Film Reviews by CH

On the face of it, this last work by Alan Plater is undemanding. It is, in fact, an affecting account of a North-West shipyard worker - Kevin Wheatley - who was traumatised by thr Somme into abandoning religion. Meanwhile, with thr outbreak of another war, his Catholic wife leaves him for a sailor, and he finds some respite from this in the Home Guard which includes Marxist-leaning colleague Robson Green. A plot about subordination works in tandem with his finding love amidst the falling bombs.

Perios detail - houses, clothes, music - are well managed. One is drawn in by these eighty minutes - a corner of war which perhaps resonates more than thr familiar newsreel by which it is intrtleaved.

A narrow partition divides the raw from the melodramatic. Slip the wrong way and a film can rattle as much as a studio set. The Man with the Golden Arm, which was filmed in Hollywood rather than the Chicago of Nelson Algren's novel, does not entirely escape this. It depicts a drug addict (Sinatra) who is fresh from gaol and clean awhile before again caught in criminal, card-dealing circles while his attentions are given to women, Kim Novak and Eleanor Parker) neither of whom leads a blameless existence. Along with a roster of sharpsters and those with an eye on the main chance (including Woody Allen lookalike Arnold Stang), Sinatra's is a torrid existence well drawn by that variable director Preminger as the jazz score (including a classic scene of Sinatra's drumming) echoes across scenes in many a boarding-house room.

The title is in fact a noun - a remote small town - rather than an adverb. Much happens without warning, though, in these eighty minutes as Sinatra and two other hired assassins get wind of a Presidential visit to the railroad station for transfer to a car. They, posing as Secret Service agents, arrive at the same time as a visit by the President's advance security staff makes the town's population seem to double. For all these well-handled exteriors, the focus is on a house in firing line of the railroad station. Here a widow and her young son live with her father-in-law (himself a retired security agent). In a sudden move, they are held hostage by well-dressed Sinatra and his nervous cohorts while a rifle is installed, bolted in place, ready for... well, past assassinations are mentioned, this one a decade ahead of the Book Depository.

That is the large-scale resonance of Suddenly but, without saying any more, most of the drama takes place within the house as the main killer's past becomes as pivotal as the hostages'. Everything has a part, including a recalcitrant television set, every quiet moment is as suspenseful as the outbursts, mechanical or human, which puncture them.

Not a film to describe in detail - and it has many more of these -, it is one to savour for oneself and reflect that, no mere Fifties b-movie, it shares much with, and holds its place against, later, elaborate conspiracy-driven work.

This is not Raoul Walsh's most fast-paced film - except of course for those scenes in which the energetic little dog Pard chases the car in which Bogart and the great Ida Lupino leave the remote shack in which they are holed up pending a raid on a hotel/spa. For this task, Bogart has been sprung from jail most imaginatively - and along the escape path meets a family in a jalopy which appears to have strayed from The Grapes of Wrath. In that is Joan Leslie, a handicapped daughter for whom Bogart falls as much as Ida Lupino does for him.

That is much of the plot, adapted from the novel by W. R. Burnett. It is more a series of well-realised scenes than a flowing narrative - although everything is vindiated, dog and all, by the final scenes which make plain the existential angle which was always a part of noir, which in this case is more a reflection than the city which is so oftrn thought its natural habitat.

You too, with a few strokes of the knife, could look like Humphrey Bogart. That is the premise of Dark Passage.

From David Goodis's novel, everything is seen for an hour through Bogart's eyes, his only physical presence that unmistakeable voice as he describes what is happening after leaving jail for false conviction of murdering his wife. Some of this voiceover also comprises his dialogue with those seen full on - including the cab driver (Tom Andrea) who puts him onto the side-alley surgeon (Houseley Stevenson) who can wield the knife, swath him in bandages and leave him to pull them off in a week's time with the help of Lauren Bacall, who had long thought him innocent and wrote to a San Franciso paper to say as much.

Preposterous is scarcely the word for all this but Delmer Davis brings to his own script the panache for a fine entertainment which owes as much to its cinematography as it does a cast which carries the absurd - even call it Absurd - with aplomb.

I have to concur with CP who did not at all care for this film. From the start it is ragged with no real suggesrion that this is life as it is lived. Nothing wrong with a film being raw bit it should br involbing rather than alienating. A disappointment as I had rented it before going to see one of screenwriter O'Rowe's plays - let's hope that is more engaging.

Has there ever been a film with so large an uncredited cast which finds itself moving between dream - or, rather, nightmare - and reality in the aftermath of the Korean War when, come the early-Sixties, a veteran of it, Laurence Harvey is programmed to assassinate politicians? From Richard Condon's novel, here is also an unlikely but credible mixture of Sinatra and Angela Lansbury. They have but one brief scene in which neither is aware of the other. Say no more, as her son Harvey goes about his task, and Sinatra becomes aware of what's afoot.. Add in two women of similar looks - Janet Leigh and the lesser-known but accomplished Leslie Parrish - and one finds the wild card of love adding to trouble ahead heralded by a pack of cards in which the Queen of Hearts ever looms.

Strange to think all this - realistic and fantastic - lasts more than two hours. A series of scenes, well-nigh set pieces,with wonderful photography, light and shadow matching the continual subterfuge, as everything past and present sits together, keeping one guessing until the very last minutes (these feature an earlier incarnation of Madison Square Garden). All of which prompt one to watch again Suddenly, a smaller-scale work in which Sinatra is mired in a killing spree. He was a better actor than many realise. Naturally, he appears at home whenever events here conspire to land him in a bar - and this disc has an extra in which he discusses the way in which a great brawl was staged. It looks as though a table fell apart in the course of events rather than being scored through to speed that crash. This is but one of the many details meticulously prepared which make so large scale a work curiously, even Oedipally intimate.

A man in a white suit and hat who fills the screen while the adagio from Mahler's Fifth swells upon the soundtrack. No, the scene is not Venice but somewhere in Japan - and with even more of an erotic import, for he resorts to food as an element in arousal including the most startling use of eggs on screen since Cool Hand Luke. All of which might sound more than bizarre but, then, this is Tampopo.

That is the name of the owner of a noodle restaurant whose handiwork is found lacking by another man, a truck driver with a penchant for Westerns. He takes it upon himself to give her a tour of other places to see how the food should be created. And that is about the sum of these two hours which bring many a strange encounter setting the country is so surreal a light the viewer might assume it is all true. How much of it can one take? Some relish it but, as a film, it is more a series of sketches - but so was Magical Mystery Tour which contains a scene which came to John Lennon in a dream and which he acted out: the serving of endless pasta with a shovel to a custoimer , a situation which perhaps influenced the best-known scene in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.

Which means that this note has mentioned four films in two paragraphs, as befits Tampopo which, with its gangster and Western elements, is steeped in film.

Very Post-Modern, very Eighties.

Except for a brief but pivotal rôle by ever-sultry Ava Gardner, Seven Days in May (1964) is a well-nigh all-male concern with each of them, from the President down, concerned to keep a calm demeanour amid events which could have consequences for the Western world - even the world itself.

Based upon a recent novel which required two authors and was a bestseller in its time, this is part of that apocalyptic turn which Hollywood took when the Cuban crisis had one and all on edge for some while afterwards (director John Frankenheimer's previous film was The Manchurian Candidate). Put simply, here is a scenario in which the President has reached an accord with Russia to dismantle such armaments. That this is controversial is established at the outset by a brawl between rival demonstraters in front of the White House. Placards and limbs take a beating which is, in its way, a mirror of what happens more decorously inside the Oval Office with the stiff-suited military personified by Burt Lancaster as a General who opposes such appeasement. It emerges that he is part of a plan to oust the President (Frederic March) but little knowing that the upper ranks' Kirk Douglas, derided as a pinko sympathiser, will turn whistleblower.

Although preparatory events are taking place in a remote corner of the country while a crucial official is killed in a plane crash near Madrid, this is not a film in which action is to the fore; these two hours show that dialogue can provide an ever-shifting stand-off.

Oh, despite all these high flyers, let us not forget another woman, Collette Jackson. Who? She makes a brief and memorable appearance as an apparent barfly with useful information to relay. As she bops across the floor, she is, what with her hairstyle, a very emblem of the time. One must wonder what became of her. She married Preston Sturges's son Solomon, appeared in a few more films while never coming to the fore - and her death in 1969 at thirty-five, some say by an overdose, has never been explained.

A success in its time, A Time to Love and a Time to Die (`1958) appears to have fallen from general awareness. Certainly it does not resonate as widely as All Quiet on the Western front. That too was taken from a novel by Remarque, who, narrowly avoiding a return to Great War battle, found that by the late-Twenties he was adept at depicting people in wartime (fittingly, that bestseller was filmed by a director named Milestone).

A Time to Live and a Time to Die too was made soon after Remarque's novel appeared. His novels were a hot ticket in their time and remain in print. This was to be the film with which Douglas Sirk returned to a Germany which he had fled in the Thirties and, after a diverse array of Hollywood films (including an unexpected take on Chekhov), became known for the brilliantly lit series of domestic small-town melodramas such as Imitation of Life.

Colours are naturally more muted in the ravaged terrain of wartime Hamburg to which John Gavin returns on leave from the Eastern front in a quest for his family. There he encounters the family doctor's pretty daughter Liselotte Pulver. Despite the strictures of her landlady (Agnes Windeck), love blossoms (symbolised somewhat awkwardly by a tree doing so early). She too wonders what has happened to her father who has been hauled to a concentration camp - something about which Gavin's schoolfriend David Thayer might have information, what with his rise in Nazi echelons bringing him a house in which even more antlers are hung upon the walls than there are women across the sofas.

All the while, upon the wide screen, bombs fall, buildings ignite and tumble in what were known as the Firestorm Raids - forcing out, ironically enough, those who sought refuge from Gestapo forces in hidden rooms (Remarque himself credibly plays a radical professor who offers sanctuary). Quandaries are compounded by pressure upon Gavin to return to the front. What will happen to him and his lover? Where has she gone? There are many tropes here familiar from romantic drama, and this is not the place to reveal more of what happens during a film which keeps one's attention for all of its 132 minutes. These do not fall back upon the easy option of relentless action. The novel is rooted in talk rough and smooth - and one soon learns almost to accept the American accents in which most of the cast speak.

Undemanding. The adjective is widely taken to be pejorative. This need not be the case. As such, Alan Plater's film makes for a diverting entertainment. Widowed, well-heeled Judi Dench chances upon an old flame (Ian Holm), something of a reprobate, who, beneath a female wig and dress, had been a bed-hopping drummer in her otherwise all-female jazz group which played in clubs during the war in something of an Ivy Benson style.

After now busking successfully in her grief with a young man (coins filling his guitar case), her children's disapproval grows - all the more so as that renewed outing for her saxophone brings her and Holm the idea of reuniting the wartime group for a gig at her grandaughter's (Millie Findlay) school (where they will take the stage to more acclaim than the punkish thrashers who precede them).

To get that far she and the spivish Holm travel about in a quest to prevail upon the band to take up their instruments again (he knows a car dealer who, at one point, loans him an E-type to her disapproval). Clues bring them to a Scottish castle and a gaol (where Billie Whitelaw is bailed out) while Joan Sims's end-of-Hastings-pier piano turn contrasts with June Whitfield's marching in the Salvation Army. As these and others agree to take part with varying degess of enthusiasm and reluctance (Cleo Laine and Leslie Caron were also members), things progress from these diverse, well-filmed locations to a sometimes fraught rehearsal room.

It is a sure thing that the performance turns out well - but will romance bloom again?

That's as maybe but, all the while, to good effect, that narrative is intercut by wartime scenes, bomb shelters and all, which find the band on fine form (an array of players as the then-young women). On and off the stage, this is a genially foot-tapping film which leaves one keen to see the later stage play in which Plater returned to the war itself to depict the band's origins.

What else is there to say about Double Indemnity? We know from the outset, as insurance sakesman Fred MacMurray speaks into a dicraphone's tube, that he has been beaten in a bid to pull a scam after falling for schemingly married woman Barbara Stanwyck. Thw suspense is no less greater for that as Wilder and Chandler's screenplay takes in a story which is as much about place - the various LA locales - as the characters who inhabit it. Masterly in every aspect, with Edward G. Robinson quietly pitted against MacMurray as suspicions grow, here is a film in which all involved will continue ro live on.

For a film which has a film editor as its protaganist, many of the scenes - including one about edting a sci-fi episode set on a spacecraft - are prolonged. The viewer is irritable at being denied the next stage in the course of events in this West Coast romance. Suspense falls away, and wry remarks now and then cannot help bring the necessary momentum to this take on a romantic comedy.

Author of many novels, some of which became plays and films, Margery Sharp is most associated with one which became animated: The Rescuers. Too little known now, and decidedly animated in the general sense of the word, is Cluny Brown. This became Lubritch's last film. Made in 1946, and set eight years earlier, it is a satire upon the English upper classes' hidebound notions, with an emphasis upon their deploring Jennifer Jones in the eponymous role as a womam for whom pleasure offers nothing greater than taking a spanner to a pipe and unblocking the laden sink above.

She finds herself as a maid in a country house where Charles Boyer (whom she has previously encountered) has been offered sanctuary from German persecution. They are kindred spirits, and make this the most unusual of romantic comedies, one encapsulated in the phrase "nuts to the squirrels!" - or should that be "squirrels to the nuts!"? Either way, this is one of the many details, such as a well-bred welcoming pot of tea and crumpet, which sound preposterous in summary but prove to have a logic as comic and affecting as the entire film.

Be sure not to miss it.

Frivolous as this might appear, it is impossible to watch any circus film without thinking of the climactic scene of At The Circus which finds Margaret Dumont launched from a cannon to join Groucho, Harpo and others, their hands and heels clutching one another's, as they swing from a single trapeze. How they managed this is something one does not endeavour to discover. Well known, though, is that former circus star, Burt Lancaster himself had performed upon a trapeze: as he had done, his character suffers an accident. Unlike Lancaster himself, who turned to acting, his character becomes a trainer, his latest pupil an upstart Tony Curtis who is in a quest to perfect the perilous triple. Something which could do without their becoming part of a love triangle with the schemingly sultry Gina Lollabriggida.

How will it all end? The suspense is - literally - up in the air. The best scenes are those above the safety net (although honourable mention must be made of Sid James as a man who handles snakes which could become more ferocious than quiescent if he were to give one of his trademark cackles). The scenes elsewhere in the tent and the Paris of the outside world pale, they have none of the charge which Lancaster and Curtis were soon to bring to Sweet Smell of Success. If one missed the opening credits of Trapeze, one might not readily guess its director was Carol Reed - and one wonders whether the final scene, with its long walk, turns a variant on that which makes The Third Man's rather more heartbreaking.