The Artist BBC 2 10pm, screenplay and directed by Michel Hazanavicius.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01n1vhr

I don’t watch many silent movies. I’m not as old as some people make out. The only time I watched silent movies when they were on the telly on a Saturday morning and there was nothing else on. And that’s going back a few years.  I guess you could say I came to appreciate the genius of Harold Llloyd and Laurel and Hardy. Ok, Laurel and Hardy weren’t silent but they were geniuses. This is the kind of era in which the film is set, with the movement from silent to Al Jolson’s blacked-up white boy walking a million miles for one of your smiles.

Here we have George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) a 1920s box-office cross between Rudolph Valentino and Errol Flynn all swash and much buckle and the play of  a film of him crossing the road is a sure-fire box-office smash.  He’s Mr Hollywood who can do no wrong. There’s a Mrs Hollywood, but the marriage is on the John wane. They have a big house and with nobody home they get busy with the silent treatment. Luckily they have a faithful dog, a little Lassie that’s allowed to bark and it has a little cameo role saving his master from a fire that’s got out of hand. George is rescued from the burning building by the friendly street-corner cop, and in his hand the doomed actor is clutching takes from an old silent movie he once made which featured the new Hollywood star of big-screen Peppy Miller (Bernice Bejo).

Peppy is classy and beautiful in the way that Audrey Hepburn was both. She’s on the up and up and he’s on the down and down, a basement boy drowning himself in drink. It’s a Star is Born, with non-barking dog. The see-saw of Hollywood swings the axe from silent to sound and from George to Peppy on the same day they bring out their newly released films. George’s film flops and with the 1929 Wall Street Crash wiping out all his savings, the flopping film wipes out his future and leaves him broken.

Peppy’s all pep and she eventually brings him round. The dance finale is Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers and George gets to say his only line, in the last take, to an appropriately named Hollywood mogul Al Zimmer (John Goodman).  A classy, funny and sweet film that could make you believe in a Hollywood of Goodmen and second chances that never existed except onscreen.

http://unbound.co.uk/books/lily-poole