Film Reviews by CH

Headlines appear as newspaper pages are turned in Cat and Mouse (1958) - and bring a running commentary.

BISHOP BRAINS BOBBYSOXERS

“Well, I bet he has a bit of fun himself.”

DOPE FIEND SWITCHES SEX

“The things people get up to, Sarge!”

As it turns out, all this makes for a crucial moment but to cite these droll remarks does not give anything away. Here is a film with curious origins. Adapted from one of the many hundreds of novels by John Creasey, it was directed and co-written by none other than Paul Rotha who was, of course, best known for his documentaries praised by Graham Greene with the caveat that they were “seldom free from a certain prettiness and self-consciousness”.

Prettiness is not to the fore in this tough tale, apart from Ann Sears. She arrives at a bedsit house somewhere in London in answer to a summons by a wonderfully creepy Hilton Edwards who had witnessed the crime for which her father was hanged twenty years earlier: the killing of a man during the theft of some diamonds which, Hilton asserts, do survive – and he wants his share.

This is but a prelude, for he takes a tumble – and the noise of their altercation is heard by a man the other side of the door: Lee Patterson. As suave as he is insecure, he hits on her and a plan to collar the sparklers. Far from documentary – apart from its nighttime scenes in the West End -, most of the film is a matter of interiors. Some might question the implausibilities but, then again, one can do so of Hamlet. There is enough happening here – ample mcguffins – to carry one through its seventy-five minutes with a relish aided by a fine musical score, the work of Edwin Astley (he of The Saint and much more), whose daughter was to marry Pete Townshend a decade later.

There is surely much more of John Creasey that could be filmed. He knew how to plot, and others could supply snappy 2022 dialogue.

“They can get courage from a bottle – but we've got lipstick.”

So says one woman to another in one of the many fraught dark moments which comprise the eighty-minute running time of Split Second (1953). That sounds the stuff of film noir dialogue but this was also the decade of hostage drama (so well caught in the Sinatra of Suddenly) and one in which an unfettered Bomb loomed. All these elements are drawn together in a film directed by Dick Powell who had moved from musical comedy to a noir starring rôle – and he is now so effectively behind the camera as events unfurl in a remote spot where a town has been cleared for another mushroom cloud to reach for the sky as dawn breaks.

What is the need for these Bomb testings? The effect had already been shown in practice.

For all that, at the time, Manny Farber said of the film, “an unusually good performance by Stephen McNally”. He has broken out of gaol, a flight which has landed a comrade with a chest wound: that bullet needs retrieval to fend off a festering death.

One way and another, an unlikely crowd – half-a-dozen others - chances to be fenced in. The very spot upon which the Bomb is likely to render all their immediate preoccupations a tawdry concern, these bright open skies a variant upon an old dark house.

And very good it is too.

What's more, McNally's repeated threat that others should not dare to be “cute” - that is smart - prompts one to look up Jonathon Green and find that this usage dates from eighteenth-century low-life.

Here is a masterpiece.

“Boy, before the evening's over, I might poison him.”

“I'll toss you for it!”

Such is the exchange between two Broadway showgirls on the pavement in Twenties Manhattan after they have been introduced to a gag-laden, straw-chewing Danny Kaye who had just arrived from hixville to ply his cornet in a band which plays to audiences in a swanky hotel. He persuades them to head to Harlem and hear a hot player (Louis Armstrong), with which one of them (Barbara Bel Geddes) afterwards falls in love with him during a taxi ride southwards.

All this, some two decades making for the two hours of The Five Pennies (1959), is based upon the life of Red Nichols, who himself supplied the soundtrack for the fingering well mimicked on screen by Kaye. Manny Farber wrote of it at the time, “even a schmaltzy jazz delight like Danny Kaye's hot cornet film The Five Pennies, has a solidity and thoroughness that belongs in an Encyclopedia Britannica discussion of post-Dixieland music”.

As musical bio-pics go, this might not rank as highly as Love Me or Leave Me, Young Man With a Horn and Yankee Doodle Dandy but Kaye's is a bravura performance whose comedy is given heft by his on-the-road, card-playing life being transformed by news that his daughter Dorothy has fallen victim to polio (a growing rôles shared so well by Susan Gordon, who died soon after Nichols's daughter, and Tuesday Weld).

Talking of which, Kaye and Barbara Bel Geddes talk during a dance-hall scene of having “a real corny, old-fashioned family”; with which, she informs him that she is “three months' corny”, which appears to be a one-off term for pregnant.

How well is this film now known? It provides more than enough to make one want to see more of Danny Kaye.

“Simone de Beauvoir is not on trial!” So proclaims the defence lawyer (Charles Vanel) when her name is mentioned during a murder trial, his client Brigitte Bardot in the dock of a crowded courthouse which is partly the setting for La vérité (1960).

The author's name had been mentioned as part of a reflection upon the way in which women are oppressed in society, with catastrophic results. That reference might lead some to recall that Simone de Beauvoir had written a long, philosophical article in 1959 for Esquire about Bardot, soon reprinted as a paperback book.

Bardot, to her own horror, was everywhere as the Fifties became the Sixties, but one might now ask how many watch those films then thought sensational. (John Lennon had a photograph of her on his Liverpool wall and encouraged his future wife to dress like her.) To miss La vérité, though, would be a tremendous shame: it shows how very good she could be. Directed by Henri-George Clouzot (he of half-a-dozen masterpieces such as The Wages of Fear), it was created, from true-life inspiration, by him and several other screenwriters (with sections suggested by Bardot herself). This befits a film which cuts from the court room to the several strands of a narrative which lands Bardot with her hands on the wooden dock as she gives vent and has to be silenced by the Judge.

The magnificent black and white cinematography brings out the shades of grey which make something complex of the gunshots of subsequent events. (One might also think, around that time, of Ruth Ellis in Hampstead and of that great film with Diana Dors, Yield to the Night.) Put simply, Bardot has joined her sister (Marie-José Nat) in a Parisian rooming house where they share a room which one of them has to vacate when matters amatory are in prospect.

Location scenes catch so well this era in Paris: streets with cars as curved as many of those on the pavements; strolls from one night-time café to another (topically, one is called Le Spoutnik); television screens are watched through shop windows; one almost expects a glimpse of Sartre struggling to re-light his pipe - but there isn't. Into the fray comes Sami Frey, a handsome student of conducting. His affections volley between Bardot and her sister; that love triangle has to take second place to the podium of an orchestra whose work includes some forcefully rendered Stravinsky.

Here ensue rows worthy of Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee. The walls of these humble rooms close in, before cutting back to the expanse of the court room where the two lawyers engage in jousting which parallels those rows (Paul Meurisse for the prosecution). All this is as free-flowing as the emergent New Wave, so much so that, afterwards, it is a surprise to find that the film has lasted well over two hours. No scene is superfluous.

Bardot, like Marilyn, could bring tremendous resources to the screen when the likes of Clouzot and Wilder were behind their cameras. A process which, on set, could be as fraught as any of those encounters which make La vérité an enduring reflection upon the way in which passion can dwindle into a power struggle with so many in its wake.

As for John Lennon, it is said that in the late-Sixties he and Bardot briefly met but, one way and another, communication was hopeless: “worse than meeting Elvis.”

“I don't want to hear what you've got to say! You've got a lot of crust!” So declares Jane Randolph to a detective (Hugh Beaumont) as he steps in and tries to turn her when it becomes plain that her beauty salon is the front for the murderous gambling racket which is the mainspring of Railroaded! (1947).

The film's dialogue is as dark as its seventy-minute setting. Jonathon Green's matchless dictionaries of slang reveal that crust, in this sense of nerve, dates from 1900 American colleges. There is much crust to the film's characters as Jane Randolph joins those (including the police) who try to pin murder upon Sheila Ryan's brother, who, when accused of stealing $5000, is asked what he spent it on and replies in exasperation, “the first thousand on bubblegum and the rest on beer.”

Written by John Higgins from a story by Gertrude Walker (both had noir credentials), it was brought to the screen in fine style by director Anthony Mann. Manny Farber referred to Mann's “inhumanity to man, in which cold mortal intentness is the trademark effect... The films of this tin-can de Sade have a Germanic rigor, caterpillar intimacy, and an original dictionary of ways to punish the human body. Mann has done interesting work with scissors, a cigarette lighter, and steam, but his most bizarre effect takes place in a taxidermist's shop. By intricate manipulation of athletes' bodies, Mann tries to ram the eyes of his combatants on the horns of a stuffed deer stuck on the wall”.

None of this takes place in Railroaded! We find here, though, that beauty is certainly no defence against a loaded gun, but all that is capped by a brawl in which two women combatants out-do that celebrated instance of Destry Rides Again. It's small wonder that a smart apartment's sofa does not collapse with the final push.

Terrific stuff, and if it does not find a place among 1001 movies to see before you die, it should certainly be high in the list for that eternal cinema upon a cloud the other side of St. Peter's Gate. Better, though, to sneak it in this side of Paradise.

“Basil Radford.” In any word-association challenge, the name is likely to bring the reply “Naunton Wayne!” They were to reprise that cricket-obsessed pair from The Lady Vanishes quite a few times. There is good reason instead for replying “The Flying Squad!”

Made in 1941, this is just short of an hour in length. Cinematically speaking, it was made as rapidly as the Edgar Wallace novel upon which it is based (he could dictate one in a weekend). As such, it sports the familiar Wallace device of a scam in which the élite conspire with low life (the latter set to take the rap, should things go awry). Boldly, it turns around an import business – an aeroplane by night – which uses face powder as a front for what appears to be cocaine. Even more boldly, the Bond Street ringleader is a suave Jack Hawkins who would become noted for the portrayal of probity itself (except of course for that masterpiece The League of Gentlemen).

Along the way, Hawkins has caused the brother of glamorous Phyllis Brooks to meet a watery end, something which prompts a Scotland Yard Inspector (Sebastian Shaw) to prevail upon her to nail this long-running racket. Her many furs spring up against art-deco settings, but all the while a violin plays, a haunting reminder of the dead.

Hokum, of course, but Basil Radford's appearances – in gaol and without - transform this into something else – and make for one of the best endings to a film (which brings back ever-rebarbative Kathleen Harrison who supplied a good what-for early on). Here is time well spent.

“You can talk until your tongue is dragging on the floor!”

And talk they do, throughout Twelve Angry Men (1957). What can left to be said about this film version of Reginald Rose's play? It continues to hit one straight in the heart and in the forehead, which is what one of the jurors threatens to do to some of the others in that closed room. Even then, it sports a glugging watercooler whose paper conical cups ease their tempers as a humid summer's afternoon tacks towards a storm and an evening's verdict (despite which, many keep their ties in place).

What's more, one of them asks another, topically enough, “don't you ever sweat?”

This is a tale, in resonant black and white, told in retrospect as the diverse Jurors, each known only by their number, listen to architect Henry Fonda who elucidates his doubts about a murder which has happened three months ago in the midnight shadow of an elevated railway. Here is logic contending with prejudice, that social concern which was so often the mark of Sidney Lumet's films.

Mostly sporting ties and with ashtrays to hand upon their shared table, these men often lurch to contradict the others and have to be reminded that “we're talking about somebody's life here” (an ad man doodles and claims it helps him think).

One might wonder how it was filmed, for it does something interesting with time. These ninety-five minutes appear seamless, the stuff of one take, but daylight turns to dusk as the hours go by. A working definition of suspension of disbelief.

Lest it all appear technical, the dialogue includes such lines as the ad man's variant on run it up the flagpole: “let's put it out on the stoup and see if the cat laps it up.” As one of them sneezes, he is told, “your horn works, now try your lights!”

“He don't even speak good English.” “Doesn't speak.”

One could say more, but should not spoil it for those yet to see this masterpiece. Simply ignore Manny Farber's contemporary description which reduces it to Lumet's “bringing a hundred tiny details of schmaltzy and and soft-center 'liberalism' into a clean mosaic”. And Farber also derides it as “the shrill tingle of... couterfeit moviemaking”.

Watch this film and call upon others to bring a verdict upon Farber.

“Altogether elsewhere, vast / Herds of reindeer move across / Miles and miles of golden moss, / Silently and very fast.” The concluding stanza of Auden's 1947 poem “The Fall of Rome” - an allegory about the nature of society – comes to mind when watching The White Reindeer (1952).

It was written by director Eric Blomberg with his wife Mirjami Kuosmanen who also stars in it (and died too young a decade later). She plays a newly-married woman whose husband is so often away that she prevails upon a shaman in their remote, snowy homestead to bring him back. He does so but the catch is that the process brings out this beautiful woman's latent witch: now and again she will turn into the eponymous creature who leaps from the herd which swirls across the landscape. None of the human tribe is safe from her predations.

That is the sum of it, and, put like this, it might sound the stuff of nordic Hammer. This is to reckon without Blomberg's wonderful filming of that land, and, being almost silent, the hypnotic score which evokes the wind and the ever-moving animals of a Lapland briefly visited by the sun. As with the places to which Auden alludes, the film is a meditation upon the fragility of society. What will survive of us is reindeer.

A familiar situation. Disparate people find themselves in a remote spot where danger threatens as the lamps go low and the rain heralds a storm. In the case of The Ghost Train (1941), the Shepherd's Bush studio re-created a Cornwall halt too far from Truro for the passengers to reach it that night.

All this derives from Arnold Ridley's play. Now a century old, it was first filmed in one of the late-Twenties Anglo-German productions (Hitchcock learnt from a stint in Berlin) and then in England by Water Forde in 1931. For many decades that version was thought lost but some of it has resurfaced. Meanwhile, the best-known incarnation is Forde's wartime re-make. This brings ration coupons and blackout curtains to a tale which turns around a couple about to marry, a temperance adherent with a pet parrot (Kathleen Harrison), ever-suave Raymond Huntley, along with Richard Murdoch. Proceedings are dominated by Arthur Askey who is on his way to a seaside season, and does not shy from vexing one and all with his gags, some of which are funny.

High in the credits is the terrific Linden Travers (she of “the buttocks over the billiard table”, as extolled by Graham Greene's 1937 review of Brief Extasy). Her arrival, as here and in The Lady Vanishes, is enough to rival that of any express. If the comedy is too broad for a thriller, it all makes for a diverting time. Most startling is the moment when Kathleen Harrison takes fright and is calmed by some of the whisky which a doctor keeps about his person. Liquor had never touched her lips but now she beams at the effect; to which Arthur Askey says, “wait till it reaches the junction!”

To continue the railway metaphor, how did that line ever get through?

A point rarely made was put well by Manny Farber some eight decades ago: “script writing has been rare that could make the whole equal to its good parts, as were Alice Adams, Wuthering Heights and The Lady Vanishes”.

Some say that the opening section of Hitchcock's 1938 film, which finds a number of people snowbound in a mid-European hotel, is a different film from its famed railway carriage sequence; in fact, it needs this to set in motion the relationship between those involved – just as there is an equally engaging and comic a time at the start of Rear Window before apparent murder takes place. The Lady Vanishes, too, has comic brio throughout which is not simply the cricket-vexed pair Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne but the banter between folksong specialist Michael Redgrave and a woman who is on her way back to marry into grand circles at St. George's, Hanover Square.

The title is a summary of the plot, the railway making the disappearance all the more puzzling while one and all, such as the creepily elegant doctor (Paul Luckas) amd the dining-car attendants assure Margaret Lockwood that she is suffering from delusion, as people were to inform wheelchair-bound James Stewart as he looked across that New York tenement block.

And to think that all this European voyage was filmed at Islington. Hitchcock's use of model sets and miniature engines carries one into a Europe on the brink of war, and, as Farber suggests, much of this is buttressed by the way in which Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder's script has these couples' lives running in parallel (not least the fusty lawyer, Cecil Parker, who is having an affair with the ever-spirited Linden Travers).

Here is high entertainment, as is so much of Hitchcock's English period. If the transatlantic Rear Window and Shadow of a Doubt have a claim to be his best work, The Lady Vanishes is not toiling along a branch line.

“Sally.” So much has this song become associated with Gracie Fields's stage appearances that some might be surprised to find that she first sang it near the beginning of her first film, Sally in our Alley (1931) while working in a tough and steaming café – where she also gives vent to “Lancashire Blues” which has a touch of Bessie Smith about it.

The film is about the aftermath of the Great War. She had agreed to marry a soldier (Ian Hunter) who, after battle (filmed with effective stock footage), fears that he will be in no state to be her husband and asks a comrade to inform her that he has died. A slender plot, especially one to sustain a decade over seventy minutes' screen time but it could have easily been the stuff a Jacobean drama. There is something torrid about the doubts, worries, friendships and rivalries in and around this café and pub.

Not whimsical comedy, this shows Gracie Fields able to broach comedy as well as tragedy – and there is raw power to the scene in which she encourages movie-struck Florence Desmond to demonstrate her acting skills by dashing down treasured ornaments from shelves and the mantlepiece.

Written by Miles Malleson and Alma Reville, this is a strange film which, with some adjustment and transposition to Germany, could have been iremembered widely as an expressionist drama. The print survives in very good condition, and only on reflection does one realise that it has made use of few sets. Small wonder that, as the decade went on, she was to be praised by Graham Greene, with whom she became a neighbour on Capri.

A boxed set to explore with relish.

Watch a number of English films from the Fifties and one is not surprised to find Sam Kydd in a small part, whether a spiv or a desk sergeant, even a newspaper seller. How pleasing, then, to see The Price of Silence (1960) and find him given a chance to stretch out. Stretch is the word. He has been in gaol, and now notices, as a small-town sweet-shop owner, that a fellow prisoner (the mild-mannered Gordon Jackson) has changed his name by deed poll and shows prowess as an estate agent.

This brings dynamic to a film – the title suggests the pivotal blackmail – with a cast which includes two women who have amatory designs upon Jackson. One is his elderly employer's startlingly sultry young wife (Maya Koumani); the other June Thorburn, an artist who lives near a delapidated house Jackson has been deputed to try to sell.

From a novel by the dependable Laurence Meynell, this was directed by Montgomery Tully who made many such films. It is one of his best, bringing out to good effect such minor characters as a Councillor (Norman Shelley) whose indiscretion in a pub loses him the chance to make a killing by swinging the Planning Committee when it discusses a timber yard. One fully expects him to clasp his lapels, puff his stomach and proclaim, “don't you know who I am?”

The elements of the plot fit together plausibly, which is partly a matter of Tully's opting for a succession of jump cuts. The pace keeps up, nothing stales six decades on. In that time, June Thorburn died, pregnant, in an aeroplane crash but Maya Koumani is still alive.

In these boxes of nine-film sets, not every item is as good as this but they are invariably diverting, and there is sometimes such a surprise as The Price of Silence.

Neil Simon is always diverting. If this one errs on the sentimental side, there is sufficent banter between the newly-weds to carry it along as they contend with a small walk-up apartment which would command a small fortune in contemporary Manhattan. In effect, it is made by Mildred Natwick as Jane Fonda's mother while ever-suave Charles Boyer is an impoverished neighbour who has not lost his sense of style. It all makes one hanker to jpin them in that bottle of ouzo. This is not Washington Square as Henry James knew it.

“He works for the Council. Would you like a ride on his handlebars?” So banters a suave Leslie Phillips in The Fast Lady (1962) and is told by another of his fetching young women, “he can ring his own bell!”

This suburban sunlit scene outside the house where he and a very Scottish Stanley Baxter lodge suits a film which, as that dialogue shows, is hardly Ibsen. At other moments it is all the more politically incorrect, so much so that if it were a school essay there would be a “see me!” beneath it.

Phillips is given to amatory/motoring metaphors which find room for such ambiguous terms as “syncromesh”. That said, it also has a contemporary tone, for the opening scenes turn around battle between cyclists and motorists; in particular, when Baxter is out on a group ride along a country lane, he is propelled into a ditch by an impatient James Robertson Justice at the steering-wheel of a Rolls.

Naturally enough, the bureaucratic Baxter tracks down Justice to a smart house in whose garden languishes none other than Julie Christie in an early rôle and a bikini (the technical term for that construction is zeugma). Baxter is so smitten that he resolves to sacrifice his saddle and learn to drive. To this end, he buys the vintage Bentley whose sale keeps Phillips in his salesman job (and so a shortfall in their landlady Kathleen Harrison's rent is cleared).

Many an Elizabethan comedy turned around as slender a pillar as this. It all depends upon the horse-power of the cast (no more motoring metaphors, I promise). Justice is his usual benignly-belligerent self (only the churlish could take exception to his telling Julie Christie that she is smitten by a “haggis-headed half-wit”). The supporting cast make the most of considerably less than fifteen minutes of fame: Derek Guyler has a wonderful turn, three whiskies in, while testing Baxter for drunken-driving; not once but three times does Frankie Howerd's head lift a manhole cover as a motor-car chase ensues.

As such, several sections of the film, which was directed by the prolific Ken Annakin, are de facto scenes from a silent movie. One gasps even when knowing that a handbrake-turn will bring all concerned to heart-pounding safety.

And has there ever been as surreal scene as the dream sequence in which Baxter outpaces once-famous racing driver Graham Hill? It would spoil things to reveal his waking moment. It is not overstating the case to say that there is a touch of Bunuel to this (as there is to the end of Carry On Up the Khyber).

Ours not to reason why: enjoy The Fast Lady for what it is: great entertainment.

What's more, could there be a revival in the Tartan wallpaper and bed-sheets with which Baxter has enlivened his room?

"Don't expose yourself – you'll make the neighbours randy!” So Billie Whitelaw is instructed after climbing naked from bed and looking through the lamplit basement window of her Paddington bedsit. Moments before, her breasts had been lolling upon the chest of none other than Kenneth More (whose character has the unlikely, doubly female name of Chick Byrd). This is a setting in which one hardly expects to find that upright hero of such dramas as Reach for the Sky; he himself, though, esteemed The Comedy Man (1964) as his best work – and rightly so.

The film opens with him in his accustomed declamatory manner, upon the stage of a provincial theatre where he tells an audience, during a curtain call, that their applause is meat and drink to an actor, “and thank you for the dinner”.

Food is to become exiguous, for he goes on to reveal to them that it is his last performance there: he has been sacked after a fling with the producer's wife. We would have heard more, but the curtain is rapidly brought down. And the scene rises upon his arrival at a London railway station which is a short taxi-ride from “darkest Camden Town” where he has arranged to take a room in a lodging house full of self-styled “thespians”. This is run by Norman Rossington, who had recently played am ever-cajoling roadie in A Hard Day's Night, and he is here accustomed to being an ad hoc pawnbroker when residents cannot scrape together the rent. Such is the place that another arrival asks, “does the ceiling always leak?” and by way of a reply is told, “only when it's raining”.

Here is all the badinage of actors seeing their way through tough times, every public-telephone offer of a cameo being something to seize upon as a harbinger: even a stint as Santa is surely but a stepping stone to Lear. Based upon a novel by Douglas Hayes, who should be better known, this was adapted by Peter Yeldham and directed by Alvin Rakoff (both of whom were born in 1927 – and alive).

Rak(e)off could be an apt surname for an agent played wonderfully by Dennis Price, who gets More the part of what was then known as a Red Indian, which is a sight to behold – and compounded by its leading a shop steward to tell the extras to down their tomahawks. This experience prompts More to inform Price that he could take on another ethnic rôle but finds that the agent had met the genuine article “the other night in a lavatory at Leicester Square”.

All of which is to describe but a few of the surprises which leap from so brilliantly paced and photographed film whose array of familiar faces in challenging, sofa-surfing settings includes the likes of Cecil Parker.

Here is the most engaging encapsulation of that era between - yes, one need not quote Larkin's lines about sexual intercourse. Suffice to add, though, that it features a party scene, with Chubby Checker on the soundtrack, that would be hard to match: the camera moves to and fro in a way that should have it made an obligatory study for a tracking shot (and, what's more, as the drink flows, one finds two men dancing together).

One can well imagine that anybody who saw this at the time would have sat round for the next showing. There is so much to enjoy here that one cannot but deem it a masterpiece.