Film Reviews by CH

Is prison an extreme form of boarding house? The thought comes to mind during Brute Force, although any landlord would find it hard to rent out a room which houses seven men who can only leave its confines for hard labour and a queue to receive unappetising gruel.

Others here have summarised a plot which turns around ribbed fit Burt Lancaster's plan to escape all this and visit a wife beset by cancer (four women appear briefly in the film, each given a brief section which sets out their part in the reason for a man ending up beind bars). Pitted against the prisoners is sadistic guard Hume Cronym. He has supplanted power from the bumbling Warden who lives only for retirement. Cronym's very expressions embody an Evil redolent of the recent German death camps (Wagner plays on a gramophone while he slugs a prisoner with a lead pipe to squeal information). Director Jules Dassin brings a noir pace to all this; it is matched by the light and dark, and vile weather, of William Daniels's cinematograph to make something palpably real of what, in other hands, would seem preposterous. It is also a masterclass in the use of sound.

It is not too fanciful to see here, as with much noir, an emblem of society at large - no less so, an astonishing eighty years on.

Four decades on, and three episodes into the six which comprise the first series, one is soon transported across time and place. That is, up North, where a schoolteacher of carpentry at a secondary school (James Bolam) is in a form of relationship with an English teacher (Barbara Flynn) but perhaps more ardent about jazz. Here is a world of trimphones and cars with problematic chokes and starter motors on ticky-tacky estates. This being written by Alan Plater, there is a surreal take to it all (some of the school staff, and others including a dog walker, could almost spring from Twin Peaks) as Bolam sets off in a quest for discs by the eponymous musician. This leads to the murky world of a church crypt and, via an allotment, brings him further attention by the Law which has taken on an ever-suspicious graduate.

So much for the plot which finds their homes as vulnerable as a smashed greenhouse. There is a beguiling humour to all this dialogue, played at a slower pace by the two main characters than it would be across the Atlantic but with some of the spirit of Nick and Nora about it.

How will it turn out? And what will the other series bring? We shall wait and see - and also go back to an earlier series by Plater, included here, which was re-worked into this high entertainment.

Eighty-five years on, the Mexican border, wall and all, might sound topical. Lither, better coiffured, and blessed with a smooth voice and a clothes sense, though, was Charles Boyer. He has holed up in the Hotel Esperanza - great name for a rundown place - with designs on making it to the American side by dint of charming a bus-driving schoolteacher (Olivia de Haviland) into marriage so that he can then divorce her and summon to his side a former dancing partner (a wonderfully cynical Paulette Goddard).

That is the plot but with it comes a joyful cargo of dialogue supplied by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, who, miracle of miracles, even manage to celebrate a typewriter whose semicolon key has been so often used that it has fallen off. This must be unique in the annals of punctuation, on screen or otherwise. Comic as all this sounds, the film does not lack for emotion, director Mitchell Leisen keeping up a pace which makes one feel for all concerned as events take a turn not to be revealed here. That Boyer survives is no surprise, for the film - very postmodern - has a prologue in which his character arrives at the Paramount set where the director is at work on his previous film I Wanted Wings with a glimpse of none other than Veronica Lake and tells him that he has a tale to make a great hit.

The only disappointment is that I Wanted Wings is among a number of Leisen's films which have yet to appear on disc. Hold Back the Dawn itself was elusive for too long - take this chance to see it.

Although the three television series are very enjoyable - some episodes inevitably better than others -, this film goes the way of many other programmes when seeking greater length: it is palapably stretched out, and the viewer feels as if on the rack. With only a glimpse of Melbourne, it largely takes place amidst the tangle of Middle East politics in the Twenties. The plot - as far as one can follow it - is muddled, and there is recourse to all the the familiar devices of adventure yarns, such as prison escapes, caves, coffins, gleaming jewels, much waving of sabres, a troubled princess. Of the original cast only Miss Fisher and Inspector Robinson figure here (apart from some cameos, such as Aunt Prudence in an English country house), which makes for a further slackening of the dynamics which made the television series so pleasing.

One episode of series three to go - and that makes for another treat in store. How can something which an Australian studio has sold to some 180 countries - including a Chinese remake - not have become more of a relishable talking point?

Word is that television showings of it have been on obscure channels - and likely to disappear as soon as they have been shown. All the more reason to celebrate a tangible box of discs. Based on a popular series of novels, the screenplays exist in their own right as each separate episode turns a startling murder-driven variant on life in 1920s Melbourne - which does not shy from some flirting which often traverses first base. Here are dresses beyond number, well-chassied cars, magnificent buildings - and even more spectacular hats worn by Essie Davis who, in the eponymous rôle, frequently doffs them, and much more, as she brings her life as an heiress to bear upon solving the unfortunate end with which each episode begins.

Such departures can be as gruesome as a decapitation during a fairground show gone wrong (it seems) but all is carried aloft more breezily than disturbingly. Here are characters and pasts in abundance (the Great War is a factor), but central figures emerge as the series develop: her seemingly prudish assistant Dot whose boyfriend is a policeman Hugh in the team run by Inspector Jack Robinson, a stiff-suited figure with whom Miss Fisher is frequently at odds while drawn in by something else about him. Not forgetting appearances by an aunt with a past - played by Miriam Margolyes. As redoubtable is a butler who displays not so much the wisdom of Solomon but that of Jeeves.

For some reason, series three is shorter than the others. One could wish for more of them - but can settle for the film made a few years later.

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.