Title: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
Year: 1962
Director: Tony Richardson
Writers: Alan Sillitoe, based on his short story.
Stars: Tom Courtenay, Michael Redgrave

The Story: Courtenay’s angry young man gets sent to a youth prison, where a cheerful warden tries to mold him into a long-distance runner, hoping that they can beat the boys from a nearby boarding school in an upcoming meet. As the young man prepares, he thinks about how he got there and what victory means to him.

Why It’s Great: The great British “angry young man” films of the early ’60s have become the forgotten missing link between the French New Wave and the American renaissance that flowered in the late ’60s. Richardson, Lester, Reisz, Anderson, et al. deserve to remain household names. This one only recently appeared on DVD, so it’s ripe for rediscovery. This has always been a favorite of mine (I took Betsy to see it at a revival house on one of our first dates) but seeing it again I can see how nicely it fits into my latest motto: “Anybody can be a hero, but nobody can become a hero by doing what anybody would do.” A hero’s triumph must stem from his unique personality. The ending of this movie may be the ultimate example of that.

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Title: Waterland

Year: 1992

Director: Stephen Gyllenhaal

Writer: Peter Prince, based on the novel by Graham Swift

Stars: Jeremy Irons, Ethan Hawke, Sinead Cusack, Cara Buono, Lena Headey

The Story: One day in 1973, a high school history teacher in Pittsburgh gets tired of lecturing about the French Revolution and instead starts telling his students about his own coming of age amongst the eel fishermen of the English Fens: a painful tale of sex, murder, and buried secrets.

Why It’s Great: The flashbacks that overwhelm Irons are elegantly constructed, compressing a sprawling family saga into a few powerful scenes. The trouble all begins with a swimming contest, and it shows that a contest is a great way to begin a story: It defines everybody very quickly– It gives each character a chance to show what they want and ranks them according as to how badly they want it. David Morrissey is great as the older brother in the flashbacks. There had been a plague of movies at the time about mentally challenged people that treated them like sagacious advocates of a simpler existence, rather than complex adults who, like everybody, want more things out of life than they’re ever likely to get, which is nothing to be ashamed of. Understanding that is the beginning of real respect.

Two more reasons at Cockeyed Caravan…

Title: Funny Bones
Year: 1995
Director: Peter Chelsom
Writers: Chelsom and Peter Flannery
Stars: Oliver Platt, Lee Evans, Jerry Lewis, Leslie Caron

The Story: Surreal, funny, heartbreaking magic-realist comedy-drama about a failed American comedian who absconds to the faded resort town of Blackpool, England, where his father performed when he was a child, hoping to steal material from the local comics. Instead, he uncovers his father’s secrets and discovers he has a monstrously funny half-brother.

Why It’s Great: This movie seemed to announce Chelsom as a major writer/director, but his follow-up (The Mighty) was a flop and his next (Town and Country) was a notorious mega-flop, so he was done, and this movie was unfortunately forgotten. This movie also seemed like it would turn Platt and Evans into major stars. They both give intense lead performances. Platt has been too often relegated to “fat friend” roles, which was perhaps inevitable, but the utter disappearance of Evans is stranger. He’s a revelation here, like a strange combination of Sean Penn and Jim Carrey. He’s been rarely seen again, which makes this one of the great one-off performances I’ve seen. This is a funny movie, but it’s more interested in being aboutcomedy, which is an inherently painful subject. The opening sequence, where Platt bombs in Vegas, is as excruciating as a horror film. The whole movie explores the symbiotic relationship between comedy and brutality. As Evans rhetorically asks, “You can’t pull your punches, can you?”

Title: Prick Up Your Ears
Year: 1987
Director: Stephen Frears
Writer: Alan Bennett, based on the book by John Lahr
Stars: Gary Oldman, Alfred Molina, Vandess Redgrave, Frances Barber, Julie Walters, Wallace Shawn

The Story: Biographer John Lahr reconstructs the story of swinging ’60s London playwright Joe Orton and his long-suffering lover Kenneth Halliwell, who pursue fame, danger and each other over the course of an ill-fated fifteen-year relationship.

Why It’s Great: This story is set at a time when homosexuality was vigorously oppressed in England, but Frears has no interest in presenting his characters as sainted victims: This is a true story about two guys who happened to personify every negative gay stereotypes: they were promiscuous, neurotic, snotty, violent, and on and on. But Frears knows that he doesn’t need to “humanize” anyone. With his usual self-assured swagger, he makes these two more sympathetic and compelling with every flaw they show. In fact, the movie has my all time favorite “fall in love” scene. All too often, someone walks into a room and our hero falls suddenly head over heels and we think– really? Why her? Why now? What is their special connection? It’s not enough to just show her flipping her hair. All the harder then, to write a believable scene in which a heretofore straight young man suddenly falls in love with a fat, balding male classmate! Here’s how they do it: They’re students at RADA, doing improv. They’re told to pass around an imaginary cat. Everybody pretends to merely pet it, until Molina gets it. He acts uncomfortable holding it, then he develops an affection for it– then suddenly it scratches him with its imaginary claw. His eyes go dead and he pitilessly wrings its neck, then hands its limp body to the next classmate. Cut to Oldman: instantly smitten. And so are we.

Two more reasons at Cockeyed Caravan…

Title: Bright Young Things
Year: 2003
Director: Steven Fry
Writer: Steven Fry, based on the novel “Vile Bodies” by Evelyn Waugh
Stars: Stephen Campbell Moore, Emily Mortimer, James McAvoy, Michael Sheen, David Tennant, Jim Broadbent, Simon Callow, Peter O’Toole

The Story: A young novelist lacks the money to marry his posh sweetheart, so he becomes an anonymous gossip columnist, casting his withering eye on a frivolous world of partying aristocrats.

Why It’s Great: Waugh always presented himself as a Catholic moralist, supposedly on the side of the disapproving status quo against the dissolute gadabouts he portrayed, but it was never very convincing. He seemed to enjoy the revelry too much. Oh, his disgust was real enough, but the source of it was his own internal conflict, his irrepressible urge to subvert and debauch the aristocratic world that he’d been raised to revere. Fascism and economic ruin are always lurking around the edges, but Fry finds in Waugh’s story a uncanny presentiment that, against all odds, the moral poison that would actually come to define the coming world was the tyranny of the pleasure principle.

Two more reasons at Cockeyed Caravan.