When the second series of Mark Kermode's Secrets of the Cinema aired on BBC4 in March 2020 I somehow managed to miss it (not sure why - was something else going on?). I only realised this when I sat down to watch the third series and looked at the iPlayer. I thought I better watch the second series first. Despite living in chaos, I do like at least some order.
The format's not changed much from the first series (Kim Newman's back on board as chief writer, Kermode's still got a natty black suit, and the set is still a very basic room mocked up with the sort of projectors and lights you'd expect to see in a studio) and it doesn't really have to. The formula works. Mark Kermode shows us film clips and then stands in a room talking about them, threading a narrative through them to describe how different genres of film work, how they're constructed, and how they're changing.
Or, how little they really have changed below the surface technology. For series two he's tackling superhero movies, British history on film, and spy flicks and he kicks off his journey with the genre that is currently the most dominant of all. Those men and women in outrageous outfits with outrageous abilities who are out there fighting for truth, fighting for justice, or fighting to overcome some long standing psychological trauma.
Superheroes set out with a simple mission to save the world but have ended up conquering it. Conquering it with their special fx, sequels, and franchises. It's a genre so dominant now that even the villains, like Joker, get their own movies. It's a genre so dominant now that some esteemed directors (Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Ken Loach) have dismissed the films as 'boring', 'despicable', and even, patently untruthfully, 'not cinema'.
Using clips from Avengers:Endgame, Avengers:Infinity War, Captain Marvel, Aquaman, Spider-Man, Tarzan the Ape Man, 1922's Robin Hood, The Mask of Zorro, The Bat Whispers, Spawn, The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Amazing Colossal Man, Village of the Damned, The Mask, Hancock, Unbreakable, Koi... Mil Gaya, Rendel, Wonder Woman, Black Panther, The Bourne Identity, Jason and the Argonauts, Deadpool, The Poseidon Adventure, Brightburn, and Teen Titans Go To The Movies, Kermode strings together the component parts that make a good, or bad, superhero feature film.
A genre of film that began with lo-fi fisticuffs, moved into the camp exploits of the sixties Batman TV series, and has ended up employing an army of special fx technicians. Kermode posits that the four big game changers throughout the genre's history have been Richard Donner's 1978 Superman, Tim Burton's Batman (1989), Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight (2008), and the all conquering Marvel Universe which began its run, also in 2008, with Jon Favreau directing Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man.
Superhero movies love a good origin story and some superheroes are born with their powers, some are given them, some come to them accidentally, and some work hard to gain them. When a superhero first gains their power it can be both exhilarating and terrifying for them at the same time. A typical scene may include leaping across the rooftops of New York skyscrapers but it may also be shrinking to the size of an ant. Three of the most common superpowers our heroes have are ones humans have probably dreamed of for years:- brutal strength, super speed, and, most of all, the ability to fly through the air.
Normally, there's a snazzy costume thrown in too which is useful because, for some reason, superheroes like to conceal their identity. A tradition that dates back, Kermode informs us, to Zorro and The Scarlet Pimpernel. This gives directors a handy plot device and often much of the quieter drama in the lives of your average superhero comes when their civilian life and their costumed life collide, most effectively in the field of romance.
Several superhero stories will end with the protagonist, very often the titular character, shedding the burden of heroism for a normal life of romantic, or domestic, bliss. Or at least they would if it wasn't for those baddies forcing them to don tights and cape and get back out there and put in another shift, in yet another sequel.
For every superhero there is a supervillain and often several (Batman had Joker, Penguin, Catwoman, and many more). The supervillain is often full of self-regard and secretly jealous of the superhero. They often have a fiendish plot that is often as much about their indifference to human life as it is purely murderous in intent. Witness Superman's nemesis Lex Luther plotting to destroy most of California so he can rebuild his property empire there.
More than anything though, the supervillain is most effective when they get inside the head of the superhero - as the superhero has no doubt got into theirs. Some will be so villainous, so evil, so murderous in intent that one superhero may not be enough to counter them. Giving us that fairly recent, and highly lucrative, phenomenon of the superhero team building exercise.
Think 2017's Justice League (Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman - together at last) and 2012's The Avengers. Other than The Incredibles (a cartoon family of superheroes) these collaborations never seem to be easy. There will be obstacles and rivalries to be overcome and often this will need to be done, as with much else in the genre, with a massive violent fight.
The ordeal of team building will be as nothing compared to the ordeal that the superhero will have to undergo before they can save the day. We need to see our heroes fail before we can truly enjoy seeing them succeed. They will have to pass almost impossible (for mere mortals) tests of strength and will power before they can prosper and often these tests will be based on our all too human fears:- drowning, falling, being buried alive.
Usually our hero will recover to fight again but sometimes they will die a good and noble death. Almost always followed by a rebirth. There's simply too much money in these films to let these dudes lay peacefully and that brings us to our final question. May they, soon, finally get that long awaited rest? Have we reached peak superhero? Have the studios overdone it and squeezed the genre too hard, killed the golden goose? Are we, to use superhero vernacular, reaching Ragnarok?
For the second episode of the series, Kermode breaks format (slightly) and instead of splitting up the genre into its component parts he runs through the films chronologically, not in the order they were made but in the era they were set, and that's almost certainly the best way to understand the story of the British history film.
A genre of film that tells us Brits that (a) we have a LOT of history, (b) that history is a highly exportable commodity, and (c) we really like a good fight. Many of these films, Braveheart being a prime example, are said to be full of woefully inaccurate period detail but it's been widely recognised over the years that a good myth always tends to outperform the truth.
Zulu, Darkest Hour, The Favourite, The Young Victoria, Excalibur, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Lion in Winter, Robin Hood (again, this time in various forms from Errol Flynn to Kevin Costner if sadly not the Disney version), A Man For All Seasons, Elizabeth, Shakespeare in Love, Witchfinder General, A Field in England, Barry Lyndon, Tom Jones, Gunga Din, Mrs Brown, Victoria and Abdul, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Dunkirk, Rocketman, and The King's Speech.
There are, I say again, a lot of films about British history. Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Canterbury Tales (1972) needs to be immediately added to your must see list featuring, as it does, a performance by Robin Askwith and a scene where Satan farts monks out of his bumhole.
Films about early British history like the factually correct and heavyweight Carry on Cleo (1964) show Romans like Sid James moaning about the crappy British weather. Another Roman, Michael Fassbender in 2010's Centurion, complained that Britain was "the arsehole of the world". Again, the weather had got to him.
Despite our drizzle and grey skies (looks out the window - yup, fact checked) many of these early British historical films look like Westerns or war movies and they often seem to call on myths and legends more than they do on recorded history of actual events. Medieval Britain seems to consist of almost nothing except duelling, archery, and swinging from ropes.
There's a little bit of time set aside to explore the rivalries between Normans and Saxons and between Thomas a Becket and Henry II. Another Thomas and Henry rivalry (Thomas More and Henry VIII) served film makers looking to capture the Tudor period well, an era of beheading, political machinations, and struggles to hold on to the throne.
In Alexander Korda's The Private Life of Henry VIII, Charles Laughton portrays the monarch as a Holbein painting come to life and, possibly, pioneered the idea of the Tudor king as a man who gnawed on raw meat while dressed in ermine behind lavish banqueting tables.
The Civil War, roundheads and cavaliers, Oliver Cromwell and Charles I, Matthew Hopkins touring East Anglia looking for 'witches' to execute. The 17th century in Britain looked like a depressing, and dangerous, time to be alive yet the next century, the 18th, could barely look more different.
At least if you're watching movies. Stately homes, baroque music, and people seeking to increase both their wealth and their social standing as the British Empire enriched the nation. Very few films set in this era care to mention that Britain's new found wealth was founded on the back of slavery but Amma Asante's 2013 Belle is an honourable exception and it is to Kermode's credit that he doesn't miss that out.
Films made about the 19th century, the Victorian era, often have more of a sense of social justice. Mike Leigh's 2018 Peterloo (which I reviewed and you can read about here) tells the story of the Peterloo massacre of 1819 which saw the death of eighteen people when cavalry charged into a crowd of around sixty thousand people who had gathered in a field in Manchester to demand the reform of parliamentary representation.
Comrades (1986, dir:Bill Douglas) tells the story of how, in 1834, the Tolpuddle Martyrs were arrested for forming a trade union and then follows the story as they are sent to Australia to toil in the harsh desert sun as punishment. Not all films made about the era fought the good fight though. Tony Richardson's Charge of the Light Brigade (1968) shows huge deference to the establishment and, most of all, to Victoria and Albert.
As you might expect, many of the historical films set in the last century focus on the two world wars but there are plenty of East End gangsters (The Krays with Gary and Martin Kemp) and pop music (Rocketman, Bohemian Rhapsody, Blinded by the Light, and Billy Elliot) too. Phil Collins playing a great train robber in 1988's Buster fills the middle of that Venn Diagram very neatly and we realise our recent history is played out as much in pop culture as it is on battlefields or in grand palaces.
Goldfinger, Skyfall, Secret Agent, Sabotage, The 39 Steps, Notorious, The Lady Vanishes, North by Northwest, From Russia with Love, Carve her Name with Pride, Joseph L. Mankiewicz's 5 Fingers, Kiss Me Deadly, You Only Live Twice, Casino Royale, The Conversation, Austin Powers, True Lies, Misson:Impossible, Clear and Present Danger, and Bridge of Spies. The third and final show sees Kermode (and Newman) offer their take on the spy film.
The cloak and dagger men, the secret agents, and the hired assassins. Sherlock Holmes' brother Mycroft was an early fictional spy or 'operative' but it was Hitchock who popularised espionage on the silver screen. He was attracted to it because of its psychological dimension. By how anyone could be, at any given moment, thrown into a dangerous world beyond their comprehension.
Using plot devices like his famous McGuffins and employing his legendary talent for suspense, Hitchcock was able to show how small men could find themselves caught up in vast intrigues that would, as the spy movie evolved, lead to global events that could even threaten Armageddon.
Even his notorious cameos had a whiff of espionage about them. Hitchock wasn't the first (in 1913 Louis Feuillade made Fantomas and in 1922 Fritz Lang directed Dr Mabuse, der Spieler) film maker to draw on the shadowy world of sleuths, gumshoes, and double crossing informers but he almost perfected the genre to the extent that the next big development in the world of the spy spun the entire genre on its axis.
In 1962, Dr No saw James Bond make his first cinematic outing and this spy didn't hide in the background at all, he even told people his name and how he liked his drinks mixed. Other secret agents soon followed in Bond's path. James Coburn's Derek Flint in Our Man Flint, Dean Martin's Matt Helm in The Wrecking Crew, and television spies like Dangerman and The Man from UNCLE. Even Fred Flintsone went undercover in 1966's The Man Called Flintstone!
You'd barely recognise him (and having TOP SECRET written on your case won't draw attention to you)! Cavemen, it seemed, were allowed to enter the world of espionage before women or people of colour but when Halle Berry appeared (out of the sea in a bikini, like Urusula Andress in Dr No, natch) in the 2012 Bond film Die Another Day as Jinx Johnson she broke both those moulds.
Berry's Jinx wasn't simply one of 007's conquests. She fought alongside Bond. Other female spies came in the form of Angelina Jolie (Salt, 2010), Charlize Theron (Atomic Blonde, 2017), and, at a stretch, Anne Parillaud in Luc Besson's 1990 Nikita. Monica Vitti's Modesty Blaise (1966) had the best intentions but didn't quite cut it according to Kermode.
I've not seen it. I can't comment. I digress. Once we've decided who is going to be our spy we need to get them kitted out. Unlike the superheroes this doesn't tend to involve a brightly coloured cape and wearing their pants outside of their trousers. It's more about the tech and the more fanciful and ludicrous the better. Knives protruding from attache cases, invisible cars, and hidden cameras (cf. The Lives of Others).
The Lives of Others feels horribly real (because it sort of was) but many other spy capers are so daft they hardly need Rowan Atkinson's Johnny English to send them up. Other common themes in the spy movie include the spy chief (M for James Bond) whose attempts to impose order on their maverick charges tend to lead to tricky relationships and pursuit scenes through crowded airports or railway stations in which the pursuer tries desperately hard not to lose track of their prey.
Some spies, like Michael Caine's Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File and Gary Oldman's George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, are less flashy, and more diligent in their work. They may question their own morality and reasons for taking the job, they may be men as flawed as those they are monitoring and, unlike Bond, their bedposts may remain notch free.
In the sixties and seventies the Cold War, Vietnam, the Kennedy assassination, and Watergate destroyed, not for the last time, faith in establishments and belief in the American dream and the film industry followed the cue and started making movies about secret establishment cabals. Films like John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate, Alan J. Pakula's The Parallax View, and Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor.
In these films the enemies were uncertain and protean but the more mainstream spies like James Bond had obvious foes, often with easily distinguishable traits and features. Ernst Blofeld, head of SPECTRE, famously had a scar running down his right cheek and would sit stroking his Persian cat. An image ripe for satire and an open goal Mike Myers couldn't resist when creating Dr Evil, the nemesis of Austin Powers.
Inspired by Fu Man Chu, these villains would often come mob handed. There'd be an arsenal of thugs (Oddjob, Jaws), snitches, informers, and disposable goons who could be despatched imaginatively and summarily early on in each spy caper to the delight of the audience.
But once the spy reaches the heart of the evil machine, the inner sanctum of aforesaid foe, things cannot be so straightforward. Our spy will have to escape, time and again, from ever more precarious and lethal looking situations. Much like, in fact, the superheroes. Unexploded bombs ticking away is a popular favourite as are elaborate Heath Robinsonesque torture devices. In Moonraker, James Bond is pushed out of the open door of an aeroplane and still manages to survive.
Once Bond, or some other spy, has survived this final test all he needs to do is thwart the evil scheme, blow up a few secret bases, and then relax, often with a drink and a beautiful lady. Other spy movies end less triumphantly. With uncertainty, with defeat, and even with death.
Mark Kermode's Secrets of the Cinema series two ended in certainty (I even got a drink though sadly neither Ursula Andress nor Halle Berry were available to join me). It was certainly as good as the first series (Kermode's a safe pair of hands, he won't let you down) and it's certainly back for a third series. No doubt I'll write about that too when I watch it. No doubt you won't read it. Certainly not this far.
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