise a theme already overstated in his plodding drawing-room whodunnit – but it’s indicative of an early work in which the writer is still figuring out the bounds of his new medium.Curiously, Dangerous Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Fans of this dense and rewarding odyssey of Prohibition and American gangsterism are doubtless still reeling from the news that its fifth series will be the last, despite the riotous applause which greeted series four. This unwelcome state of affairs perhaps accounted for the vaguely dissociated and dream-like quality of this season opener, which was as much concerned with filling in some of Nucky Thompson's early history as with driving the plot forward into the 1930s.An opening sequence set in 1884, of young boys diving into the sea to catch gold coins flung from the Atlantic City pier by Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The newly restored, 111-minute cut of M is being screened 35 times during BFI Southbank's current Peter Lorre retrospective. One only has to see and hear Fritz Lang's first sound film once, however, to appreciate its undiminished power as a vision of a Germany teetering on the abyss less than three years before the Nazis took power.One of Lang's most meticulously calibrated films, it is ostensibly a docudramatic procedural thriller, albeit one with Expressionistic camera angles, shadowy compositions, and signifiers of madness (such as a bobbing arrow and a rotating spiral in a shop window) Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Dance as an art form doesn’t have a great track record in social and historical commentary. The endless grey areas, not to mention the complicated details, of history really require words to do them justice. Flamenco, of course, has words, but it’s still a highly emotive art form, one you might think unlikely to produce a subtle take on the theme of homeland. But 72-year old Paco Peña is not only one of the greatest living flamenco guitarists, he’s also a great producer, putting on thoughtful shows with wonderful performers from other traditions, seemingly revelling in the artistic richness Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” declares Lord Darlington in Act II of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan. He’s the classic Wildean cad - unprincipled, facetiously witty and in this production, possessed of the vilest pencil moustache, and yet the playwright gives him the most memorable line of the whole play. Why? To demonstrate that nobody is too completely good or bad not to be redeemed by beauty.irst performed in 1892, Lady Windermere’s Fan was Wilde’s first society comedy and its success set him on the way to becoming one of the most popular Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
“The touch is light. We like it so,” wrote Ninette de Valois in one of her later poems. You didn’t know the founder of the Royal Ballet wrote poetry? Don’t worry, you’re not missing much – except the occasional phrase which can serve as an epigraph for early English ballet. “Light touch” is one of those expressions – like “very English” – which crop up in almost all descriptions of the work of Frederick Ashton, founder choreographer to de Valois’s company, later its director, and a reserved genius who knew pomposity and po-facedness only as traits to satirise (gently, of course) in his Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Many successful writers turn to their pens having failed miserably at everything else. Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, and subject of Sky Atlantic’s new mini-series, spent all of his youth failing, but unlike literary contemporaries Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, failure seems to have been a thoroughly enjoyable experience. The side effects of a racy lifestyle required his withdrawal from both Eton and Sandhurst, while a brief engagement, to the exquisitely titled Monique Panchaud de Bottomes, had to be quashed by his well-connected but overbearing mother.Professional life Read more ...
Matthew Wright
For his new band, Pigfoot, trumpeter Chris Batchelor has gathered three virtuosos of British jazz. Between them, pianist Liam Noble, tuba player Oren Marshall and drummer Paul Clarvis have made some of the most original British jazz of the past few decades. In this, Pigfoot’s debut album, they not only blow the cobwebs off eight favourites of the trad repertoire, they sandblast away decades of treacly cliche, revealing music of both immense joy and subversive power.Footage of 1950s crowds dancing to trad jazz shows an audience not unlike modern clubbers, wild-eyed and ecstatic at the novelty Read more ...
David Nice
Read Erich Kästner’s 1928 novel about young Emil Tischbein and the Berlin boys he enlists to catch a thief, and you’ll come away feeling warm if slightly incredulous at the strong moral compass of all the kids and most of the adults. Gerhard Lamprecht’s early (1931) “talkie”, with a screenplay by Billy Wilder, has darker undertones, much admired by the obsessive 19-year-old Benjamin Britten. Carl Miller’s adaptation for Bijan Sheibani’s racy new National Theatre production sees it from a slightly different angle, scrupulously mindful of Weimar Berlin, but last night I had the feeling that not Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Vivien Leigh deservedly won the Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of the mercurial Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind, so producer David O. Selznick's legendary Civil War epic has been re-released to coincide with her centenary. It is a tactless choice to have been made, however, at a time when movies are conscientiously addressing the horrors of slavery and the movement to overthrow it.Django Unchained and Lincoln have been followed by 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen's landmark depiction of the degradation and brutality relentlessly inflicted on slaves working Louisiana sugar and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Beyond being made in the 1930s, being a British production, being a musical and two having the same director, nothing links these four films. But the randomness of this double DVD set brings bucketloads of charm. There’s a songwriter trying to break into showbiz with the help of a plucky chorus gal (Harmony Heaven, 1930), a frothy Vienna-set love story about a star and her secretary who cannot reveal their emotions (The Song You Gave me, 1933), a tangled comedy of class and manners (Over She Goes, 1937) and – the jewel in this crown – a vehicle for bandleader Henry Hall (Music Hath Charms, Read more ...
kate.bassett
Forever breaking into song and dance, musicals are fun, fun, fun. They are primarily what folks go to for uplifting entertainment, are they not? Actually, many of the best aren't anything like that simplistic. Opening at the Young Vic last night, The Scottsboro Boys is no mere barrel of vacuous laughs, though it is comical and buoyant along the way.With its score and lyrics by America’s John Kander and Fred Ebb, and its book by David Thompson, this is a barbed biomusical about racism and miscarriages of justice. Set in the Deep South of the 1930s, it plays – sometimes very sharply – with the Read more ...