Movie Masterworks

“Ben: You can never, never ask me to stop drinking. Do you understand?”
“Sera: I do. I really do.”

Synopsis: Best Actor Oscar® winner Nicolas Cage and Best Actress Nominee Elisabeth Shue set the screen ablaze in this profoundly moving love story. Nominated for two additional Academy Awards® - Best Director and Best Screenplay - this emotionally charged powerhouse of a film graced over 100 “10 Best Lists,” including Roger Ebert’s number one Movie of the Year. Ben Sanderson (Cage) is a career alcoholic who has hit rock bottom. Trashing all personal and professional ties to his L.A. existence, he sets off for the lights of Vegas on a mission: to drink himself to death. There he meets Sera (Shue), a beautiful, seen-it-all hooker. From the moment Ben and Sera connect, they form a unique bond based upon unconditional acceptance and mutual respect that will change each of them forever. In the words of David Thompson of ‘Los Angeles Magazine’, ‘Leaving Las Vegas’ is “a masterpiece”.

Critique: Imbued with all the emotional acuity of a beautifully composed suicide note, “Leaving Las Vegas” is a difficult movie to watch. It hurts and it numbs and it courts heartbreak. There’s nothing conventionally entertaining in this small character study, nothing that redeems the ruined love of its two archetypal characters — the drunk and the whore. Any break in the bleakness is undermined by the inevitability of dissipation and doom; the abject yet certain knowledge that no one can save he who will not be saved.

Nicolas Cage plays the terminal alcoholic Ben Sanderson as a man who has come to the end of the world yet insists on dangling his feet in the abyss. By turns comic and boorish, shattered and sweet, Cage swims through the movie with a liberating disengagement. As the other half of the subterranean couple, the girl-next-doorish Elisabeth Shue works against type. Shue manages a daring, surprisingly tough performance that nearly equals Cage’s — albeit in a much less flashy role. She comes across as cool and dangerous.

Mike Figgis, the English director who also wrote the script and score for the movie, gives us a lurid, jittery, hand-held look at this dolorous couple and the color-soaked city that contains them. “Leaving Las Vegas” is a brilliantly realized tone poem. It is a cauterizing movie — it burns like bourbon splashed on an exposed heart.

-by Philip Martin

My thoughts: What makes Leaving Las Vegas so powerful is the connection between outcasts Ben and Sera. All they have is each other. It’s a movie about love and despair in their tragic relationship. I became involved. As Leaving Las Vegas came to it’s inevitable conclusion, I realized this movie was an experience that would stay with me for a long long time.

“We live in the trenches out there. We fight. We try not to be killed, but sometimes we are. That’s all.”

Synopsis: Unlike most “message” films which date themselves almost immediately, Lewis Milestone’s low-key unpolished and deeply-felt screen adaptation of the Erich Maria Remarque anti-war novel has lost little of its original impact. Years after its release it was still being banned in countries mobilizing for war. The plot follows a group of young German recruits in World War I through their passage from idealism to disillusionment. As the central character Paul Baumer (Lew Ayers) declares, “We live in the trenches and we fight. We try not to be killed - that’s all.” ‘All Quiet’ is an anthology of now famous scenes: Ayres trapped in a shell crater with a man he has killed; the first meeting of the recruits and the veterans; infantrymen being mowed down to machine-gun visual rhythms; a moonlight swim with French farm girls; Ayre’s pacifist speech to his astonished schoolmates; and the final shot of the soldier’s hand reaching for a fatal butterfly.

Critique: All Quiet on the Western Front is the most famous anti-war film ever made. Adapted from Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, it focuses on a group of German teenagers who excitedly sign up to fight for their country in World War One after hearing their teacher speak enthusiastically for the cause. The boys’ enthusiasm however soon vanishes when they come face to face with the reality of warfare. Bombings, gas attacks and hand-to-hand combat destroy any romantic views that might linger in their minds. On the Western front, death is almost obligatory.

An acknowledged masterwork, this film has over the years retained almost all of its potency. It works particularly well on the human level, transcending cultures and generations with its all-powerful pacifist message. Lewis Milestone’s direction is very effective and the photography is simply unforgettable. The battle scenes are gruesomely realistic; nothing is glossed over.

A profoundly moving picture, All Quiet is required viewing for every single human being, especially those who still cling to the belief: “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (It is sweet and meet to die for one’s country. Sweet! and decorous!)

Edinburgh University Film Society
Review by Stephen Townsend
Taken from EUFS Programme 1992-93

My thoughts: I watched this movie again soon after my brother went to fight in Iraq. It prompted me to ask myself, “Should I really support a war that could kill my brother, and will kill many others, for the sake of imperialism? The message of this movie is still as relevant today as it was in 1930. Sadly, it just proves we haven’t learned anything since.