Silent Running (USA, 1972)
Directed by Doug Trumball
Starring Bruce Dern, Cliff Potts, Ron Rifkin, Jesse Vint

It's long been fashionable for film reviewers to slag off films for being sentimental. The problem is not so much the notion of sentimentality in and of itself, as the context and manner in which it is applied. Criticising Steven Spielberg for being sentimental is simultaneously apt and foolish - apt when it meddles with or cheapens a dark subject matter, as with Schindler's List, but foolish when it is complimentary and integral, as with E.T. or Close Encounters.Silent Running's reputation has suffered from a similar stigma, namely that a grown-up science fiction film with serious thematic intentions cannot bow to something as feeble as human emotion. The clichéd view of 1970s science fiction, created by 2001 and cemented by Solaris, is one of a cold, clinical, existential world where any concession to audience emotion is strictly verboten. But while such an approach worked wonders for Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky, Silent Running is still a damn fine film which proves that substance and sentimentality can go together.Doug Trumball made Silent Running in direct response to the perceived coldness and clinical precision of 2001. Having created many of the special effects on Kubrick's film, including the iconic star-gate sequence, he sought to make a film about the future of humanity in which computers and apes were not the most human characters. Where Kubrick's films focussed on Mankind, Trumball wishes to look at people as individuals. And where Kubrick balanced Humanity's physical insignificance with its God-like potential, Trumball praises Man's capacity for compassion even in the face of insignificance, disinterest or despair.If one was feel as cold and calculating as HAL, one could easily dismiss Silent Running as nothing more than 'hippies in space'. Being a product of the early-1970s, when America was experiencing the death throes of hippie culture, such connotations are to some extent inevitable. It is undoubtedly true that Bruce Dern's character conforms to popular, if cynical, stereotypes of hippies, from his loose-fitting clothing and drawling delivery to his obsession with nature which many (the crew included) would consider unhealthy.One of the problems with Silent Running from this point of view is its questionable attitude towards mankind in the pursuit of pro-nature or 'hippie' ideals. The position towards technology is ambivalent; Dern yearns for a monastic existence where Man eats the fruits of His own labours, but it is ultimately the machines which sustain the forest. More problematic is the implication that preserving nature is more important than human life, to the point where murdering his crewmates appears to be justified. The film could be making the point that one has to go the hard yards in the name of one's principles, but it remains questionable whether in its content or its presentation.But if we put this immediate concern to the back of our minds, Silent Running's ecological theme emerges as more than a simple choice between Nature and Man, or Man and Machine. It is more prominently a film about harmony, about how the march of progress has made humans overly dependent on technology. Technological progress, including the development of space travel, has increased the standard of living of the astronauts to such an extent that they take their resources for granted.Dern's colleagues no longer care about the forest or the food they eat because they have been living in a world where their every want is met. They behave almost like spoilt children, spending their time racing around the cargo bay and joking around. Dern's position is similar to that of the 19th-century Arcadians like John Ruskin and Henry David Thoreau, writers who warned against the increasing luxury and apathy brought on by mechanical progress. Dern is the Arcadian among the lackadaisical industrialists, still able to enjoy himself but ever watchful of the consequences of progress, and mindful of the alternative which could soon cease to exist.When WALL-E was released three years ago, numerous critics compared the opening section to Silent Running. There is an obvious parallel in the role of robots tending to the Earth (or what is left of it), and in the loneliness of this occupation both practically and philosophically. Like WALL-E, Dern and his droids are going against the grain to do what they believe is right, and both have developed eccentricities through isolation which has caused them to deviate from their original 'programming'. With WALL-E, it is his bizarre passion for Hello Dolly!; with Dern, it is his desire to teach droids how to play poker.Although WALL-E could not have existed without Silent Running, it remains the superior of the two films. Although one of the longer PIXAR efforts, it feels tightly structured and well-paced, while there are long sections of Silent Running which feel superfluous or needlessly slow. This may be down to the involvement of Michael Cimino at a script level; his first writing credit in Hollywood contains the same flaws in pace and emphasis which would scupper him as a director. The poker scene, for instance, feels like it shouldn't be there, or at least like it should be a lot shorter.Parts of Silent Running have also dated quite badly. Peter Schickele's soundtrack has stood the test of time rather well, but Joan Baez' warblings are a distinctly Marmite experience. Some of the dialogue is preachy, with Dern going over many of the same arguments to the point of exhaustion. But to be fair, it is very difficult to sustain a story with a limited number of locations and characters without the luxury of extended dream sequences (Solaris) or multiple versions of the characters (Moon). Trumball may be no Kubrick, but all in all he has done a reasonable job.One aspect which hasn't dated, however, is the special effects. When Trumball was interviewed recently for the Blu-Ray release, he commented that organic, miniature or optical effects date better than CG visuals because they are more "photo-realistically impressive", i.e. have weight and tactility. The external shots of the Valley Forge are shot from the correct perspective so that we aren't conscious of them being model shots, and the explosions look and feel both realistic and custom-built.The most illuminating special effect, however, is the three drones which Dern uses to tend to the forests after commandeering the Valley Forge. The drones, inspired by characters in Tod Browning's Freaks, were created by double amputees walking on their hands. This and the facial structures of the drones create a human-like movement which we can recognise and use as a starting point for empathy.What makes Silent Running remarkable, and ultimately successful, is the strength of its emotional pull. The tactility of the special effects, the honesty of the script and the tender nature of the final act has the same effect that the ending of E. T. does; you feel as though you have earned the right to blub your eyes out because of how well the characters have been formed and how much you have enjoyed their company. Much like The Man Who Fell To Earth, the emotional weight of the characters allows us to overlook or forgive any narrative shortcomings and enjoy having our hearts broken.Silent Running remains an underrated and underappreciated science fiction film. It's not without its flaws, whether narrative or otherwise, and it has to take a back seat to 2001 both in ambition and in execution. But what it lacks in awe and spectacle it makes up for in heartache, coupled with a good-natured and welcome intelligence. WALL-E may have since surpassed it, but it remains compelling viewing.

Rating:
Verdict: An underrated sci-fi heartbreaker

The Bed-Sitting Room (UK, 1969)
Directed by Richard Lester
Starring Ralph Richardson, Arthur Lowe, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore

Nobody makes cult films like the British. From the chilling horror of The Wicker Man to the high-camp lunacy of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Britain has produced more than its fair share of cinematic oddities which were just too much for the mainstream. And no film is more emblematic of this particular brand of oddness than The Bed-Sitting Room, a film which makes even The Man Who Fell to Earth feel disciplined and coherent.The Bed-Sitting Room began as a one-act play by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus, who had collaborated in the later years of The Goon Show. After a successful run at the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury, it was extended into a full-length play and ran in London to critical acclaim throughout 1963. After a successful revival four years later, Richard Lester entered into discussions about making a film version.

Although Lester became successful through his work with The Beatles, his career had been kick-started by Milligan; their eleven-minute short, The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film, was Oscar-nominated in 1960. As the decade wore on, Lester's output became more blackly comic in tone, particularly with the 'anti-anti-war' satire How I Won the War. Under these circumstances, The Bed-Sitting Room seemed the ideal project for the budding director.The presence of Milligan, both as a co-writer and in a supporting role, does lend comparisons to The Goon Show. Aside from its surreal, absurdist humour and madcap cast of characters, the plot is similar to an episode called 'The Nadger Plague', in which Eccles and Neddie Seagoon end up being turned into a gas stove and clock respectively. But in fact, the film is closer to Milligan's later work on the Q series, being every bit as visually outrageous and every bit as inconsistent.

This inconsistency derives mainly from the fact that there is no 'restraining device' on Milligan's humour - there is nothing to stop him or the plot wandering off on some stream of manic energy. In The Goon Show, having an audience meant that there was a cut-off point for the humour, either by laughter or by the 30-minute time limit. Even though The Bed-Sitting Room barely makes it to 90 minutes, bits of it feel much longer because there is no natural brake on proceedings. The lines come so quickly and the jokes from so far out of left-field, that we are given far too little time to stop, laugh and take it all in.On top of this, Lester is not the most accomplished director when it comes to narrative. Like Nicholas Roeg after him, his films often contain very odd experiments with colour; there is one whole section in which the screen is bathed in a mixture of red and green light, for no apparent reason. And like The Man Who Fell to Earth, the film gives very little clue as to the passage of time. In place of pace, we have long, lingering shots of the devastation of London, which in some way foreshadow the junkyard scenes in Superman III. The film has so many characters and stories running around and it really struggles to bring them altogether, even for a couple of scenes.Just as The Goon Show often poked fun at the army, health service and labour exchange, so The Bed-Sitting Room is a comedy about various British institutions. The film takes place after a "nuclear misunderstanding" which led to the shortest war in history - "two minutes, 28 seconds, including the signing of the peace treaty." All the institutions that made up mass society (the army, the postal service, the NHS and the church) are now being run by lone survivors. The film begins with a BBC newsreader moving from one abode to another, reading the last recorded bulletin before the bombs fell.

When questioned about the film's meaning, Milligan said it was a story of how, after the dust had settled, man would simply rebuild society and carry on as if nothing happened. Though it's a cliché, the film embodies the British spirit of 'keep calm and carry on'. One of the characters actually offers "we're British" as an explanation when asked why the survivors are carrying on, trying to live their lives as if nothing happened. Nobody ever talks about the bomb specifically, and the main advice of the police is just to "keep moving", never mind where to.By having characters carrying on as if nothing had changed, The Bed-Sitting Room is making two very different points. Firstly, it demonstrates how impersonal most social institutions are: without masses of people working as cogs in the machine, they are little more than empty shells. It makes no sense to have the whole National Grid being powered by a man on a bicycle. Neither is it common sense to crown the Queen's tea lady as ruler of the British Empire. The Bed-Sitting Room is absurdist both in premise and in purpose: it is absurd to cling on to the past and the familiar when the world has so irrevocably changed.

But if the film attacks institutions, it is a lot kinder to the characters that inhabit them. Out of the myriad plot threads and episodic bouts of nonsense, there emerges a central story about a pregnant woman and her lover; in the manner of Children of Men, she is effectively carrying the future of humanity. The second message of the film is that even in the midst of all this chaos and clinging futilely to the past, there is some kind of hope for the future. The film ends with a parody of the second coming, as Roy Kinnear warns people to repent and Peter Cook descends from the sky and tells the survivors that everything will be alright.Although The Bed-Sitting Room is designed to be a comedy, you won't spend an awful lot of time laughing. The film is not a failure because of that, since there are a great many comedies which don't provoke outright hilarity. You'd be hard-pressed, for instance, to find anyone who laughed during the montage of atomic explosions at the end of Dr. Strangelove. A number of moments will raise a chuckle, like Harold Wilson agreeing the rent of 10 Downing St. with Mao Zedong, or the scenes of Marty Feldman's mad nurse screaming down a zip wire and crashing into a tree. But the primary response to the film will be a mixture of sadness and bewilderment.There is a huge vein of Beckett-esque pathos surrounding these characters - the play was once described as "Waiting for Godot with better jokes". Two characters in the film end up mutating into inanimate objects; Lord Fortnum becomes the bed-sitting room, and Mother becomes a wardrobe. A third character, played by Arthur Lowe, ends up as a parrot which is eaten for dinner. When these characters 'speak' in echoed sentences, it is like hearing the ghosts of the past - the people who inhabited this world and these rooms, both of which are now seemingly useless.

There is, equally, a copious amount of scenes which cause you to stare at the screen in total bafflement. Take Harry Secombe's character, who lives underground, staring at old film stock and ranting about 'Haig the butcher'. In one very odd scene, he asks Mother to be his wife, because a cut-out on the wall cannot satisfy him. Instead of a bawdy sex scene, she then starts throwing crockery at Secombe, who tries to explain that he wasn't having an affair. Such oddness is textbook Milligan, but it comes so far out of nowhere that we fail to understand its relevance, either in that moment or in the story as a whole.The Bed-Sitting Room is a really ramshackle concoction and a bona fide cult film. It is absolutely a product of its time, and a classic example of a film which simply cannot be re-made. It's not as consistently funny as either The Goon Show or Monty Python's Flying Circus, and it does require an awful lot of patience. But there is some joy to be had both from its message and from watching an all-star cast of British eccentrics clearly having a ball. Recommend viewing for all who seek to be baffled.

Rating: 3/5
Verdict: Very British and very baffling

The Man Who Fell to Earth (UK, 1976)
Directed by Nicolas Roeg
Starring David Bowie, Candy Clark, Rip Torn, Buck Henry

Philip Ridley once said that “watching a film has always been both an experience and a process; we experience it first and we spend the rest of our lives processing it.” Each of us can cite examples of films which were memorable experiences to watch and which have dogged our imaginations since that fateful first viewing. Sometimes the film is so perfect we embrace it and analyse it ad infinitum; sometimes it is so hideous that we are repulsed and vow to avoid that area forever. And sometimes, as with The Man Who Fell to Earth, the experience is just so strange that we don’t know what to think.The Man Who Fell to Earth is a notable meeting point in many interesting careers. It was maverick director Nicolas Roeg’s follow-up to Don’t Look Now, a flawed but fascinating Gothic tale of grief and the supernatural. It was produced by Barry Spikings and Michael Deeley, who would later win Oscars for their work on The Deer Hunter. And it marked David Bowie’s first foray into film, having failed to get an adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four off the ground.

More than any of that, it is also one of the strangest, oddest and most baffling films ever to have come out of Britain – quite something for the country which gave us The Wicker Man. Roeg’s experimentation with colour, composition and narrative structure takes a relatively straightforward science fiction story and distorts it ruthlessly, creating something which is incoherent and indulgent, but utterly memorable.Based on a 1963 novel by Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth is something of a bridge between the drug-induced hippie culture of the late-1960s and the post-Altamont paranoia of the 1970s. Its visual style is reminiscent of Michelangelo Antonioni, particularly The Passenger and Zabriskie Point. Both films rely on long slow scenes with lengthy takes, and the camera is as much in love with the landscape as it is with the characters dotted around it.

There are also hints of Andrei Tarkovsky in Roeg’s work. Like The Mirror, The Man Who Fell to Earth plays out like a stream of consciousness with no particular interest in narrative. And as with Solaris, part of what story there is includes a man wanting to rejoin his family on a distant planet. We watch David Bowie’s mind conjure up images of a strange desert world, and are not sure whether we are seeing what is real or illusion, the future or the past.One of the distinctive features of The Man Who Fell to Earth is its complete disregard for the passage time. Characters physically age, but there is no clue as to how much they age by or how long it has taken Bowie to accumulate all his wealth and power. Roeg deliberately sought to remove the “crutch of time” from his audience, a decision which makes the film deeply incoherent. Couple that with the generally slow pace of the film, which runs to two-and-a-half hours when fully uncut, and you would expect the whole project to collapse into a soupy heap.

This is avoided by Roeg’s striking visuals which pull us into the world of the film and keep us totally engrossed (if freaked out) by what is going on. Like Ken Russell before him and David Lynch shortly after, Roeg puts images on screen which are so horrifically beautiful that we can be fixated by what is happening even if we have no idea what is going on. The scenes of Bowie’s home planet, inhabited by hairless creatures with air packs and yellow eyes, is up there with the acid queen sequence in Tommy.
The Man Who Fell to Earth is a deeply druggy film, right down to Bowie’s entrance which resembles footage of Syd Barrett (allegedly) tripping on mushrooms in a quarry. This psychedelic feel spilt over into the production, since the film was made at the height of Bowie’s cocaine addiction. Perhaps the only way to rationally understand the film is to liken it to an acid trip or lengthy state of drunkenness, in which little makes sense and one has little control over events playing out before you.

It’s therefore hard to know whether the film’s indulges with both time and content are deliberately intended to reinforce this effect or are simply a case of poor discipline. By and large Roeg is well-behaved behind the camera, choosing his angles for their propriety rather than to show off his skills as an editor. His use of zooms, while repetitive, does enhance the film, mimicking our wandering minds that focus on something on a whim for no good reason. That said, we do have to put up with the gratuitous shot of Candy Clark urinating in fear, in which the camera focuses tight on her underwear in a really uncomfortable manner.Being an X certificate film, The Man Who Fell to Earth also has its fair share of nudity and graphic sex. We get full frontal scenes of Clark and Bowie, and scenes of Clark and Rip Torn making love in a manner which resembles a mugging. Although none of these scenes are exploitative, they are far removed from the famously delicate love scene in Don’t Look Now. We also have to put up with a parade of teenagers staring at Torn’s genitals and remarking: “you don’t look anything like my father”.

But beneath all its incoherence and excess, The Man Who Fell to Earth is an insightful and powerful film about the destructive effects of wealth and the lifestyle that goes with it. Beyond the obvious irony of the story (a man sent to find water ends up becoming a drunk), the film demonstrates how someone of seemingly noble intentions can end up as a bankrupt vessel of decay. Thomas Jerome Newton begins with no emotions and a singular focus on his mission, setting up World Enterprises with the express purpose of helping his planet. But the longer he stays on Earth, the more Newton absorbs the lifestyle and values of our planet until he loses all desire to help anyone.Just as Charles Foster Kane was based on newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, so there are shades of real life enigmas in Bowie’s performance. The most obvious comparison, aside from Hearst, would be with Howard Hughes. Both individuals are obsessive by nature, with the ability to conjure up wealth and power out of nothing. Like Hughes, Newton entertains the possibility of travel by seemingly unrealistic means. And like Hughes, Newton becomes a recluse who is both tormented and fascinated by film and television. Think of Newton as Kane’s mentally deranged, druggy half-brother – and even then, you’re only halfway there.

Much has been written about Bowie’s performance, which is the best of his erratic acting career. Bowie literally inhabits Newton to the extent that he lived the lifestyle of the character long after the film had wrapped. The covers of Station To Station and Low are stills from the film, and Bowie’s persona of The Thin White Duke was in some respects a perversion of Newton’s mental state. His performance is the mainstay of The Man Who Fell to Earth, the touchstone which sustains our attention and prevents us from being completely alienated. His pathos-ridden delivery and unusual beauty pulls us hypnotically into the world of Newton and his various pleasures, and the heartbreak is genuine as he slowly but inevitably falls apart.The Man Who Fell to Earth is a remarkable feat of science fiction which finds Roeg at the height of his powers. It can’t be called a masterpiece, because of its blatant disregard for anything resembling discipline or coherency. But it is a deeply cinematic experience with a sense of ambition and scope which is rare in filmmaking, even for the period in which it was conceived. It holds up both as a bona fide cult film and as the document of a bygone age, in filmmaking and in Western society. It’s baffling, bizarre and utterly bonkers, but never anything less than unforgettable.

Rating: 4/5
Verdict: Rambling and ridiculous but ultimately rewarding