Film Reviews by CH

This 1957 film's title denotes the V-shaped flight by a flock of birds on their way to another life. It could equally apply to the very filming of this by Mikhail Kalatozov who animates a simple tale by much use of overhead cameras. Here, in the brief political spring after Stalin's death, he was able to fashion something poetic – from Viktor Rozov's play – about Moscow in the war rather than merely trumpeting the glories of the Fatherland.

The young Tatyana Samoylova is to be married to Aleksey Batalova. Theirs is a joyful romance which finds him rushing up a curving staircase to be with her. The camera is forever moving in these ninety minutes. Indeed, the cameras. Events are seen from many angles, sometimes with scenes superimposed upon each other in the reverie of memory.

And memory is the dominating force. All too soon, before any nuptials, the Pact has broken down, Russia and Germany are at war, and he is called away to serve at the Front. Typical of Kalatozov's blending of the crowd and the personal is her rushing to be there to see him off at the railway station. Heartache, on all sides, is palpable.

The way in which events turn out is typical of life for many – around the world – in wartime. Loneliness, anxiety, treachery. To say any more of the plot would reduce it to the nuts and bolts of tank; is is far more smoothly done than that. An air raid or a woodland death with a last glimpse of trees, is caught in an ever-swirling manner, in quest of a still centre amidst tumult: in effect, a drowning scene above ground.

Acclaimed at the time, a prize-winner in Cannes, sixty-four years on the film is as fresh as ever. How well is it known now? Nobody should miss this, as if Chekhov had lived decades longer into a very different world and caught it as exactly as he always did.

A twenty-minute movie which lasts rather longer. Portmanteau, circular plots have long appeared on the screen and in recent times given a vogue by Pulp Fiction. With Bound(also known as The Power of Few, 2013) director Leone Marucci traverses a dramatic New Orleans automobile smash five times, victims and witnesses' lives overlapping.

Among these is somebody holding up a shop counter, a stolen Vatican shroud, an attempt to find illegal goods, a break-out upon a terrifying motorcycle - and two Beckettian hobos (including a very hairy Christopher Walken) who guy a police officer much as the felines did the one in Top Cat. All this takes place to a soundtrack so pulsing that it appears on the point of bursting its artery (blood is a familiar commodity throughout).

Any film could look far different if its camera angles had been differently chosen. The effect of Bound coming at the incident time and again is much like a butterfly's wings causing a typhoon somewhere else on the planet. One small act of kindness could have prevented all this from happening, which leaves on wondering whether that would necessarily have been for the best.

Top Cat was a cartoon, and, in many ways, so is Bound. The characters, including Christian Slater, do not have much opportunity to be anything than, at most two dimensional but the way in which a simple story becomes a plot brings them all a greater interest than would otherwise be the case. Whether it would stand up to a second viewing – let alone five of them – remains to be seen.

Half a decade before Annie Hall there was Henrietta Lowell. Who? She was played by Elaine May in a A New Leaf (1971), a film which she also directed and wrote its screenplay from a short story by Jack Ritchie.

If anything, here is a woman even more ditzy than Annie. As such, she falls prey to the ever-brilliant Walter Matthau, a man who had twice as many facial muscles as most of us. He is Henry Graham (is this an in-joke about Graham Greene's first names?), a man so improvident that, despite an apartment which seems to sport a Rothko, he has used up the capital and income of his trust fund. His attorney (a brilliant turn by William Redfield who died far too young after coming to wider attention a few year later in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) is less forgiving than his man-servant. Here, then, is a Jeeves-and Wooster set-up. Except that Wodehouse's prose could never find a counterpart on screen. Here, though, George Rose (an English actor who should have been better known) is as adept as Matthau at facial expressions which say so much more than words as his employer's follies continue to land them in it.

Elaine May is a rich, naïve botanist whom Matthau hopes will be his salvation, especially if he can bump her off a discreet while after the wedding has taken place. An old plot, of course, but given such fresh momentum here that one so wishes she had directed more than four films.

(Of course she was clobbered by Ishtar, which is in fact very watchable.)

There is not a moment wasted in A New Leaf, its visual gags matched by the verbal ones (a fern plant deserves a credit of its own, as do Elaine May's Hockneyesque spectacles).

How to convey the spirit of this terrific film without giving too much away? Well, the opening scene finds Matthau looking anxious, close up, while a screen appears to beep at a hospital bedside. The news turns out to be good, and the camera pulls back to reveal that the patient is... his much-troubled sports car.

That sets the tone for a film which should not be missed. It bears out Edmund Wilson's journal entry about seeing her on stage in a famed cabaret turn with Mike Nichols. “She is extremely handsome, with powerful black eyes – probably passionate and strongwilled.”

As for Matthau, it is a sign of his brilliance, he would soon after appear in a very different take upon Manhattan: The Taking of Pelham 123.

Vera Lynn and espionage are not subjects often thought to go flag-wavingly hand in hand. That is to reckon without her third, and final, film One Exciting Night (1944). This was directed by Walter Forde, whose skills often turned around both comedy and thrillers - and, what's more, given his music-hall upbringing, he had a relish of the stage.

All of these elements come together in the seventy minutes of this wartime yarn. It finds her caught up in a plot by which an English government official (Donald Stewart) has brought back to London from Lisbon a rolled-up Rembrandt drawing sent there for safe keeping but now sought after by a bunch of well-heeled thieves whose base is a Piccadilly apartment knee-knockingly high above a night club.

The light and shadow of the film's cinematography, whether beside a railway station's cloakroom or beneath a theatre's stage, is a model of effective contrast. Here is no White Cliffs propaganda but entertainment of sufficiently high order to remind viewers that central to civilization is a relish of all its variety.

As such, the film's military nurse Vera Lynn finds herself given songs suited to a small club's audience – and she handles them so well. She has panache, she has humour – and there are moments when it reminds us of those well-staged situations in which Jessie Matthews had found herself.

If no masterpiece, One Exciting Night remains a joy eighty years on. And it has an undoubted classic scene in which Vera Lynn sings through a truck's megaphone to urge one and all – above and below stairs – to bring forth their earthly goods for recycling. The proffered goods make the charity shops of our era appear a model of restraint.

Somewhere, in another Dimension, Cecil Day Lewis must feel rueful every time that, across the Universe, he hears himself described as Daniel Day Lewis's father. And there were perhaps times, on this soil, when he felt similar chagrin at his thrillers and detective stories, published under the name of Nicholas Blake, being preferred to the work which would, none the less, bring him four years as the job of Poet Laureate.

These novels, which began with the mid-Thirties prep.-school setting of A Question of Proof, invariably turned around the sleuthing skills of Nigel Strangeways, inspired by the crumpled figure of that decade's dominant poet W.H. Auden (himself an enthusiast for detective fiction, as was another, older poet Herbert Read). One might have thought that these novels could have been filmed as they appeared. Perhaps his affair with, and marriage to, Jill Balcon upset that influential cinema family. At any rate, the film industry is always fickle. Only one of the novels has appeared upon the screen: The Beast Must Die, a title of Classical precedent. As a film, it first surfaced in, of all places, early-Fifties Argentina and most recently, this year, in an English television series (yet to appear on disc).

Over fifty years ago, and towards the end of Day Lewis's lifetime, it became a notable work by Claude Chabrol as Que la bete meure (1969). We are in provincial France, where a young boy is walking home from a fishing expedition to his widowed father (Michel Duchaussoy) only to be killed by an automobile whose crass driver (Jean Lanne), while shouting at the glamorous woman (Caroline Cellier) at his side, speeds away without any witnesses to the bloodied corpse.

The father is left in a void of diary-keeping grief which sets him upon a trail serendipitously aided by a nearby farmer. Much ensues from that. By way of almost-Bunelian social satire (a fraught household whose country-house fortune turns around a huge automobile repair workshop) we are drawn into cliff-edge and ocean-bound revenge drama.

Here is not the stuff of rapid editing (although one ducks when watching the yacht's sails head this way); Chabrol, as so often, is alert to the well-nigh sedentary way in which horror reveals itself.

For all its antecedent life in print, this is a film which exists in its own right – and keeps one guessing long after the end. We must hope for more Blake on screen – including the back-stabbing world of publishing that is End of Chapter.

Graham Greene consistently praised James Cagney as “one of the most reliable actors on the screen; his vigour, speed and humour are just as apparent in The Irish in Us, a film to discourage a less hard-working and conscientious actor, as in A Midsummer Night's Dream”. Come The Sequel to Second Bureau, he lauded “the lightweight hands held a little away from the body ready for someone else's punch: the quick nervous step of a man whose footwork is good: the extreme virtuosity of the muted sentiment”. And in The Oklahoma Kid there is “nothing Mr. Cagney can do which is not worth watching. On his light hoofer's feet, with his quick nervous hands and his magnificent unconsciousness of the camera, he can pluck distinction out of the least promising part – and this part has plenty of meat”.

Again, of Each Dawn I Die, Greene lighted upon that nervous quality, and it is writ foot-tappingly large in the very title of Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three (1961), a two-hour film carried by Cagney's increasingly manic performance as a harrassed Coca-Cola executive who has holed up in the West Berlin office while harbouring hopes of the plum London job.

Adapted, very loosely and yet tightly, by Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond from a Molnar play of three decades earlier (and with a dash of Wilder's own 1939 screenplay for Ninotchka), here is another instance of life catching up with art. While Wilder was directing it in Berlin - Brandenburg Gate and all - the Wall sprang up suddenly and some scenes then had to be shot in Munich. Could word of this film-in-progress have brought orders from Moscow to erect that concrete hulk?

Cagney has his eye on the Russian market, negotiations begin with three stooges redolent of those in Ninotchka while he contends with German staff who insist upon clicking their heels at every turn while the deskbound staff rise to their feet at his every entrance. This is office life rather different from that of The Apartment, although there is a winningly-done affair with a secretary (the fetchingly comic Liselotte Pulver) while his wife (Arlene Francis who blends politeness with well-judged jaundice) hankers for the family's return to suburban Arkansas.

With material enough already for a farce which verges on the screwball, it goes up several notches when the family is asked by the company's Chairman to look after his teenage daughter (Pamela Tiffin) who has been sent on a European tour after striking up four engagements within a few months - and proves to rank midnight encounters higher than, well, tiffin.

Wilder and Diamond wanted to make the fastest-paced film ever. Laugh at one joke, and you might miss the next one as the bizarre logic of it all traverses the borders of a divided city. Coca-Cola appears to have acquiesed in the use of their name as an emblem of corporate ambition and internal tyranny – trumped by the publishers of “Itsy-Bitsy Teeny-Weeny Polka-Dot Bikini” sanctioning the repeated use of that disc by Communist police to break down the spirit of one of their own whom they take to be a spy (one suspects that André Previn, who adapts classical music throughout, did not have a hand in that).

Difficult to pluck lines from it out of context; one reinforces the other while there are visual gags galore (with an interesting emphasis upon balloons and an adroit instance of table-dancing with flares which a violinist does his best to ignore). Cagney's footwork is again good (and be sure not to miss him in Yankee Doodle Dandy, a title echoed many times by the office wall's cuckoo clock, which becomes a significant part in the plot's twist).

In these long months when the world's borders have presented other challenges, here is diversion which has one hooting in delight. One wonders whether Graham Greene, with his well-known wariness of America, saw it. Cagney would again have won him over.

“People like that don't commit suicide – they're far too busy.” The title Black Widow might lead one to expect a square screen framing black-and-white scenes most of which take place after dark. This 1954 film is in Cinemascope, the camera panning from side to side of large swanky Manhattan apartments whose furnishings are offset by copious sunlight. From one of Hugh Wheeler's mysteries (written as Patrick Quentin), this is a well-upholstered whodunit with no sign of a holster, just the shadow of a body hanging from a bathroom ceiling.

Van Heflin, a Broadway producer, is married to Gene Tierney who leaves town for a while to look after her ailing mother. Reluctantly, he goes to a party given by a neighbour in the block, none other than a Ginger Rogers who is currently in one of his productions and given to greeting many with an insult while her bag-carrier of a husband (Reginald Gardiner) looks on despairingly. Seeking fresher air, van Heflin goes on the balcony (some of the backdrops do not travel that well to Hollywood), and there encounters Peggy Ann Garner, a leopardess who, at twenty, hides her spots while going in for the kill while climbing the ladder of ambition with her typewriter (a sentence which could need editing but that might risk giving too much away).

And so he takes her out for some food more fortifying than Ginger Rogers's things on toothpicks, and, before long, suggests she can use his apartment by day as a writing retreat while his wife is away.

An innocent mid-life crisis?

Detective George Raft has his doubts. Some might call all this stagey, though it might not work on stage. Whichever, it is entertaining, not least with the brief turn of a cleaning lady played – almost Monty Python-fashion - by Cathleen Nesbitt who, some four decades earlier, had been in love with Rupert Brooke.

Think of John Wayne and there come to mind a big gun, an even larger hat and quite possibly a horse. So how, in Without Reservations (1946), does Claudette Colbert fit into such a scenario? Dodge City is hardly the place for a best-selling author. No, this is only a Western in the sense that she is heading West, to Hollywood, upon a sleeper train to discuss the filming, with Clark Gable and Lana Turner, of her highly-regarded book which turns around new hopes for human society.

As the title suggests, she has to make do with lesser sleeping quarters upon a crowded train, which brings her into the company of Wayne, a no-holds-barred, plain-speaking kinda guy whom, despite initial, er, reservations, she realises would be perfect to portray her novel's hero on screen.

She cannot pitch this notion to him directly as she is keeping herself incognito. Much, but not all, of the film takes place aboard the train – one with a dining carriage, a far cry from today's forlorn trolleys (where even those still exist). Directed by Mervyn LeRoy, long adept at fast-moving movies, the dialogue is snappy, with frequent reference to a matter of concern to one and all; that is, “bananas”: no, this is not a health matter but slang for dollars.

Banana can have another slang meaning, if you get my drift – and perhaps that is hinted at it the film's final, lingering screen-filling shot; but this is not the place to reveal that; watch this is, and enjoy the good time with which Claudette Colbert is synonymous, in the nicest possible sense of the phrase.

Oh, and do not blink or you will miss Cary Grant showing that is is a thoroughly good sport. He was born with the twinkle in his eye which he deploys to good effect here. A gentleman can be judged by his eyebrows.

“These old houses creak as much as my knees.” So a landlady tells a young and fetching church organist (Candace Hilligoss) who has rented a room in a small town after, apparently, surviving a crowded automobile's plunge from a bridge into a river at the beginning of Carnival of Souls (1962).

Created and directed by Herk Harvey, who appears throughout as a ghostly figure, this film, rendered in effective black and white, does not succumb to gore but is continually unnerving, not least with the man (Sidney Berger) across the landing, a warehouse functionary creepily set upon deflowering her: he arrives at breakfast time with a jug of coffee laced with spirits (as it were): for which she supplies the wonderful term of “germkiller” (all this,after a classic bathtub scene).

Within and without, the film is stark, scantly populated. How many people know of it? How did it come to be made? Little funding was available, and yet it echoes across six decades, partly driven by music which riffs upon that modest church organ to summon the stuff of nightmare.

The past eighteen months have taken us back ninety years. That is to say, it quickly became clear that to set up one camera in front of a stage production was as uninvolving for the audience as the sluggard nature of early talkies whose directors could not move microphones swiftly lest there be untoward wind effects. The thought comes to mind while watching Denzel Washington's 2016 film of August Wilson's Eighties play Fences in a revival of which he and many of the cast had appeared on Broadway a few years earlier.

Some have said that this film shows its theatrical origins. It does so, but also, by dextrous means, transcends them – and, in its two-and-a-quarter hours is a joy for those of us who did not get to see it on stage (let alone the other nine plays in Wilson's century-spanning Pittsburgh series).

Fences chronicles a few years around the Fifties halfway mark. Denzel Washington plays a garbage collector given to philosophical and social reflections not often associated with such a job (although one might recall the crew in Jack Rosenthal's television series The Dustbinmen). His home life is the focus of the film, whether within the building or on its street and back garden, where the eponymous and symbolic fence-building task is a prolonged one. All this is complex. Much of it is galvanised by his heroic wife, played by Viola Davis, and fraught dealings with a son (Joven Adopa) whose adolescent yearnings remind Washington of failure to make more of himself. “Man hands on misery to man...”, in Larkin's lines.

The film's structure turns upon monologues without lessening its dramatic surprises (not to be hinted at here). It has the spirit of Tennessee Williams, but one might also wonder whether Wilson knew D. H. Lawrence's plays (and indeed Williams adapted one of his short stories You Touched Me!).

Commercial imperatives mean that the film is in colour but, in one's memory, it has an almost sepia quality. One can but lament that Wilson died at sixty, a decade before the film appeared – but glad that he had created this screenplay, and he would be sure that to relish the result.

Chances are that a disc of Let's Make it Legal (1951) will have Marilyn Monroe on its cover. She is only in it for a few minutes, some of which linger upon her swimming costume. One should not feel short-changed. Here is a drama to whose proceedings screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond brings quite a bit of his natural wit (whether the scene involves a baby or outraged policemen).

Proceedings is an apt word, for the plot turns around the imminent divorce of Claudette Colbert and plant-loving, gambling addict Macdonald Carey, whose daughter, Barbara Bates, is keen to prevent this: self-interest is that motive, for she enjoys an easy living at home with her infant daughter, a situation which infuriates husband Robert Wagner. A further complication is the return to the town of Zachary Scott whose sinister moustache is an emblem of his business success and political aspirations in Washington, all of which pale beside his renewed hopes of wooing and marrying Claudette Colbert (hopes from which he is not deflected by a gold-digging Marilyn).

Directed by Richard Sale, things move at a pace – often inside the house itself - in this hour and a quarter, and one can only marvel at clothes which would now fetch a fortune on the vintage racks.

We should be grateful that Matilyn's prescence has kept this film in sight. Of course, she would soon be famous, and, within a decade was dead. Another book has just asserted that she was murdered. Be that as it may, her tragic end has overshadowed that of Barbara Bates who gassed herself in 1969. Bright lights have dark shadows.

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.