GLASGOW GLASGOW GLASGOW FIlm festival festival fes festival
BEYOND As Joel and Ethan Coen open the Glasgow Film Festival with Hail, Caesar!, their comic paean to the golden age of Hollywood, Niki Boyle matches up some of the pair’s back catalogue gems with other timeless classics
T he words ‘premiere’ and ‘opening gala’ have an undeniable air of old-school Tinseltown glamour about them, conjuring up red carpets, black ties, glittering gowns, paparazzi l ashbulbs and spotlights strai ng the sky above Hollywood Boulevard. It’s i tting, then, that Glasgow Film Festival’s opening gala is the UK premiere of Hail, Caesar!, a tongue-in-cheek tribute to Hollywood’s glitzy golden age, starring modern day matinee idols George Clooney, Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johansson.
Appropriately for a i lm fest launcher, Hail, Caesar! is a movie that’s in love with movies, which is just what you’d expect from writing-directing team Joel and Ethan Coen, a duo whose obsession with cinema inhabits every story they shoot. Here is a mere handful of examples from their i lmophiliac back catalogue. For optimum results, we recommend scheduling a double-bill and settling down with a jumbo bucket of popcorn . . . p p
W Were you on board for Miller’s Crossing (1990)? Try M it holding A Fistful of Dollars i (1964) ( Set S in Prohibition-era USA, M Miller’s Crossing is of a piece w with 1940s noir i ction and c cinema; indeed, certain story b beats and character names in Miller’s Crossing are lifted straight from Dashiell Hammett’s celebrated crime novel The Glass Key. However, we reckon the plot – about a taciturn gangland hustler (Gabriel Byrne) who i nds himself working for rival mob bosses – also tips a wink to Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (itself a Westernised remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo), in which an unknown loner plays two warring crime families off against each other.
18 THE LIST 4 Feb–7 Apr 2016 18 THE LIST 4 Feb–7 Apr 2016
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Were you a sucker for The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)? Make a date with His Girl Friday (1940) d naïve Tim Robbins T e entrepreneur Norville Barnes in the C Coens’ screwball c comedy, which shares DNA with P Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels a and Christmas in July as well as A Alexander Mackendrick’s The Sweet Smell of Success. However, the stand-out performance in Hudsucker is not Robbins’ easily-duped hula hooper but Jennifer Jason Leigh’s hard-hitting reporter Amy Archer, a note-perfect tribute to fast-talking newshound iday. Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) in Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday. oft-overlooked
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w s Does The Big Lebowski (1998) tie your room together? Say hello to The Long Goodbye (1973) In a (reluctant) interview with Indiewire, Joel l e Coen stated that The Big Lebowski structure d consciously mimics that of a Raymond r Chandler noir. ‘We wanted to do a Chandler d kind of story; how it moves episodically and l deals with the characters trying to unravel y a mystery, as well as having a hopelessly complex plot that’s ultimately unimportant.’ Lebowski buffs looking for a cinematic reference point should check out Robert Altman’s Chandler adap The Long Goodbye. Starring Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe (the hard-boiled detective made famous by Humphrey Bogart), the movie’s 1970s setting, Californian backdrop and druggy sub- plot will provide familiar touchstones for followers of The Dude (aka His Dudeness or El Duderino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing).