A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE TO ASSEMBLING THE PERFECT TV CREAM FILM

9 - THE FINISH

Casting, production design and the assorted paraphernalia of titles and cameos are one thing but none of it adds up to much without a script that makes sense or, which is even more important, has a proper finish. Sir Thomas Beacham, communicating to the world largely through the frame of Timothy West on stuffy Sunday night musicology programmes, always insisted that an orchestra need only start together and finish together for the audience to go home happy. What happened in between hardly mattered.

Of course we're not advocating the sort of slapdash goldbreaking that constitutes most of classical music by any means, principally because people actually like films and tend to pay attention to them when they've paid money to go and see them. And while the principle allure of classical music is being able to insist that the most obscure and inaccessible cobblers is indeed the best on offer, and no-one dare argue for fear of seeming a philistine, in films it's all up there on the screen for everyone to see and if it doesn't make any sense then, well, it doesn't make any sense and it doesn't matter whether it's got a French title or not. Again, contrary to the norm in yer classical music canon, if an 'expert' pronounces some lengthy piece of grainy cinematic bobbins a classic they can fulminate on that theme in the Sunday Times Culture section all they like but it won't change the fact that if it doesn't have a proper ending then, well, it doesn't have a proper ending. We hesitate *cough* to bang on about 2001 anymore than we already have but it's a handy case in point. Cinematic wonks can babble on about the ending of that load of old knockers for ten thousand words in obscure journals if they like, but in this obscure journal we're quite prepared to maintain that it doesn't have a proper ending and what little ending it does have makes no bloody sense. Fact.

So films are better than classical music, a revelation that we, a) are sure you were all already perfectly aware of and, b) didn't really want to bring up here at all and we're not sure why we did. We don't have any words of advice for the classical impresarios of the country to help them increase the popularity of their staid world beyond the provision of a better selection of sweets and drinks in concert halls (although one of the definite plus points of going to a proper concert is that it enables you to eat flowery boxes of violet creams in public without anyone giving you a second look) so we won't try. Instead we'll just get back to the plot.

In essence what we're concentrating on here isn't script per se, since we'd suggest that a heist movie starring Rodney Dangerfield pretty much writes itself, but instead we're concentrating on the denouement, the finale, the climax, the BIG FINISH! 'Cos every film, we think, needs a proper BIG FINISH. We hate films that just slither off and at this point we're going to press back into service two of our good friends from over the past few weeks to illustrate our point perfectly, namely AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS and BACK TO SCHOOL. Without wanting to linger any longer on these two stalwarts of the Partwork feature we should point out that the former is a bad example of the Big Finish theory of films, and the latter a very, very good one. ATWI80D just sort of... stops. David Niven gets home, he realises the clocks haven't been changed and then wins his bet. And that's about it. All in all it only really requires a huzzah! with a small 'h'. Quite the reverse is true of BTS which manages to capitalise on a conceit first introduced in the montage titles, that of Rodders being a diving showman while a lad and he gets to relive this with the impossible (Ho! Ho!) Triple Lindy dive at the very end. Much better.

In order to expand on this point and in the process prove that we've actually seen a few more films than that, we can hone in on a few more examples of the great Big Finish. Another tip-top example is FLASH GORDON when the culmination of an hour and a half of ludicrously overblown and scandalously contrived plot is brought to its glorious conclusion by Ming being skewered by a whole spaceship. A whole spaceship! Okay, so there's a little bit of banter after that and then the traditional pantomime walk down at the end so we can see everyone made it to the last reel, but hey, that's one helluva planet that ending comes from. From a wildly different genre but equally as fun comes the Goldman-pleasing curtain-dropper from NORTH BY NORTHWEST when Cary Grant, Martin Landau and James Mason spend ten minutes leaping around the nostrils of Teddy Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore whilst caught in the crosshairs of Leo G. Carroll's comedy policeman in a fantastic piece of tension-building climactic nonsense never bettered by Hitchcock in all his other films; endings not otherwise being his strong-suit by any means.

There's nothing more disappointing than a disappointing ending. In the same way that it was a real pain in the arse when, at the very end of THE BOX OF DELIGHTS on the telly, it all turned out to be a dream (and God, how do we hate that!) then similarly it was toweringly frustrating when we had suffered through the gloriously designed but otherwise largely interminable THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN (Gilliam version, not scary Czech version) only to find that not only was the whole thing supposed to be a story told by to an audience but that the supposed plot twist made about as much sense as casting John Neville as the hero. Infuriating. Again, we didn't stick with the fun-but-overrated THE PRINCESS BRIDE only to be assured that it was a story all along. We mean to say, we realise Peter Falk was reading it to Fred Savage while the latter was in bed but a cheeky wink to camera at the end to let us know that it was actually real all along would have been most welcome. We don't go to the cinema for glimpses of realism for heaven's sake! We can go to Somerfield for that!

Mind you, frustrating endings can work quite well but we really need them to be heavily signposted for us to avoid that crushing disappointment that comes with the realisation that there's only ten minutes to go and the baddies aren't dead yet. In NINETEEN EIGHTY- FOUR you'd have to have been bordering on the illiterate not to realise there wasn't going to be a happy ending involved (although it's a question of perspective of course; if Stalin was looking in he might have laughed his kulaks off) but at the same time the likes of BRAZIL come with a pedigree that suggests there's not going to be a triumphant reunion of the lead characters in a nursing home at the end. If you expect something like that from a Gilliam film - and counting from TIME BANDITS down the odds are agin it - then you've only yourself to blame.

The best endings are happy endings. Fact. That doesn't mean to say the rest of a good film is negated by a miserable conclusion. Spine Millington's greatest moment on celluloid (and Pe'er Sellers too, come to that) THE GREAT MCGONAGALL is a glorious piece of filmmaking and rightly sits well up the canon of the best ever British films, but by Jove, it's got a bleak ending. And as we keep insisting, we don't really do bleak as a rule. Unsurprisingly then, Disney chalks up more than its fair share of classy climactics from the likes of MARY POPPINS and ALADDIN to the excellent finish to the brilliant DARBY O'GILL AND THE LITTLE PEOPLE which involves death coaches, banshees, people dying and a fist fight. Not the sort of plot devices that find their way into FINDING NEMO.

However, leaving the superstitions of rural Ireland behind (unless we're going to have Rodney try and steal Bono's millions from a hotel safe in Dublin's Arsey-Quarter, which is as plausible an idea as any we reckon; we could even call it BONO'S MILLIONS, though only if we can't think of anything else) we are after all supposed to be putting together a heist film so you've got to figure that the Big Finish has got to have something to do with that. The exception from that logic would be the sudden change in direction at the end of THE TAKING OF PELHAM 123 which you would think has come to a close with Robert Shaw putting his fingers in the plug in the NY Underground but in fact staggers on for a while until Walter Matthau and Jerry Stiller stumble across Martin Balsam spreading Vick about his bedsit for a fantastic 'Gesundheit!' pay-off. So our men don't have to be caught in the act, as t'were, but the current moral climate (for which read 'startling hypocrisy') seems to be dictating more and more that the crooks can't get away with it but if they do then there has to be some sort of twist that means they all end up better people. Ah well, we can't have everything we suppose.

Note to pseuds - "pretentious" is a negative term by definition. And you don't get more definitive than Staney's optical vacuum.

Niven forgets about British Summer Time yet again. "You'll be glad you had an Extra Strong Mint!"

And then of course, this is craftsmanship.

Visual pyrotechnics - and a film to go with them! We refer the honourable gentlemen to picture caption A.

"OoooooooooOOOOOOOOHH..."