Film Reviews by CH

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.

“Let's be fashionable and make it a trunk murder!” So says Billy Milton to Leslie Perrins a dozen minutes or so into No Exit (1936). The latter is a crime novelist informed by a critic outside a theatre that he has no grasp of modern police methods; to this end, the riled Perrins soon suggests to a man-about-town friend that he conceal him, Milton, for a month with the intention of showing up flummoxed Scotland Yard as fools.

The pair fashion a plot, which indeed turns around a substantial trunk – just as it had in Graham Greene's under-rated novel It's a Battlefield. Inspired by real life, that was the only one which Greene had deliberately written with a film in sight; alas, it has never been made. (For his trouble he was, surreally, accused thirty years ago by biographer Michel Shelden of being the actual Brighton Trunk Murderer.) If No Exit is no match for that putative film, it exists, it survives - and proves to be diverting stuff.

And boldly so, for Milton is in thrall to a young married woman Valerie Hobson who is not averse to the situation and so smitten as to leave upon blotting paper... Add to this a canny novice detective (who had been thrashed by Perrins at Charterhouse) and a bumbling local reporter – and several scenes in which Perrins bluffs his way through questioning while inadvertently scattering clues as Milton cowers in a cupboard or loft: capacious hideaways after a journey in the trunk whose dripping bottle of port leaves traces mistaken for blood.

As far as the plot goes, we can leave it there as glorious hokum – but then a phrase leaps from the screen, a reference to “the third man”. Which makes one wonder whether Greene could have reviewed the film.

He did not do so.

So that on-the-hoof theory falls as flat as his being the trunk murderer.

Such films as No Exit are often accused of being “stagey”. It was based upon a play by George Goodchild and Frank Witty, and has sidelights upon theatre in the Thirties, with some self-referential gags about the movies, but it stands in its own right as what Greene would have termed an “entertainment”. In any case, these films are, at least, a record of plays that one is never likely to see again upon a stage.

That said, an amateur group could have a Christmas hit if it seeks out the original play.

Any child fortunate enough to see Johnny on the Run(1953) will have a lifetime's memory of a film which carries aloft comedy, suspense and a measure of social commentary. It is an early work by Lewis Gilbert, who was always willing to try something different – and generally find success with it. In this case, with support by the Children's Film Foundation, he tells of a Polish orphan - Eugeniusz Chylek - housed in Edinburgh by a woman (a splendidly contrary Mona Washbourne) who is only in it for the money. His life is miserable, although he is viewed with compassion by her young daughter.

One day he finds a small poster from which he learns that a voyage to his homeland can be had for £17. There is, throughout, an intensity to his face, a sense of purpose (it is the only film in which he appeared). He determines to leave the city and head for the port. Before long he meets two buffoonish thieves (Michael Balfour and Sydney Tafler) who have failed to get through the small window of a smart house. Johnny is prevailed upon to help (he believes the yarn of their having lost the key). Needless to say, the theft of a broach goes wrong, they have to split up, and Johnny is left with Tafler to walk across the hills; this section of the film takes on a Buchanesque turn, complete with a suspicious, rifle-toting character in a remote cottage.

The chase is on, and Johnny goes it alone. Entertaining as all this has been, the film comes into its own when Johnny chances upon a village run for, and by, displaced children from abroad and home.

With guidance from a few adults, they make the decisions about life in a comfortable building beside an idyllic loch. This is equally entertaining, with quite a part played by an ad hoc safe in the Treasurer's care. Although not stated as such, all this owes something and more to the Swiss reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi who was inspired by the work of his contemporary Rousseau to put into practice educational theories that would benefit society as a whole. (In recent times there was just such a school in Seddlescombe in Sussex.) Not that there is any stuffiness or sanctimony about it: much of the action turns around a cross-country paper chase which would not be out of place at Lindley Court, that boarding school at which Anthony Buckeridge's Jennings and Darbishire were forever pupils (and contemporary with this film).

Even if one did not see this film in childhood, there is time to catch up - and be well rewarded.

If one is not in the market for several children's films at once, this film is also one of several extras on the disc of Gilbert's terrific noir Cosh Boy made the year before.

“It was a shop girl's melodrama and the public loved it.” So recalls Joan Collins of Cosh Boy (1952), directed by Lewis Gilbert (“adorable to me, and good to work with”). He was also to work with her on The Good Die Young, and from these English variants on noir he would take in such diverse items as Reach for the Sky, Alfie, several Bonds and Educating Rita.

As Joan Collins puts it in her 1978 memoir Past Imperfect, “the film was the story of a group of youths who spent their time getting their kicks by robbing and beating up people – rather like today's muggers. I played Rene, the innocent young girlfriend of James Kenney. We had an explicit love scene in the garden of a deserted house, which by today's standards was tame enough to be in a Disney film.”

Kenney played the leader of a gang whose ad hoc headquarters was one of the era's numerous inner-city bomb sites with cover provided by a youth club to which he and an accomplice (Ian Whittaker) had been assigned as a condition of probation after an earlier assault. Kenney's performance is remarkable. It can be rightly compared to that by Richard Attenborough as Pinkie. Both are troubled, insecure. In the case of Kenney, he is one of many whose father did not return from the war and is in well-nigh Oedipal thrall to a mother (Betty Anne Davies) who hankers for another man, one who might be able to control this wayward juvenile delinquent (when did this Fifties term fall from use?).

As with Pinkie, there is a hysterical pitch to Kenney's commands; it gets higher with his every refusal to believe that he himself is responsible for anything going wrong. As Joan Collins recalls, Lewis Gilbert brought out the very best in a young cast. He also had a veritable troupe of experienced actors. Almost inevitably there is a moment with a seen-it-all desk-sergeant Sid James, who is taking down evidence from Hermione Gingold, one of those whose illicit takings have made her a victim of the gang's cosh. Meanwhile, Joan Collins's mother is played by a Hermione Baddeley hopelessly adamant that her daughter should have no truck with this hoodlum.

So much for the scenario. What brings all this to another level is the cinematography. Much of it takes place after hours, filmed in some Hammersmith streets; this does not preclude a robbery which finds them on Chelsea Bridge and narrowly escaping the fangs of an outraged occupant of Battersea Dogs' Home after ducking over a wall.

There is more to all this than was perhaps evident to all those involved at the time of its filming. To them, it was welcome work; to us, it is a well-realized, enduring record of the fact that for no country does war end with the signing of a peace treaty: there are repercussions in which psychology plays as much a part as ration books..

This remarkable film is here available as dvd issued by the British Film Institute. Its “extras” include numerous other early works by Lewis Gilbert. Believe it or not, among these is one in which Charles Hawtrey explores the steel-based nature of post-war pre-fabricated buildings. And, geekishly fascinating at that is, a more exciting item, made for the Children's Film Foundation, is Johnny on the Run (matter for another day).

And after all that, there is a recollection by one of the Cosh Boy gang. Ian Whittaker was with Kenney in the original play, Master Crook, by Bruce Walker which toured the country before it reached the West End. They were the only two of that cast to appear in the film. Curiously, such is memory, he recalls – contrary to Joan Collins – that the some public shunned the film as it coincided with the enduring controversy of the Craig-Bentley “let him have it!”

All of which shows that this terrific film is the very stuff of life and sudden death.

“Got into some interesting conversations with Sidney [Poitier] about life. He's one of the few people in this town [Los Angeles] who talks about something meaningful and deep.” So noted Joan Collins in her diary one evening in 1997. His recent death showed the esteem in which he was held – and the regret that he had been in fewer films of late.

In the Heat of the Night (1967) is perhaps paramount. Nobody could wear a suit - and cuff-links - quite like him, even when up against it on a visit to the South where he finds himself arrested for a murder which he promptly sets to work on solving. After all, as the local, portly police chief (Rod Steiger) is surprised to discover, Poitier – playing Virgil Tibbs - is in fact a homicide expert.

This was the Sixties, the Delta had seen many lynchings, the rabid were still on the loose and set to do so again. There are many turns to the film, all of which lift it above the didactic. Here is suspense, forensic detail, a terrific car chase, any number of potential murderers – high and low – and an array of squalid premises from a diner to the police chief's own home.

Directed by Norman Jewison, with Hal Ashby prominent among the crew, it catches the indelible light of the South so well. Landscape as character when the cotton is high. Nobody, however grotesque, is a caricature. All of which makes one eager to seek out the 1965 novel by Alan Ball on which it is based. He wrote many of them,

including more which feature Tibbs. Less well known is that Poitier played the character in two more films. These would be hard pressed to match this one but surely worth a whirl.

And let us not forget the score by Quincy Jones, which opens with the eponymous song by Ray Charles and, throughout, has many an echo of the Delta which gave rise to Robert Johnson and so many others.

Mary Orr. Margola Cranston. These are not names that immediately come to mind when thinking of one of the most famous movies: All About Eve.

This sprang from a short story “The Wisdom of Eve” in which Mary Orr, having heard of a real-life incident, created a character, an actress Margola Cranston who would be upstaged by the eponymous help Eve, a smooth-talking serpent. This was clear from the opening sentences, as it would be in the awards dinner which begins the film where Bette Davis, as Margot Channing is swept aside by the machinations of Anne Baxter. This scene is notable for its use of two voice-overs, a device anticipated by Mary Orr's own opening: “A young girl is on her way to Hollywood with a contract for one thousand dollars a week from a major film company in her pocketbook. In a year or two I am sure Miss Harrington will be as much of a household word to you as Ingrid Bergman or Joan Fontaine.”

That destiny is the result of Eve's inveigling her faux-innocent way into the lives of these thespians whose bravado and insecurities mirror her own. So much for the brief plot of the story, published in Cosmopolitan in 1946; the film, just four years later, turns upon so much more, with pleasingly baroque screenplay and direction both by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. He had to hand elegant sets in which to swathe not only Bette Davis but a cast so good that the phrase “supporting players” does not do justice to the ensemble effect, one in which the ever-acerbic Thelma Ritter is never cowed by her employer's tongue.

And one has to treasure the creepily polite columnist played by George Sanders, whose clothes and intonation make him Noel Coward with an edge. Not to mention, though one must, the few minutes with Marilyn Monroe (if minutes they are, they linger in the memory).

The dialogue - “a bumpy night”, and all that - is well known, but the thing is that it gains so much from being heard, and seen, as a whole. Such is the pacing that one does not realise, until it is over, that the film has lasted for two hours and twenty minutes. One could dwell upon in-jokes, such as a jocular reference to the film's own producer and to Eugene O'Neill, but that would be geekish, contrary to a film carried aloft by passion - with a stunning final moment.

Who knows where a short story might lead? Not only this, but Mary Orr made a play from it and it became a long-running musical, Applause. Twentieth-Century Fox got a great deal from her for its $5000, even if she had been inspired by life itself, a quality evident upon every inch of this film.

I thought that in these times it might be diverting to see Emily play in a pre-covid era, but the first episode was enough to realise that there is not much to all this, and that it could not take up hours of life. There is so much else to watch. This is a far cry from Sex and the City.

As the previous reviewere suggests, this is indeed an empty film. There have been other films, and novels, about young women who turn to prostition, and these can have psychological power. Here, though, there is so little with which to engage - including a ropey twist to the plot - that one does not much feel like expending more time in writing about it. For a while, it seemed as though Ozon's name being attached to anything meant that it is worth a whirl, but recent experience makes me now doubt that.

A heist has taken place. That is stock in trade for a film noir. What distinguishes Jacques Becker's Touchez pas au grisbi (1954) from others is that there is no rush to dispose of the goods, indeed the gold. The ingots can bide their time as smartly-dressed Monsieur Big (Jean Gabin) decides when to bow out quietly from an illicit trade, and enjoy a less anxious life.

Here are women (including Jeanne Moreau) as curved as the smart automobiles whose whitewall tyres ply the Paris streets from one night club to another. Trouble is that Gabin's accomplice, René Dary, has let slip sufficient to his girlfriend just as she is tiring of him; she does not lose time in telling others of the wealth to be had for a little rough-handed asking.

Such is the plot, and it does not lack for gunfire - and quite a climax -, but, as much as anything, here - on a second viewing - is a study in loyalty (it was, predictably, released here as Honour among Thieves). For all the action, this is a reflective story, taken from a novel by Albert Simonin (and there are indeed elements akin to the dur novels by his near-namesake). He wrote two more in this series. Both were filmed, but do not appear to have the réclame of this one, which is so good that one feels inspired to seek them out.