This is the first post of films watched after my move to Sweden. I brought my Blu-ray player and my Amazon FireStick with me, but unfortunately the television in the hotel apartment I’m renting has no HDMI slot, so I can’t use them. I’ve been watching films on Amazon Prime on my laptop. Which has somewhat limited my ability to write blog posts or, well, fiction. Both of which I planned to do more often when I got here. Ah well. Perhaps when I find somewhere more permanent to live…

The Quatermass Xperiment, Val Guest (1955, UK). I’m pretty sure I saw this many years ago. If so, it was before I started documenting the movies I watched. Certain scenes felt very familiar… but there are number of British films from the same period which are quite similar… so maybe I have seen it before, maybe I haven’t. The Quatermass Xperiment is a film adaptation of a television series, originally broadcast in 1953 by the BBC. A British scientist, played in the film by an American, with no attempt at sounding British, but played by Brits on television, sends three astronauts on an experimental rocket into space. They lose contact… and the rocket later crashes in a field in the country. Only one astronaut has survived – in fact, there’s no trace of the other two. But that one astronaut seems to have caught some sort of space germ, which slowly turns him into a monster and sends him on a murdering spree. The film ends with Quatermass and flunkeys cornering the monster in Westminster Abbey, which has been closed for renovations. I’d like to see the TV series on which this film was based, because the film is a straight up monster movie and though it tries hard to be thoughtful its story is just too B-movie. Meh.

Quatermass II, Val Guest (1957, UK). It doesn’t take a genius like, er, Quatermass, to spot that this movie is a sequel to the one above. And like The Quatermass Xperiment, it was also adapted from a television series from 1955. Quatermass is once again played by American Brian Donlevy (although two different British actors had played the role in the two TV series). This time, small missile-shaped meteorites have been landing in Essex, and nearby is a secret government project researching new sources of food. Except it’s not researching that. Not anymore. As Quatermass soon discovers. The meteorites contain some sort of organism, which takes people, leaving them with a telltale scar, and these alien-inhabited people are using the government project as a bridgehead to take over the Earth. By growing a giant alien inside an oil tank. Or something. Apparently, The Quatermass Xperiment was extremely successful, so makers Hammer Film were keen to capitalise on it. Unfortunately, Quatermass II was outperformed at the box office by another Hammer movie, The Curse of Frankenstein, and so Hammer decided to focus on making horror movies. (They returned to Quatermass in 1967, with Quatermass played by Andrew Keir, a Scot.) Quatermass II is a much better film than its predecessor, although like the earlier film it climaxes with a giant monster. Both are very much films of their time, and while they resemble B-movies they’re generally better thought-through and smarter than US B-movies. But I’d still like to see the original TV series. Incidentally, when searching on Amazon Prime for these films, be careful. There are free versions available and pay-to-play versions. I’ve seen that a few times on Amazon Prime. Streaming, eh?

Mahler, Ken Russell (1974, UK). You’re never entirely sure what you’re going to get when you sit down to watch a Ken Russell film. Some of them are really quite bad, and yet others are absolutely brilliant. Mahler falls somewhere between the two. It looks cheap – despite being set in Mahler’s native Austria, it was clearly filmed in the UK – but there are some impressively-staged scenes. And some outright bonkers ones. It is not, after all, every day that you watch a movie featuring a dream sequence in which a dominatrix in SS uniform whips the protagonist on a mountain-top while he is tied to a giant sword… Robert Powell plays the title role, and the film opens with Mahler returning to Austria on a train, a famous composer and conductor – “I live to compose, I conduct to live,” he tells a reporter. His life story is told in a series of flashbacks – the antisemitism he experienced as a child, his later conversion to Catholicism (for, it is suggested, chiefly professional reasons), the death of his daughter… I know nothing of Mahler’s music and, to be honest, the film has not made me a fan of it. But I am a fan of Russell’s films – well, many of them – and while Mahler apparently, according to Wikipedia, “by 1985 the film had recorded a net loss of £14,000”, I actually liked it a lot. It’s bonkers, but in a good way. Powell is okay, but Georgina Hale as Mahler’s wife is better. There is some lovely photography of the Lake District – okay, it’s supposed to be Austria, but it’s still very nicely shot. I’d been in two minds about Russell’s films about composers, since they’re not people that really interest me, but if the others are like Mahler then I’m quite keen to see them.

Tycoon, Pavel Lungin (2002, Russia). The first film by Lungin I watched was The Island, AKA Остров, which was released on DVD in the UK by Artificial Eye. That was back in 2015. Since then, I’ve watched Tsar (see here), a later film, and now Tycoon, AKA Олигарх, an earlier film. And, to be honest, they don’t much feel like all three were made by the same director. True, those first two are both about faith, although the stories they tell are very different – although Tsar is a lavish historical re-enactment. Tycoon, however, feels like a made-for-TV movie, and it’s somewhat surprising it was allowed to be made, given how critical it is of Russian oligarchs and the government corruption which created, fostered and profited from them. And still does. The film opens with the police seizing the offices of Infocar, the holding company of billionaire oligarch Platon Makovski. On his way home, Makovski is killed by a rocket attack on his car. The film then jumps back to 1985, when four childhood friends attended an economic symposium.. Shortly afterwards, they decide to go into business together, selling jeans they’ve stonewashed. And from there, it’s one business scheme after another, until a Georgian who manages a Lada factory joins then and they become automobile dealers. The film doesn’t really explain how Makovski and his friends became so powerful and rich. The business deals they do on-screen, often put together with the help of underworld contacts, or abetted by the Kremlin, don’t seem the sort to lead to a personal wealth of $5 billion, as mentioned at the start of the film. Through a series of flashbacks, Tycoon shows Makovski’s rise through its flashbacks, while the present-day narrative continues after his death as some of the old guard in the Kremlin move in on the company, with the help of one of the friends. It’s apparently based on a true story, but some of the details are too vague to convince, and the present-day events are a little too byzantine to be realistic. Still worth seeing, however.

Just Another Love Story, Ole Bornedal (2007, Denmark). There are not many films that start with the protagonist lying dead on the street, while he explains that he’s dead. It’s been used plenty of times in written fiction, but I’m fairly sure it’s not all that common in cinema – although I’ve a vague feeling I’ve seen a 1940s noir film that used something similar. Anyway, protagonist Jonas is married with two kids and a life that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. On the road one day with his family, he narrowly avoids an accident – but the woman in the other car was not so lucky and is seriously injured. Jonas goes to see her in the hospital, where he learns she has lost her memory. They won’t let him see her, so he lies and says he is the woman’s boyfriend, Sebastian. But all her family are there in her hospital room, and they’ve never met Sebastian – the woman met him while on holiday in Thailand, and had only just returned to Denmark. They take Jonas at his word. So he begins a double-life: Jonas with his family, Sebastian with the injured woman. But then Sebastian turns up… And it seems he’s being chased by Chinese gangsters because he stole some diamonds from them. Just Another Love Story is a feeble title, but this is a smart modern thriller, with a contemporary twist on a noir-ish story. Worth seeing.

The Dawns Here Are Quiet, Stanislav Rototsky (1972, Russia). During WWII, a detachment of Soviets soldiers who man an anti-aircraft gun in Karelia are spending too much drinking and womanising, and the sergeant in charge complains to his superior officer. So the troop are re-assigned and the sergeant is sent an all-female platoon. Things go well for a while, until early one morning one of the soldiers spots a pair of German paratroopers. So the sergeant picks five of the female soldiers, and they go out to kill the Germans. Except, it turns out there’s a whole platoon of them. But they still have to stopped. And while reinforcements have been sent for, it’s going to be a while be they reach Karelia. The bulk of the film is the cat and mouse game, shot entirely from the Soviet point of view, as the sergeant and five young women try to get themselves into a position where they can ambush the paratroopers, which involves taking a path through a swamp known only to the sergeant, and eventually ends up with a running firefight in which the Soviets are badly out-numbered. For some reason, The Dawns Here Are Quiet has been presented on Amazon Prime as a two-parter, which proved confusing as I hadn’t noticed and the film ended up very abruptly. But it was definitely worth hunting down the second part as this is an excellent film. It was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 1972, but lost out to Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, and I’m not entirely sure that film is actually better, or not so much better it would not be a difficult decision to choose between the two. Recommended.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 939