Now Over 5500 Reviews and (near) Daily Updates!

WELCOME! Use the search engines on this site (or your own off-site engine of choice) to gain easy access to the complete MAKSQUIBS Archive; more than 5500 posts and counting. (New posts added every day or so.)

You can check on all our titles by typing the Title, Director, Actor or 'Keyword' you're looking for in the Search Engine of your choice (include the phrase MAKSQUIBS) or just use the BLOGSPOT.com Search Box at the top left corner of the page.

Feel free to place comments directly on any of the film posts and to test your film knowledge with the CONTESTS scattered here & there. (Hey! No Googling allowed. They're pretty easy.)

Send E-mails to MAKSQUIBS@yahoo.com . (Let us know if the TRANSLATE WIDGET works!) Or use the Profile Page or Comments link for contact.

Thanks for stopping by.

Saturday, December 17, 2016

MISTER JOHNSON (1990)

Even at his considerable best, Bruce Beresford favors the neat & tidy, crisply tucking in all dramatic corners. Cinema as ‘well-made’ play. His best known pics, BREAKER MORANT/’80 and DRIVING MISS DAISY/’89 were, indeed, both adapted from ‘well-made’ plays. But here we have something looser, messier; uncomfortable to play, uncomfortable to watch in a way Beresford rarely is. And while the film opened & closed without leaving a trace, Beresford thought it the best film he’d ever made. He was right. It’s early 1920s, East Africa, British Colonial period & all that, and Mister Johnson (debuting Maynard Eziashi) is a local native striver working as clerk to Pierce Brosnan’s town magistrate. Clever & incompetent, Johnson cultivates all the exterior trappings of British civilization (oops, civilisation), but underpinned with African sensibilities. The dichotomy cuts two ways, consistently getting him into trouble yet offering highly original solutions to intractable problems. For Brosnan, the main task is getting a road built to the main highway, but Johnson may not keep his position long enough to get it finished. That’s alright, he can always go into trade with local dealer, and casual racist, Edward Woodward (in an appallingly honest turn, half comic/half tragic). Treated by employers and by his own people, with equal suspicion, Johnson gayly burns his bridges as he moves onward & upward, but there’s a limit, no? The film is funny, insightful, tragic and devastatingly fine. Excellent extras, too, on a new Criterion edition.

DOUBLE-BILL: The only other major film from author Joyce Cary is THE HORSE’S MOUTH/’58 with Alec Guinness as an irascible modernist painter. (Guinness got an Oscar nom for his script.) BTW, this Joyce Cary is the well-known male novelist; the well-known female Joyce Carey is the character actress best-remembered as running the train station food counter in BRIEF ENCOUNTER/’45.

No comments: