MikePadgett.com

• Director: Nicolas Roeg
• United Kingdom, 1973
• 

Don’t Look Now is technically a horror movie, but it’s also a technical film, arty and aloof and not at all a genre standard. You could even see Meryl Streep playing the wife, but that would have made an already difficult film intolerable.

Roeg’s off-season Venice is cold and strangely alluring and he casts silence in a leading role. The nerves of the nervous become frayed by seemingly inocuous situations loaded with dread potential and queasy close-ups of minor characters, transforming them into grotesques.

At times Don’t Look Now can be irritating with its distant, dazed moodiness. Despite effective acting, this dispassionate viewpoint prevents us from sympathising with the protagonists John and Laura Baxter as they struggle to deal with the loss of their daughter. Ultimately the distance serves to lessen the impact of the plot’s climax, making viewing the film a chilly and unrewarding experience.

• Director: Robert Altman
• United States, 1970
• 

Altman proved with MASH that a messy film could still be a successful one. Production was problematic, 80% of the dialogue was improvised and analogies to the situation in Vietnam were considered highly unfavourable by the studio.

From the hubris of organic filmmaking that later became Altman’s trademark emerged a funny, humanistic story about the sometime bizarre coping strategies of a group of medical surgeons in the Korean War.

Many of the Altman quirks are there, including the zooming, the overlapping conversations and the ensemble casting, and the film feels unusually raw as if it’s been edited without much of a plan. We know sometimes that the recipe doesn’t quite come together (Dr T and the Women) but in MASH the concoction is successful without precedent.