Auteurist-en-Ecosse

Long unavailable, you can now (2011) buy this on DVD in an Italian release. No English subtitles but if you play the Italian subtitles you can work out what is happening. I wanted to see it for two reasons. First, I'm trying to watch all the various film versions of Ilf and Petrov's 1920s Soviet novel The Twelve Chairs. The plot - a man inherits a set of dining room chairs with jewels stashed in one of them, and a frantic chase ensues to find the right chair after the set has been dispersed - has been used various times, most notably by Mel Brooks in 1970. Second, the bizarre international cast seemed to indicate this was a really classic instance of international co-production of the type so common in the late 1960s. I was particularly interested, as a British viewer, to see stalwarts of 1970s British TV in an Italian-made film. What would the results be like?

After years of waiting, I was not disappointed.

In no other film will you see:

Willie Rushton declare his love for an ultra-camp Tim Brooke-Taylor - in dubbed Italian

Tim Brooke-Taylor camping it up with, in separate scenes, Orson Welles and Vittorio de Sica

Welles play Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as if in a pantomime

Terry-Thomas as a lorry driver.

Mylene Demongeot as a prostitute quite happy to hire out her chairs for men to make love with.

And so on and so forth. The film is typical of the late 60s kaleidoscope approach to film-making - throw every bizarre ingredient into the mix and see what happens, a la the original Casino Royale. But this film, while wildly dated, still entertains in a giddy sort of way, because it's fast-paced, there are no boring passages and you never (and I really mean never) know what will happen next.

If you like late 60s cinema, then this is a crucial watch. It is also valuable to watch if you are a student of British comedy, as you get two different comedy traditions - an older one music hall represented by Terry-Thomas on the one hand, and a newer TV satire one embodied by Rushton and Brooke-Taylor on the other - playing out in the context of an Italian film. It's really interesting to watch this if you are interested in the history of British comedy. I am pretty sure that no film historians writing such a history have included Twelve Plus One, but it deserves at least a side mention of British actors being used for international co-production purposes. The results are odd but fascinating.

I should also note that Ms. Tate is charming and certainly at the most beautiful I have seen her in any film. The tragedy of her early death is underlined by watching this film, where she does seem hugely magnetic. You do get a sense of why Polanski fell for her in real life.

Overall, Twelve Plus One is well worth seeing. It is a perfect time- capsule of what European films were like in the late 60s. It has a silly charm that still works today - in fact, the film may play better now, at forty years' distance, than it did when it was first released.

If a film has standard thriller ingredients - assassins with a past, murky figures from their past, sexy female assassins wanting to assassinate the assassin, glossy European locations, etc etc etc - you rather expect you are going to get some thrills.

This promise is wholly broken by The American, which assembles the stock materials and gives you very little in return. It manages to be pretentious and dull, with the cinematography the only point of interest - and as the critic David Thomson has noted, when in a film the only good thing you can say about it is that the cinematography is nice, then you are in the presence of a failed enterprise.

The makers have clearly thought that you can make profound statements about the nature of identity, self-hood, history (etc etc etc - all the usual vacuous non-concepts that pseudo-intellectual "artists" like to bandy about) - within the frame of the thriller genre. No you can't.

You either make something like a Resnais or Antonioni film, or you make a thriller with thrills in. The American fails because it is neither a genre piece or an art-house piece, but a wholly vacuous and dull non- film that wastes a good cast and ... nice cinematography. In this sense it is very like another American assassin in Europe film - Hard Contract from 1969 - which likewise gets bogged down in its own pretensions, and forgets that assassins are stock pulp figures, intended to figure in thriller stories. Any attempt to invest them with tragic existentialist qualities of "significance" will very likely fail, unless you have Jean-Pierre Melville or another director of that calibre at the wheel.

The American, however, belongs in that unfortunate category of films - see Candy and Myra Breckenridge -directed by people who don't know how to direct.

Mr. Corbijn may know how to make nice pictures - hence the lovely cinematography - but he has no idea how to extract any tension from the unfolding images, which is what film directors are supposed to do.

Out of the hundreds of films I have seen in the last year, The American stands as testimony to a simple truth - only people who can direct films should be directing films. The American is a wasted opportunity of quite substantial proportions.

If a proper director like Sam Fuller had seen it, he'd either have been appalled or would have left the cinema laughing at the pretentiousness and the ineptitude.

Note to Mr. Clooney - stick to working with people who know what they are doing. Don't be taken in by Europeans with a lot of chat and not much substance to back it up.

This is a very funny film. It stars the great Stanislaw Tym - the only professional actor in an otherwise non-professional cast - as a chancer who cons his way on board a pleasure-boat on a river cruise, and he becomes the ship's entertainments officer. The cruise is used as a vehicle for a satire of communist Poland that manages to be cutting but warm at the same time. The absurdities of life in Poland at the time are wonderfully caught. But much of the humour is also more universal - trivial conversations where people have nothing to say but keep talking anyway, pretentious discourses about poetry and cinema leading to complete misunderstanding, the ridiculousness of spending one's time on "holiday" when the time spent supposedly enjoying oneself starts to resemble the boredom of working life, and so on. Non-Poles like me will miss out on the clever word-play in the script, unless you have a Polish speaker on hand to translate for you (as I did - thank you, MT!). But if you just watch it in translation without such help, it's still very funny anyway. The non-professionals are used wonderfully well - imagine Ken Loach or Pasolini making a really silly, but still pointed, comedy. There are some nice visual homages to Fellini and Tati too - another part of the universal appeal is that I think the film is in places like a Polish Monsieur Hulot's holiday. It is a piece of work that is perfect in its own way, and it's easy to see why it is so beloved in its country of origin. But it is also greatly appealing to foreigners, not least because it shows you very nicely what the essence of Polish humour is.

Although it is ostensibly a weird connection, it would be worthwhile to watch this in conjunction with Richard Lester's "Juggernaut", which is apparently a disaster movie about bombs on board a British liner, but is in fact a satire that uses the background of a cruise to make some pointed observations about contemporary society, in this case Britain in the mid-1970s. And Lester's film has some wonderful moments from Roy Kinnear as the ship's increasingly desperate entertainments officer, the spiritual cousin of Tym's phony art and culture secretary. It makes one realise just how great a metaphor for the human condition a cruise is: every one of us is trapped in a delimited space with a bunch of generally well-meaning idiots. This for me is at the root of Rejs's appeal for anyone at all, whether they are Polish or not.