Great auteur’s film about film enjoys return to spotlight
husband is Jean-Pierre Leaud, the child star of Truffaut’s seminal New Wave film, The 400 Blows.
Behind the scenes are a host of other characters, from happy-golucky make-up girl Odile (Nike Arrighi) to uber-organised PA Joelle (an early role for Nathalie Baye) and Leaud’s off-screen lover, Liliane (1960s French singer Dani).
Together they indulge in a fair amount of bed-hopping with the other backstage characters, among them the rakish English driver hired as Julie Baker’s unlikely stunt double.
There’s also a glorious, Hitchcockian cameo for author Graham Greene as a stuffy English insurance broker (apparently Greene was a huge Truffaut fan), and cinéastes will enjoy spotting the in-jokes the director spreads liberally throughout the film: a parcel of books he opens contains studies of Jean-Luc Godard and Nicholas Ray, there’s a close-up of a street sign saying Rue Jean Vigo and another of the signature on a Jean Cocteau print (Jean-Pierre Aumont will have approved: he worked with Cocteau in the 1930s).
Among the extras are archival interviews, on-set footage and a feature on the legendary spat which erupted after the film’s release between Truffaut and Godard, who absolutely hated it and made his opinions known publicly. The gilded members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences didn’t agree with him, however: at the 1973 Oscars Cortese and Truffaut were both nominated, and Day For Night won the award for Best Foreign Language Film. Entertainment One, £12.99 THAT Elvis Presley turned up at the White House gates early on 21 December 1970 with a handwritten letter asking for a meeting with then-President Richard Nixon is established fact.
So is Presley’s motive – he wanted a Federal narcotics agent’s badge – and the eventual outcome, a bizarre visit to the Oval Office to meet Tricky Dick, receive the badge and pose for a photograph.
The snap still exists (Google it: it’s just as creepily weird as you imagine it would be) but although notes were taken by an aide, there is no recording of the meeting.
It wasn’t until two months later that Nixon initiated the practice. Into this handy absence of facts steps comedy-drama Elvis & Nixon, directed by Liza Johnson and starring Kevin Spacey as the President and Michael Shannon as The King, though the story is seen mostly from the point of view of Presley’s put-upon buddy and fixer Jerry Schilling (British actor Alex Pettyfer).
There’s a little too much set-up and some flabby scenes involving Presley’s aimless activities as he waits to hear whether Nixon will see him. But from the moment he sets foot in the White House and checks in his firearms in front of an exasperated secret service officer, the film is comedy gold. Shannon is hampered slightly by not looking much like Presley (though he could pass for a young Jack Palance) but Spacey’s turn as the President is pitch-perfect, right down to the mannerisms, the rasping growl and the potty mouth.
That it could soon be Donald Trump sitting in the Oval Office entertaining the famously rightwing Ted Nugent adds a certain frisson to the whole thing. Studio Canal, £19.99 DAVID Bowie was no slouch when it came to acting, but Nicolas Roeg’s wonderful 1976 adaptation of Walter Tevis’s novella is probably his high watermark.
Bowie plays Thomas Newton, an alien trying to ship water back to his home planet and delivers an absolutely gripping performance.
A cult film in anyone’s book, it has long been a staple of latenight television but this 40th anniversary 4K restoration gives it a new lease of life and has been conducted in consultation with Roeg and cinematographer Anthony Richmond.
The four-disc set contains a wealth of extras and interviews (including one with artist and film-maker Sam Taylor-Johnson) and also contains the CD soundtrack.
Roeg, in his wisdom, decided against letting Bowie do the music and instead commissioned John Phillips, formerly of The Mamas And Papas. That slight aside, The Man Who Fell To Earth has everything for Bowie fans.