As You Like It (1936)

"He that sweetest rose will find / Must find love's prick, and Rosalind."

Well then. This saucy, decidedly queer play, new to me, is not what I expected from Shakespeare, and the fact that this is a post-code film from 1936, subtitles for YouTube provided for cultural reasons by the US Government (I bet Trump has put a stop to that) only serves to show how intrinsic to the play this queerness is.

I know Shakespeare, I flatter myself to say, better than most. I have a mere undergraduate degree, from Nottingham uni, but before tonight I knew 22 Shakespeare plays to varying extents, now 23. And until tonight I have given no more than perfunctory acknowledgement to queer theory in relation to the bard. I am, of course, aware of the trope of women dressing as men in such plays as Twelfth Night, but have accepted this as early modern LGBT (let us not forget the T) only in the generic way that one must accord to all cross-dressing. And yet... here Rosalind calls her male disguise "Ganymede", Jove's eponymous catamite. It's hard not to see deliberate, glorious, authorial queerness here. And that's before considering the wonderful sexual ambiguity of pretty much all of Rosalind's lines once she takes on male guise. It's doubly wonderful that this happily queer character should be played here, with a noticeable accent but a great deal of charm, by Elisabeth Bergner, a Viennese Jew who had fled Hitler's Berlin.

Ok, queerness aside this stuck me as a relatively ho-hum Shakespeare comedy with moments of lyrical genius, not quite up there with his best, but that's a relative statement. But there's much to marvel at with this somewhat ancient artifact. My reason for watching this was the presence of Henry Ainley, father of the actor Anthony Ainley, well-known to us Doctor Who fans and subject of a splendid biography. Ainley, though, turned out to be the exemplar of something truly fascinating; the theatrical delivery of Shakespeare of a certain era, still "traditional" although pretty much beyond living memory, against which the more "naturalistic" delivery of actors such as Lauence Olivier.

Also notable are the presence of John Laurie (Private Fraser in Dad's Army) as a young heartthrob and a young Peter Bull- the Soviet ambassador in many James Bond films- as a young yokel. This film is fascinating, in the public domain, and on YouTube with proper subtitles.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

"Mr. President, we must not allow a mineshaft gap."

This isn't the first time I've seen Dr. Strangelove, which is probably a good thing: this time I was able to look past the hilarious script and superb comic performances from, yes, Peter Sellers but the whole cast to Kubrick's superb direction and, perhaps, a slightly deeper context.

Still, it's worth emphasising that not only is this one of the funniest films ever but Sellers is utterly, utterly outstanding in all three of the parts he plays. Sterling Hayden deserves a mention, though, as does the utterly hilarious George C. Scott. And yet.... the Cuban Missile Crisis is less than two years ago and the film was made at what must have been the absolute peak of absolute nuclear annihilation. Strip away the comedy and this is a bleak and terrifying film (the concept of the Soviet doomsday device alone is existentially fearsome) which ends in absolute nuclear holocaust to the strains of Vera Lynn. And yet I think that both the humour and the underlying bleakness owe much to Catch-22 (the extraordinary novel: I haven't seen the film), another example of absolutely dark and horrible subject matter being leavened by a very mid-twentieth century absurdist style of humour which brings us back, again, to the existentialism which underpins this film, one of the greatest ever made.

Oh, and it's great, if weird, to hear the imperial tones of James Earl Jones in a film thirteen years before his signature role!