Neame, Ronald

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Maggie Smith is so witty and commanding in this film, you might forget that the script paints Jean Brodie as an ultimately self-deluding spinster. Dame Maggie won the first of her two Oscars for playing a teacher in 1930s Edinburgh more in thrall to her romantic notions of art and beauty than the real world, a cultivator of worshipping "Brodie Girls." (She exalts the Mona Lisa and Mussolini with equal fervor.) Smith's expert playing makes many of the brogue-heavy Brodie-isms worth memorizing ("She seeks to intimidate me by the use of quarter-hours.") and raises the picture above its generally theatrical style. Real-life husband Robert Stephens plays Jean's married lover, Celia Johnson excels as the hostile headmistress, and Pamela Franklin is the deadpan whistle-blower within Miss Brodie's coven. The dippy music of Rod McKuen helps mark the movie as more of a reflection of the '60s than the '30s. --Robert Horton

Based on Muriel Spark?s best-selling novel, the film The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie earned a Best Actress Oscar for its star, Maggie Smith, in 1969. The theme song, ?Jean? written by Rod McKuen, was also nominated for a Best Song Academy Award. An inspiration to the young girls she teaches and a challenge to the 1932 Edinburgh school who retains her services, Jean Brodie (Smith) espouses her wisdom on art and music, defends fascism, and otherwise encourages fiercely independent thinking in her students. As she engages in ongoing battles with the school?s rigid heads and bewilders two men in love with her, Miss Brodie also faces the biggest trial of her life when her career and livelihood become threatened.

Hopscotch - Criterion Collection

Walter Matthau is in peak form in Hopscotch, a featherweight spy-game comedy in which he plays a CIA agent who's way smarter than his dimwitted superiors. That's the fantasy part--this amusing cat-and-mouse game is so lopsided that you can't take it seriously. The movie's charm is derived from the sardonic pleasure with which Matthau makes his pursuers look like idiots, after they've targeted him for "termination" for publishing a tell-all memoir about his tenure in "the Company." He's no stool pigeon, however; it's his boss (played with blustery thick-headedness by the great Ned Beatty) who's abusing his power, so Matthau recruits an old lover (Glenda Jackson) to join him in a globetrotting game of clandestine cleverness. Under Ronald Neame's too-casual direction, this is a not-so-wild goose chase, but Matthau and Jackson (reuniting after they had fun making the 1978 comedy House Calls) have an easygoing chemistry that's nicely balanced with Matthau's cantankerous shenanigans. --Jeff Shannon

Miles Kendig knows too much. One of the CIA's top international operatives, he suddenly finds himself relegated to a desk job in an agency power play. Unwilling to go quietly, Kendig, with the aid of a chic Viennese widow, puts himself back in the game by writing a memoir exposing the innermost secrets of every major intelligence agency in the world. The CIA wants Kendig dead, but he refuses to cooperate—he's having too much fun. Based on Brian Garfield's best-selling novel, and starring the inimitable comic team of Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson, Ronald Neame's Hopscotch is a smart and stylish tale of international intrigue and a cat-and-mouse comedy.

The Man Who Never Was

A real beauty of a true story provides the basis for The Man Who Never Was, a gripping World War II picture that has no combat scenes, no great vistas of troops. The time is 1943, as the Allies prepare the invasion of Sicily and desperately need a diversionary ploy to make the Germans suspect another invasion target. The solution is simple but ingenious: a dead man's body will be left in the sea to float ashore on the coast of Spain; made to look like a British pilot, he will be carrying papers suggesting an Allied attack on Greece. When the papers fall to the Nazis, they'll swallow the bogus story…or will they? The film's final third tracks an Irish spy for the Axis (Steven Boyd, in one of his first roles) as he travels to London to investigate loose ends.

Clifton Webb gives a crisp, disciplined performance as Ewen Montagu, the officer in charge of the scheme. The film errs only in some melodrama involving Gloria Grahame, the histrionic roommate of an Intelligence worker. Other than that, director Ronald Neame brings his steady, classy approach to bear on a good yarn, and saves special grace for the treatment of the unfortunate dead man who unwittingly loaned his body to a stunt that saved hundreds, if not thousands, of lives. The film's final haunting shots capture the ethereal shiver of its title. --Robert Horton

Clifton Webb stars in this fascinating account of a daring intelligence operation designed to mislead the Nazis prior to the 1943 Allied invasion of Sicily. In an effort to convince the Germans to redeploy their defenses, Lt. Commander Montagu (Webb) creates a false English officer and fabricates letters that indicate the British intend to land in Greece. Montagu than plants these documents on a dead man and orchestrates the "discovery" of this "officer" on the coast of Spain, Knowing the papers will fall into German hands. What follows is a taut cat-and mouse game as British Intelligence waits for Berlin to respond, then races to stay one step ahead of the Nazi agent dispatched to determine if the dead man is genuine. This true story of ingenious deception is a riveting tale of wartime espionage.

Scrooge

A mixed bag as variations on A Christmas Carol go, this 1970 British musical tells the usual story of Scrooge (Albert Finney) and his spirits on Christmas Eve, although the whole thing is set to music by Leslie Bricusse. Except for Finney's feisty and involved performance, however, there isn't much to recommend this. The songs, which absorb so much of the evolving story line and emotions, are not all that good. Plenty of support, however, from the likes of Roy Kinnear (Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory) and Dame Edith Evans (Tom Jones), the handsome production is directed by veteran Ronald Neame (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie). --Tom Keogh

A mixed bag as variations on A Christmas Carol go, this 1970 British musical tells the usual story of Scrooge (Albert Finney) and his spirits on Christmas Eve, although the whole thing is set to music by Leslie Bricusse. Except for Finney's feisty and involved performance, however, there isn't much to recommend this. The songs, which absorb so much of the evolving story line and emotions, are not all that good. Plenty of support, however, from the likes of Roy Kinnear (Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory) and Dame Edith Evans (Tom Jones), the handsome production is directed by veteran Ronald Neame (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie). --Tom Keogh

The Poseidon Adventure (Special Edition)

Hands down, this is the best movie (and was one of the first) to come out of the seemingly endless cycle of disaster movies that dominated box offices during the 1970s. It could even be argued that Titanic owes some of its success to the precedent set by this 1972 blockbuster starring Gene Hackman as a priest who leads a small group of survivors to safety from the bowels of a capsized luxury liner. From its stellar cast to its cheesy, Oscar-winning theme song, The Morning After, the movie has all the ingredients of a popular classic, beginning with a New Year's Eve celebration aboard the ill-fated Poseidon and ending as a pop allegory when the Hackman character becomes a Christ-like martyr. Filmed on spectacular sets where everything down is up and the ship's thick hull points in the direction of salvation, this is "a waterlogged Grand Hotel" (in the words of New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael) that is as entertaining as it is unabashedly brainless. The Poseidon Adventure is filled with performances that rise above the limits of the screenplay. It's also the only movie--unless you count her underwater corpse in Night of the Hunter--that lets Shelley Winters strut her stuff as an aquatic heroine. Who could ask for anything more? --Jeff Shannon

One of the most gripping disaster films of all time follows ten survivors as they struggle to escape from an ocean liner capsized by a tidal wave. Suspenseful terror, combined with the victims' intimate and personal stories, results in compelling and hear

The Odessa File

An overeager German journalist (Jon Voight) discovers a long-buried secret plot beginning to resurface in this moderately compelling, surprisingly straightforward adaptation of a novel by conspiracy whiz Fredrick (Day of the Jackal) Forsythe. Although this somewhat pokey suspenser never quite flows the way a classic espionage thriller should, it does offer a number of compelling diversions along the way, including a blessedly nonhammy (and impressively accented) performance by Voight, Derek Jacobi's amusingly Freudian supporting turn, and a tremendously physical hand-to-hand confrontation in a print shop that leaves no pane of glass intact. Maximillian Schell's scenery-chewing, deliciously evil cameo almost makes this worth the watch by itself. Andrew Lloyd Webber composed the garishly florid (yet somehow effective) score. --Andrew Wright

Meteor

Sean Connery leads a team of asteroid-battling astronomers in Meteor, one of the last and most unusual examples of the disaster movie craze of the 1970s. In this one, a killer asteroid named Orpheus threatens to collide with the Earth, and Connery must come up with a plan to stop it. Cold war politics date the picture a bit, but they also add some weight to the impending doom facing humanity. Like any good disaster flick, it's populated by an all-star cast, including Karl Malden, Martin Landau, Natalie Wood, Richard Dysart, Henry Fonda, and Trevor Howard. Brian Keith plays Connery's opposite number in the U.S.S.R. While the pacing and special effects are weak compared to similar celestial menaces depicted in Armageddon and Deep Impact, Meteor displays all the benefits of its more powerful cast… not to mention Hank Fonda as President. --Mark Savary

Outer space can hardly contain all the stars who round out the extraordinary cast in this spellbinding thriller about a five-mile-wide meteor on a catastrophic collision course with earth. Natalie Wood and OscarÂ(r) winners* Sean Connery, Karl Malden, Martin Landau and Henry Fonda shine in this 'thoroughly engrossing (The Hollywood Reporter) sci-fi special effects spectacular thatrockets across the screen like a speeding comet. A brilliant scientist, Dr. Paul Bradley (Connery)is summoned to Washington by NASA chief Harold Sherwood (Malden), who informs him that a huge meteor will smash into earth in six days. The only chance to destroy the meteor is to work with the Soviets, revealing to them top secrets. But as the clock is ticking, fragments of the meteor split off and come crashing to earth, causing enormous damage. And as avalanches and title waves take a devastating toll, Bradley works against all odds to eliminate the greatest threat the world has ever known.*1987: Connery, Supporting Actor, The Untouchables;1951: Malden, Supporting Actor,A Streetcar Named Desire;1994: Landau, Supporting Actor, Ed Wood;1981: Fonda, Actor, On Golden Pond; 1980: Fonda, Honorary Award

The Horse's Mouth - Criterion Collection

Alec Guinness was in the full bloom of his stardom when he suggested, scripted, and starred in this wonderfully odd 1958 adaptation of Joyce Cary's novel. As Gulley Jimson, a gravel-voiced, antisocial painter, whose artistic drive is as single-minded (and as self-absorbed) as a terrier's, Guinness sketches one of his carefully constructed marvels. The film has a bumpily episodic structure, but when it works, it really works: Gulley inhabiting (and mostly destroying) a penthouse apartment when the upper-crusty owners go on holiday for six weeks, or marshaling an army of apprentices to create a masterpiece on a giant wall in a condemned building. Departing from the novel, Guinness concocted the movie's madcap ending, which is guaranteed to bring a smile. Adding verve is the music, adapted from Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kijé, which fits Gulley like the paint under his dirty nails. The artworks, vivid and thick, are by John Bratby. --Robert Horton

In Ronald Neame's film of Joyce Cary's classic novel, Alec Guinness transforms himself into one of cinema's most indelible comic figures: the lovably scruffy painter Gulley Jimson. As the ill-behaved Jimson searches for a perfect canvas, he determines to let nothing come between himself and the realization of his exalted vision. A perceptive examination of the struggle of artistic creation, The Horse's Mouth is also director Neame's comic masterpiece.

Tunes of Glory - Criterion Collection

Venerable British actors Alec Guinness and John Mills give two of their finest performances in Tunes of Glory, a compelling, emotionally charged study of leadership in a peacetime Scottish battalion. In one of his most memorable roles, Guinness plays Jock Sinclair, the brash, red-haired colonel who temporarily commands his regiment of loyal, devoted soldiers. He's quick with a drink and hearty tales of military bravado, placing him in fun-loving contrast to his replacement, Col. Barrow (Mills), a hot-tempered martinet whose by-the-book style couldn't be more different, or less likable, than Sinclair's. In adapting his own novel for director Ronald Neame, James Kennaway keenly establishes the psychological opposition of these two stubborn men, demonstrating the equal merit of their military careers while exploring class distinctions and, ultimately, the inevitable tragedy of their failure to reach a mutual understanding. Ironically, Guinness was originally offered Mills's role, but suggested a switch to avoid comparison to his role in The Bridge on the River Kwai. It was an inspired decision, allowing each actor to shine in a timeless film that speaks volumes about military men and the winning (or losing) of hearts and minds. --Jeff Shannon

In Ronald Neame's Tunes of Glory, the incomparable Alec Guinness inhabits the role of Jock Sinclair-a whiskey drinking, up-by-the-bootstraps commanding officer of a peacetime Scottish battalion. When Basil Barrow (John Mills)-an educated, by-the-book scion of a traditionally military family-enters the scene as Sinclair's replacement, the two men become locked in a fierce battle for control of the battalion and the hearts and minds of its men. Based on the novel by James Kennaway and featuring flawless performances by Guinness and Mills, Tunes of Glory uses the rigidly stratified hierarchy of military life as a jumping off point to examine the institutional contradictions and class divisions of English society, resulting in an unexpectedly moving drama. The DVD features new interviews with Ronald Neame and John Mills, the theatrical trailer, and more.

I Could Go On Singing

In her final film, Judy Garland lights up the screen with a "vibrant, vital performance" (New York Herald Tribune) as a singer torn between her career and motherhood. Co-starring Dirk Bogarde,this powerful and touching film boasts "excellent direction, winning vocal numbers" (The Film Daily) and the "incandescent magic" (The Hollywood Reporter) of one of Hollywood's brightest stars at her sensational best. When celebrated singer Jenny Bowman (Garland) asks her ex-lover David (Bogarde) to let her see their son, Matt, she is unprepared for the emotional consequences. Though Matt doesn't even know Jenny is his mother, their growing bond will force Jenny to make the most difficult choice of her life: between the rewards of motherhood, and the glamorous life of the stage.