Film Reviews by CH

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.

The opening half of the first, two-part episode is harrowing stuff and one balks at completing a viewing of the episode. That said, I hear that future episodes - each sufficent to itself - are not like this, and so they might merit a higher rating. Six series to pace out rather than binge upon.

Little-known as this film now is, chances are that Paul McCartney has watched it closely. This might appear an unlikely assertion but one of its East Sussex locations is the building which has since become his recording studio.

What with that fringe of desolate Romney Marsh and the towns of Winchelsea, Rye and Hastings, here is so sparsely populated an area that it suits the smuggling racket. One must wonder, though, how the eponymous pub which provided storage did any regular business. The premises have now been bought by Jane Hylton who brings along trusty employee Dora Bryan, whose boice could be heard through any fog.

Artists have to make a living; even so, it is surprising that Derek Bond combines his easel with another wooden structure: the cross-channel boat which brings the contraband ashore. Jane Hylton will have no truck with this but that does not prevent her from feeling something for him in the slipstream of leaving a husband who is in gaol.

This twin triangle - combined with a potentially atmospheric setting and an strong element of female jealousy - could be the stuff of Sussex noir but the pace does not become enough to make the real and metaphorical windmill turn.. Much of the acting is stiff, what one might call ham on Rye

The area, though, is still sufficient unto itself. Could a film crew return there with a more potent script?

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.