Three Films Make A Post: The Best Loved Bandit Of All Time!

On the Rocks (2020): This is another one of those films where I seem to have seen a very different movie than most other people. After comparisons with classic screwball comedies, praises for its New York-ness and with Rashida Jones and Bill Murray in front of the camera and Sofia Coppola behind it, I was pumped for a bit of light yet fun entertainment. What I actually got was a rich people’s problems film where poor people only exist as waiters, waitresses and drivers to serve as a background for some of the least interesting marital and daddy issues imaginable. Most of the film may take place in New York, but it’s certainly no part of New York anyone but the upper class twats inhabiting it would ever want to see. It’s all just very dull to look at, and that dullness runs through most of the film – it’s slow, the emotional stakes for this viewer are very low, and when it comes to light charm, humour and hidden depths, you won’t want to throw out your Nora Ephron movies.

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938): So let’s get back eight decades into the past to find something more lively. Michael Curtiz’s Hollywood version of elements of British folklore is of course one of the best swashbucklers every made, and a film that still plays rather wonderfully. Sure, as always, there are elements very much of its time especially when it comes to characterisation, and I’m always flabbergasted by the Richard the Lionheart love (a guy who clearly didn’t give a crap about the country he was supposed to rule, what with him always gallivanting off to a crusade or two, or finding other business to be away on), but otherwise, this is a flawless movie, from Errol Flynn’s ability to play a smug bastard but still make him charming and likeable, over the eye-popping colour palette, to an astonishing amount of clever and playful little touches and ideas in the script. There’s never a dull moment here, that’s for sure.

The Green Room aka La chambre verte (1978): I have to admit that I’ve never been a particular admirer of Henry James, not even of his visits in the realms of the supernatural and the borderline weird, but the man’s body of work certainly has resulted in quite a few great movies. Case in point is this one, where François Truffaut mixes James’s story “The Altar of the Dead” with elements of a couple of other short stories that apparently connected with the director’s own haunted thoughts about the people in his life he lost. The result is an emotionally and intellectually complex meditation on what we owe the dead, how the memory of the dead can dramatically overshadow the ability to live life itself.

So it is very much a ghost story, though one without any ghosts but the ones the protagonist, as well played by Truffaut in his last stint as an actor, creates through his inability to let go of the love as well as his grudges against the dead. I don’t really want to pretend it’s a horror film in anything but the broadest sense, yet it does at the very least tell of a haunted man and incorporates some finely wrought gothic imagery. Beside being brilliant.