Film Reviews by CH

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.

Anybody who has wielded an allen key and unfolded the innumerable pages of an ikea assembly-instruction leaflet will feel that this was a tranquil experience compared with all that Buster Keaton and his bride (Sybil Seely) endure in the matchless One Week (1919).

Astonishing to reflect that this was made over a century ago. Its stunts bring far more gasps than anything that computerised imagery can do. On the (often-terrified) face of it, the plot is simple. The couple have been given a house as a wedding present. Which sounds very generous. In fact, it is a self-assembly item, sabotaged by a rival in love who mis-numbers the many boxes; the puzzles of its construction bring many more - and all in some twenty-five minutes.

To reveal too much would spoilt it. Sufficient to say that there is a storm as virulent as the one in The Wind. And one reflects that a “sight gag” should be as subtly done as a verbal one. Just as a joke in Wilde or Orton should not be protracted as the real laugh comes with the follow-up line, so each calamity here gains its full effect by a shot a few seconds later (a classic example in the final moments). The actors take it seriously; that is the point of true comedy. As James Agee was to say of Keaton, thirty years after One Week: “he used this great, sad, motionless face to suggest various related things: a one-track mind near the track's end of pure insanity, mulish imperturbability under the wildest of circumstances; how dead a human being can get and still be alive; an awe-inspiring sort of patience and power to endure, proper to granite but uncanny in flesh and blood”.

In light of that, one should not be surprised that, some fifteen years later, the author of Keaton's final film was none other than Samuel Beckett. And, indeed, is One Week the first instance of post-modernism? For reasons not to be revealed here, the bride is discovered in her bath; the shot reveals more than would be allowed a decade later, but, as she leans out to retrieve a towel, a hand drops in front of the camera: a gag which brings a whoop of laughter in a cinema if one is fortunate enough to see this there.

Otherwise, enjoy it at home - what's more, ask a few friends round to share a great time.

Suspense can be hampered by relentless action. Assassin for Hire (1951) does not slip into that trap. True to its Soho setting, where a night-time murder sets events in train, there are many scenes in one caff or another set against an almost-Oedipal scenario in which a purported stamp-dealer (Sydney Tafler) in fact earns his money as a killer - not of his mother, but in order to fulfil her dying hopes that her other son would gain recognition as a violinist.

To stage a concert (in the Rigmore Hall!) costs several hundred smackers - and, well, there are ways and means of raising the necessary. Trouble is, the Yard has its eyes on Tafler, in particular there are those bright, hunch-backing organs which animate the pipe-smoking face of Ronald Howard (who became a good Sherlock Holmes later in the decade).

One would like to know more about its director, Michael McCarthy, who died a few years later at just forty. Any writer would have relished his bringing a script to the screen with the aplomb on display throughout these sixty-five minutes' glimpses of post-war London.

A moment to treasure is when a caff owner offers a choice of coffee: “Keynan or Mocca?” “What's the difference?” “There isn't one.” The baristas in modern-day Soho would provide a soliloquy.

Here is a chance to visit Ukraine. Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera took several years to film, and was released in 1929. It is an unmatched work of editing. Filmed without sound, and variously scored these past nine decades, it moves at an incredible pace by means of such cinematic devices as montage and split screen to create a view of Russian life a decade after the Revolution.

Railway trains, baths, bustling streets, an actual birth (perhaps the first on screen), one event follows another, the work gaining a unique logic as people and machinery vie for a place in the current scheme of things (one might think of Chaplin a few years later, but this is more of an Expressionist hue).

At seventy minutes, it is fuller than many an epic, and cannot be seen only once. The story is but scant - perhaps a day in the life – but that is not the point of a work which is energy incarnate. Here, too, is something of metafiction, with a cameraman in the frame every now and then, while his wife is seen editing the very film playing on the screen.

This is not the world of Five-Year Plans and exhortations to drive tractors across the land but something perennially human.

Forster-like, one may as well begin with Spoliansky's music. That is to say, his score for Wanted for Murder (1946) is highly romantic. Did it inspire the choice of Rachmaninov for Brief Encounter a couple of years later? Which said, the two films share a study of passion; this one's theme, though, is strangulation, never a possibility on that railway-station platform.

Sometimes deemed a second-string number, Wanted for Murder is in fact a great example of the way in which character actors – even Stanley Holloway (and off-screen wife) - could portray stolid Scotland Yard figures who find themselves caught up in a fatal, even Greek kinkfest.

It gives nothing away to say that cigar enthusiast Eric Portman, troubled grandson of a Victorian hangman, is the strangler of women in London nights. The plot turns upon his being tracked, and captured. We can, of course, be sure that he will not escape, but...

Here is another glorious portrayal of post-war London, within and without, which transcends the classes not in fact felled by the seemingly seismic 1945 Election.

Nothing is ever set in stone, or even wax: a couple of crucial scenes to treasure are a be-whiskered Wilfrid Hyde-White as a sleepy night-guard at the Chamber of Horrors (does anybody still go there?).

And, at the same time, across the Atlantic, no less a reviewer than James Agee praised “some beautifully exciting shots of Hyde Park as a police cordon clears away the rattled crowds and closes, through the twilight, for the kill”.

Those involved in creating this film are often deemed lesser lights but their efforts brought us a masterpiece.

This is not the only thing likely to blow up in High Treason (1951). Made by John Boulting a year after his splendid Seven Days to Noon, this, too, has an apocalyptic tone as troops mass in Eastern Europe along with fatal sabotage at the Docks.

Many are the settings which play a part in all this, from Kenneth Griffith's electrical-repair shop volubly frequented by Dora Bryan to the very corridors of Parliament – with many an exterior scene of a bustling capital.

The suspense is terrific, within each scene and as a whole (a rare achievement in cinema), which makes it as good as Sabotage, perhaps better. Stock figures transcend such types, whether stout detectives, an alluring woman (Mary Morris) or the palpably serious audience at a classical music society (with this a pivotal point of the plot, it is fitting that the film has a fine score by John Addison).

Deserving of the term noir, much taking place after dark, it owes much to Gilbert Taylor's cinematography (he had worked on Seven Days to Noon and would make Dr. Strangelove and A Hard Day's Night distinctive).

How well known is this film? Nobody should pass up a chance to see it.

“My name is Bates.” No, despite the remote location, this is not a member of a motel's staff, but hairy-chested Gary Merrill who has arrived one dark night at an oak-lined, big-gated house on the Moors thirty miles from Harrogate. It is owned by Bette Davis (in life then married to Merrill), a retreat in which she dictates detective novels to her pretty secretary (Barbara Murray) who is engaged to Anthony Steel.

Adapted by Val Guest (he of Jigsaw a decade later), the film's cinematographer was Robert Krasker, whose work was guaranteed to silence any creaks in a plot. Another Man's Poison has all the Gothic steam one associates with Bette Davis. What is any film with her but a chance for barbed dialogue? Told that “one sleeps better on one's own”, she replies, “or more often.” There is a thesis, or a self-help book, in “it's a wonder what new clothes do for you, mentally.” When telling Merrill “you've been drinking”, she meets her match with his “to help me think sober.” Is there any more withering remark than “for a man, you have disgracefully long eyelashes”? If her tongue does not kill you, there's always the cocktail bar.

Could all this be metafiction, the stuff of a future novel? After all, it gives little away to note that Merrill is fleeing a crime in which his partner, Bette Davis's husband, has died. And the local vet, played well by a suave and irritating Emlyn Williams, brings to bear on all this some amateur studies in (human) psychology (with emphasis on “the escapist character”), as does the daily help (Edna Morris).

How on earth does a vet fit into this pleasingly tangled scenario? Well, Bette Davis's passions are here most aroused by her horse Fury, and one has not seen anything until her return in jodphurs while, what's more, cracking a whip. It's almost enough to turn a clergyman into a fetishist if he isn't already (a cleric is the one local functionary not to appear on the scene).

There are some curious moments. Why does the vet have a left-hand-drive jeep? And why does he need to borrow a dictionary for some work, “nothing cosmic, just a paper for the Royal Society.” Surely he would have one, unless a patient has eaten it? Still, this allows Bette Davis to say, “it's a new Oxford one” and the vet to reply, “our old friend” (Martin Amis recalls his father patting the Concise Oxford as if it were a pet and saying, “this is the one”).

And by way of an ending, a review can add to the sum of human knowledge. Some of this was filmed on Yorkshire location, at a village near a waterfall known as Janet's Foss. Could that first name have inspired the one given to author Bette Davis in this diverting film whose entrances and exits bring it something of a dark farce?

At first glance, The Abominable Dr. Phibes, released in 1971, appears the very embodiment of the late-Sixties. A smart Victorian terrace house which, inside, is fashionably decorated in a style akin to the first interior scene of Help!

And so it continues with a strange-faced man (Vincent Price) at the keyboard of a theatre organ while the rest of a band turn out to be puppets. Very strange. And even stranger is that all this turns out to be taking place in the later-Twenties, a fact mostly evinced by a few carriage-like motor cars in the exterior scenes which are also graced by Virginia North whose hooded fur-coat could be something sported by Diana Rigg in The Avengers. This film in fact shares a director and writer of that series.

Nothing is real, and there is a gloss to the horror as Dr. Phibes sets to work, turn by turn, to enact deadly revenge upon the nine surgeons (Terry-Thomas soon vanishes; Joseph Cotten hangs on longer). Phibes deems them all to have conspired in killed his wife upon the operating table when in fact they were battling to save her.

His means of now disposing of them is to re-create the series of fatal Biblical curses, such as frogs and locusts. If this sounds familiar, such a method – deaths in Shakespeare – was the inspiration for a film in which Price starred two years later, after a Phibes sequel. Theatre of Blood is far better.

More slick than sick, The Abominable Dr. Phibes is diverting enough when the wind is rattling the windows and a glass of wine is to hand.

Basil Dearden was known for addressing social themes. In directing such films, he did not allow thesis to swamp the fact that narrative is essentially provided by well-defined characters. One of his best is Frieda (1947). This opens in war-torn Europe, where in a brief stretch of no man's land in a crumbling city, prisoner-of-war, former schoolmaster David Farrer arrives with the German nurse (Mai Zetterling) who has helped him escape. There they are married in a brief moment before leaping a hay-strewn goods-wagon towards freedom.

With which, the scene cuts to a small town somewhere in the South of England, all single-decker 'buses and well-tended verges. The country is still at war, and word has reached his family, which shares a large house, that he is bringing a wife (having failed a few years earlier to win the woman who chose his brother, a fellow since killed in battle).

This is strong stuff, their stiff upper lips a contrast with talk beside the billiard table in the pub – where, to complicate matters, discussion turns around the suitability of one of the family (a steely Flora Robson) to continue as Parliamentary candidate in the next Election.

No need to anticipate here all the turns taken, including the need for a marriage that will enable the couple to share a bed: the first one was in a Protestant church, and has to be re-done to accommodate her Catholicism, a further element in a fraught situation.

Redemption is indeed the theme of this film, for all concerned, and its deus ex machina (if deus is the word) proves something else. What's more, here is a notable fight scene. All too often in such brawls one can hear the splintering of balsa-wood chairs; this appears so much the real thing that one cannot help but grip one's own more comfortable armchair in a 2022 which is proving equally divided.

The best film in this box, but the others are diverting.