Chiltern U3A

Let’s go to the pictures!

Monthly meetings take place on the second Tuesday of every month at 14:30 in the Amersham Community Centre Large Barn Hall.

Members of the group share an interest in Cinema – whether recently acquired or life-long – and we celebrate this by viewing and discussing films from all over the world (but chiefly from America and the UK) across a wide range of genres and across many decades.  Sometimes we follow a particular theme; for example we have considered the work of several notable European émigrés in Hollywood including Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch, Douglas Sirk and Fritz Lang; and in consecutive months we compared the two screen versions of Hemingway’s story The Killers.

Some meetings take the form of a talk on a particular subject or person, illustrated with excerpts from relevant movies.  At one meeting we welcomed Dr Tony Williams, former President of the International Dickens Fellowship, to speak about how the works of Charles Dickens have been treated on screen.  And we also welcomed Kevin Ashman, star of TV's Eggheads, who spoke about the famous Gunfight at the OK Corral, illustrating his talk with film clips to show how accurately – or, in most cases, inaccurately – the incident has been portrayed through 100 years of cinema.

Our recurring theme for 2022 was Ladies First, which encompassed a wide range of films with a prominent female presence, whether in front of or behind the camera.  These included:

Denial (2016) - the story of Deborah Lipstadt's libel case against Holocaust denier David Irving; The Bigamist (1953) - directed by Ida Lupino; Bright Star (2009) - directed by Jane Campion; The Divine Order (2017) - the story of the enfranchising of women in Switzerland; A Woman at War (2018) - an Icelandic woman's environmental activism; Million Dollar Mermaid (1952) - biopic of swimmer and actress Annette Kellerman; Antonia's Line (1995) - Marleen Gorris's Oscar-winning Dutch feminist film; Wadjda (2012) - eye-opening drama directed by Saudi Arabia's first female director Haifaa al-Mansour.   Al-Mansour's follow-up to that film will feature in June 2023.

2023 featured a short season of films with the theme Aunts & Uncles.  These included Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, Jacques Tati's Mon Oncle, Cary Grant in Arsenic and Old Lace and the remarkable Grey Gardens, the story of Jackie Kennedy's aunt and cousin living in their decrepit Long Island mansion.

For 2024 the recurring theme was Seeing Double, in which we considered pairs of films featuring the work of particular actors or directors: Angela Lansbury, George Cukor, Richard Attenborough, Barbara Stanwyck and George Clooney.

For 2025 (and perhaps longer!) our theme is Icons of Cinema. 

Thank you to all you members of the FAG who have suggested subjects for our ‘Icons of Cinema’ season – there are so many great possibilities that we will definitely continue this into 2026!  Meanwhile in September, having considered Sweet Smell of Success last month, we focus once again on director Alexander Mackendrick, this time with star Alec Guinness in The Ladykillers, the last film to be made at Ealing Studios before it was sold off to the BBC in 1955, and Mackendrick’s last work in Britain before moving to the US.  Regularly found in the upper reaches of any poll or ranking of greatest British films, it also boasts a very rare 100% approval rating on the critical aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes.  Although Guinness and Sellers are the two most recognizable ‘star names’ in the cast, special praise is due to Katie Johnson who plays the ‘sweet little old lady’ rôle. An accomplished and frequent player on the West End and Broadway stage, usually in supporting rôles, she made her first of many film appearances in 1932, but without any great acclaim until, aged 76, she won her Best Actress BAFTA for The Ladykillers. 

In October our ‘icon’ is the actor Paul Newman in Hud.  It’s based on the Larry McMurtry novel Horseman, Pass By whose title derives from the sardonic last lines of a WB Yeats poem carved on Yeats’s gravestone: Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by.  Set in the 1950s, the story contrasts the ‘old West’ values of rancher Homer Bannon, full of integrity and deeply religious, with the much more self-absorbed attitude of his son, Hud – and, caught between them and in the process of growing up, the impressionable Lonnie, Homer’s grandson and Hud’s nephew.  Leaving aside the grey, shadowy film noir style used to such great effect in Sweet Smell of Success, legendary cameraman James Wong Howe uses high contrast black-and-white photography in the unrelenting Texas sunshine to elevate the dramatic tensions, and won an Oscar for his work.  Playing the ranch housekeeper Alma, Patricia Neal (married for 30 years to Roald Dahl) also won an Oscar for her standout performance, and there is a great musical score by Elmer Bernstein. 

For November’s meeting we feature Life is Sweet as we switch our gaze to a British ‘behind-the-camera’ icon, Mike Leigh, who first came to widespread attention in the 1970s with his TV plays Nuts In May and Abigail’s Party.  These established his reputation for a caustic wit which often satirises the banality of the British middle classes in a way which manages to be both bleak and also warmly humourous.  Life is Sweet typifies his famously improvisational style (greatly influenced by his early exposure to the work of John Cassavetes). Although his films will usually say ‘written by Mike Leigh’, he and his troupe of actors meet together for weeks before shooting to thrash out each character’s nuances, role-play and rehearse different scenarios and collaboratively arrive at a ‘script’ which will be the basis for filming.  The results in this case provide us with a memorable tragi-comedy, which was one of Leigh’s greatest successes both critically and commercially.

And then we bring 2025 to a close with Adam’s Rib, a Hollywood classic with those two much-loved screen icons Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.  When married writers Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin found that two lawyer friends of theirs were working on opposing sides in the high profile divorce of actor Raymond Massey, they saw in this the germ of an idea for a screenplay and wrote it specifically for Tracy and Hepburn.  Making her film debut, apart from a couple of uncredited bit parts, co-star Judy Holliday so impressed Columbia’s boss Harry Cohn that he cast her the following year in Born Yesterday which we saw a few months ago at our FAG, and for which she won the Best Actress Oscar.  And you might also take notice of another blonde lady in the cast – Jean Hagen, who, just two years after this, would wow audiences as silent movie star ‘Lina Lamont’ in Singin’ In The Rain.

The Group is always happy to accept new members, but other CU3A members are welcome to attend any meeting of interest on production of their current Membership Card.  If you intend to come it would be helpful, though not essential, to email the Convenor in advance.

Details of Coming Attractions are always included in the quarterly CU3A Newsletter, and the Group has its own regular Newsletter which is circulated by email to its members.  In addition members receive weekly emails, when time permits, with suggestions for worthwhile films that are coming up on the free-to-air television channels.