Film Reviews by CH

Some titles cannot be euphoniously translated. And so they remain La Traviata and Cosi fan tutti. This thought comes to mind when watch Max Ophuls's Everybody's Woman (1934), a coarser title than La signora di tutti.

With the advent of the Nazis, Ophuls sought refuge in Italy before a move to Hollywood. This stay yielded one film, from a cliff-hanging serialised story by Salvatore Gotta. On screen, it opens with film star Isa Miranda's suicide attempt upon a smart bathroom floor and, as the gas mask lowers upon her head in the operating theatre, all dissolves into the sequence of events which brought her to this sorry pass.

The first of the men to fall for her was a married teacher, whose declaration of love is such that he cannot live without her, and dies by his own hand – a scandal which obliges her to leave and spend a year cooped up at her parents' home. Pressure is brought for her to attend a dance in a large, grand house, and there she dances with the son (Freidrich Benfer) who appears to spurn her but she takes on a job as assistant to his well-nigh bed-bound mother (Russian-born Tatyana Pavlova - and to say any more would rob viewers of the suspense of a melodrama whose continual movement owes so much to everything which Ophuls had learned in Germany.

Here, in light and shade, often in deep focus, are dances, a boat upon a lake, many a wide, twisting staircase, glimpses of transcontinental railway trains as one and all – even the servants – are caught up in a drama whose coils appear driven by fate itself.

For all that glamorous Isa manipulates the situations, hauling herself from one situation to the next, it is as if she is trying to make up for that initial adversity of the schoolroom. A pattern is set. As she moves forward she is continually stumbling over herself.

Such is Ophuls's skill that one never pauses to deem it an outlandish scenario. It is ravishing, and should be more widely known.

As films swell in length, it is always heartening to return to those portmanteau items where so much is brought within linked works, each of which fills some twenty minutes. Such is Torture Garden (1967) directed by Freddie Francis who had made Paranoiac a few years earlier. This time, now working in colour, he turns to good effect a script by Robert Bloch (best known for the novel upon which Psycho was based). This takes as its linking theme a fairground sideshow where a barker invites people to part with a fiver, in exchange for which Dr. Diabilo will reveal to them true horror.

And so some, confident of getting their money back if not satisfied, go inside. Beneath the canvas, the Doctor, wonderfully played by the versatile Burgess Meredith, invites each in turn to look at the open blades of shears in front of a still woman upon a throne. With which, the screen dissolves into a story which draws out their malevolent ambitions, none of which involve torture as such, let alone gardening.

The first and fourth are the best. In the first one a starring rôle is taken by a cat who has power over both Michael Bryant who is after the money which his uncle (Maurice Denham) has evidently concealed in a tumbledown house, complete – of course - with basement and all that entails (to make a double pun). That course to madness is captured convincingly. And the fourth segment is a lesson to anybody who has harboured thoughts of collecting things, on however modest a scale: that way madness again lies, as Jack Palance finds when his enthusiasm for Poe takes him to the house of Peter Cushing who has, somehow, amassed unknown treasures from the pen of an author who met a wretched end.

And it not all over yet.

A film which, if you are a holding a glass of wine, is enough to have you running to the bathroom, pulling off clothing and dousing it in cold water before the stain sets in.

“If that's love, I'm a pig's grandfather.” A terrific line but not one uttered by Jessie Matthews herself in Head over Heels (1937). By dint of some back projections, she is living humbly in Paris while performing at night in an open-air café which can run to an orchestra and an array of dancers.

Here she is in a love triangle, torn between Victor Flemying (an inventor who is ahead of the technological game) and actor Louis Borel who could be on the way to Hollywood. The film which falls into two parts, several times over. One could say something similar of Cabaret, in which the stage scenes out-do most of the rest; as Christopher Isherwood himself often observed, if Sally had been as good as Liza, she would have been the sensation of Europe; equally, Jessie Matthews's performances are magical while the scenes in in a rough apartment and elsewhere are lumpen.

The first of her films to be directed by Sonnie Hale, it appears to bear the scars of their fraught marriage. Still there are the songs, by Mack Gordon and Harry Revel. Not only only the title number but “There's That Look in Your Eyes Again” and “Looking around Corners for You”: this last is perhaps the film's high spot: while thinking that all is lost, that Jessie is lost, Fleming walks around a back-projected Paris and chances upon couples in cafés and elsewhere, each time thinking that the woman is Jessie, but she isn't: she herself is superimposed upon the screen as she sings that song, making for adroit montage which could have a claim to be the first pop video.

Jessie Matthews was terrific: play one of her discs with relish: she did not need that winsome appearance to succeed but she is always enjoyable to watch, that flutter of the eyelids which are the mark of an all-knowing spirit staking out the innocent territory.

Pagan. The word derives from the Latin for country. That is, those of such a disposition hail from unsophisticated parts, even villages. So we are reminded by John Atkinson who, looking like a cross between Derek Nimmo and Jeremy Irons, plays a rector in a pleasant house in the Malvern Hills. This etymological point is not part of the sermons which he types on what, even in 1974, was an antique machine, but an observation made while walking across a nearby field with his son, Spencer Banks, who is about to turn eighteen.

Banks is an unusual schoolboy, immersed in Elgar, in particular to spiritual voyage he created from Newman's The Dream of Gerontius. Banks has politics of a country-loving Tory hue, at odds with his time and fellow pupils who, dressed at times in Army uniform, are much given to ragging him (there are moments when one thinks of If...).

Penda's Fen was written by David Rudkin, and to his surprise Alan Clarke agreed to direct it. Clarke was known for gritty films of social realism. Although billed, in some quarters, as a work of horror, it is not exactly that. Rudkin has said that the idea came to him from a road sign in the area which pointed to a village. Its name haunted him, and he looked into its origins: it derives from Penda's Fen, name in honour of a King.

Banks himself is on a quest, a direction in life which, for all its ease and good fortune, is troubled. This will involve him in many strange encounters as angels descend and strange rituals are enacted as reality and dream merge to create a new dimension to existence.

Rudkin has recalled that, at times, Clarke was not sure what was happening. He told him simply to follow the script that it was all in there, it was the only book he need to read about all the myths and psychology – and the life of Elgar – which he had drawn upon in writing it.

And so here it is, a mélange – with many a descending Sun – which carries us along, the dialogue taken at a slightly slower than natural pace, as if all concerned are out of synchronisation with the world around them.

What's more, one learns that part of Gerontius was inspired by one of Elgar's dogs.

There is nothing quite like Penda's Fen, too little known since its first showing in the BBC's Play for Today series.

How can a film as good as Paranoiac (1963) slip from general notice? Rarely has there been one which, in ninety minutes, takes so many turns and brings so many gasps. It was directed, for Hammer, by Freddie Francis, whose earlier career as a cinematographer proves a great force in the shades of black and white in a film set in the vicinity of the Dorset coast.

Working from a script by Jimmy Sangster, which derived from Josephine Tey's novel Brat Farrar, he fashioned a near-Gothic set-up which opens with shots of two sides of a tombstone: the deaths of two wealthy parents followed by the drowning of one of their sons.

Inside the church, as the vicar intones about those events a decade ago, the other son – Oliver Reed – sits at the organ and, as the music swells, his sister (Janette Scott) looks up and faints at the sight of somebody. To the fore comes their aunt (a formidable Sheila Burrell) who took charge of the children in tandem with the local accountant (Maurice Denham) as the day looms when sports car-driving, heavy-drinking Reed is set to come into half a million.

As one can imagine, the atmosphere in the rambling family house is fraught. Is the sister mad? Who is in league with whom?

And what can any of them make of a startling arrival?

Surprises are sprung in the first fifteen minutes, but it would be unfair to reveal even these, for they are the foundation upon which the rest is built. Surprise follows surprise, all of which make the very film a great surprise. Nobody with a relish of the resources shown by modestly-funded British films should miss it. Oak-lined rooms lit by candles bring as much a cliff-edge atmosphere as the sunlit chalk of the cliffs themselves.

There is more to be written about the use of organs in film. What is is about such a great instrument that the very press of its keyboard harbingers the sinister?

What will happen to Hollywood when automobiles are not only driverless but guided by pavement devices which limit speed? Such tyre-squealing chases - often after the real owner has mysteriously left the keys in the ignition – are familiar, and can be enjoyed by those happier with pedals of a bicycle. The thought comes to mind during The Driver (1978). The cars have names (a Mercedes is notably roughed up) but the actors simply go by the task allotted them in a series of heists throughout a raw Los Angeles. The eponymous man at the wheel is Ryan O'Neal, a professional hired for his skill at making a getaway which leaves others standing – or lying on their sides as their car takes a tumble.

This is all too much for Bruce Dern, a decidedly weird detective whose hair aspires to an Art Garfunkel cut. He is determined to bring in O'Neal, even if it means that he has to depute a particularly unsavoury gang to act as go-betweens. Add Isabelle Adjani – well, love interest is pitching it a bit high – and here is something that, on the streets, is indeed explosive; elsewhere, in seedy rooms, it is, as written and directed by Walter Hill, close to the existential. Here are people with chasms between them, listlessness alleviated only by breaking the speed limit and turning the wheel just in time to avoid something coming from another direction at the lights.

Meditative it isn't, but its sparse dialogue is sharp – and one cannot help recall that scene in Truffaut's La Nuit Américaine where a stunt driver wears a long wig so that, on screen, a woman appears to be at the wheel. And one wonders whether Hill had to use day-for-night techniques to bring in all this more safely.

A mystery that The Chain (1984) should be little known, for it addresses two perennial themes: the seven deadly sins and the fraught business, in Britain, of moving house.

With a script by Jack Rosenthal who otherwise wrote, memorably so, for television, this is a portmanteau film in which seven couples get up early, this the day of their moving a rung up a property ladder which can often feel more like a rope turning into a noose. None of them has Ealing in their sights, but the spirit of those social comedies pervades this one.

Not least in its ensemble cast. With no member of it out to hog it, all get to give their best, part of it propelled by the removal firm which is lugging the belongings of a young couple whose bigger place is funded by giving the basement to her widowed, dictatorial father, Maurice Denham whose delaying obstructions will bring him grief.

As happens to a penny-pinching, well-heeled man (Nigel Hawthorne in a horrendous blazer) whose wife (an ever-pained Anna Massey) despairs of him as he unscrews door plates and even reaches for their light bulbs. He is an emblem of Avarice.

The Sins, though, are not laboured. Here, with a suggestion of La Ronde, is pre-AIDS London in the Eighties, a city which embraces white vans and limousines. And, all the while, aboard the removal van there are, among its aching-back crew, Bernard Hill who is asked to test colleague Warren Mitchell about the philosophers upon whom he will be examined during the evening, after this gruelling day, at what appears to be a night school (whatever happened to night school?).

Spinoza and others might appear remote from this daily life but, without over-doing it, Mitchell manages to bring words of wisdom to those in the throes of uprooting themselves. Billie Whitelaw is well known for her work with Samuel Beckett, and here, as a widow who hankers for her native Mediterranean island, she has an accent far from her stage work – but conveys a similar spirit of somebody caught in a bewildering world.

A film to relish – and wish there were more of its kind.

Time was when Fleet Street was in Fleet Street and newspapers dealt in news. True to such cinematic form, The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) has several scenes of the latest issue clattering through the presses and the front page filling the screen with a thud as events unfurl. In this case, with an original script by Wolf Mankowitz and director Val Guest, it turns around the contemporary fear of the Bomb. It has not killed anybody recently but, as two Daily Express reporters discover, several tests of it have tipped the planet off the axis which brought and sustained life up and under these shores.

This is no science-fiction extravaganza. The effects are minimal but well used, and, as is the newspaper, all is in black and white. Except the characters. Here are people, in all their variety, each containing multitudes.

Leo McKern (who recalls that it was all made in an astonishing five weeks) is the newspaper's science correspondent and Edward Judd a reporter forever on the trail of stories while brooding on the divorce which means he rarely sees his son. Guest re-created the Express offices – and used the real-life staff member Arthur Christiansen to the play the Editor (as he does capably enough). Along the way Judd meets Janet Munro, a Government source, who also provides him with sultry distraction in her small flat and at the funfair in Battersea Park. Guest was always very good at making use of locations, and here all the more so as that tilt in the axis brings floods and cyclones while the Prime Minister intones from Downing Street – and, for a few seconds, a helmeted Michael Caine attempts to direct panicking drivers.

All of which means that it has as much contemporary relevance as it did in that period when Bertrand Russell addressed crowds in Trafalgar Square. With the climate emergency sending the planet out of kilter by other means, here is a drama as troubling, and involving, as ever. A gem which gleams from its sepia-toned opening and for the following ninety minutes.

Strange, the way the mind works. While watching Monsoon (1943) there came to mind Robert Ballard's book about his voyage in a submersible to look at the wreck of the Titanic. He remarked of a grand piano that it was now out of tune, which is a masterclass in understatement. The cost of Ballard's journey doubtless cost a sum which would boggle Edgar Ulmer. Born in Germany, where he worked with Billy Wilder on People on Sunday (1929), necessary exile brought him to Hollywood and a by-word for low-budget acumen, displayed so well in Détour and Ruthless.

Less well known is Monsoon, sometimes called – fittingly – Isle of Forgotten Sin. How to describe it? It opens, as dawn breaks, with the female owner of some premises tapping upon slatted doors, the other side of which slumber sultry women. They have to get up, a ship has docked and business is likely to be brisk.

Naturally, one wonders what this might entail. It emerges that downstairs is a casino, although as events unfold, that first suspicion of journeys upstairs are not dissolved.

And one has to question the competence of the carpenters who built those banisters. Fights break out, and the handrails collapse at the first grasp. Even at eighty minutes, the plot is convoluted, and can sometimes slow down things. Roughly speaking, two sailors are on the track of hidden treasure, and neither can trust the other, especially with others getting wind of its seabed location. All of which entails some of the casino's scantily-dressed women joining a voyage to the island where three-million in gold languishes offshore.

Those dresses survive a midnight swim to a cave, during which the soundtrack sports something which sounds as though Wagner had scored the cheesy opening music of The Simpsons.

There are enough slugfests in all this to ruin a lettuce patch. Nobody's passions are going to be turned upside-down, but it is very entertaining, with some surreal lines, such as the one in which a man comes round from being knocked out to exclaim, “well, I'm a horned toad!” And, when one of the women learns of the money at stake, she observes, “that's not hay!”

This film throve upon a hay diet.

The double is a familiar form in films – and Marlene Dietrich was given to guises several times in her work. Those shall not be revealed here but it gives away little of The Flame of New Orleans (1941) to say that this features another one. How well known is the film now? Written by the ever-adroit Norman Krasna, one of those who mysteriously attract the word professional as a near-insult, it is a diverting entertainment with many of those touches that distinguished René Clair (here in wartime exile).

In the middle of the nineteenth century Marlene Dietrich has arrived in town (with her wise maid Theresa Harris), and sings less than one could wish. She is a woman of mystery, necessarily so. She has plied her wooing ways elsewhere, and here is duly rewarded with a necklace by stolid banker Roland Young. Money can't buy him love, though, especially when Marlene hankers for impecunious Bruce Cabot, a man as rugged as the vessel he captains.

For which of these men will it be a case of the gal that got away?

Around this scenario are turned many scenes which culminate in a bravura barroom scene which contrasts with many high-born interiors (if so young a place really has old money). However small a part, each member of the cast plays it to the full (such as the matronly figures who tacitly inform Marlene about the rigours of the bedroom, to which she gives an eyebrow and twinkle unrivalled in film history).

Here is abundant fun.

In this era when so much is available and the chasing down of an old film does not involve several changes of 'bus to an outlying repertory house, how does one discover a film and decide to watch it?

Serendipity is a part of the process, fuelled by flicking through the contending guides. Leonard Maltin is dismissive of Station Six-Sahara (1962) and so there perhaps some might leave it, unseen; then again, the Radio Times guide enthuses, and so it proves that this is a film well worth watching.

Written by Bryan Forbes and Brian Clemens (perhaps best known for television series The Avengers) from a play by Jean Martel, it was directed by Seth Holt with much of the dramatic effect provided by cinematographer Gerald Gibbs. The shades of black and white make this desert outpost more sultry than colour perhaps would have done. The camera hones in repeatedly upon a ceiling fan while other machinery pumps up and down in what appears to be a staging post in the subterranean transmission of oil across the continent while radio contact is fitful.

In its time, the film was advertised with the erotically-charged Carroll Baker to the fore. In fact, she appears halfway through. By this time, the real attention and interest have been provided by the five men palpably going to seed in this outlandish setting, where monotony so inflames petty rivalries and jealousies that one of them offers to give Denholm Elliott a month's pay if he can choose and keep one of the many letters he receives each month.

This might sound preposterous as the mainspring of a plot, but it works, bringing so much with it, tension already heightened when Carroll Baker, literally, crashes into the place with a man badly injured in the offending automobile (“he's not a friend, he's my ex-husband”).

Anybody at the time who had sought out this too-little-known film by travelling across London and holding an umbrella against the wind-driven rain would not have regretted the expedition. To find oneself in this parched, malevolent location (in fact it was made in Shepperton) becomes all absorbing. The pause button is not needed.

A prison escape is always risky. Life outside brings perils worse than the monotony of the cell. So Dennis O'Keefe finds in Raw Deal (1948). Written by Leopold Atlas and John Higgins, from a story by others, this strong script was bolstered by Anthony Mann's directing which, in turn, owed so much to the cinematography of John Alton: he, literally, brought out the best in a cast whose features glow and fade in scenes which range from automobiles to forests - and that essential part of almost any noir: a dubious night club.

The curved hood of the automobile which, variously pursued, is as much a star of all this as those within. Alongside O'Keefe are not only his erstwhile, dodgy girlfriend Claire Trevor but also a woman from the legal firm which is certain that he has been framed: Marsha Hunt. He is smitten with both, that is clear. All of which brings a further frisson – female lips' edge sparring – to a situation which has a towering Mr. Big, Raymond Burr, who is as determined to see off O'Keefe as the police, for he is unwilling to give the fugitive the $50,000 which he is owed for taking the rap.

That is, as it were, the sum of it, and one almost suspects that the film were made for less. No matter. Such privation had all those as much on their toes as those depeicted within. One scene flows into the next – and, as for the final ones, I am too much of a gentleman to say more. Treat yourself to a great night in.

It is a familiar story. A daughter is obliged to return to the family home after the break-up of a romance. Such is the case in Kenji Mizoguchi's A Woman of Rumour (1954).

What's more, though, the daughter (played by Yoshiko Kuba) had attempted suicide in Tokyo because her lover had ditched her after learning that her studies were funded by her mother (Kinuyo Tanaka) who... presides over a geisha premises in Kyoto.

For all the fine costumes, elaborate hair and ceremonial bows before the clientele, this amounts to a brothel. And, in her fraught state, the daughter is aghast at witnessing the spectacle of these deep-focus premises filmed in grey shades of black and white which somehow possess an inner colour. Further drama is provided not only by the daughter's growing appreciation of the women's need to avail themselves of this work but her shock at finding that her mother is in thrall to a visiting doctor (Tomoemon Otani) who duly augments his lust by hankering after both of them.

This is not to give away too much, for all becomes apparent a short way into a drama which makes the most of its ninety minutes. In a sense, the denizens of the geisha house realise that they are performing upon a stage, presenting a persona, part of an age-old ritual – as if the Bombs had not fallen upon the country some eight years earlier.

Melodrama, essentially, but with a heart which supplants the other, equally vital organs which we do not see, but in Leonard Cohen's phrase – new skin for the old ceremony – foment a film which startles and haunts us almost seventy years later.

A hostage drama always has a built-in advantage. Will they escape? That is, both the kidnappers and their victims. From a novel by Robert Westerby, whose work one feels a need to explore, The Small Voice (1948) finds Valerie Hobson unhappily married to James Donald who has become successful as a playwright with a knack for exploring the criminal mind. Even so, they are taken by surprise when offering a lift to some men who have had an accident at the roadside; these have escaped from Dartmoor and promptly lock the couple in the country house to which they had been returning.

What's more, the leader of the gang is none other than Howard Keel (billed under his real name of Harold). All this is directed by Fergus McDonell with a noir turn which generally surmounts the implausible, and much of its brio comes from the couple's redoutable housekeeper Joan Young (her Biblical diversion is a high point). And one cannot overlook a young brother and sister – Glyn Dearman and Angela Foulds – who, well-clipped accents and all, find themselves holed up there. Well worth seeing.

In recent weeks there has been as much publicity for Promising Young Woman as Blake Bailey's huge biography of Philip Roth. And in the past couple of days, the latter has taken a twist, its distribution halted by the publisher amidst allegations that the author is as prone to the forced seductions favoured by his subject.

Which is the very material of Emerald Fennell's first film. To have read or - scanned through – articles, one soon learnt that, in revenge for a friend being raped, Carey Mulligan exchanges a quiet daytime life behind a coffee bar for one of dressing provocatively and affecting drunkenness during a night on the town where she picks up men, and at the moment they are about to take the plunge, she reveals all (as it were): it is as though Philip Roth were kicked in the balls, even - one might infer - killed.

Having read of this, one might fear that the film itself could prove repetitive – one incident the same as another. The twist in all this is that it proves to be ingeniously varied. Without giving away too much, there is a moment when it appears about to mutate – happily ever after - into a romantic comedy.

The other surprise is that it turns out to be set in America, which makes sense: the country's turbulence is at the heart (if that's the word) of events here, although, of course, such self-styled lotharios populate the planet. It is a dark film, literally so, its colours, often red, suggest a well-nigh subterranean world of displaced morals: the work of cinematographer Benjamin Kracon while, for my taste, the music (the score by Anthony Willis and the use of songs by Britney Spears among others) is mixed rather too much to the fore of a story which is strong enough to carry itself.

Not only Carey Mulligan but many of the other women (of all ages) give terrific performances; by contrast, most of the men, such as potential boyfriend Bo Burnham, appear to have strayed from bachelor-party territory – then again, that is perhaps the point. For all its being rooted in terrible reality, it has appeared to some as unlikely; in fact, it should be regarded as Jacobean, a period when plays took many a savage turn while shifts in mood could include comedy (the Gravedigger being the most obvious). And in that spirit, five centuries on, Emerald Fennell worked swiftly, filming this in three weeks. As a début, it has the brio of Truffaut's one – and brings to mind one which nobody has mentioned: Richard Gere's. He was in the very good film made from Judith Rossner's brilliant novel Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), whose singles-bar terrain is the mirror-image of all this.