Film Reviews by CH

I gave up some fifteen minutes into this, and wondered whether the rest of the film would have proved to be as dull. It is reassuring to look through these reviews and find that my supposition was right. It almost makes one think that Mel Brooks's Spaceballs would be preferable - but I am not inclined to put it to that test.

It was fitting to watch this after The Most Dangerous Game (1932) for it was made at the same time, and both films concern a mind whose two sections are split between characters. The Jekyll and Hyde instance is well known, and exists in its own right as a novella. This first sound version brings to the story a distinction different that of prose itself. Here, we see one team's view of the London setting (made in Hollywood) and the way in which the characters look - in particular the transformation of one eponymous character into the other. This is a marvel of early cinematic technique, and the film as a whole makes remarkable use of close up, light and shadow, and has one of the most provocative displays of a female leg - made all the more so by the sheet from which it protrudes.

All this well nigh amounts to noir long before before noir took its mid-Forties shape. Not that technique swamps the story. That is the familiar one of mystery and pursuit, which springs its own surprise in Stevenson's telling. If a film cannot match that particular technique, here is so much to savour that nobody should miss this version which has been restored to its original length.

A treat after dark.

The previous review has described the plot and the making of this engrossing film. The action, the chase across the island's varied and terrible terrain is but a quarter of the running time. This leaves plenty of room for philosophical discussion in the lounge of the ship soon to meet its end destruction. Only Joel McCrae survives shark-infested seas, from which he emerges to spend even more time upon such talk in the even greater space of a Count's (Leslie Banks) imposing home. Here, a previous arrival, Fay Wray soon loses her brother (Robert Armstrong) to the Count's evil plans.

This sounds the stuff of many a horror film., but there is another angle to this. McCrae plays a hunter for whom, say, a tiger is fair game; he now finds himself the target of the Count's pursuit. The hunter becomes the hunted, and any tiger might cheer on the Count in the task. Are McCrae and the Count aspects of the same person? What does it take for anybody to kill another? This was, apparently, the thrust of the long story - once well known in America - to which this film added a female rôle.

Within this hour, much happens amidst interiors and exteriors to give free range to expressionist cinematography better seen than described. This was the first film with Leslie Banks, a noted stage actor. Be sure to see anything with him in it (such as Went the Day Well? where he is another form of overlord). We must lament that he died suddenly at sixty-one. Anybody drawn to the Dorset village of Worth Matravers by its celebrated small pub The Square and Compass should also be sure to include a visit to the nearby graveyard and, in this very different landscape from the Count's island, pay tribute to this fine actor who is buried there.

An early struggle, boarding houses and all, brought Fannie Hurst material for novels and stories which made her so famous that there was even a market for a memoir, with recipes, of her dieting while the public was also eager for news of her greedy dogs. What's more, all this led to three-dozen films, including two versions of Imitation of Life (as well as a late-Forties Mexican incarnation).

The more subtle of these, with Claudette Colbert, was made soon after the novel appeared in 1933. Better known is the one with Lana Turner a quarter of a century later. In which time, colour had come to the fore - and was never so vivid as in the Fifties work by director Douglas Sirk who, after a varied career in Europe and America, found a whole new subject in this late flourish as a chronicler of suburban American life.

In this take on the story in which two single women - one white, one black - come to share a minuscule downtown flat while bringing up a child apiece, Lana Turner is a stage aspirant who, with success, takes that ad hoc maid (the inspired Juanita Moore) to her series of greater houses. What do their daughters make of this and the parade of men who find a place in a tumultuous narrative? The plot turns upon that, teenage angst exacerbated by an attempted "passing" as white which provokes a sidewalk fight scene with music suddenly redolent of West Side Story.

Summary makes it all sound as clumsy as it it undoubtedly is, never more so than the turn which reveals that the hard-pressed maid had been salting away sufficient money for a funeral which somehow includes a solo turn by Mahalia Jackson herself and, from nowhere, a crowd which the police struggle to keep on the sidewalk as four white horses pull away the black carriage and coffin. For all that, one cannot help be involved, there is so much to savour even if one's taste is more to return to the 1934 version (and watch again Humoresque, that wonderfully preposterous noir which turns around a violin and also sprang from the pen of Fannie Hurst).

Imitation of Life was Sirk's last film although he lived another three decades. In that time, and beyond, his reputation turned from that a man who had worked with whatever material came to hand (both Chekhov and Fannie Hurst) to a savant and auteur. Better perhaps to appreciate him as a man who dealt in both superior entertainment and such clunkers as, from Faulkner, The Tarnished Angels.

Considering the many pivotal moments determined in Touch and Go by black-furred Heathcliff, it is surprising that the cat who played him is not mentioned on the cast list. On the credits of course is the screenwriter William Rose who had envisaged that feline element. This year of 1955 was the same one that his The Ladykillers appeared - and has overshadowed this lighter comedy in which Boccherini plays no part though there is a good jazz moment with Kenny Baker.

The plot is simple. Frustrated at forty in a job with a design company which is oblivious to modern trends, Jack Hawkins chucks it in and determines to take his wife and reenage daughter to make a new start in Australia. That they qualify for an assisted passage is suprising, for they have a desirable house in Chelsea near the river. The timescale is compressed as they are soon ready to go (although the jewelry is not packed) and much happens a day or so before their departure, not least seeking a new home for Heathcliff who - cats know these things - makes a bolt for it and is saved from the river by an engineering student (John Fraser): he and the daughter (June Thorburn) become smitten, the thought of swift parting painful.

Even if the viewer does not feel any of the agony which many of the cast display at the thought of such transplantation, there is so much which is well done here that it makes for something agreeable - and one's only sadness is to learn that a decade later June Thorburn died, pregnant, with thirty-six others when a flight from Spain crashed into a flock of sheep on Blackdown Hill in Sussex.

At more than two hours, most scenes as slow moving as Peter Sellers's voice, Being There is so absorbing that it goes by quickly. The story, from Jerzy Kosinski's novel, is well known, and perhaps not his own creation. Whether or not he took it from a Thirties Polish novel is perhaps irrelevant, for it is a variant on the theme of an innocent in a complex world.

A Candide for our times, Sellers's incarnation of the gardener Chance who has been cocooned from the world all his life is a performance galvanised by all that he sees of that world previously known through the television screen. This gives rise to his catchphrase "I like to watch" which becomes all the more memorable when uttered during the scene where Shirley Maclaine attempts to seduce him (a pleasuring to rival the "I'll have what she's having" of When Harry Met Sally). As memorable are the sexual difficulties suffered by the President (Jack Warden) and his wife when Chance's indvertent fame finds him so acclaimed for his simple wisdom that he could be a front runner for the highest office in the land.

Bring There is, then, hardly a work of stark realism but it goes beyond the limits of a fable to become something genuinely affecting - not least an ending which occured ro director Hal Ashby as he was about to film it. Superby filmed, often within large interiors, Being There achieves a form of magic.

Essentially, Written on the Wind is a small-scale drama, about a discordant quartet of characters, set against the large background that is Texas. Despite being much-troubled and choleric in temper, oil tycoon Robert Stack meets and soon marries Lauren Bacall - to the chagrin of his poorer friend Rock Hudson who is beset upon her but tries to do the decent thing. Meanwhile Stack's man-hungry sister is at large, and testoterone can almost be heard pumping its way along the soundtrack. Some might call it a soap opera but it is all far from clean living; the riches which oil can bring does nothing but soil them. All of this is filmed with the glossy colours which mark out most of Sirk's work in the Fifties, and this distinguihes it from many a melodrama. That said, it feels more of a cartoon this time around, if not much less enjoyable for that.

To reveal anything about the way in which all this resolves itself would be unfair.

Widely thought to have gone off with later work such as Spaceballs, Mel Brooks is often lauded for this, his first film. How much of it can one take? George Harrison often watched it but for some of us, a second viewing disappoints. No need to reiterate the plot here, and every reason to enjoy such moments as the Busby Berkeleyesque moment in which the camera pulls above the on-stage dancers to reveal them as a swirling swastika.

Nothing wrong with bad taste, and The Producers has plenty of it - from dolly birds to elderly dames and Zero Mostel's combover greased in place above those uniquely staring eyes. Trouble is that, short as the film is, there are many longeurs, such as the repetitive opening scenes.

It lacks the crass subtlety of Brooks's best, which is surely Young Frankenstein (and it is worth watching the under-rated parody of Hitchcock, High Anxiety). Also, Brooks himself appears in, but did not direct an effective re-make of To Be or Not To Be which again guys the Nazis from a show-business angle.

The summary does not mention that she appears in the title rôle of The Country Wife, her husband none other than Bernard Cribbens. After a slow start this becomes a bawdy farce. We need more Restoration comedy on disc.

Raymond Chandler highly praised Elizabeth Saxnay Holding's novel The Blank Wall, which differs from this film based upon it two years later. She set the narrative on the East Coast, with a visit to New York instead of a nearby Los Angeles; what's more, this was in wartime, with a neat view of those privations, and more was made of the Black maid's canny sense of a household with a husband/father away while a teenage daughter's infatuation with an older man brings apparent murder and palpable blackmail in its wake.

The novel, naturally enough, has a detective on the case, a significant strand of pressure which is absent here - and so, curiously enough, does not beset Lucia, the mother, played by Joan Bennett in something which combines director Ophuls's luxuriant manner with noir. Everything, at eighy minutes, moves much faster than a novel which does lose some pace two-thirds of the way through. Well done, though, is the affinity which grows between Joan Bennett and one of the blackmailers who is elegantly played by James Mason (the daughter, Geraldine Brooks, could almost be her mother's age)..

Among its many details of suburban household life which anticipate Sirk's Fifties dramas is a theme of imminent Christmas. It is surprising that all this - although nary a snoflake falls - is never mentioned as one of those films which, one way and another, have a seasonal place.

Will the blackmailer find that Santa has brought him something? Watch and see.

But for a pivotal rôle by barfly Gloria Grahame and a brief appearance by Jacqueline White, here is a film in which men, including Robert Mitchum, are to the fore in all their post-war bigotry and vulnerability.

It opens, noir-fashion, with a killing in the shadows of a room. Only after a while does it emerge that this was driven by anti-semitism. For some time, as attention switches between a group of servicemen, the plot is convoluted until pipe-smoking detective Robert Young's efforts engage sufficiently with the others' for the hulking Robert Ryan to give himself away.

Without a conventional narrative (it also includes flashbacks, some of which require the camera to mimic a drunken haze), this is a film to enjoy more for its parts than its resolution - and, in a narrow timeframe, what brilliant parts these are. That said, a remake could take an interesting angle upon The Brick Foxhole, the now-elusive novel by Richard Brooks upon which it was based. In that novel, Brooks (who became a film writer and director) made the murder turn upon homosexuality, a bold stroke then forbidden upon screen. Eight decades on, this could yet be the stuff of a period drama.

... as Dylan's lyric continues, "but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?"

This comes to mind when watching The Whole Town's Talking which might well be called - to continue the Dylan angle - Ballad of Fat Men, for it stars portly Edward G. Robinson, who takes two rôles in it. One of these is mild-mannered clerk Mr. Jones who, in his rooming house, aspires to write hard-boiled fiction; the other is an escaped murdering monster Mannion.

Such resemblance is a trope established in fiction long before the camera was invented, but this film (from an outline by W.R. Burnett and co-written by Robert Riskin) has particular brio, not least because it requires Robinson not only to take a very different rôle from his hard-boiled, side-of-the-mouth manner but also to guy it - as he does when reaching for a sub-machine gun (of which a henchman remarks, "this is the humane method").

All of this is hardly something one associates with its director John Ford. And, ninety years on, one must also marvel at the way in which he had the two Robinsons appear in the same shot.

The whole thing is wonderfully lit. If there is anything to lament, it is that the luminous Jean Arthur does not appear in more of this miraculous narrative.

Pedants among us might wonder what became of the bath which Jones left to overflow in the opening minutes and to relish his canary but wonder why his cat disappears for the rest of the action. Then again, that's cats for you.

Anybody who sees this masterpiece will urge it on others.

Others, evidently, rank it higher.

For some tastes, though, as a noir it lacks the punch of the best of these (many of which feature Bogart). The narrative is uncertain, the banter as awkward as the plotting. There are incidential pleasures, of course, but it pales beside another one chockful of unlikely characters (including another Fat Man - Robert Morley) directed by Huston with Bogart to the fore: Beat the Devil.

As for The Maltese Falcon, it would be interesting to see the earlier versions, one of which was titled Satan Meets a Lady. These though are elesive

Long unavailable, and filmed twice before, this proved a disappointment, for, despite thr presence of Boyer, the opening twenty minutes did not establish the promised embroilment.

When did womem cease walking across the room in nothing but a long, neatly-pressed shirt which perhaps belongs to the man also upon the premises?

This is but one - twice over - of the Seventies tropes which find a place in Night Moves. This also finds room for a small boat with the name POINT OF VIEW stencilled across its rear. This is perhaps an in-joke for a film, directed by Arthur Penn and written by former novelist, Scotsman Alan Sharp which echoes other works. The main point of view is that of private investigator Gene Hackman whose latest case is as tangled as the one behind The Big Sleep (including his own fraught marriage)..

In Los Angeles he is hired by a one-time actress to seek out her teenage daughter (Melanie Griffoth) who is no blushing violet. On the contrary, she turns out - in Florida - to be distinctly pink-bottomed and living with her stepfather.. These are but a few elements of a plot which also finds room for smuggling and stuntmen. It is as if almost anything could surface in a narrative whose body count accelerates through these hundred minutes. This is not time wasted, there is always something to keep the attention, and it is all more engaging than the bizarre work to which Penn next turned: The Missouri Breaks.