Anne Billson's Blog

The Interstellar actor was remarkably underrated until the Nineties, but his versatility and voice make him peerless, says Anne Billson

By Anne Billson 12 November 2014 • 6:00am

Not the least of the pleasures in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is watching Michael Caine doing what he has been doing in each of Nolan’s last six films – anchoring the outlandish elements with a performance of quiet authority. Caine helps you believe that a billionaire can dress up in a bat costume to fight...

I wanted to post the first two chapters of my unfinished novel FILM CLUB here on my Multiglom blog, but WordPress’s new editing interface is a disaster – intolerable and unworkable – and clearly not designed with writers in mind, so I have posted them on Substack instead.

Here are the first two paragraphs of the preamble:

When I first joined Twitter, back in 2009, I concocted a story called The Psycho Murders, inspired by the 1973 Vincent Price film Theatre ...

When I was an art student in the 1970s I was obliged to work at weekends and during the holidays in order to make ends meet. For a Season of Hell I worked in an Oxford Street shoe shop (a nightmare of turquoise Bri-nylon pinafores, acryclic carpets and metal shelving that would give you electric shocks every time you touched them) before seeing the light and moving up the road to Claude Gill, a bookshop adjoining Tottenham Court Road Underground station, in t...

At the time of writing, it’s nearly 60 years since the death of one of cinema’s most deliciously sinister presences. Peter Lorre was born in 1904, of Jewish Austro-Hungarian descent, and attracted international attention in 1931 with his terrifying but weirdly sympathetic portrayal of a child murderer in Fritz Lang’s M, the mother of all serial-killer movies. Lorre used to tell the story that after he had left Germany following the Nazi rise to power, he received a telegram f...

Paul Verhoeven’s Elle has been described as a rape-comedy. This may be catchy but it’s inaccurate; there is comedy in the film, mostly thanks to Isabelle Huppert’s sarky way with a one-liner as a Parisian career woman who doesn’t react in the way you’d expect to being violated on the floor of her dining-room by a masked intruder. But the rape scenes (and there are more than one) are not played for laughs. Nor, thank God, are they even remote...

Bruce Campbell as Ash in Evil Dead II (1987)

Ah yes, the season of mists, mellow fruitfulness and another Final Girl triumphing over the masked killer who has just butchered her friends. You could hardly call this a spoiler for the latest Halloween – though be warned, there will be plenty of spoilers in this piece, since it’s all about endings. But we already know The Final Girl, that slasher movie archetype incarnated by Jamie Lee Curtis in some of her early horror roles (the first two Hallowee...

Midway through Inherent Vice, Paul Thomas Anderson’s woozily intoxicating adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel, there is an interlude of such demented sleaziness it almost jolts you out of your bemused neo-hippy stupor and into another, more manic universe. It’s a showcase for Martin Short as a randy coke-sniffing dentist called Dr. Rudy Blatnoyd in a double-breasted purple velvet suit and paisley kipper tie, and a reminder of what a pleasure it is to see Short, one of those actors whose mere p...

Jim Sturgess in London Fields (2018)

I have an actor blind spot and it’s Jim Sturgess. I should say straightaway that I bear him no ill will, nor do I think he’s a bad actor. On the contrary, I think his self-effacing abilities almost certainly stand him in good stead in his chosen profession. But here’s the thing: I am have now seen him playing leading roles in at least twelve films (including Across the Universe, One Day, Cloud Atlas – in which he was one of the multiple role players) yet I st...

Robinson Crusoe por un año aka Castaway (1986)

In February 1987 I talked to Nicolas Roeg for Time Out to tie in with the UK release of Castaway, a virtual two-hander about what transpired after 49-year-old Gerald Kingland placed a small ad in search of a woman who would be willing to marry him (to comply with visa requirements, apparently) and live with him for a year on Tuin, an otherwise uninhabited island in the Torres Strait between New Guinea and Australia. The successful respondent was 25-...

Hiccup in How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2014)

At the end of How to Train Your Dragon (2010), Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III loses one of his legs. But does he let that slow him down in How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2014)? Does he heck; by the time of the sequel Hiccup has not just learnt how to cope with his artificial limb, but, with his inventor’s skill, has turned it into a practical enhancement. And he’s not the only character in the film with bits missing: Hiccup’s dragon, Toothless the Night Fu...