HANK'S PICS 03/02/10:
THE DAMNED UNITED - Michael Sheen successfully veers from his much lauded roles as Prime Minister Blair (The Queen) and David Frost (Frost/Nixon)
to portray a different kind of ambition: the brash and hard scrambling
true life story of English soccer coach, Brian Clough. Rising through
his rapid successes in the lower divisions, he takes over the reigning
and infamously raging championship team of Leeds United. Can he put his
own clean-playing moral stamp on a team that owes its success to dirty
play, and whose loyalty remains to its former manager, Brian’s longtime
competitor and nemesis? Beautifully shot and breezily written by the
screenwriter of the two aforementioned films, the natural arc of this
compelling story seems to lose the ball in the final few minutes but
still winds up well played on your TV.
 FLAME AND CITRON
– In this colorful and suspenseful film, taking place during the Nazi
occupation of Denmark, Flame and Citron are close friends but, more
importantly, assassins who are part of a dwindling group of resisters.
Citron has a wife and young daughter he’s trying to hold onto; Flame is
a very young police detective who blithely disregards of any hope of a
normal future. Their techniques are brazen, their successes becoming
legendary. Acting independently as a team, both believe that trust in
others, and in sabotage itself, have their limitations; all you can do
is eliminate the occupiers one by one, down to the last one. Yet they
are loners who, relying on a network of information, cannot act alone;
and there is a traitor in their midst. This beautifully paced film with
authentic-feeling locations focuses not just on the derring-do, but on
the half truths one must rely on and the necessarily unclear agendas of
the people one is forced to work with. What this film makes clear is
that war is not only hell, it’s also a mess.
BERLIN EXPRESS – As a little boy, I first got into movies through the eerie, under-the skin thrillers of Jacques Tournier: Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, Leopard Man, Curse of the Demon, and the film noir that more than any other defined the genre, Out of the Past. In Tournier’s Berlin Express
(one of our recent Warner “Exclusives” of long unavailable worthy
films) there are no cat people, zombies, New York City demons or
hard-boiled detectives. Instead we have underground Nazis, a stealthy
strangler, and an atmospheric train journey, all cast against the
rubble and despair of post-World War II Germany. Here in this
devastated country, four strangers (American, British, French, Soviet)
are drawn into an attempt on the life of an elder statesman who brings
the hope of peace and unity to a divided land. This quasi-documentary
thriller, while not strictly part of the Tournier “canon,” nonetheless
partakes of the concision and atmospheric style of the great director.
A couple of interesting documentary-style details: the price of
admission to a nightclub visited by two of our sleuthing protagonists
in desperate, war torn Frankfurt is three cigarettes; toward the end of
the film the train pulls into a small suburban burg named Wannsee,
where Hitler and his top generals met to devise the Final Solution.
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