Film Reviews by CH

Light upon The Juniper Tree - and light is the word for the shadows and sky of this film - and one might assume that it was made by somebody of a Nordic background. Especially as it includes the young singer Bjork among a cast who ply the hills and retreats of this Icelandic territory. In fact it was the Los Angeles-based graduate Nietzchka Keene who wrote and directed this late-Eighties film, with support from George Lucas, after a university steeping in the Sagas here combined with an unsettling tale by the Brothers Grimm.

Filmed in black and white, effectively so, it never shies from Death when two sisters flee the stoning of their mother as a witch. One of them uses such scorcery to beguile a rugged man into taking up with her, a ruse deplored by his young son who simultaneously finds a rapport with the other sister (who communicates with the dead mother). This is the essence of the story, its resolution not so much a central concern of the narrative as the film's lingering upon a bleak terrain and the animals - birds, shorn sheep, a fly - for whom it is equally, perhaps more comfortably, home.

One might almost expect Bergman's famous hoodie to put in a scythe-clutching appearance, but, no, Nietzchka Keene fashioned something distinctly her own in such a landscape. It leaves one to discover what else she made - and saddened to find that after an elusive television movie in the Nineties, she died at fifty-two near the beginning of the century, several years before Bergman who made it to eighty-nine.

The dvd includes an interesting interview with her - and, among other things, stretches a point with a 1924 short by some Cambridge undergraduates from its Kinema Club: that emoting encounter with a Spirit on a lane somewhere outside that City is more whimsical than The Juniper Tree which cites and is tangentically linked to Eliot's lines about one beneath which "the bones sang, scattered and shining".

One to see again? Perhaps.

At the same time as it adapted the radio series The Whistler, Universal Studios took on a version of the Inner Sanctum. As with Richard Dix in the other series, this gave a different rôle in each of these six hour-long films to Lon Chaney. Two episodes suggest the variety on offer. In one a doctor turns hypnotism upon himself in order to prove that he did not murder his wife during a weekend which saw him embroiled with a nurse out of town. There are pleasing twists here, and some fine lighting, a tale which scarcely prepares one for another episode in which Chaney visits a remote island for a study of ritual - and returns with material for a book - and a woman he has married there. A situation which doubly riles other academics: there is a parade of outraged women, some of whom had their own designs upon him. Here is a tangled thread, perhaps too much so. If, on this showing, the Inner Sanctum - well shot as it is - does not entrice as readily as The Whistler it certainly shows how much can be done within an hour.

Although silent, The Lodger's opening scream rivals the one which Hitchcock was to bring to Psycho some three decades later. Here was his first foray into murder, which was to be his stock-in-trade.

As so often, he worked from a novel. In this case it was one written by Marie Belloc-Lowndes who published it in 1913. It was set in a boarding house and inspired by Jack the

Ripper. This was recommended by Gertrude Stein to Hemingway as "something that will hold your interest and is marvellous in its own way". He agreed that this and The Chink in thr Armour "were both splendid after-work books, the people credible and the action and the terror never false".

How does this compare with the first of what were to be several film versions of the novel? Hitchcock does not match its continual unease, partly because the eponymous character was played by Ivor Novello, so popular a figure at the time that he could not play a murderer. That said, he exhibits strange behaviour. This includes an attempt to creep into a bathroom where, again an anticipation of Psycho, a young woman stretches beneath the water. All of which arouses the suspicions of her mother, his landlady and a policeman who chances to be smitten with the woman and is also assigned to the case of murders of blonde-haired women whose corpses bear a visiting card with the Avenger's mark upon it.

That said, there are many nascent Hitchcock touches in this expressionist film (and the first of his own appearances). Montage figures throughout, and, in a bold touch, a ceiling turns transparent to reveal the padding feet above. It is subtitled "a story of the London fog", a turn to the weather which is always filmic, as are windows bearing the force of the rain.

It keeps our attention more than it did the splendidly named Mordaunt Hall's. He reviewed it in the New York Times the following year, when it was renamed for that market as Thr Case of Jonathan Drew. It is a droll, bravura article - seek it out - which ends by saying that "all the characters are prone to overact - Mr. Novello especially, he having more opportunity". Curiously, he remarks that the film is fifteen minutes too long. Down the years it has somehow lost its running time and became eighty minutes until its recent restoration by thr British Film Institute to ninety, along with the original tinting. That is not the disc available here, and one might seek that out. As for Mr. Hall, he could have declared an interest: he worked with Hitchcock on the intertitles to films earlier in the decade after returning from Great War naval intelligence work which he was to recall in a memoir which attracted praise. Strange, thr way in which one thing leads to another.

The film's title is adroit, applying to lawyer and villain alike. One holds a stout volume which encapsulates the Law; the other is beholden to that ad hoc rule, not set down in print, by which nobody "squeals" to the authorities about another of the fraternity's misdemeanours.

Such is the mainspring of this early film by Howard Hawks, from a play by Martin Flavin. Phillips Holmes has killed a man whom he thought reaching for a gun in a speakeasy and is betrayed by a woman who swiftly departs the scene, leaving him to be arraigned for murder, in fact manslaughter, and consigned to the slammer for a decade at the behest of a politically ambitious DA, Walter Huston.

With a jump of six years, we find him in a cell scarcely better than the prison's health-shattering jute mill where he toils by day. No longer is he suave, but breaking down, his mother's telegrammed death bringing scant sympathy from his two cellmates, one of whom is Boris Karloff near the start of a career which would find that rigid face in demand. As for the other occupant, he is bitter at the betrayal which brought him back to gaol after one illicit beer while on parole. Plot enough, you might think, and that is already but part of it; what's more, a new Warden arrives and is none other than the DA who sent Holmes down and has not gained State office. This time around, he takes aboard the suggestion that Holmes become his factotum. Everthing looks brighter for him, especially when Huston's daughter (Constance Cummings) becomes smitten.

This world of light and shade - real and metaphorical - is caught well by cinematographer James Wong Howe as the suspense becomes physically palpable, vertiably neck-tightrning, when all turns upon Holmes's dilemma: after a wonderfully-staged breakout attempt, will he squeal about the murder which took place in an adjunct to Huston's office? Watch the scenes with him in solitary at yout peril. Even so, Holmes and Constance Cummings do not have the screen presence displayed by many others in a cast whose work is as dialogue driven as any of the work for which Hawks would become better known - whether, here, the upright but self-seeking tones of Huston or the slang of Karloff and his cronies.

Startling to think that to watch this is to look across ninety-five years at something which is as fresh as ever. And among the extras on the disc is one which sets side by side scenes from it with counterparts not only from Hollywood remakes but foreign incarnations of a story which it would be interesting to see again on stage - difficult though it might be to put out of mind the expressionistic hues of this film, which should be better known.

The cake in question does not fill much of this wonderful film but it is pivotal.

The circumstances of the film's making, of its being digitally smuggled from Iran and winning prizes, has been widely publicised - and is unlikely to change its subject, which is the suppression of women there. Not that these ninety minutes are didactic. The plot is simple. Neither a widow nor a taxi driver (a veteran) whom she overhears in a café has known passion in decades. She contrives to have him ferry her to her house, and invites him in (careful of the neighbours' eyes and tongues). To say anymore would spoil it. You might well guess what is in prospect as they talk. Slow, it never drags, but draws the viewer into the teling of lives which have been a case of forever surmounting inherent disappointment.

Let this not be thought the stuff of despair. There is a relish of life, so much so that the cake makes its celebratory appearance.

What else does it herald after the taxi driver takes a shower? Why did he stop at a pharmacy en route? What happens after the credits roll?

Here is a film to keep viewers themselves talking.

"I'm a funny guy - I even like broccolli." So says John Payne, a smooth-talking sharpster who is front man for a gang out to fleece Joan Caulfield of $100,000 under guise of setting up a West Coast memorial to her war hero husband with whom Payne claims to have served in Europe. Love, or something approaching it, intervenes and there is a fair ration of double cross. Very much the stuff of a noir - not least with Dan Duryea as leader of the gang and lover of Shelley Winters. She, however, is so smitten with Payne that she disobeys orders to hide in Havana and arrives on the scene, complete with a line in the sharp talking which is a highlight of the film, so much so that the viewer accepts the turns taken by the plot. The dialogue makes all this close to a corker. It should be better known.

The idea of this was beguiling but, try as one might, it was undermined by the long takes. If one wants to savour long dialogue, how much better it is to explore the work of Eric Rohmer.

Sad to watch the last two of thr eight Whistler b-movies. The seventh, with Richard Dix, turns around a familar movie trope - rival trucking firms - and keeps up a fine pace as owner Richard Dix also falls foul of a vindicrive police officer but is aifed, in a tale full of double crossing, by Karen Morley as the owner of a diner wjhere her teenage son proves to be one of the savviest of them all. The final film - The Return of the Whistler - lacks Dix but is based on a Cornell Woolrich story and turns - and what turns! - a good variant on the familiar themes of somebody gone missing and a corrupt sanitorium. Both films are well worth watching, and leave one wishing that more films would be made with an hour's running time.

Those familiar with the Whistler series, of which these are the fifth and sixth parts (each a story to itself), will know that there is ingenuity to plot and setting every time. Of these two, the second - about an artist married to a rich , dying woman - is the better even if Mysterious Intruder has some fine moody noir scenes, all alleyways and ill-lit premises.

As for Secret, much is owed to model and femme fatale Leslie Brooks - and leaves one eager to seek out her later Blonde Ice, in which she disposes of a series of husbands (something of an aspiration in this one).

Two more Whistlers to go - a treat in store for anybody who welcomes an intelligent diversion.

Not perhaps now as well known as other Nouvelle Vague films, it features the South of France in a starring rôle, shimmering sea a contrast with a shuddeling roulette wheel which spins more frequently than each coming and going of the tide. A seductive Jeanne Moreau beguiles a dull Claude Mann into chancing his hand on an impossible future. An improbable series of wins appear to vindicate her, and there is an inevitable fall. Say no more, except that there is some fast editing typical of these films but, for all the incidental enjoyment (and Jeanne Moreau's bizarre hairstyle), Demy does not do enough to carry aloft a slight, perhaps magical tale with the panache of a Truffaut. That said, it should be seen by anybody who wants to cover all bases in post-war French cinema.

It is with a start that one finds the name of Ursula Parrott in the opening credits of There’s Always Tomorrow (1956). Who? She died in obscurity the following year but has recently come back to attention for her bestselling first novel, the torrid Ex-Wife (1929) - a title which created the term.

Hers was a wild a life, partly funded by sale of work to Hollywood, which included this story. It was previously filmed at the time (1934), a version now elusive; to see it would make an interesting comparison with this one, a lesser-known part of Douglas Sirk’s work in America. Among its unexpected turns is much use, in various renditions, of “Blue Moon” - and, all the more so, some appearances by a robot. The latter is a potential product for Fred MacMurray’s toy-manufacturing firm - and, before long, an emblem of the life which has tied him to a suburban house run by Joan Bennett and peopled by three ungrateful children (there were five in the 1934 incarnation).

Unlike most Sirk’s other takes on Fifties life, this one is in black and white, as was All I Desire which also featured Barbara Stanwyck. There she created some dust, and she does again. Having risen in the fashion design world, she has returned to the West Coast and looks up this old flame. As these things go, it is innocent enough, with something of Brief Encounter about it, but wildly misunderstood by the children after one of them chances to witness a meeting during these tumultuous days.

So much soap, one might thing. The way in which it is paced (at eighty minutes), with many of Sirk’s typical interior set-ups, makes for something much more involving than that. Barbara Stanwyck does not unbalance the ensemble playing. Here are people whose lives are an emblem of hopes entangled by the fate they were unable to shrug off twenty years ago - and one which might have the children caught in their turn. As for “Blue Moon”, how many recall that the song went through many versions before finding its final, romantic form? Somebody could yet re-discover the version which includes “I could be good to a lover, / But then I always discover / The bad in ev'ry man".

Flashback. It is a familiar technique which is not as easy to use as might appear - whether in book or film. How does one carry the reader and viewer along? The question comes to mind again throughout Robert Siodmak’s Criss Cross (1949).

Written by Daniel Fuchs from a Thirties novel by Don Tracy (recently reissued by Stark House Press after decades out of print), the film takes a while to get (and even keep) going: this is a case of establishing that Burt Lancaster and Yvonne DeCarlo were previously involved and that in his two years’ absence she has taken up with another man, the wonderfully creepy gangster Dan Duryea. He is not best pleased to chance upon this apparent tryst but is persuaded by Lancaster’s riffed explanation that he has a foolproof heist plan: a waylaying of the money-laden vehicle he drives for a living.

Duryea accepts this and so Lancaster is obliged to put into action this flawed notion. So episodic a narrative has one querying its implausibilities time and again, not least a trussed-up departure from a hospital, but the best scenes, including the smoke-filled raid upon that very vehicle, bring to life a vanished Los Angeles.

Mention Yvonne DeCarlo and it’s likely that The Munsters will be mentioned in reply. And rightly so. The shame is that, appear in so many films as she did, very few of them are a patch on Criss Cross which sometimes finds Siodmak close to his finest.

Meanwhile, as for an armoured car robbery, be sure to see Richard Fleisher’s 1950 film of that title which almost matches his The Narrow Margin (1952).

Although filmed in the technicolour for which Sirk's takes on Fifties life are celebrated, this first excursion in it is a throwback to the Twenties and the story - about a millionaire who considers leaving a fortune to the familt of an old flame- is not a patch on the work which follows it. Lacking here is the wherewithal to make for a whimsical comedy in which songs come to the fore now and then. Better to catch up with his earlier work if one has already seen All I Desire and its successors.

Robert Siodmak’s career began with People on Sunday, that 1930 film on which he worked with Billy Wilder and others before the events of 1933 precipitated his departing Germany and, via France, reaching Hollywood. There he found a skill for noir - who can forget his take on Woolrich in Phantom Lady, drumming scene and all?

With our perspective, we can see Deported (1950) as pivotal, a step in his return to Europe and the decline which found him dead a few months after his wife in 1973. Not that Deported can be accounted any sort of failure, even of a falling away. Put simply, it continues those noir elements with Jeff Chandler being released from Sing Sing after five years but not revealing where he has sequestered the $100,000 which landed him in a cell. (For all that lolling on a narrow, badly-sprung bed, he remains straight backed and even sharper suited.) The authorities decide to ease their troubles by exiling him to his native Italy while, naturally, keeping a watch upon his activities in Naples, Siena and other bright locations which contrast with the dark alleys which Siodmak had staked out earlier in the decade.

As in most noir, cherchez la feeme or, as it denizens might say, seek the broad. In this case, Chandler encounters sultry Märta Torén, a widowed Countess who is part of a charitable organisation which helps with food and other supplies for the many citizens poverty stricken by a war which caught them between German and Allied advances.

Yes, Chandler can now see the makings of a scam which could be all his to play for. Use that stash of dollars, via coded telegram, to pay for such supplies as a donation, and then, on their arrival, have these stolen and sold on the black market for more. Quids, liras in.

All this is as evil as the adulterated vaccines in another transplanted noir, the previous year’s The Third Man. The logistics of either racket would daunt many, but one accepts this Italian take on it while watching all of the otherwise leisurely waterside activity (quite a chunk of these ninety minutes). That said, as the crates arrive, there is as much shadowy, warehouse-set activity as any that Greene and Reed had depicted in Vienna by night (as producer Selznick wanted to call their film). Bullets are one thing, tumbling crates another. As long as these do not head our way, we are free to say that Deported provides enough to keep us on side if not quite sufficient to provide a return to these shores, well-populated as they are by the supporting cast.

A stranger arrives in town. So begins many a story, and so it is that the opening of The Green Cockatoo (1938), directed by William Menzies, finds young, wide-eyed René Ray on a train from a small town in quest of the excitement that is London - something she is warned off by a burly passenger of a philosophical leaning who vanishes from the scene after holding forth.

It would be easy at this point not to expect much of the following hour. The film comes, however, with not so much a history as a future. The story was created by Graham Greene, who wrote in a journal of going to Denham to see the first tests for his apprentice work: “The excitement of hearing one’s own dialogue on the screen for the first time. Good dialogue it sounded too.” He himself was apparently not responsible for the screenplay, credited to Ted Berkman and Arthur Wimperis - but he also recorded that he tried to remove every trace of Americanisms from the script, and he chronicled another “lunch at Denham with Menzies and Arthur Wimperis. Wimperis one of those faintly arrogant elderly men with the appearance of naval officers whose chaff goes down so well with their mental inferiors who feel complimented at being noticed at all. I found him curiously unbearable. Harrow and hunting in his manner, and nothing in his career to justify his self-confidence. One of those elderly men who take too much care of their bodies.”

One can see in this note the way in which the film is a conjunction of those at the end of their careers and newcomers set on working with film in a different, less stagebound way. As such, the music is by Rosza while Mutz Greenbaum (later Max Greene), from Germany, brings to it quite a few of those Expressionist scenes which herald noir - even if the street which contains the eponymous club is palpably a painted set (in which an amiable policeman’s glance advises a prostitute it would be wise to vacate the lamp-post against which she is leaning).

How does the club fit into all this? Once off the train and at an underground station René Ray had fallen in with a man (Robert Newton) who advises her to lodge at a boarding house with the unlikely name of Hotel Majestic. There is one room left and she takes it, only to find that he returns, not with wanton intent but because he has been knifed by a race-track gang - very Greene - whom he double-crossed when it came to fixing the odds. His dying words ask her to seek out a man to be found at the club.

As she heads there the plot becomes as creaking as any of the noir staircases which occupy a fair part of this hour. She does not realise that the premises’ unlikely song-and-dance man (none other than a, yes, toe-tapping John Mills) is Newton’s brother. Bizarre is her singing about a Smokey Joe with him. (Greene liked to create song lyrics in his work, though this is not one of his.) More than that, complications ensure as the police follow the Majestic’s landlady in assuming that she is the one to have wielded the knife. No need to linger as a butler (Frank Atkinson) somehow fits into all this as a Jeeves in a vest which contrasts with the gang’s wide-lapelled, spivish suits scarcely damaged by brawls which - so often the case - find furniture in a different state from the one in which started.

Any plot can sound risible, and if The Green Cockatoo does not overcome its premises as smoothly as The Third Man would do, there is more than enough here to show the direction in which Greene was heading with other teams of collaborators.

As for Greene’s phrase about men who take too much care of their bodies, there could be a story or more in that - and we must assume that he did not follow the régime advocated by P. G. Wodehouse and E.F. Benson (seek out the latter’s unlikely 1913 manual, the nakedly illustrated Daily Training).