Got off to a dodgy start a couple of days ago with my tiny, three-student advanced English class.

To my opening gambit of “What did you do today before you came to this lesson?”, the answers were:

“I was sick all day and I didn’t get out of bed till half an hour ago.”

“I had to take my brother to the hospital. He is very sick, he has cancer.”

“I went to the doctor and on my arm he found a growth that he will have to cut off.”

Not the most upbeat opening I’ve ever had to a lesson.

In situations like that, you just have to press on with the lesson until the gloomy opening fades.

On a more positive note, I got paid last night.

That happy event led to a binge on the wine at Bate Popo in Costa da Caparica, followed by a couple of beers at Paradise bar.

Today a wonderful bowl of soup at Pic-Nic café restaurant on Rossio has revived me in time to enjoy Oliver Reed, Charlton Heston, Christopher Lee and others in a showing of Treasure Island at Cine Camões in Bairro Alto.

Cine Camões is located just off Rua do Alecrim.

Its entrance is under a large sign for Underwood Cash & Carry.

Inside the cinema a dozen shabbily dressed men are loitering by the bar.

There are no women here at all.

The posters on the wall are an eclectic mix. Old prints of Tyrone Power and Susan Hayward share wall space with Emmanuelle and others of that ilk.

This cinema used to be a theatre. It looks like it has fallen on hard times.

Thankfully, just before 2.15 p.m. when ‘Treasure Island’ is due to start, a couple appear, followed by three female pensioners and a mother with two kids.

The presence of these latecomers dissipates the unpleasant voyeuristic atmosphere that had until now pervaded the bar area.

The ticket is very cheap, 180 escudos for the balcão area. Up here about eighty brown leather seats give a good view of a decent-sized screen.

‘Treasure Island’ is a well made, enjoyable, tongue-in-cheek film.

As Long John Silver, Charlton Heston spares no piratical cliché. Timbers shiver, bottles of rum are summoned with yo-ho-ho’s, and the obligatory parrot on his shoulder squawks about small denomination coinage.

The cast seem to be loving it all, hamming it up most entertainingly.

Sitting behind me in the audience are a couple of coughing and belching Oliver Reeds in addition to the real one playing Captain Billy Bones up on the screen.

Another spectator near me in the balcão area guffaws when Jim Hawkins’ terrorized mother kicks Reed’s prostrate body to see if he is dead.

It’s lowbrow stuff for sure but surprisingly beautifully filmed at times, with gorgeous deep blue seas for the pirate’s boat to drift in, atmospheric and elegant onshore town locations and taverns for the press-ganging of the boat’s crew, and hints of menace and evil that save the whole affair from degenerating into a facile parody.

Taking it with the requisite pinch of salt, I enjoy this gallivanting 1990 version of ‘Treasure Island’.

I’m unable to read the final credits because at the end of the film everyone leaps up out of their seats and bolts for the exits, a distinctive habit amongst Portuguese filmgoers.

Afterwards I take a ride down Rua da Bica de Duarte Belo on the tiny yellow funicular.

It descends past old faded houses with green balconies.

Twice, I accidentally stand on a small metal bar set in the floor of the funicular, which makes the bar clang like a bell.

This Ascensor da Bica passes a handful of cheap eating places at the top of the hill, descending between fine old street lamps with intricate iron grillwork.

I like this tranquil part of old Lisbon.

At the end of the funicular ride, a couple of doors down from the terminus I drop into a cheap restaurant for a bitoque, a steak with a fried egg on top. Most of the walls in this restaurant are lined with four-deep rows of port, whisky and Madeira bottles.

Someone who looks like Jean Cocteau sits down at a neighbouring table.

I finish my bitoque and walk along Rua de São Paulo.

Opposite the restaurant Popular da Bica there stands a beautifully tiled chemist’s called Ultramina. This well preserved old chemist’s is graced with paintings of various medicinal plants and herbs, such as polygala, chamomilla, menthe aquatic, and borrago officinalis.

I have never known a city that brims with as much style and elegance in its streets, shops, bars and cafés.

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Cinemateca Portuguesa, located on Rua Barata Salgueiro in the centre of Lisbon, is a wonderful place for cinephiles.

Great posters and marvellous black and white stills from the 1940s adorn the foyer walls: Bogart in All Through the Night, Howard Hawks’ The Thing from Another World!, Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine in Rebecca, Spencer Tracy in Edward, My Son, Bogart and Bacall in The Big Sleep, Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce, René Clair’s I Married a Witch, and Basil Rathbone, definitely the best Sherlock Holmes, here in Errol Flynn’s 1938 version of The Adventures of Robin Hood.

Cinemateca has a single screen and what glorious seats! Even better than the ones at 7ᵃ Arte, these Cinemateca seats recline in decadent luxury.

I’m half-expecting an usher to approach garbed in a toga, dangling a bunch of grapes before me.

A fine old polished piano stands to the left of the stage complete with two pairs of brass candlesticks to allow the pianist to read the music in a darkened auditorium.

There is no allocated seating, which means that I am free to sit wherever I want.

The ticket price is a very reasonable 175 escudos, roughly eighty pence in British money.

An arty, black-clad crowd of forty or so is present at today’s showing.

Today’s film is The Window, a 1949 RKO production directed by Ted Tetzlaff.

It stars Bobby Driscoll as young Tommy, a boy whose imagination causes him to cry wolf one time too many; Barbara Hale as Mary Woodry; Arthur Kennedy as Ed Woodry, Tommy’s exasperated parents; Paul Stewart as Joe Kellerson; and Ruth Roman as Jean Kellerson. The Kellersons are the villains of the piece.

Tommy, excellently played by Bobby Driscoll, is a compulsive teller of tales.

He tells his pals that he and his family are going to leave New York for a ranch out west, that they are going to kill whoever they need to in order to make it safe there, and so on and so on.

This is one story too many for his parents, who subsequently refuse to believe him when he claims to have witnessed a murder committed by the Kellersons, the couple living upstairs.

The Kellersons are outwardly respectable, but in reality a seedy pair.

The plot revolves around the refusal of the police and Tommy’s parents to believe him, and also the efforts of the Kellersons to make Tommy have an ‘accident’ so there will no longer be a witness to their crime.

‘The Window’ is a terrific thriller.

Music is used brilliantly, building up to nerve-wracking crescendos interspersed with heavy, ominous silences which in turn are broken out of with considerable virtuosity.

Manuel Cintra Ferreira’s Cinemateca notes use a very apt Portuguese adjective to describe the mood of this film: ‘hitchcockiano’.

Bobby Driscoll steals the show as Tommy, but he gets classy support from Barbara Hale as his mother. She radiates goodness, even though her patience is tried beyond its limit by Tommy’s antics. It’s a nicely understated performance from Hale.

Arthur Kennedy as Tommy’s father is also an admirable figure, despite the hint of whimsy in the earnest moral lessons he imparts to his over-imaginative son.

Ruth Roman plays Jean Kellerson as a dishevelled but not yet desperado individual. She is not as evil as her husband Joe is.

As Joe, Paul Stewart oozes unredeemable malice. They make a great, disturbing couple.

‘The Window’ first showed in Portugal in 1950.

It then reappeared in 1965.

It’s back now in 1991.

If it recurs with similar frequency and if I’m in Lisbon in 2011, I’ll happily take the opportunity to watch it again.

After the film I drift out of Cinemateca down Avenida da Liberdade to the beautiful funicular that ascends Calçada da Glória.

Built by General Electric in 1904, this wonderful old funicular takes me up to the edge of Bairro Alto.

On the other side of the street stands the Port Wine Institute, which shares a building with the Portuguese Cinema Institute.

I’m now sipping exquisite twenty year old port, meio seco and aloirado, in the refined ambience of the Port Wine Institute bar.

There are wooden beams across the ceilings, and exposed brick walls. Low-slung, comfortable armchairs and stools are set around dark glass tables. A fifteen-foot long bar counter has eight stools lined up along it, with an array of tempting port bottles in the background.

Subtle illumination is provided by lamps of various shapes and sizes strategically placed around the two-level drinking area. Two intricately patterned lampshades are placed at ground level near where I am sitting. Their light throws an almost stained glass window effect onto the walls.

A taciturn waiter in black trousers, white shirt and maroon waistcoat drifts discreetly around the room.

What a great place to wind up after a film.

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Ghostly mist is swirling through the streets of Cacilhas this February morning.

I decide to check out some local haunts before crossing the river into town for another Saturday triple bill of Cecil B. DeMille films.

I start my wander on Rua Cândido dos Reis, where I drop into an anonymous bar opposite the offices of the Centro de Cultura Libertária. Here I have a bica and a glass of aguardente, the local firewater. It costs 130 escudos, about fifty pence. A couple of weeks ago Pedro told me that a coffee with firewater in the morning makes you feel great all the rest of the day. After a couple of sips here I believe him.

Malcolm Lowry would have loved this little bar, its walls stacked high with row upon row of gin, brandy and wine bottles, its plain tables and chairs, green painted walls and vaulted ceilings.

The barman, out of sight, is busy stacking clinking bottles behind the counter.

Apart from me there is only one other customer in the bar, though ‘customer’ is maybe not the right word as that person is an ancient man seated in a corner by the window. He’s not drinking anything. He’s just sitting there with a weary expression, leaning his elbow on the table to prop up his face. He has just exchanged a few words across the empty bar with the barman. He is more like a piece of furniture than a customer, as inanimate as the bottles on the wall.

The next bar that I find myself in, down by the bus station, is even more Lowry-esque.

It feels like this bar has materialized from the pages of Under the Volcano. Delighted to have found such a place, I order a beer. The bar doesn’t seem to have a name. A plaque on a wall says 14, S.C. Abel Pereira da Fonseca. Painted tiles on its facade depict dangling bunches of ripe grapes. There is a thirty-yard long U-shaped bar counter and a vaulted ceiling like in a monastery. Flaking cream paint, immobile ceiling fans, and a downbeat clientele complete the scene. What an irresistible drinking hole.

There are two bartenders. The younger one is probably around twenty years old. The older one is middle-aged and looks like he might be the owner.

The older bartender is resting his huge pot belly on a sink behind the counter. His blue check shirt strains to contain the bulging mass.

In a gloomy corner behind me a destitute diner is sucking spaghetti straight off the plate, not bothering to use cutlery.

The older barman has noticed me scribbling.

He points out to me, in a none too friendly tone, that I am writing with my left hand.

Why am I not writing with my right hand, he demands to know.

“I can’t write with my right hand!” I explain to him with a grin designed to defuse his bewilderment.

But he’s not satisfied.

He persists in pointing out that I should be writing with my right hand.

Fortunately, someone standing next to me at the bar intervenes to say that I write with my left hand and that some people are different.

The barman grunts and goes to serve another customer.

My next port of call is a wonderful little bar next to Afilador restaurant down on Cacilhas waterfront.

After the coffee, aguardente and beer I am feeling great.

Foghorns are blaring on the bright orange ferries plying the Lisbon crossing.

I love these long bar counters where you perch on a raised stool and drink whilst floating off the floor.

A wizened little man is trying to sell me a lottery ticket.

Behind the bar it seems to be a husband and wife doing the work. They probably come from the north of Portugal as there is a Porto F.C. team calendar hanging on the wall.

Their young son scurries about aimlessly.

Someone who seems to be grandma sits lifelessly on a small wooden chair.

Grandma examines me when I come in, decides I am harmless, and turns her empty gaze towards the open door.

The fog outside shows no sign of lifting.

I’m sitting at the far end of the bar counter, on the last stool. Three feet below to my left, a large black anchor is resting on the floor. On the wall behind me are a lifebelt, two old wooden oars, a beautiful old gas lamp in a green iron case, three brass portholes, six framed paintings of women fishsellers, and finally, extraordinarily, the cabin and steering wheel of a boat. Stuck on the wall.

Two men at a table at the other end of the bar are having a heated discussion about tomorrow’s big match, the game between Benfica and Sporting, which I have got a ticket for.

I have to try hard not to laugh as the barman-cum-waiter gallops up the stairs carrying two plates of bacalhau. On the top step he trips up and the salted cod goes flying onto the floor. But he sees the funny side of this slapstick incident. He comes scuttling back down the stairs with a sheepish grin on his face and explains to his wife what happened. She smiles hugely, letting him know that it’s not a problem.

Well fuelled for the rest of the day, I head over to Cinemateca for Cecil B. DeMille’s 1929 film, The Godless Girl.

After the first five minutes my impression is that this film is loathsome, with its reactionary misogynist patronizing tone.

But by the end of the film I feel that I have just seen a flawed masterpiece.

The story, and Cecil B. DeMille’s movies tell a story like few others can, revolves around the initial conflict and eventual love between Bob Hathaway (Tom Keene) and Judy Craig (Lina Basquette).

He is a squeaky clean Christian boy, the strong male, the dressed-in-white hero, leader of the students’ union, who decides to combat carmenesque Judy, the godless girl of the title. Judy is the ringleader of the Godless Society who are responsible for distributing atheist leaflets around the school.

What is offensive about all this is the simplistic distinction between good and bad, male and female, believer and atheist.

However, it takes only a few more minutes of the film for some powerful nuances to dissipate the initial facile stereotyping.

The Godless Society leaflets have some sharp lines, and the intertitles, at first glibly patronizing towards the atheists, gradually soften their puritanical tone.

The film’s first piece of visual brilliance occurs in a scene where the true-believer students led by Bob invade and disrupt a meeting of the Godless Society.

In the ensuing melee the students spill out from the top-floor room. As ever with DeMille, the mass mayhem is marvellously orchestrated.

Tragedy strikes when a female student, one of the atheists, gets forced through the balustrade and falls several floors to her death.

The scene is strikingly filmed.

We see the girl from below free-falling towards us, her face contorted with fear, arms and legs flailing.

Then there is a cut to a plunging shot of the girl plummeting to her death, the camera dropping like the girl straight down past the silent horrified faces of the other students who are standing on the stairs, breaking off their fight to watch her fall.

She doesn’t die immediately because her dying seconds offer the chance of a thematic moment, a pondering of religion versus atheism.

Cradled in Judy’s arms, the dying girl beseeches Judy to tell her that this isn’t really the end, that there must be something more.

The dying girl’s face is seen in angelic glowing soft-focus close-up.

Cut to Judy, not in close-up, not soft focus, thus appearing by contrast hard and devoid of affection.

Judy can offer no consolation to her dying friend.

Enter a kindly policeman, a solid father-figure kind of character, who gently grasps the dying girl’s hand and reassures her that yes, there is something more, intimating that she will be welcomed in heaven.

The girl beams radiantly, leans back and expires.

Bob and Judy are judged responsible for the girl’s death and both are sentenced to reformatory. The boys’ reformatory is particularly brutal, governed by a sadistic slob of a head guard who beats one inmate unconscious. The head guard also assaults Bob.

The girls’ reformatory is little better and the intertitles make it clear that the film makers strongly disapprove of the way that those institutions are run.

Eventually Bob and Judy manage to escape, enjoying a few hours of blissful freedom in the idyllic rural setting of a deserted farm.

Sunlight illuminates the blossom in which Bob and Judy frolic.

Inevitably, reality soon intrudes, in the form of the brutal and stupid head guard and other guards whose dogs track down the two young lovers. Bob and Judy are carted back to their respective reformatories.

There follows a superb scene, the burning down of the hated reformatories.

The fire starts by accident.

The problem for Judy is that when the fire breaks out she is handcuffed to a railing in a solitary confinement cell and cannot escape.

The special effects – the crashing walls and masonry, the raging flames and billowing smoke – are all as exciting as the effects in ‘Backdraft’, even though this Cecil B. DeMille film was made seven decades before ‘Backdraft’.

After a dodgy start, ‘The Godless Girl’ turns out to be an impressive, memorable film.

Today’s second film is The Golden Bed, a 1925 effort hailed by a couple of critics as Cecil B. DeMille’s melodrama masterpiece.

But it’s a disappointment.

The film is an uninspired reworking of the lamentable but regular Cecil B. DeMille theme of a good honest man brought down by a frivolous irresponsible cold-hearted beautiful woman.

It’s all a bit predictable and unengaging.

A handful of imaginative moments fail to wrench the film from its gentle tedium.

The cast do what they can and the performance of Rod La Rocque as Admah Holtz, self-made man, successful hard-working entrepreneur, is the best thing in an otherwise feeble film.

He is ‘Candy Man’, whose naivety and generosity are exploited by Flora Lee Peake (Lillian Rich), daughter of an aristocratic family that has fallen on hard times.

Flora Lee marries Admah for his money.

She then spends all his money on gowns and parties and other indulgences that lead to his imprisonment for the debt and embezzlement which she has led him into.

The pinnacle of Flora Lee’s wastefulness is the throwing of the ‘Candy Ball’, a monstrously extravagant society party where everything is made of candy.

There is everything from candy roses to candy neo-classical pillars, a candy Parthenon right there in the grounds of the old Peake family mansion.

The expense of this Candy Ball is what finally ruins Admah.

In case we haven’t got the message of a good man being the victim of a scheming woman, we are treated to a Lorelei scene with the shipwrecked sailor vainly trying to climb out of the raging river and up the rock on which the siren is preening herself. Apart from that, nothing to report on this forgettable film.

Much better is the third of today’s Cecil B. DeMille movies, his extraordinary The King of Kings, from 1927.

No matter how epic or extravagant the historical theme, there is always some humour in DeMille’s treatments.

In one scene in ‘The King of Kings’ we see Roman soldiers trying to catch a coin-bearing fish like the one that the disciple Peter caught.

They reel in a fish but it has no coin in its mouth, so one of the Roman soldiers shakes it to see if it rattles before chucking it in disgust back into the sea.

Then there is the crown of thorns.

In the best “here’s one I prepared earlier” tradition, a crown of thorns is produced by someone who accidentally pricks himself on a thorn, which gives him the idea to crown Christ with it. When the camera cuts back to this ham-fisted individual, he has miraculously made a perfect crown.

The Last Supper scene is beautiful, with its wonderful composition and lighting.

Throughout the film, Jesus (H.B. Warner) glows and Peter (Ernest Torrence) overacts terribly.

Judas (Joseph Schildkraut) betrays in another excellent dimly lit scene in which High Priest Caiaphas (Rudolph Schildkraut) counts out the thirty pieces of gleaming silver.

The powers of darkness score a temporary victory by securing Judas’ betrayal of Jesus.

Another good scene is the one where Jesus drives the seven deadly sins out of Mary (Dorothy Cumming), each sin personified by a leering temptation figure.

This showing of ‘The King of Kings’ features live musical accompaniment by Mário Laginha on piano.

His playing during the storm scene that follows Christ’s death on the cross is superb, perfectly complementing the visual drama and amplifying the portentous elemental onslaught of God’s wrath.

Brilliant chaos rages across the screen.

The earth is rent asunder, earthquakes and landslides engulf the panicky throng, bolts of lightning illuminate Jesus’ lifeless body up on the cross and, truly horrifically, Judas’ body hangs from the tree where he committed suicide, unable to bear the guilt of having caused Christ’s crucifixion.

A tempestuous gale wreaks havoc over the whole scene, a quintessential Cecil B. DeMille spectacular.

Related Post: ‘Prophecy’, Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA)

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Cinema Terminal is sold out for ‘Barton Fink’.

So I take a quick look at SE7E’s film listings and see that in a quarter of an hour Fink is showing at São Jorge, ten minutes walk away up Avenida da Liberdade.

There I scurry, only to find a queue so long that I would have missed the start of the film.

Schwarzenegger to the rescue! Terminator 2 is showing in Almada at 9.30 p.m.

Plenty time to get there, and it’s on my way home anyway.

In the meantime, I can’t resist taking the Glória funicular up from Restauradores to Rua São Pedro de Alcântara.

It’s a scene out of one of those wonderful old Sherlock Holmes films starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce: a turn of the century funicular tram trundling through smoke drifting up from chestnut vendors’ charcoal fires, an evening of mist and mystery.

Hanging inside the tram is a framed copy of a municipal edict dated April 21 1927, stating the rules for passengers travelling on this vehicle.

Paragraph 4a states, “It is absolutely forbidden for anyone to descend anywhere en route. Penalty 20 escudos”, easily the lowest fine I have ever seen, about twelve pence in British money, although back then it would have been more of a deterrent.

I walk down Rua do Alecrim to Cais do Sodré, where the 1936-built ferry Setubelense takes me across to Cacilhas.

The April 25 suspension bridge is looking good off to the west, illuminated gracefully in green and orange.

By the dockside at Cacilhas a musician is simultaneously playing a battered old tin accordion and a penny whistle. It’s that jolly sort of music that gets everyone grinning.

A small group of passers-by has gathered to listen.

Realizing that he has got an audience, the musician really gets into it.

His elbows pump like pistons whilst his right foot stomps the beat on the pavement.

His ditty squirts to a finish.

One of his mates cheers. The rest of the onlookers just smile and wander off.

When I get to Almada’s Academia cinema for ‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day’, the box office cashier is busy knitting a yellow pullover.

“One ticket please.”

I didn’t pick up anything at all from her reply.

“Sorry, I don’t understand.”

“For today?”

“Yes, today.”

“For nine-thirty?”

“Yes. Near the front, please.”

“No no no. At the front you can’t see.”

“At the front is ok, it’s ok!”

“No no no. Here you are.”

She hands me my ticket for seat number 21 in row R, about halfway back, plum in the middle of the row. It’s a good place to sit so I forgive the box office person for refusing to give me a seat at the front.

But it can be good to be right up by the screen, where the colours and movement flow over you.

Maybe I’ll sneak down to the front during the interval.

Academia is a great cinema, with a massive screen.

It’s a rowdy crowd in here tonight for Arnie’s Almada premiere.

I am intrigued as to whether this hi-tech movie is going to be an exhibition of mindless machismo or, as some have claimed, a witty and ironic condemnation of violence and current American adulation of such.

You could read the poster for ‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day’ either way: Arnie looking extraordinarily slick and mean mounted on a beast of a bike, brandishing a weapon that looks like a portable cannon.

Kurosawa’s ‘Rhapsody in August’, which I saw recently, was great in an earnest arty way. But in its own way, ‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day’ here tonight is equally superb cinema.

Thrilling and hilarious and full of dry humour, ‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day’ goes down a storm with the Almada locals, who erupt with frequent cheers and applause.

From the opening moments of the film with Dwight Yoakam singing Guitars, Cadillacs, I know that this is going to be something special.

At the end of the film I leave the cinema feeling totally exhilarated.

Everything about ‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day’ is magnificent.

The actors are perfectly cast.

As Sarah Connor, Linda Hamilton sustains her justified obsession in the face of constant institutionalized persecution, her commitment to the cause temporarily overriding her motherly emotions towards John Connor the future savior.

John Connor, played by Edward Furlong as the ultimate sensitive semi-delinquent, bosses around ‘his’ terminator.

Schwarzenegger is assured enough to indulge in self-deprecating incidents like the scene in which he stands on one leg merely because Furlong tells him to.

The reflective desert scenes are beautifully shot.

As Hamilton and Schwarzenegger and Furlong gather their strength, the tranquil skies and soft breezes blowing over the desert and glowing hills remind us of what they are fighting for.

Arnie holds up a baby at arm’s length, the killing machine turning human.

The special effects in ‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day’are astounding, but they never overwhelm the story or the performances.

Roll on Terminator 3.

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November has now rolled around.

The tourists are long gone from Costa da Caparica.

It’s a bright blue morning so I have a walk along the tiny narrow gauge railway which runs along the back of the wonderful beaches between Costa da Caparica and Fonte da Telha a few miles south down the coast.

The trains only run in peak season.

The sand-covered sleepers show that the track has been out of use for a few weeks.

This healthy invigorating sea air is great for clearing your head in the morning.

When my classes finish this evening I race up Avenida Heliodoro Salgado until I reach Cine Incrível, one of Almada’s three cinemas.

Incrível is a cavernous place with a dated appearance.

Its brown and yellow walls induce a slight queasiness in me.

The auditorium has wooden handrails, a wide stage and a good-sized screen way down below.

The BONG! BONG! BONG-BONG! sound announcing the imminent start of the film sets something shuddering in the ceiling. It feels like the roof is about to cave in.

My balcão seat ticket costs only 200 escudos, about seventy-five pence in British money.

Though glad that it is on, I can’t help wondering why Incrível is showing Sam Shepard’s quirky film Far North on a November Monday night in this distant suburb of Lisbon.

Only four people are here to see it, giving this large cinema the empty unreal feel that Hampden Park must have when Queen’s Park are playing at home.

The three main characters in ‘Far North’ are Uncle Dane (Donald Moffat), Bertrum (Charles Durning), and Kate (Jessica Lange).

Early on there is a terrific conversation between Kate and Bertrum, her Dad, in his hospital room. Their talk is dry and laconic, tinged with a madness which pervades the whole of the movie.

A marvellous soundtrack is provided by the Red Clay Ramblers.

Storming country fiddle accompanies a brilliant scene in which Bertrum and drunk old Uncle Dane set off along railroad tracks, first through industrial wasteland, next through some deserted sidings and then as night falls they make it to the countryside, emerging from birch forest as they walk across a river bridge silhouetted against a purple dusk sky under a full moon, benign lunatics in their element.

Kate, in a perfect performance of good-humoured restrained exasperation by Jessica Lange, is the prodigal daughter who has left her rural roots far behind in order to seek something more stimulating in the big city.

Returning home to comfort her Uncle Dane during his grouchy convalescence, Kate finds her mother dottier than ever, charmingly decades out of touch with reality, pining for the days when her household was full of hard-working menfolk of whom Dane and Bertrum are the only remnants.

There are echoes of Vladimir and Estragon in a drunken conversation between Dane and Bertrum in Bertrum’s hospital room overlooking the industrial port from which huge freighters slide out into Lake Superior.

The freighters’ sirens hoot as they depart, a doleful registering of time slipping aimlessly by.

Melancholy, warm, humorous and downbeat, ‘Far North’ is a perfect movie for a Monday night in November.

Related Post: ‘Evil Does Not Exist’, The Garden Cinema London

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Sâo Jorge cinema, like Condes cinema just along the road, is another gigantic city centre dream shrine on Avenida da Liberdade.

The avenue’s plane trees and palms are swaying and rustling in the blue afternoon gust.

By the Sâo Jorge cinema entrance steps, plenty pre-Backdraft smoke is swirling up from a roast chestnut vendor.

In Screen 1, where Backdraft is showing, the seats almost all have their numbers missing.

This is causing great confusion between audience members and ushers.

On the plus side, though, the screen is splendidly huge.

The idea of Ron Howard as director doesn’t excite me too much, but on the other hand it’s an irresistible cast: Robert De Niro, Kurt Russell, Rebecca De Mornay, Jennifer Jason Leigh, William Baldwin, Donald Sutherland and Scott Glenn.

Kurt Russell is great as the heroic loser. He has lost his wife, his chance of promotion, and his hope. He is blanking it all out through the adrenalin rush of his dangerous job.

Life has left him as high and dry as the old boat he now lives in.

William Baldwin as his young brother tries to follow in these surly footsteps. But unable to compete with his older brother’s bravery and experience, he opts out of active firefighting and joins De Niro as an assistant fire investigator.

De Niro is superb as the dedicated investigator, aloof from the often tedious male bonding camaraderie of Russell’s ‘17’ unit. He has to constantly rebuff political interference into his arson investigations.

De Niro’s authority is immediately established in the first scene he appears in.

At the burnt-out remains of a building, the firefighters have done their job and are drifting away.

The camera draws back to show De Niro sizing up the situation from the street.

He lights a cigarette before picking up his bag and entering the charred house.

No fuss, no heroics, no sweeping music, just a seasoned professional doing his job.

It’s a rowdy audience in Sâo Jorge cinema tonight for ‘Backdraft’.

Several people laugh out loud at the frazzled body sticking through the windscreen in one scene.

Later on, many spectators applaud Kurt Russell when in drunken jealousy he punches his ex-wife’s new boyfriend.

As an incarcerated arsonist, Donald Sutherland is marvellously insane, unnerving the rookie Baldwin with his cold callous observations on the delights of burning the whole world straight to hell.

De Niro, though, is unfazed by Sutherland’s gleaming malice and ensures that the parole board keep him locked up for another year.

In what is essentially a movie about male heroics, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Rebecca De Mornay play less prominent roles, though Jennifer Jason Leigh’s is a crucial one.

She helps blow the whistle on her city hall boss and his financial cutbacks that have led directly to the deaths of firefighters due to lack of backup when dealing with major fires.

Some of the fire scenes are amazing and very exciting, especially the final scene where a massive fire in a chemical warehouse is complicated even further by the confrontation between Scott Glenn and Kurt Russell. They look like they are going to set about each other with axes until the fire takes over, with exploding oil drums and crashing flaming girders all around them.

Then, in the most dramatic stunt of the whole film, one of them sprints across a high platform through the flames.

After each step, that piece of the platform gives way and collapses into the heart of the blaze. It’s a tremendous scene.

Despite a few dodgy moments in the middle of the film when clichés of gushing water hydrants and slow-motion posing abound, ‘Backdraft’ is an entertaining couple of hours.

After the film finishes, I nip up Calçada da Glória for a couple of Bairro Alto beers.

I then head home to Costa da Caparica where there is a fantastic Atlantic sunset.

A lone motor-cyclist races across the beach, silhouetted against the fiery evening sky.

Related Post: ‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day’, Cinema Academia Almadense, Lisbon

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After last Saturday’s State of Grace I went up to Bairro Alto to meet Pete and his flatmate Sarah in As Primas.

I mentioned to them how Portuguese subtitles in films always seem to tone down colourful language.

In a film I saw recently, one character lamented the fact that everything was ‘fucked up’, which got translated as ‘tudo é uma grande confusâo’.

From As Primas we headed down to a bar owned and run by José, a mature student in one of Pete’s English classes.

We were served free beers by him till two in the morning and then when all the other customers had been asked to drink up and go, we were invited to stay behind and share some of the cake that was there to mark the birthday of one of the bartenders.

José then locked up the bar and we went for a drive along the north bank of the Tagus in the direction of Estoril to a late bar, with U2’s new album blasting out the car tape deck.

José used to be a racing driver in his native South Africa and he took great pleasure in chasing down an overtaker, smoothly leaving him trailing.

We stopped a few miles further on at the late bar for more beer and some hot dogs.

Being miles and miles away from my apartment, I crashed at Pete and Sarah’s place in Sâo Joâo.

On Sunday morning I went out for a hangover-clearing constitutional with Pete.

It was a grey, wind-buffeted November day.

We walked to Cascais for coffee at John David’s Snack Bar, a venue populated by a colony of expat Brits sitting outside in the driving wind, sea spray and occasional drizzle, drinking coffee and reading the English newspapers provided free of charge for customers to peruse.

Yesterday’s first division football scores were chalked up on a blackboard at one end of the bar. We discussed Brian Clough and Graham Taylor and English football officialdom’s habit of snubbing managerial talent in favour of blandness.

Sitting there chatting in the damp November breeze was strangely invigorating.

Feeling restored, I headed back across the river to Almada and Costa da Caparica.

During the week there were no tempting films on in town.

But during Tuesday’s Portuguese lesson with Silvia we arrange to go see the film Ao Fim da Noite on Saturday.

She thinks it very strange that I should want to watch a Portuguese film.

“Are you sure you want to see this film? It is Portuguese, it will be boring.”

“Yes, I want to see it. I’ve never seen a Portuguese film.”

She laughs.

“You will regret it.”

Amoreiras is the cinema showing ‘Ao Fim da Noite’.

The film is directed by Joaquim Leitâo, with music by António Emiliano.

As Silvia guessed it would be, it turns out to be a disappointing film.

There is no rhythm to it, and the acting is wooden.

It’s a plodding and dull would-be thriller devoid of atmosphere and elegance despite being set here in Lisbon, one of the most atmospheric and elegant cities in the world.

“What’s everyone saying about the film?” I ask Silvia at the end, as everyone gets up to leave.

“Oh they don’t like it”, she replies.

Outside Amoreiras it’s a dreich early evening.

I see Silvia off onto a bus taking her home.

Then I turn towards Rotunda.

I walk through misty rain that is drifting like illuminated snowflakes around Rotunda statue.

I follow Avenida Fontes Pereira de Melo up past the Sheraton hotel, and soon come to Nimas cinema on Avenida 5 de Outubro.

The cinema’s exterior is nondescript, with just a small entrance on the ground floor of an apartment block.

Inside, though, Nimas is similar to the impressive architectural style of Amoreiras.

Orange cubes hang from the ceiling over wood panels and blocky brown walls.

The film that Nimas is showing tonight is Zandalee, or to give it the English equivalent of its Portuguese title, Last Tango in New Orleans. Music is by the band Pray For Rain.

Right from the opening bars of strummed acoustic Cajun-style music, I know that I am going to love this movie.

The incredibly sensual Erika Anderson plays Zandalee. 

Judge Reinhold is superb as Thierry, with Nicholas Cage drifting charismatically round the edges as Johnny.

Old friends Johnny and Thierry have each gone their own way in life.

The paths they have chosen are poles apart.

In ‘Zandalee’, Johnny is the wild artist letting passion rule his life, whereas Thierry has killed the artist within himself, opting instead for a life of workaholic materialism.

This conflict comes to a head in the wonderful dinner scene where decorum, etiquette and polite chit-chat are subverted by Johnny’s acidic observations on ‘respectability’.

Another great scene in this steamy semi-masterpiece of a movie is the dance in the bayou between Johnny and Thierry with Zandalee looking on, the two waltzing fools suspending their mutual contempt for a sublime couple of minutes.

Related Post: ‘Treasure Island’, Cine Camões, Lisbon

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