Solo Sunny review – a rueful East German gem of ambition, loneliness and faded dreams

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Konrad Wolf’s 1980 drama follows a singer trying to escape the drab compromises of GDR life, capturing the melancholy of thwarted ambition with warmth and wit The terrible sadness, tattiness and poisoned idealism of the old GDR is preserved as if in a time capsule in this East German film from 1980; it could be a kind of B-side to Bob Fosse’s Cabaret. The heroine, would-be solo pop singer Sunny, is told by her ungallant MC that she is no Liza Minnelli; Cabaret fans might well incidentally recognise here the brusque German word “bumsen”. Solo Sunny is the work of Konrad “Koni” Wolf, a director with an impressive and strange pedigree: he was a garlanded state-sanctioned artist in East Germany, much admired at the Berlin film festival, whose older brother Markus happened to be one of the highest-ranking officials in the Stasi. It makes Wolf the second most politically compromised German film-maker in history. (The disillusioned communist East German character in Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Ka...
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Hugh Hudson: smash-hit pop classic Chariots of Fire director was a hero of British film

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Hudson brought an ad-man’s eye to the brilliant 1981 drama about athletics and bigotry, as well as directing the hilarious Cinzano commercials

As the 1980s dawned, British ad director Hugh Hudson took on his first feature film and made it a legendary hit: an inspirational story which supplied a sugar-rush of patriotism and a swoon of nostalgia which hit the spot both sides of the Atlantic. It somehow brought off the trick of being about the underdog and the victim of bigotry and religious discrimination – and yet also being a resounding endorsement of the status quo which could, on grounds of decency and meritocracy, always accommodate the outsider. This was the era of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and the ethos of success for the hardworking and the deserving.

The film of course was Chariots of Fire, the true story of the 1924 Olympic runners Harold Abrahams (played by Ben Cross), a Jew who ran to defy prejudice, and Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson), a devout Christian who found a creationist glory in his speed. It was the destiny of so many involved to be forever associated chiefly, or solely, with this smash-hit pop classic: certainly Cross and Charleson never again found roles to match Abrahams and Liddell. And maybe Hudson himself never again had a triumph like it: though he was no one-hit wonder, later directing the Oscar-winning Tarzan drama Greystoke, and later Revolution, an epic about the American revolution starring Al Pacino which was derided but then grew in acclaim, giving his Hudson his own misunderstood masterpiece moment.

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