Film Reviews by CH

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).

How many people know the series of films made in the later Forties introduced by a shadowy off-screen man known as the Whistler? Based on a radio series, eight were adapted for film. Each of these, at about an hour, starred Richard Dix except for the last one (he had died). He was not so much a recurring character but somebody more interesting. He played a different character in each, some more sympathetic than others and all of them fascinating.

With the third of these, The Power of the Whistler (1945) he is a man knocked by a car at the side of a city road, an accident which loses him his memory, as becomes evident when he seeks comfort in a nearby bar and, at an adjacent table, he is seen by Janis Carter who predicts from her tarot cards that he will die within twenty-four hours. Nobly, and with only the clue of some items in his pocket, she sets about helping him restore his identity and fend off a fall of the Scythe.

There is something of film nor to this, as there is the series itself, and this instalment takes a sinister turn. Say no more, but equally praise the next one, The Voice of the Whistler, in which a man who has risen Citizen Kane-like to great business power - the opening has a sequence of documentary extracts to this effect - now learns that he is set to die within months.

Fancifully he proposes to his doctor’s nurse so that, come the time, she will inherit his fortune and be able to support that heroic fiancé. This is, so far, something of a Capra construction, along with a cockney driver who is one of those founts of wisdom that can grate. The film has another startling element which finds the temporary couple retreating to a lighthouse for about half the film, a situation complicated by Dix’s apparent recovery and... Say no more. There is no predicting what form each of these eight films will take. Nor to be watched in a binge but a couple now and then makes for high-level entertainment which defies modest aspirations.

One should not only be thankful that Max Brod ignored Kafka’s instruction to destroy his work but also that, in turn, three decades on, Lorenza Mazzetti took no notice when that executor forbade her to make a student film of his stories while studying at the Slade in the early Fifties.

Her arrival there was heroic. In Italy she and a twin sister had survived a German slaughter which saw off her family. Come her arrival in London and working in a café, she was determined to study art, making bold to arrive at the College and demand to see its director. Little did she realise that she was speaking with the man himself, artist William Coldstream. He was so taken by this approach, along with her assertion “I am a genius”, that he readily admitted her.

Among her discoveries was the Film Society which not only showed films but had the equipment for making them. And so it was that she set about adapting a Kafka story The Country Doctor. These eleven minutes were to prove controversial, for the authorities discovered that she had used the cameras without permission. Ever benign, however, Coldstream organised a showing of it where the audience would decide whether or not she should be punished for what was shown on the screen. Certainly an unusual take on practical criticism. She won support for what she had done; the upshot of which was that she took on another Kafka work, the story in which a man turns into an insect - a rôle taken by lithe fellow artist salesman Michael Andrews - while resident in a dark and narrow boarding house. Much of the running time is silent, the film naturally does not claim to have any conventional narrative - and she was not to set aside such an approach when it led to her becoming part of the Free Cinema movement and as associate of Lindsay Anderson

Together (1956) is also part of a British Film Institute disc of her work made in England. Again Michael Andrews has a part, in tandem with the burlier artist Eduardo Paolozzi (who encouraged the artist and early Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe). They are a pair of deaf mutes who, during the film’s fifty, often silent minutes, stroll around a bombed-out East End, with packs of children following them now and then. (Whatever happened to packs of children?) As with much of the Free Cinema work, there is a documentary nature to all this but it is more than a matter of old buses and cars, vanished shops, riverside work and dredging, labourers in suits. Theirs is a quest which leads in and out of pubs, even finding Andrews seduced in a claustrophobic room. As it happens, the disc also contains a fascinating interview with Lorenza Mazzetti shortly before her death in 2020: she cheerfully recalls that she herself slept with Andrews. So terrible an early life, which she never mentioned at the Slade, led her to relish everything that the decades could subsequently provide.

To watch these films is to become imbued oneself with that spirit - startling though Andrews’s fate is in the film. Exile is also the theme of an extra on the disc, Robert Vas’s 1959 Refuge England, about a man who, escaping Hungary, has been given the address of lodgings in London.

Trouble is he has only the street number and name - Love Lane - and there turn out to be several of these. He traverses them as day turns to night, a different eye upon a beguiling and challenging metropolis. (Both this and Together are also available as part of the Free Cinema box which includes work by Anderson, Schlesinger and others.) The Lorenz Mazzetti disc is limited to a thousand copies, and comes with other commentaries and a forty-page booklet which will lead anybody to her own book London Diary about those years as well as the short recollection The Sky is Falling which, after abandonong it with the opening page, she was encouraged to pick up that piece of paper and keep going, which she did quickly.

At first sight, here, in 1954, is the first of those Fifties films in which Douglas Sirk takes a more subtle view of small-town life than their soap-opera and technicolor hues would lead many to realise. In fact, there is something of a religious parable to this particular tale which - as is well known - sees Rock Hudson, much troubled by a series of accidents which leave a newly widowed Jane Wyman blind, turn from a recklessly speedboating playboy to a caring, well nigh miracle-working surgeon guided to the light by an artist who himself had found epihany.

All this had been the stuff two decades earlier of a film with Robert Taylor and Irene Dunne a few years after publication of the otiginal novel by former pastor Lloyd Douglas, later known for such Biblical epics as The Robe. In all cases, it would be easy to scoff at the preposterous but Sirk's skill, both in setting and pace, carries the viewer along in a way that has one revelling in it all - even at such a moment, perhaps unique in cinema, which finds Hudson stripped to the waist before donning sugical robes to shroud muscles capable of lifting far more than a scalpel.

Here is a film which might appear to encourage a music-drenched wallow but time and again one is jolted from such a posture.

What was known at the time as a supporting feature, and now as a b-film, here is something which outdoes many a longer and splashier work. Much of it takes place in and outside a Home Counties telephone box some six decades ago. Teenage Christina who babysits for the owners of a pub is outside the call box to await the 'bus home when the telephone keeps ringing. From some impulse, she picks up the receiver and, despite finding it's a wrong number, she is beguiled into talking with a strange man, a smooth-talking one with whom she agrees to speak again from the box.

Things look set to go badly from there, with a Chorus figure saying as much - played by none other than Dandy Nichols as the 'bus conductress. Which is a contrast with the cavalier way in which her parents treat the situation after she has mentioned it to her younger sister (Janina Faye), a Buddhist-leaning girl who becomes wise to the imminent danger.

Written by Gwen Cherrell, this is not , for most of the time, so much a thriller as an account of the turmoil in the mind of so many who find a part in so unusual a drama. It is difficult to think of anything quite like it, even those in which a telephone figures largely - and, indeed, the earlier broader-based Never Take Sweets from a Stranger in which Jenina Faye also appeared with similar peril.

There is something to be written about the rôle of the truck in American films - and also the propensity for automobiles to take a tumble over a cliff. Framed (1947) could find a place in both studies. At the wheels of a truck whose brakes have failed, mining engineer Glenn Ford arrives with a smash in a small town where he soon falls victim of a racket which turns around despatching him to a plunging death one night in a car - as envisaged, his body mangled, he would be taken for the married man who has made off with a cool $250,000 from the town bank belonging to her family.

Those are a few noir tropes - added to which is the familar bold one of Janis Carter, lover of that banker and first encountered at work in a café - premises which contrast with her glamour. Play with her at your peril. She seems to know what she is about, but, but..: plotwise, any viewer, at one stage or another, might pull to a halt more swiftly than that opening-minutes truck as her dealings unravel in parallel with Ford wising up.

That said, all this happens at such a pace that there is no time to linger over such items as conveniently-sited, boldly-labelled poison bottle. Well lit, whether the dark of a bar or the light of a highway, the settings play quite a part in carrying one along, relishing it all.

Many a film turns around a courtroom scene. Few, though, have mentioned one of the most dramatic, which occurs halfway through Never Take Sweets from a Stranger. Although filmed in and around Bray, this purports to take place in small-town Canada - and with a child in the witness box. She is interrogated - which is the word - by a brutish defence lawyer, his client the elderly, expressively unspeaking Felix Aylmer who has coaxed her and a friend into dancing naked for him in exchange for sweets.

A bold subject, even now six decades on, for this foray by Hammer into social issues. The young girl, well played by Jenina Faye, tells her headmaster father and mother what has happened while the town conspires to silence them, for the man in question is the elder of a family which has created the town's existence around its business.

In these eighty minutes characters are as sharply played as a narrative which plays well against the light and shade within buildings as well as without.

What's more, the soundtrack is by serialist composer Elizabeth Lutyens. As often, music that many might not be willing to hear on its own proves effective accompaniment to tensions which comes thoughout so well plotted a work. There is a forty-minute account of her as one of several extras which are a part of this cherishable disc (another extra is a revealing interview with Jenina Faye).

Curiously, two years later, Jenina Faye appeared in Don't Talk to Strange Men - another one to seek out amidst these English films which deserve to be better known than they are.

Made a few years before Rear Window and also from a story by Cornell Woolrich, The Window has much in common with Hitchcock's take on a murder seen across the way. Unlike his, this was filmed in New York itself and in an effective black and white, fire escape and all.. Much of the screen time is filled by Bobby Driscoll, a young boy so given to lies which others might call fantasy that nobody - parents, police - believe his claim to have witnessed neighbours topping somebody (for reasons never explained). From the beginning, it is tense, and does not let up - to the extent that one almost does not pause to ask why he is left home alone in a perilous tenement and one or two other matters.

The Mob is pitted against the FBI in a tale which was derived by Fuller from newspaper reports. Front pages figure largely in the narrative after events which have see many felled along the way (including a bicycle, no..., better not give it away: gasp for yourself). With so many villains on display - not so much Mr. Big as Messrs Big - there can become something close to monotony, even confusion. Thank goodness, all is alleviated by Fuller's adroit way with close ups and the use of black and white.

One hardly questions some of the turns which range from poolside to alleyway, both perilous, and yet one might pause to ask why there are no spectators to a prolonged scene which culminates in THE END filling the screen?

Would that Dolores Dawn had appeared in more films rather than returning to teach others in acting school.