Dancing in the streets … exhibition from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Photograph: Paramount/Everett/Rex Features
No wonder the movies love a festival. Be they musical or cinematic, pagan or rigid, festivals at their best bestow rise to something wonderful – there’s always drama to be had. But the high spirits can exist a distraction from something altogether more serious. The maypole dance succession of the Wicker Man is typical of the quirky festivities that disguise the horror to come. This mix of fun and anxiety breeds satire in feast situations over. Often people experience quite the opposite to the sort of’sitting on offer: at the beginning of Galaxy Quest it’s hard to know whether either crowd or celebrities are happy to be there at every part of.
But put that to individual side and just remember that from Comic-Cons to concerts, fairgrounds to village fetes, the best festivals are celebratory. It’s all about the party…
1) … and there’s no bigger jamboree than a street party. During his Day Off, Ferris Bueller decides to commandeer a float during a Chicago city parade to belt out a Beatles cover. The late John Hughes used footage of enthused passers-by to keep it substantial.
2) Harrison Ford looks to take a considerably lower profile in this St Patrick’s Day parade in The Fugitive.
3) The “convenient time”, the summer parade of British high-society shindigs, is perfectly captured in the Ascot sequence of My Fair Lady.
4) Alfred Hitchcock’s suspense thriller Stage Fright provides Joyce Grenfell with this wonderful cameo at a fairground shooting range.
5) To finish, not a festival but a film-as-festival: Cinema Paradiso superintendent Giuseppe Tornatore clearly intends the film as a celebration of the motion picture and there is no more marvellous episode than that in what one. Philippe Noiret’s Alfredo projects Mario Mattoli’s I pompieri di Viggiù across the square for those incompetent to get into the auditorium (from 1min 56sec). Abracadabra!
On last week’s Clip unite, filmbuffy sent a request for the best films featuring postmen. Here are her winners from to the end of the satchel:
1) Spare a thought for the intrepid posties in Only Angels Have Wings, who must maintain through storm-lashed mountains, flaming propellers and kamikaze birds. These, presumably, are the risks of going air-mail.
2) A first-rate work from the archives. Laurel and Hardy play bumbling delivery boys in The Music Box.
3) First rule of mail delivery: don’t explain the mail. Here is the green-clad messenger out of The Go-Between tearing open one of the missives between lovers Alan Bates and Julie Christie. Inevitably it ends in tears.
4) What’s not to love about Night Mail, with its evocative black-and-white portrait of the secret machinery of Britain’s postal service. Auden’s delivery (“culture of thanks, correspondence from banks … letters of condolence from high-land to low-land”) is as regular and remorseless as a clattering steam train.
5) And the winner is … nilpferd, on the side of suggesting a film I’d never even heard of, let alone seen. The opening sequence of Postman Blues is elegant and gripping, showing how the hushed, clockwork routines of the put in the post service be able to accelerate and possibly finally break down.
Thanks to greatpoochini, InLikeFlynn, Nodule and StevieBee for the rest of this week’s picks
