Colour Me Kubrick

John Malkovich plays the Londoner who passed himself off as reclusive director Stanley Kubrick.

Herald rating: * * *

What's in a name? For Alan Conway, a London conman with a lot more cheek than class, there was plenty as it turned out. The name concerned was that of Stanley Kubrick, the famously reclusive New York-born, London-based director of such films as Lolita, Dr Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange.

Trading on the fact that Kubrick was rarely photographed, Conway managed to get drunk and fed at others' expense for several years in the early 1990s by simply claiming the name. It didn't seem to matter that he bore not even a passing resemblance to Kubrick or, as one dramatic scene demonstrates, even know much about his films.

Conway's story is as much about credulousness as deceptiveness. Most of his marks are desperate to believe him because the implications for their own fortune are so good.

So a pair of down-at-heel blokes representing a thrash metal band are happy to front him $20 so he can buy vodka and cigarettes because they just know he's going to make them rich.

The film's writer, Anthony Frewin, knows his subject: a researcher on most of Kubrick's films, he took plenty of phone calls from the real Conway's victims and compiled a file on the man's exploits.

Yet he and director Brian Cook, an assistant director on several Kubrick projects here making his feature debut, have made a rather flat and drab picture that never finds it feet as an interesting story. Conway's frauds are presented as a string of vignettes in which, for the most part, the other characters are sordid and unlovely sorts.

Malkovich has plenty of fun in a particularly camp performance that mangles accents into a dozen different mid-Atlantic melanges. Yet at times he seems almost too big for the role: when he (as Conway, as Kubrick) says that he's casting John Malkovich in his next picture and someone says "Who's he?", it just feels too clever for its own good.

Even the references - visual and aural - to Kubrick's oeuvre, starting with the first scene which samples A Clockwork Orange's droogs - are more often than not forced and mannered.

There are some nice cameos from Richard E. Grant, Leslie Phillips, Ken Russell and others but it is more a cinematic curio than the genuinely interesting movie that it might have been.

Cast: John Malkovich
Director: Brian Cook
Running time: 86 mins
Rating: M, offensive language and sexual references
Screening: Rialto
Verdict: The story of a legendary London conman is a string of vignettes which make for a disconnected and sordid story, but Malkovich is watchable as ever.