SUGARHOUSE   : [2/10] : UK 07 : Gary Love : 96m : seen CM 17.8 (press)
   Ostentatiously violent drama strains desperately hard for effect to the extent that it often becomes unintentionally comic. Daniel Bronks' elegantly-composed DV cinematography is just about the only saving grace in an otherwise misbegotten affair about hangdog yuppie Tom - aka Horatio (Steven Mackintosh) - venturing far beyond his turf to buy a gun from jittery, self-described crackhead 'D' (Ashley Walters), only for both of this mismatched pair to fall foul of psychotic hard-man, Hoodwink (Andy Serkis in bellowing-nutcase mode).
   Performances are pitched mostly at the flashily hyper-intense end of the Method spectrum; Dominic Leyton's script (adapted from his own play) is a hotchpotch of cliches, contrivances and implausibilities, with both bloodshed and 'four-letter' language immaturely amped-up beyond gratuitous levels. How very depressing that such horribly overwrought fare should manage to obtain funding in Britain today - doubly so when, as the opening title proudly proclaims, its cinematic release is being paid for from National Lottery funds. A 'Good Cause' this most emphatically ain't.

HIS PICTURE IN THE PAPERS   : [7/10] : 55m (approx) 
THE SOCIAL SECRETARY   : [6/10] : 52m (approx)
both US 1916; John Emerson; seen FH 17.8 (public - paid £5.20)
   Delightful double-bill showing as part of the festival's Anita Loos retrospective - she co-wrote both scripts with the director, her future husband Emerson. 
   His Picture in the Papers is a knockabout satire about good-for-nothing rich kid Pete Prindle (Douglas Fairbanks) desperate to obtain publicity in order to boost his dad's health-foods company. Daft shenanigans duly ensue, most of them excuses to showcase Fairbanks's rather unlikely agility.
   This unprepossessing, pudgy-faced chap (who from certain angles resembles Anthony Lapaglia) quickly reveals a strikingly fluid, cat-like athleticism - and he's visibly performing all of his own stunts. It's easy to see why Fairbanks, who went on to swashbuckle his way through all manner of silent-era epics, was among the most prominent and admired celebrities of his showbiz era - his renown giving Prindle's hapless quest for fame a ripe metatextual irony.
   But there's much else to like here - the script's deft skewering of the (then) new-fangled vegetarianism fad; inventive use of varied Manhattan locations; a pace which gradually builds to a disarmingly breakneck/screwball alacrity. The ridiculing of celebrity-hungry publicity-seekers is, of course, even more topical a full 90-odd years on.
     The Social Secretary hasn't aged quite as well as the Fairbanks vehicle, but is nevertheless of rather more than historical-curio interest. It's the story of a young working-woman (Norma Talmadge) sick of working for employers with 'wandering hands'. She finds an ideal vacancy in the home of a society matron who's fed up of her social secretaries leaving to get married, and so advertises for a candidate "extremely unattractive to men".
   Our heroine duly "frumps down" - but soon becomes entangled in all manner of romantic, farcical, melodramatic goings-on, most of them related to her boss's naive, lovestruck daughter. Talmadge's freshness and vitality compensates for the rather cumbersome complications of the plot, and the fact that most of the other performances are pitched at a somewhat stagier level: Erich Von Stroheim (of all people) is especially hammy as a nosily muckracking journalist. 

IN SEARCH OF A MIDNIGHT KISS  : [7/10] : US 07 : Alex Holdridge : 98m : seen FH 17.8 (public - paid £6.36)
   Essentially a cross between Swingers, Before Sunset and Mutual Appreciation - and starring an actor (Scoot McNairy) who from various angles distractingly resembles Jamie Bell, Guy Pearce and a very young Keith Carradine - In Search of a Midnight Kiss isn't exactly the freshest or most innovatively original picture you'll see all year. But it is one of the most beguilingly charming - a romantic comedy that's sufficiently romantic and comic to win over viewers who usually give the genre a wide berth. The two leads - McNairy as aspiring screenwriter Wilson, Sara Simmonds as aspiring actress Vivian - are an appealing duo as their characters endure/enjoy an extended blind date in downtown Los Angeles one becalmed New Year's Eve. 
   On one level, this yet another talky, low-key, noodling example of low-budget "indie" US filmmaking - the score features rather a couple too many quavery-wavery emo ballads for comfort, alongside a couple of all-too-seasonal Sinatra numbers, while the bittersweet script isn't without its clumsy moments and detours. But the monochrome black-and-white cinematography by Robert Murphy is alluringly classy, and the choice of downtown locales - in a characterfully dilapidated area that's always been ludicrously underexploited in American cinema - is a consistent delight: Thom Andersen will surely be delighted. And he won't be the only one: Midnight Kiss is a deft crowdpleaser that - despite its shoestring origins - deserves, and will hopefully obtain, widespread commercial distribution.

I SERVED THE KING OF ENGLAND   : [7/10] : Obsluhoval jsem anglickeho krale : Cz 06 : Jiri Menzel : 118m (approx) : seen CW 17.8 (public - paid £6.76)
  An unlikely but welcome return to the limelight for Czech veteran Menzel (whose last feature was back in 1994) the whimsically charming I Served the King of England sees the director once again filming a novel by Bohumil Hrabal - the pair's most famous collaboration being 1966's Foreign-Language Oscar winner Closely Watched Trains. Forty years on, IStKoE also focuses on World War II, tracing the progress of Dite (Ivan Barnev), a child-like figure of naive innocence who works as a waiter in a series of increasingly fancy establishments as he pursues his simple goal of wealth-acccumulation. 
   As his country quickly succumbs to Hitler's aggressively expansionist Germany, Dite falls in love with a committed, idealistic Nazi (Julia Jentsch, clearly relishing the chance to essay a character diametrically opposed to her Sophie Scholl role) - though he himself is essentially a non-partisan, happy-go-lucky sort who's able to bob along on history's turbulent tides. 
   IStKoE is in some ways this year's equivalent to Black Book: a big, expensive-looking, rather old-fashioned sort of production (Menzel's film even features copious Europudding-style dubbing), episodic and conventionally structured via flashback from a post-war perspective, whose surface sheen hides all manner of moral complexities and ambiguities. Both films feature a rather surprising amount of nudity, and postage-stamps play a small but pivotal role in both scripts. 
   I Served the King of England is, however, rather more troubling in terms of the viewer's relationship with the protagonist, as Dite - in stark contrast to Black Book's heroine - never seems to grasp the horrendous nature of the Nazi regime with which he becomes so intimately familiar. But the tone is generally rather lighter than in the Verhoeven movie - for long stretches, it's fundamentally a comedy, most of the ripest laughs being deftly mined by Martin Huba as Skrivanek, unflappable Maitre d' of the jaw-droppingly opulent Hotel Pariz.
   Rather less successful are the extended sequences set in the 'present' (i.e. the early 1950s), where Dite, recently released from a 15-year prison stretch and played by a craggy actor (Oldrich Kaiser) who bears only a passing resemblance to the boyish Barnev, romances a flame-haired neighbour and looks back on his youthful adventures with a rather plodding kind of wistfulness. But on the whole I Served the King of England (the title referring, perhaps surprisinglt, not to Dite but to the vastly experienced Skrivanek) is a rewarding affair, one likely to appeal most strongly to those who remember Menzel from his long-ago heyday.