Murder by Decree (1979)

 "I prefer bad manners in the theatre to violence in the streets..."

This film is an odd and intriguing beast. It's very well directed indeed, with the scenes involving the Ripper particularly well-realised. It has a superb cast. It's a very well made film. And yet...

Firstly, the script is somewhat plodding, slow, oddly paced and not quite worthy of the excellent way it's been realised. While James Mason gives us a first rate Watson, Christopher Plummer's generally impressive performance as Holmes suffers from the fact that the script doesn't really get the character- this Holmes is too openly emotional, too "normal".

This isn't the first time that cinema has put Holmes and Watson into the context of the Jack the Ripper murders but... well, SPOILERS, but this film adopts wholesale the then-fashionable theories advanced by Stephen Knight in his unfortunately titled Jack the Ripper:  The Final Solution, theories that woukd later form the basis of both the graphic novel and the film of From Hell..

And this is a problem. Not because such theories have fallen out of fashion (Personally, I don't buy the freemasonry nonsense- it's a very silly organisation but, except in the context discriminating against non-freemasons in their careers, harmless nonsense. I'd suggest borrowing a razor off that nice Mr Occam. The Ripper was probably Charles Lechmere.), but simply because adopting this narrative wholesale means that Holmes and Watson are by definition unable to have much agency or influence over events. 

Still, this is an interesting little curiosity nonetheless.

Julius Caesar (1953)

 "Why, he that cuts off twenty years of life cuts off so many years of fearing death."

I'm utterly knackered today after a long, difficult drive and the emotional drop after dropping Little Miss Llamastrangler back at her mum's after a wonderful half term week, so I wanted to watch something undemanding and... yeah, it's Shakespeare. But I've seen this version before in my youth and was curious to see it again, and this is the play I've seen on screen the most for some reason.

This is, of course, sublime cinematic Shakespeare. James Mason excels as Brutus who is, I suppose, the closest we come to a main protagonist: it was certainly the part later played by Charlton Heston in his later version, not comparable to this but fascinating in its own way. The direction, the sets, all is at once suitably cinematic yet at the same time appropriately intimate in ways that suits Shakespeare who, writing for the Elizabethan stage, focused by necessity on dialogue rather than complex spectacle.

Yet there are two obvious stand-out performances by two truly great actors who, incidentally, both exemplify different schools of acting, both done to perfection- the traditional stage approack of John Gielgud and the method, er, method of Marlon Brando. Gielgud is the perfect Cassius. Yet Brando as Mark Antony steals the show. Antony doesn't have as much prominence in the play as one might think, but he certainly has the big soliloquys. And Brando performs them in a way that may never be surpassed, perhaps showing once and for all that the best of Hollywood can approach Shakespeare with utter confidence. Making no attempt to pointlessly do a fake British accent, Brando brings an intensity to the part that makes the words come alive. It is, perhaps, the single greatest Shakespeare performance ever committed to film.

So, yeah, this is a truly great film. It also shows how the same Shakespeare play can speak to you in different ways each time you see it, perhaps shaped by the differences in direction, performance, version of the text. Here I was struck by the many references to the inevitability of death and how one must manage one's fear and existential dread that we are all mortal. Death is the only certainty in life.

Yet the one line that struck me most this time came not from one of the characters but from the Roman crowd as Brutus makes his speech: "Let him be Caesar!". Brutus and the conspirators do their bloody deed, ostensibly for liberty and so that the Roman Republic may not know another Tarquin, yet the masses utterly miss the point, thereby showing that such scruples are futile in the long run... and, of course, young Octavian waits in the wings, he and Antony dissing poor Lepidus behind his back...

So, yeah. Nice simple film for knackered old me.

Genghis Khan (1965)

"It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness."

Oh dear. This film is not very good, Where to start? Well, how about with the arse-clenchingly awful fact that all but a very few characters are played by white actors in yellowface, with James Mason's jaw-droppingly stereotyped performance as Kam Ling being quite something to behold. No amount of accounting for the different social mores of 1965 can let us escape from the fact that this is all incredibly racist.

Oh, the location filming looks impressive and epic, and you can tell that the film is trying to be Lawrence of Arabia. But this is somewhat undermined by the fact that this is a film about Genghis Khan that focuses mainly around inter-Mongol squabbling, the extensive interlude in China doesn't particularly involve him conquering the place, and there's a general lack of conquering going on. In fact, late on in the film, a quick burst of narration jumps smoothly over the conquests of China, Russia and India and jumps unconvincingly into the conquest of Khwarezm. Where's all the stuff we want to see in a film about Genghis Khan?

I accept that a film like this has to show a certain amount of historical inaccuracy, but making the film mostly about the rival between Temujin and his Mongol rival Jamuga is such a waste. And so, ultimately, is the film.

Yellowbeard (1983)

"Three farthings for a lump of shit please..."

This film is, well, not all that good which, considering that two of its three writers were Peter Cook and Graham Chapman, is rather bewildering. But it just isn't much good. And it killed Marty Feldman.

That isn't to say that there are no laughs at all, of course, nor that it isn't a pleasure to see the talents of those in them tags down there, plus Spike Milligan, Nigel Planer and even an eyebrow-raising from a very Let's Dance era David Bowie. But the whole thing never really takes off, perhaps partly because the script isn't great but in large part, I suspect, to a rather flat directorial style with no comedic timing or flourishes. Also, I have to say, the constant rape jokes don't exactly make for comfortable viewing.

Still, Graham Chapman is good, as is Marty Feldman in his last film, although Peter Cook is somewhat wasted in a straight man role. And the character of El Nebuloso is superb, with the scenes of Cheech and Chong, the acid pool and the torture device being the closest the film gets to being Pythonesque. But the film as a whole is a bit of a damp squib and worth seeing only for Monty Python or Peter Cook completists.