You can tell Letterboxd is terrible, as I have just noticed my Reds review from 2016 is the second most popular on the site. Can't bring myself to re-read it.
But, as I say, if you are really political, this is probably going to hit you harder. Or you'll probably hate it and have 100 years of history to make your point. I quite liked the car blowing up and spinning through the air and the Heat inspired shoot-out.
Jamie Foxx is pretty good in the film. He is very much in his Mann phase. Lots of pauses and quiet looks to the side. Jennifer Garner feels like she should have had a better career. The film also has a superb supporting cast - Chris Cooper, Richard Jenkins, Kyle Chandler, Danny Huston.
I think of this as a "what if she was white" scene/ending. Impossibly well-intentioned, painfully sincere, and really patronising. An American right-wing version of it.
The film has a solipsistic quality that sits uncomfortably with its setting and forceful action scenes. But, I was fascinated where it chose to end - with "we're going to kill them all". Almost out of nowhere the film aims at a mock profundity.
There is a maudlin and paranoid streak running through the film that feels really resonant with post-9/11 filmmaking. Everyone has taken inspiration from Saving Private Ryan and mentally converted it to the new war. Peter Berg is a muscular, fairly right-wing director, not without talent.
Oddly, I was kind of struck by its boldness. It is racist but aims itself provocatively at Saudi Arabia. Hope Michael Mann (here an Exec Producer and presumably an inspiration for the firefight action scene) isn't looking that direction for money for Heat 2.
I am the least political person on Bluesky, which is going to be my undoing with The Kingdom. It didn't strike me as being nearly as close to The Green Berets as its reputation suggests, while clearly being a film made in the first flush of the War on Terror.
I'm sure this has aged like a fine wine. Being reminded of the post-9/11 and war on terror films a few weeks back, I am going to tackle this Michael Mann adjacent action thriller tonight.
...in spite of its acting prize? at the recent Berlin Festival. That just goes to show that the Germans have no idea either... From beginning to end the film is an incredible debauch of camera movements as complex as they are silly and meaningless."
Jean-Luc Godard wrote "One really has to rack one’s brains to find anything to say about a British film. One wonders why. But that’s the way it is. And there isn’t even an exception to prove the rule. Especially not Woman in a Dressing-gown anyhow..."
Yeah, that's true. To be fair, this was a comic overstatement for Bluesky. I haven’t actually cried about anything since Sheff Wed lost a penalty shootout to Wolves when I was 11.
I have 8 J. Lee Thompson films to go (I am discounting most of the TV movies because they'll be impossible to see), it remarkable that after 38 films, I am still stumbling headfirst into near masterpieces.
Though, it is a proper downer for a Saturday morning!
The J. Lee Thompson who made Woman in a Dressing Gown, was a remarkably good director. A film of bars on windows, teeming rain, and untidy flats. It isn't subtle, but it illuminating. Pubs with men in ties and woman singing the old songs. Everyone sad, in their own way. Not even Syms rises above.
I haven't felt quite as bad for a character as I did for Mitchell here when she gets her hair done, and then the rain starts. It is almost too much. A touch overcooked that could have become comic in the wrong hands. But Mitchell is such an open wound that you really can't face the subsequent scenes
I think it is easy to see why Quayle falls for a 23 year old Syms, with those eyes and lips that Thompson hits you with in close-up. What 44 year old man wouldn't! But, the film has real clarity about everything that follows. The sheer misery that follows.
I rather like Quayle's ineffectual lothario. Rather like Trevor Howard in Brief Encounter, he's the villain. Though, J. Lee Thompson is rather more sincere in looking at his behaviour. Syms, of course, is beautiful. Her tears in the third act are really well-judged.
Then you see Qualye and Syms, having an affair, in her posh flat. A divorce is required. How Quayle breaks it to Mitchell is devastating and her response is even more upsetting. The film then proceeds through two more acts to its bone dry ending, quietly bleak and seemingly realistic.
Yvonne Mitchell is phenomenal as the perma-grinning wife who world is about to be smashed by Anthony Quayle and Sylvia Syms. The first scene is almost comic, as Mitchell bumbles about setting fire to breakfast, moving stuff from place to place in their really untidy home, and it is all good fun.
