Capote

Truman Capote's In Cold Blood was a publishing revolution. Released in 1966, Capote's book about a grisly real-life murder case in Holcomb, Kansas would create its very own genre, the True Crime Novel. While Capote had been a celebrated writer for some years, In Cold Blood made him a bestseller. It also made him the celebrity he knew it would.

From the time Capote stumbled on the small article in the New York Times reporting the violent murders, to the eventual execution of convicted murderers Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, Capote chronicles the troubled years the writer spent trying to unearth the events that took place on the night of November 15, 1959.

Brilliantly played by the often underrated Philip Seymour Hoffman, Truman Capote is an egotistical man who knows this book has the potential to turn him into a star. With the help of his childhood friend, writer Harper Lee (who at the time is on the brink of publishing the bestselling To Kill A Mocking Bird ), Capote visits Holcomb, interviewing neighbours, friends, and police and detectives who worked on the case. From the first police press conference until the killers are captured Capote is there, watching, listening, and planning his definitive work. But as the killers appeal their death sentences, weeks turn into months and Capote becomes increasingly frustrated as he tries to pry the truth from Perry, whom he has come to befriend. In the end, one can't tell whether Capote's friendship with Perry is genuine or merely a way of obtaining his coveted ending.

Capote brilliantly captures the tenuous relationship between a man who has nothing to lose and another who has everything to gain. While Capote's hunger for fame drove him to give Perry false hope, he also believed that some bad decisions were the only things that separated Perry's life from his own. They had both grown up in small-town America, abandoned by their alcoholic mothers and unable to fit in. Had Capote made different choices, the man sitting in that cell could have been him.

Capote's struggle in writing In Cold Blood and the decisions he made in order to finish it are skillfully portrayed in this enthralling film which presents the writer in all his glory: ambitious, talented, and meticulous, narcissistic, insensitive and conflicted.

Capote did choose fame over compassion and the book made him the celebrity he dreamed of being, but it came at a price. At 42 years of age In Cold Blood would be the last book he would ever write.

Anabel Pandiella

Capote will be released on DVD soon.

The 1967 film version of In Cold Blood is available on DVD.

Walk the Line

In comparison to The Life and Death of Peter Sellers , Walk the Line is a very straightforward telling of the life of singer Johnny Cash.

Starting off when Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) was just a boy witnessing the accidental death of his older brother Jack in rural Arkansas, Walk the Line takes us through Cash's early days before stardom, when he was a struggling door to door salesman who dreamed of a life playing music. Cash teams up with his band mates and they record their own demo for just a few dollars.   That first recording is impressive enough to earn Cash a contract to record his own music straightaway. Whilst touring, he meets and forms an intense friendship with June Carter (Reese Witherspoon) who was making her name with a hybrid musical comedy act. Carter never quite leaves Cash's mind and this, plus his addiction to amphetamines, brings about the eventual undoing of his first marriage. Cash and Carter later marry after she helps him fight his inner demons and the two start touring and recording together which they would do continuously for the next thirty years.

Walk the Line was nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award in 2006, along with another biopic Capote , starring Philip Seymour Hoffman. Apart from Hoffman's memorable performance, one of Capote 's many strengths was that the film focused on one small part of its subject's life - several years during the writing of the book In Cold Blood . By comparison, Walk the Line's grand take on the first 30 years of Cash's life doesn't allow the audience to really get inside his head. Consequently Walk the Line presents Johnny Cash at times as just another tortured rock star who is literally walking the line of stardom.

But none of this should detract from the fact that Walk the Line is an exceptional film with truly award worthy performances from Phoenix and Witherspoon, who sing and play all their instruments themselves - something they had to learn from scratch for the film. The scenes of Cash playing to inmates inside Folsom Prison are truly brilliant as Phoenix really embodies Johnny Cash and introduces the man and his music to a new generation.

Anabel Pandiella

Walk the Line will be available on DVD soon.

The Life and Death of Peter Sellers

The Life and Death of Peter Sellers is not a biopic in the traditional sense. Roger Lewis' very substantial 1000-plus-page book on which the film is based, is a warts-and-all description of the late actor's life which leaves no stone unturned. The film version covers the final 30 years of Sellers' life, during which he discoverd fame and fortune whilst losing his own identity in a sea of his own comic creations.

Starring Geoffrey Rush in the lead role, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers opens in the mid 1950s when Sellers was part of the hugely successful Goon Show on BBC radio along with Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe. Never one to settle, he longs for a career on the big screen. Putting on the first of many masks, he tricks a casting agent into auditioning him for a role in an upcoming film. So impressed by the ruse, Sellers is cast straightaway and a string of now mostly forgotten, but moderately successful films follow. Sellers soon develops a reputation as one of Britain's finest comic character actors and in 1964 Hollywood takes notice. The sudden exit of Peter Ustinov prompts director Blake Edwards to cast Sellers in the role that made him famous all around the world. The film was The Pink Panther and the role was the infamous character Inspector Jacques Clouseau. By the end of the decade, Sellers was one of the most famous actors in the world.

Sellers' rising fame was beginning to clash with his personal life and he was not dealing with it. Four failed marriages and a string of flings only served to loosen Sellers' grip reality and push him further behind the many masks he wore. He died of a massive heart attack in 1980.

Rather than a blow-by-blow account of Sellers' life, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers endeavors to present the audience with an overall impression of what the man was like. Scenes from Sellers' movies are meticulously reenacted by Rush, but the bulk of the movie is based more or less on what is assumed about Sellers' life.   The greatest innovation of the film occurs when Sellers takes on the role of the other character in a scene.   A symptom of Sellers' consistent denial that he was ever in the wrong or that people were thinking badly of him, these role-reversal stunts give him a forum to fantasise about what he would want people to say about him, and he addresses the audience directly, playing his mother, father and wife.

Also excellently cast are Emily Watson as Sellers' long-suffering first wife Anne,   Charlize Theron as Sellers' Swedish second wife Britt Eckland, Stephen Fry as the dodgy 'psychic to the stars' Maurice Woodruff, and the truly brilliant John Lithgow as Hollywood director Blake Edwards. The strong career-long relationship that Sellers had with Edwards is portrayed particularly well by Rush and Lithgow who also work so well together on screen.

Playing Sellers from the age of 30, through several drastic weight changes and even plastic surgery, Rush probably wore more latex masks for this shoot than Sellers wore in a lifetime. And he is absolutely brilliant.   Geoffrey Rush would have won an Oscar for this role, if only the film had been eligible. Although released to theatres throughout most of the world, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers was originally made for television in the United States.   But the movie has made a successful leap to the big screen and it's hard not to get chills when you see characters like Clouseau and Dr. Strangelove come to life again so convincingly some 25 years after Sellers' death.  

Alex Dalrymple

The Life and Death of Peter Sellers is available on DVD.

The Party

Very easy to watch and hysterically funny, The Party is one Peter Sellers' films known to most filmgoers whether they are fans of the actor or not. Its PG rating and innocent plot mean that most people will probably remember the film from childhood, when it aired during on of its many re-runs on network television.  

Originally designed to be a homage to the silent era, the script for The Party is a mere 63 pages long, or about half the usual length for a 95 minute film, and much of the movie's dialogue and action were improvised during the shoot. Sellers plays Hrundi V Bakshi, an Indian actor working in Hollywood, who has been accidentally invited to a swanky party hosted by studio chief Frederick Clutterbuck. (J Edward McKinley).   Bakshi wanders around the party rubbing shoulders with some of Hollywood's most powerful actors (including a brilliant John Wayne rip-off: Wyoming Bill Kelso played by Denny Miller), directors and producers, whilst almost systematically destroying the gathering with his chronic ineptitude.

"The character is so innocent and so well meaning" says director Blake Edwards, "but he just fucks things up." He falls in the pool, decimates dinner and invents the foam party when he fills the whole house with bubbles. And who could ever forget those Birdy Num-Nums?   But there is almost a sadness to the character as he struggles, for the first half of the film anyway, to be accepted as an actor in the celebrity-obsessed Hollywood. The only person who offers him friendship is another up-and-coming actor, Michelle Monet played by Claudine Longet, who years later would rise to infamy after accidentally shooting her husband to death.   The scene where she picks up the guitar to sing is The Party's only low point.   Longet's singing sounds like her tongue is stuck to the roof of her mouth with corn syrup, but fortunately it is saved by the brilliant Sellers who is desperately trying to find a bathroom to relieve himself in the background.

And that's really about it as the storyline goes, not that this film is at all lacking for it. Visually The Party is stunning, capturing the late 60s in Hollywood in all its vivid colour, funky fashions, cool furnishings and artworks that adorn the walls of the sprawling Hollywood mansion in which the film is set. The audience has to keep their eyes constantly moving around, as there is often something funny, if not funnier, happening in the background of the shot. On another interesting audio note the band, playing cool jazz composed by Henry Mancini, are present in almost every scene. Even when they do not appear on screen, they can be heard muffled in the distance as if they are playing in another room and it really adds to the feeling that the audience is part of the action.

The Party also gave moviemaking one of it's greatest innovations. By hooking up a video camera to the main film camera, Blake Edwards was able to instantly review what he had just shot - very handy for an improvised movie that is filmed in chronological order. Saving a huge amount of time and money on re-shoots, it's hard to imagine modern filmmaking without video assist.

The Party was one of the first films Sellers made in Hollywood, and not unlike the Bakshi charcter he plays in the film, Sellers was out to impress the West Coast industry. It was also the first film he made with Blake Edwards since the pair fell out during the making of A Shot In The Dark in 1964.   It was also the last time they would work together for several years. Sellers took his role in The Party as an opportunity to showcase the best of his work over the last decade in the UK, delivering a laugh-until-you-almost-lose-control-of-your-bowels performance somewhere between Chaplin and his own comic masterpiece Inspector Clouseau from The Pink Panther films.

A quintessential 60s comic masterpiece, The Party is a guaranteed mood-lifter that will be making filmgoers laugh for generations to come.

Alex Dalrymple  

The Party is available on DVD through MGM Home Entertainment.