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Lewes Community Screen Chair of Trustees Robert Senior has held a lifelong passion for film. In this blog he shares some of his personal thoughts on films showing at Depot and on the wider industry.
THANK YOU FOR COMING BACK TO ME
Published 2 October 2025
The famous line which closes David Lean’s masterful Brief Encounter (1945) ends what is for many the ultimate melodrama. The genius is in the understated passion of this post-war romance which is arguably ( the screenplay is by Noel Coward) a metaphor for an illicit gay relationship. In any event it was an obvious inclusion in Depot’s Autumn season of melodramas which the BFI (it’s a national sort of thing ) have called “Too Much”. Although in fact many of the great melodramas are understated, finding their power in the subtle and the nuanced. But certainly not all.
The season is of personal interest because back in the dark days of Covid I ran a five week virtual course on melodrama using the new (for me) Zoom technology. Those five sessions have now been condensed into one, an introduction to melodrama which starts off the season, followed by a screening of Max Ophuls’ sublime Letter From An Unknown Woman (1948).
Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)
Melodrama is basically a combination of music and drama, and a musical score is usually but not always integral to the narrative. The film will probably be some sort of doomed romance, contain moments of tragedy or examine mother – daughter frictions, the sort of film popularly known as a tear jerker or in the old days a “women’s picture”. They do almost always have strong female roles and are usually based around family and domesticity, but again that’s a rule ready to be broken. What is generally true is that the film’s “plastics” – set designs, costumes, cinematography, direction, composition – are integral to the movie, embedding it with symbolism, sub-texts and layers of meaning. There is also a purposeful artificiality.
All That Heaven Allows (1955)
The early silent melodramas were defined by fallen women, vamps, pantomime villains and histrionics but a group of largely female novelists laid the foundations for the modern melodrama on film. In the 1930s the American director John Stahl made many of them into movies, and in the 1950s the German born director Douglas Sirk created definitive versions. Along the way Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, David Lean, Max Ophuls and Vincent Minelli made important contributions. But this is only Hollywood melodrama – countries such as Italy, Japan and Mexico all made melodramas with a distinctive style, especially in the 1950s. Fewer melodramas were made after 1970 but the German director Rainer Werner Fassbender and the Spanish director Pedro Almodovar created movies inspired by Sirk but fashioned in their own style.
It’s a big subject and Depot will be showing a season of classic melodramas throughout the Autumn which will reflect these different strands.
THE SUNDANCE KID IS DEAD
It had to happen and last month saw the death of one of the most famous actors of his generation, Robert Redford. Most people will remember him as a strikingly handsome leading actor in such films as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969), The Candidate (Michael Ritchie, 1972) and All the Presidents Men Alan Pakula, 1976). But my personal favourites are the powerful racial western Tell Them Willie Boy is Here ( 1970) by the blacklisted American director Abraham Polonsky and Sydney Pollack’s beautifully filmed frontier adventure Jeremiah Johnson (1972).
Redford was a man of many talents. He also directed a melodrama, Ordinary People (1980) which won four Oscars and he founded America’s largest indie film festival, Sundance, in 1981, based in Salt Lake City. He directed other good movies and was by all accounts a nice guy.
Earlier blogs
Click a post title to read one of Robert’s past blog entries.
TERENCE STAMP (1938-2025) & SILENT CLASSICS AND SOUNDTRACKS - 20 August 2025
Sad to see Terence Stamp pass away at the age of 87. He last notable role was as a mysterious stranger in Last Night in Soho, Edgar Wright’s quirky time shift thriller made in 2021. Stamp does what he always did well, looking brooding and menacing, in fact he was probably best known for playing villains, notably as the stalker in The Collector, made by William Wyler in 1985. He liked playing complex roles and was predominantly a character actor rather than a star. Good looking, he perhaps shared some characteristics with Oliver Reed who was born the same year although less flamboyant and much less posh.
I would pick out three movies. His portrayal of the kidnapper Freddie Clegg in the film version of John Fowles’ The Collector (1965) was groundbreaking in terms of psychological acting – a disturbed young man who seemed outwardly ordinary and even likeable. Not everyone favoured John Schlesinger’s large scale version of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd (1967) but the performances were excellent as was Nicholas Roeg’s fine cinematography. As Sergeant Troy, Stamp brought his handsome saturnine looks fully into play and he was to embark on a relationship with Julie Christie which is evident on the screen.
My personal favourite came much later when Stamp was over 60. Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey (1999) featured him as an British gangster looking for his daughter in LA, a narrative reminiscent of Get Carter. Stamp steals the show.
SILENT CLASSICS AND SOUNDTRACKS
There is a trend to use modern musical scores to find new audiences for silent classics, spearheaded by a company called Silents Synced. But it’s not exactly a new trend : Philip Glass’ score for Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931) was recorded in 1998 with the Kronos Quartet (which sounds rather apt) and the musical score totally invigorates a rather slow and staid movie. Many other films have also had classical or semi-classical new scores (notably the brilliant Carl Davis score for Abel Gance’s 1927 epic, Napoleon.
The soundtrack written by the Pet Shop Boys for Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 masterpiece Battleship Potemkin was first performed back in 2005. The score was written specifically for the 80 year anniversary of the film and performed live across several venues including Trafalgar Square (despite efforts it never made it to the Red Square). The film is a pioneering movie about a shipyard strike that features early use of montage, where fast cutting and stark compositions are used to create a powerful visual language.
The second Depot screening is through a new venture created by the company Silents Synced, which have spliced F. W. Murnau’s 1927 movie, Nosferatu with music from two Radiohead Albums, Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001). Fans of the splendidly entertaining Robert Eggers’ version, released in 2024, will be intrigued to see the original with the famous portrayal by Max Schreck. Come and see both !