Classic Films – Page 6 – The Daily Opinion

Film Review: The Quiet Man

As far back as I can remember I’ve been a John Wayne fan. I may have been but a freckle-faced junior with grazes on my knees and dreadfully sensible sandals on my feet but there I was, sitting with my father watching those weekend matinee cowboy films on one of the three TV channels (remember those days?). I recall Dad frequently telling me not to sit so close to the screen – “You’ll make yourself cross-eyed!” Wayne’s embodiment of heroism, strength and honour was, to my young mind, as right and true as any natural law of the universe, something to aspire to so that whatever you did, wherever you went, everything would work out fine as long as you conducted yourself in the same manner. Sure, there’d be hardships along the way and battles to fight but if you’d quit bellyaching, stand firm and face your adversaries head on, you’d triumph in the end and be able to ride off into the sunset with love and righteousness by your side. (Sounds almost biblical, doesn’t it?)

Well, I’m older now (you don’t say!) and, I hope, a little wiser and a little more knowledge about some things in life but when I sit through a Wayne movie my mind just goes right back to those formative years when life seemed simpler, when love and honour seemed to truly mean everything and when a man was only as good as his word.

Hand on heart, I can say that I’ve watched pretty much all of John Wayne’s films – certainly those of which came after Stagecoach in 1939 and with equal sincerity, I can attest to having enjoyed them all. To me, he’s just so watchable. However, when it comes to truly great pictures, classic films, I have to concede that he made but a handful. And yet that’s okay because let’s face it, any artist, be they an author or a painter or an actor, if they leave even just one shining example of their craft – one book, one painting masterpiece or one performance that is unmatched or unquestionable in its brilliance, then they’ve hit the jackpot. They’ll inspire generations and live on forever. Wayne did just that – some might say with the help of a great director but as I’ve said before in these pages, sometimes in the movies, the stars in the heavens align, the talents of cast and crew come together in total harmony and perfection is created.

For Wayne this is clearly evident in The Searchers, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Red River. Three superb films directed by two of Hollywood’s greatest movie makers – John Ford and Howard Hawks – with performances from the Duke that should be ranked as highly as any performance by any actor, ever! There are a few other titles that could arguably join this group – True Grit (for which Wayne won the Oscar for Best Actor), Rio Bravo and The Shootist (his last and most poignant performance) and I cannot omit The Quiet Man. If you’ve only seen Wayne wearing a gun-belt or brandishing a Winchester, then this is a bit of a departure but it is an absolute GEM. If you’ve never seen it, I urge you to do so. It’s beyond beautiful, it’s funny, moving and utterly charming. And it’s the sort of film that would not, nay, could not be made today. No matter how overused it is, the aphorism is true – they just don’t make ’em like they used to. Yes, modern cinema had gained much with its CGI, its new fangled digital cameras and lightning quick editing techniques but along the way something has been lost. If you’re into great movies, you’ll know what I mean.

Anyway – The Quiet Man. Wayne plays Sean Thornton, an Irishman by birth who returns from 1920s America to his childhood home with the intention of settling down. He’s also running away from something in his past. He meets and falls in love with the beautiful but feisty Mary Kate Danagher (played by the incredibly lovely Maureen O’Hara). Unfortunately, she happens to be the younger sister of local squire and ill-tempered bully Will Danagher (a role that suited the hulking Victor McLaglen to a tee). Sean’s attempts to court Mary Kate are met with stiff resistance from her brother however, with the help of the friendly locals – an impossibly loveable bunch of village stereotypes – the romance gets a leg up (so to speak). Sean’s romance of Mary Kate forms the main plot of the movie but there’s an intriguing undercurrent because the past that Sean was hoping to leave behind in America returns to haunt him.

The script was based on a 1933 Saturday Evening Post short story by Irish novelist Maurice Walsh. Apparently director John Ford read the story and soon after bought the rights for $10. Republic Pictures, the studio through which the film was made, was known mostly for low budget B-movies and considered The Quiet Man to be a big risk with Wayne and Ford stepping away from their usual genre of the western. They only agreed to finance it if Wayne and O’Hara and Ford agreed to film a western with them first, which they did. Rio Grande was that western. The studio needn’t have worried though because The Quiet Man was a commercial and critical hit upon release and it went on to become the first and only time the studio received an Oscar nomination for Best Picture.

The Quiet Man would go on to win two Oscars out of seven nominations, one for Ford’s directing, the other for Winton C. Hoch’s cinematography. All of the outdoor scenes were shot in various locations around County Mayo and County Galway in Ireland throughout the early summer of 1951and Hoch used his lens to capture the vivid green beauty of the countryside like Constable used his paintbrush. It’s just lovely. Many of these locations have since become tourist attractions and the pub used in the film (though it had been a shop at the time of filming) hosts daily reruns of the film on DVD! The production employed many actors from the Irish theatre as well as extras from the surrounding countryside and the film is one of the few Hollywood movies in which the Irish Gaelic language can be heard.

Wayne’s performance as the stranger in a strange land is well judged. The little town of Innisfree, its people and their customs are a far cry from the world his Sean Thorton has left behind. Wayne doesn’t do peaceful and quiet very often in his films so it’s great to see him in something with a gentler pace but he still bellows his authority when he has to. The chemistry he shares onscreen with Maureen O’Hara is something special too. They must have adored working together because it shows in their performances and it’s no surprise to note that they would go on to make a total of five films together. As always, O’Hara is just wonderful, portraying innocence and youth, romance and passion like few are able. The other main characters are played by some of John Ford’s regulars – Victor McLaglan, Ward Bond and Barry Fitzgerald. The latter is absolutely hilarious as the cheeky Michaeleen Oge Flynn who likes a drop o’ whiskey every now and then. The music by Victor Young compliments the picture perfectly – frequently romantic and cheerful and at times wonderfully cheeky but always keeping that Gaelic heart. At a certain point in the film, Michaeleen begins humming a catchy little melody called “The Rakes of Mallow” and if you’re anything like me, you’ll be humming the tune yourself as he credits role.

Film Review: All About Eve

With movie award season being well and truly underway, all thoughts are no doubt turned towards that most prestigious film award of all – the Oscar. I happened upon a certain statistic recently which led to this review. Did you know that in the Academy Awards’ 85 year history, there are two films that hold the record for the most nominations? It probably won’t require too much head-scratching to bring to mind one of them because most of us past our teens can probably remember the night James Cameron hailed himself “King of the World” when his 1997 epic Titanic took home 11 wins out of 14 nominations. That’s a lot of categories to be up for and let’s face it, Titanic was, and still is, visually impressive. But almost half a century earlier, All About Eve was the talk of the town when it too was nominated in 14 categories. It would end that night of the 23rd Academy Awards show with winning far fewer statuettes than Cameron’s blockbuster (though 6 including Best Picture and Best Director is still an incredible achievement) however it would win one that Titanic wasn’t even nominated for – Best Screenplay. And All About Eve is still the only film in Oscar history to receive four female acting nominations, two in both the Best Actress and the Best Supporting Actress categories.

Funnily enough, the film begins at an awards dinner where Broadway’s latest, hottest star Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter) is being recognised for her breakout performance in a critically acclaimed new play. Slimy theatre critic Addison DeWitt (George Sanders) watches the proceedings from his table and in a rather derisive voiceover, recalls how Miss Harrington’s star soared as quickly as it did.

Flash back a year and we meet Margo Channing (Bette Davis) in her dressing room after a night’s performance of a play. Margo is one of Broadway’s biggest stars, successful but inevitably jaded and aware that, at forty, her career has only one way to go. One of Margo’s closest friends Karen Richards (Celeste Holm) who also happens to be the wife of the play’s author Lloyd Richards (Hugh Marlowe) meets starstruck fan Eve Harrington outside the stage door and decides to make the young fan’s day by taking her backstage to meet her idol. Margo and her friends, including Margo’s young director boyfriend Bill Sampson (Gary Merrill) find Eve and her reverence of Margo and the theatre in general charming and following a touching story Eve recounts about her difficult life to date, Margo moves her into her house and takes her under her wing as an assistant.

Everything’s peachy and everyone adores the lovely, helpful Eve. All except Margo’s maid Birdie (Thelma Ritter) who senses something the others do not. And it’s not long before Eve subtly begins to reveal her true intentions and nature. It’s all done with such a sweet humble facade but she slowly schemes her way to becoming Margo’s understudy and then, by cold, measured manipulation of Margo’s relationships with Lloyd, the writer and Bill, the boyfriend and director, she conspires to usurp Margo in the plays Lloyd writes for her. As the film progresses, we are witness to the full range of trials and tribulations that theatre folk are faced with as well as all the emotions that close friends and colleagues have to deal with.

At the end of the film, we return to its beginning at the awards dinner as Eve receives her trophy. So it’s clear she attains the fame and critical acclaim she so craved. But at what cost? Addison DeWitt, cynical as well as slimy, has dug into Eve’s past and uncovered skeletons she’d rather keep buried and so, in exchange for his silence, he informs Eve prior to the awards dinner that she now “belongs” to him. The final scene of the film mirrors the first in that it appears the ‘user’, Eve, is about to become the ‘used’ when another young starstruck girl, Phoebe, finds her way into Eve’s apartment with the obvious (to us, the audience) intention of insinuating herself into the now, shining Broadway star’s life. What goes around comes around.

The casting of this movie was inspired. Everyone is right on the money; it’s no wonder there were so many acting award nominations. George Sanders was ultimately the only winner and his portrayal of the charming but insincere theatre critic is masterful. Bette Davis was brought in after the first choice of Claudette Colbert suffered a back injury and had to withdraw shortly before filming began. Davis, who commented that the script was one of the best she had ever read, later admitted that when Joseph L. Mankiewicz cast her in this movie, he saved her career from oblivion after a series of unsuccessful films. Even Marilyn Monroe in an early role as young starlet Miss Casswell is terrific. Watch closely and you can definitely see signs of what would soon make her a star.

Together with Mankiewicz’s writing and directing, the film received overwhelmingly positive reviews upon its release and even now, over 60 years later, it’s easy to see why. The dialogue is at times witty, at others moving but always sparkling and true and Mankiewicz paces the story perfectly. The movie is 2 hours and 20 minutes long but you’ll never know it.

It’ll come as no surprise that the film turns up in numerous top 100 film lists, American Film Institute’s as well as others and the film is usually always selected to highlight Davis’ legendary career. In 1990, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.”

In short, All About Eve is the epitome of a classic Hollywood movie. It has every necessary ingredient and it’s brightness in the firmament of greatness grows with the passage of time. And unlike so many movies of today, it doesn’t rely on special effects, explosions or unfeasible action sequences to keep you in your seat. It’s a group of talented artists who came together to create, for us, something quite wonderful.

Film Review: The Heiress

Oh, the weather outside is frightful but the fire is so delightful, and since we’ve no place to go, we may as well watch a good ol’ movie. And so it was that, from a storage box rediscovered during an impromptu search for something entirely unconnected, I unearthed this DVD of a film I’d not seen before.

The Heiress is a 1949 drama based on the 1880 Henry James novel Washington Square. It was directed by William Wyler and stars Olivia de Havilland as Catherine Sloper, Ralph Richardson as Dr. Sloper and Montgomery Clift as Morris Townsend.

Catherine Sloper is the daughter and only surviving child of the highly respected surgeon Dr. Austin Sloper and they live in opulent splendour at 16 Washington Square, New York City. Catherine is a rather plain and terribly shy young woman who, unlike her deceased mother (Dr. Sloper being recently widowed) is completely lacking in social charm and graces, a fact that her father is all to often reminding her of. All the same, despite her awkwardness at the various parties she and her father attend, Catherine thinks the world of him.

Then one day, she meets the very charming and handsome Morris Townsend and is immediately besotted with him and his efforts to woo her. She falls in love with him and they announce their engagement. Her father believes Morris to be nothing more than a fortune hunter and threatens to disinherit her if she marries him and even takes her away to Paris for a few months in the hope that her naive romantic feelings for Morris will cool but on their return, the young lovers plan to elope.

Just as Morris is about to head off to pack and procure a carriage for their flight, Catherine tells him of her father’s intention to cut off her inheritance. And so that night, all packed and ready to head out with the man she loves, she waits…and waits…and waits. Cue the sound of a heart breaking.

Shortly after, her father dies and Catherine inherits his entire estate but a life of spinsterhood seems likely to be hers. But several years later Morris returns from California and again professes his love for her with claims that he left her behind previously because he couldn’t bring himself to be responsible for depriving her of her inheritance. Catherine pretends to forgive him and they resurrect their old plans of elopement for later that night. Morris leaves to pack but when he returns with a carriage Catherine exacts her revenge. She calmly has the door bolted leaving Morris outside shouting her name and banging his fists against the door as she silently ascends the stairs to her bedroom.

One look at the credits for this film and the amount of talent involved is obvious. From the writers Ruth and Augustus Geotz who based the screenplay upon their own very successful stage play of the novel to William Wyler and his exquisite direction (let’s not forget this is the man who gave us among others Ben-Hur, The Big Country and Roman Holiday) to the wonderful performances from Richardson and de Havilland. Ralph Richardson had already played the role of Dr Sloper in London’s West End and the fact that he inhabits the role as comfortably as one might their own slippers makes this quite evident. Clift’s portrayal of the young man hoping to secure an easy ride for himself is fine but he’s perhaps a little too relaxed in his deportment and doesn’t quite convince me as do his co-stars. Olivier de Havilland on the other hand, gives the performance of her life. She starts out as wonderfully mousy and self-conscious and you almost cringe at her nervous social exchanges with the opposite sex but then, once love gathers her up in its arms and sweeps her off her feet, she’s suddenly filled with light and almost becomes someone else. In act three she changes again with the hardening of her heart as she realises that both male figures in her life (father and lover) have lied to her and let her down. Truly wonderful acting. No wonder she went home with the Academy Award and the Golden Globe the following year. It’s worth watching just for her. Miriam Hopkins who plays Lavinia Penniman, a widowed aunt who lives with the Slopers as a kind of chaperone and guardian to Catherine is worth a mention too. She adds a layer of humour to the film and often offsets Richardson’s austerity with her rather childish romantic prattling.

Overall, it’s a compelling and powerful drama that will grip you, as it did me, from start to finish.

The Lost World

A couple of weeks ago, a well-thumbed copy of Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic 1912 novel The Lost World caught my eye on a bookshelf. Having read and enjoyed at one time or another similar tales of adventure by the likes of Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs, I took it down and indulged myself. I’ve had great pleasure in reading the majority of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories so therefore I felt certain I was going to enjoy this too. And enjoy it I did. The mix of Victorian characters, exotic adventure and prehistoric fantasy all written with that turn-of-the-century eloquence made it an eminently pleasurable page-turner.

Naturally, upon completion it led me to check out the original filmed version of the story which in turn led me to a comparison with a contemporary one. The first, directed by Harry Hoyt, was made in 1925 and the date of this alone is impressive, not least because this was still the silent era of cinema. One can almost imagine those early studio bosses scratching their heads and wondering how on earth do you take prehistoric beasts off of the page and bring them to life before a paying audience.

The answer was, of course, stop motion special effects and this was the first feature film to use such a technique courtesy of, in this instance, Willis O’Brien. O’Brien was a pioneer of this style of special effects and would become responsible for some of the best-known images in the history of cinema, his best known work perhaps being the greatest monster movie of them all, King Kong (1933). For audiences of the time, it must have been incredible to see dinosaurs moving about on screen when all they had ever seen of them before were drawings on a page. The film itself is significant for this reason and overall it’s worth a viewing not just to see how far cinema has come since those early days but also to see how creative these filmmakers were with the resources they then had.

In the film, Wallace Beery plays the brusque Professor Challenger who leads a group of British explorers into the Amazon in order to prove to the world that a land of prehistoric creatures exists on an isolated plateau. The South American jungle is depicted by set pieces of rainforest and river with the occasional snake dangling from a tree and one or two cutaways to stock footage of a snarling jaguar. The prehistoric plateau is more of the same but with models of distant smoking volcanos and of dinosaurs roaming around or fighting in that uniquely disjointed way that is stop motion animation. One panoramic scene of dozens of dinosaurs fleeing an erupting volcano was created on a tabletop that was 150 ft long by 75 ft wide!

By today’s standards it is, of course, laughably crude but then in this digital age where everything from men made out of liquid metal to flying vampires can be brought to life so convincingly, we’ve all become a little immune to the impossible.

The second adaptation of this story I watched was the 2001 BBC TV movie starring Bob Hoskins as Professor Challenger and boy! what a difference 75 years make. This version was obviously always going to be more accessible and with the special effects taken care of by the same team that produced the hugely popular Walking with Dinosaurs series (indeed, some creatures were used for both programmes), it was far more watchable and more entertaining entirely.

But is it as important a film as the earlier one? No, definitely not because as artistry in film goes, it is no better than average. In 1998 the Library of Congress selected the 1925 film for preservation in the US National Film Registry as being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant”, something that the BBC version will never be deemed. Perhaps one of the reasons it is less significant is that we all recognise the creatures to be computer generated, after all, ever since Steven Spielberg made Jurassic Park in ’93 (a film that will surely gain inclusion to the registry at some point), we’ve got used to seeing them this way. And let’s face it, they look about as real as we’d ever want them to

Let’s just suppose for a moment that Spielberg had dreamed up a hoax (perhaps a ‘market experiment’ would be a better term) sometime before the 93′ release of Jurassic Park and that hoax involved a crackpot professor with an outlandish story. This professor made headlines because he wanted to tell the world about some fantastic trip he had just returned from and he then proceeded to show the world footage of prehistoric beasts he had reputedly taken while there, footage which was actually pioneering computer-generated imagery of dinosaurs Spielberg had recently perfected. Would the world have been fooled? After all, we’d never seen anything like it before had we? Isn’t it just possible we would have reacted in the same way as Sam Neil’s Dr. Grant and his party when first encountering the Brachiosaurus in the movie – i.e. pinch me, I must be dreaming.

It’s hard to imagine now but in 1922, Arthur Conan Doyle showed a test reel of Willis O’Brien’s work to a meeting of The Society of American Magicians, one of whom was none other than Harry Houdini. The footage – which Doyle craftily refused to discuss the origins of – depicted a Stegosaurus, a family of Triceratops and an attack by an Allosaurus. The next day, the New York Times ran a front page article saying, “(Conan Doyle’s) monsters of the ancient world, or of the new world which he has discovered in the ether, were extraordinarily lifelike. If fakes, they were masterpieces”. You get my drift? If those magicians were fooled by something they’d never seen before, couldn’t we be? Or has the coming of the digital age, where any visual representation is possible and incredibly lifelike, robbed us of that mystique of the unknown? UFOs, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster – even if (for the sake of this argument) it were genuine, would even the clearest of film footage convince us nowadays?

There’s no denying special effects evolved enormously between The Lost World of 1922 and Jurassic Park of 1993 and in terms of lifelikeness these two examples are at opposing ends of the visual spectrum. But my God! didn’t it take a long time to get from one end to the other? The stop motion technique was refined and better filmed perhaps with the passing of decades (Ray Harryhausen will forever be a favourite of many) but it took 70 years for any groundbreaking improvement. And then, BAM! with the help of computers, suddenly we’re seeing monsters that don’t twitch when they move, suddenly we’re seeing dinosaurs that actually breath, that flow with their movements, that look, for want of a better adjective, REAL. And all this creativity and invention simply to make our visual experiences more lifelike and thrilling.

But where is the future? Most special effects are virtual reality now – that is, what we see on screen is virtually real – but it can never be ‘really’ real because it’s on screen and consequently not reality so again, I ask, where is the future? Where do filmmakers go from here? Let’s all be honest now and admit that apart from involuntarily ducking your head out of the way of some apparent incoming object, 3D doesn’t really add that much to the cinematic experience yet. Haptic technology such as that found in flight simulators and certain video games which simulate motion to the user by applying forces and vibrations is quite exciting but whether it will ever have a place in cinema is debatable. And yet there’s bound to be a continued progression – it’s simply the way of things. But who can see the road ahead?

Personally, ever since Jean Luc Picard and his crew occupied the bridge of the Enterprise in Star Trek The Next Generation, I’ve been looking forward to the arrival of the Holodeck. Surely, that’s the future right there. A room projecting an optical reality all around us in which we can interact with simulated people and objects and move around on a virtual treadmill. That’s got to be fun. Sadly though, if that’s going to take another 70 years to become fact, I’ll never know because I’d have gone the way of the dinosaurs.

I’m not against Disney acquiring Star Wars. I dislike Star Wars needing to carrying on. At all.

So the Star Wars franchise has been passed onto another company. This company is the master of entertainment. It regularly churns out top notch animations through one of its subsidiaries and turned out one of the best superhero films of our life time, so far…and if you don’t count the Dark Knight Trilogy. Yes I am talking about Disney; the company synonymous with the two mouse ears has acquired the rights to this once great film franchise to the tune of over $4 billion (£2.5 billion).

What does this mean for the existing franchise? More importantly, what does this mean for the existing fans?

With the recent Star Wars prequels being reasonably successful at the box office but not very well received by critics or fans, one can only speculate how an actual Star Wars sequel may turn out. Can Disney insert some kind of Mickey Mouse Magic into this franchise?

The Star Wars Universe already has a few official story lines (not counting fan fiction) that are being or have been explored:
1. The Prequel Trilogy Story – revolves around Anakin Skywalker, Padme and Obi Wan Kenobi
2. The Original Trilogy Story – revolves around Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker
3. The Clone Wars Story – animated TV Series set between Episodes II and III of the Prequel Trilogy, focuses on the missions Anakin and Obi Wan get up to before Revenge of the Sith, as well as Anakin’s Paduan
4. The Old Republic Story – series of video games set many millennia before the events of the films (pictured above)
5. The Force Unleashed Story – video game series set a few years after the Prequel Trilogy but before the Original Trilogy. Revolves around Darth Vader’s apprentice
6. The 1313 Story – unreleased but announced video game revolving around the bounty hunters of the Star Wars Universe. Time period is undetermined

I think for the sake of the fans and the franchise, it would be pointless to milk any of the film stories anymore. With Disney’s experience with animation, The Clone Wars may get some type of boost but also risks become less mature and appealing to the adult fans even less. The Old Republic has a huge online following due to its massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) nature. This particular storyline has many interesting characters that can be explored through film or anything else that Disney can come up with but at the same time, may anger the existing fans of the series due to possible misrepresentation or misinterpretation, seeing as the fans are able to control the actions of these characters in the game. The 1313 storyline is not yet known and if Disney decides to expand this, it would be rather foolish; however, the folks at Disney may be able to have input in the game itself. This leaves us with The Force Unleashed story or a totally new story to consider. The characters in The Force Unleashed were voiced by actors in real life who also lent their likeness to the game, so each character also looks like the person they are voiced by. This kind of makes it easy for a film to be made revolving around the same characters. However, being so close to either trilogy, it would seem too close to the existing movie storyline and cause some incoherence as well as seem like they are milking the films again. Finally, we have a new story. This can be either a reboot or new characters in a new setting. It also has the potential to be a series of films. Recently Disney has never passed up a chance to show the world that it can also make mature films such as Alice in Wonderland, Tron: Legacy and Secretariat as well as one of this year’s most successful blockbusters, The Avengers. Some have turned out to be franchises such as The Pirates of the Caribbean and the Chronicles of Narnia. There is no reason to doubt the potential quality of a new Star Wars story but the problem remains for Disney to tackle is how to make it unique whilst maintaining the same Star Wars feel.

Disney’s move to acquire Star Wars is bold and one can only speculate at the motives behind it. The only way for the Star Wars Universe to live on through Disney is with original content but it must be unique and have the same shock factor that the original trilogy had. If a new film has a mediocre reception, the possible negative perception of the new direction would be uncontrollable and would harm Disney’s image; fans would begin to assume that Disney did not have best interests in mind for Star Wars during the acquisition and are just milking it for the money. With the quality and reception of sci-fi films improving every year with films such as Looper and Inception, a new Star Wars film should have a decent chance; emphasis is placed on the “should” because it also has all these great films to compete with. More often than not, a good film is often overlooked because it lay in the shadow of a great film of the same genre released during the same time, and a new Star Wars risks being one of those films.

Disney definitely knows how to make movies but let’s take a look at some of its other franchises. Star Wars fans would be very reluctant for their franchise to be preserved by the same group of people responsible for the likes of High School Musical or Hannah Montana. The acquisition could indicate that Disney is looking to use the rights to expand their theme parks and Star Wars themed rides would definitely make sense. There is always potential for more original content but the people at Disney must think to themselves, can this new idea function outside of the Star Wars Universe at all and stand alone as a film in its own right? If so, why not just leave Star Wars alone and make an original film instead. Should this franchise be milked even harder?

No. Star Wars should be left alone.

The Force Will Be With Us – Always!

So, with a little over $4 billion changing hands, George Lucas has sold his Lucasfilm empire to Disney, who have stated that a new Star Wars film will be coming in 2015 followed by another every two or three years after that.

I feel a great disturbance in The Force as if millions of voices across the globe have all cried out in pain. Of course, it could have been a huge collective ‘Hoorah!’ from fans but in my humble opinion (whatever that’s worth), for fans of the original three movies starring Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford, this will likely come as sad news. I happen to be one of those fans and I have lost count of the number of times I’ve sat and enjoyed that original trilogy, usually comprising a marathon session during a holiday where every couple of years myself and a good friend would draw the curtains and, surrounded by a calorific selection of salty snacks, watch all three films back-to-back. It’s almost become a ritual.

And I, like many others, considered the prequel trilogy with Ewan McGregor and Natalie Portman to be, at best, a mixed bag but generally very disappointing. So, to hear that sequels are possibilities that Disney is considering makes me roll my eyes and groan like a Wookie.

Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi are three movies that tell one simple yet epic story and like all good stories, it has a beginning, a middle and an end. It’s that END that is of great significance here because at the end of the third film, everything is wrapped up nicely, all done and dusted. The nasty old Emperor and his Empire are defeated and all evil destroyed – even Darth Vader sees the light and changes his dastardly ways moments before popping his clogs – and the ensuing party with the Ewoks clearly looks like the dawn of a new era.

But now they’re telling us that in 2015, it’s likely a sequel will follow on from there and will involve the iconic characters of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo etc. Personally, I just don’t see how it would work. The saga came to a natural and logical conclusion in 1983 and I for one cannot see how anything other than hackneyed storytelling can resurrect the story from there.

Will I go and see this new episode when it comes out? I don’t know. Possibly out of curiosity I would, perhaps secretly hoping that the writers had found some miracle of continuance, something that makes complete sense in order that these characters can carry on fighting the Empire. The only problem/argument with that scenario is selecting the actors to play those characters. Answers on a postcard please….