Film Reviews by CH

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.

As The Earth Dies Screaming (1964) opens, one scene cuts rapidly to another as people keel over, a train-driver dies at the wheel and the carriages go up in flames as they fall from the track, a plane falls from the sky – and more. All falls quiet after a while, and we infer that others have met the same fate elsewhere, perhaps across the world: a few survivors, who meet by chance in a Surrey village, are unable to get any radio or television signals.

Static is everywhere.

Some claim that is the very adjective for this film. This is to underestimate its effect. As an American test pilot, Willard Parker, comes to realise, all of them were out of range of whatever gas killed the population (he was high in the air, for example), another was in an oxygen tent; a married couple, on the point of having a baby, had been in an emergency shelter.

Panic and resolve are the uneasy partners as the group holes up in an inn, and look through the window as one of them, foolish enough to flee, is greeted and exterminated by a pair of tall, robotic figures.

By now the quiet has given way to Elizabeth Lutyens's distinctly effective music while director Terence Fisher keeps a steady hand on the pace of this black-and-white world. Much the best known of the cast is Dennis Price, a tweedily enigmatic figure determined to make a bolt for it while keeping up an air of pompous rectitude.

Many a moment springs a surprise, gore is restricted to the eyeballs of the posthumous – say no more. Scoff at one's peril; chances are that any who watch this – it is but an hour – will shudder more than they expected.

Many authors would relish having as many films made from their work as Cornell Woolrich did. Subsequent life in a hillside mansion could be alleviated by retreats to the Riviera. Not that Woolrich favoured anything like this. He continued to live with his mother, as well as in a series of flop 'n' slops from which he emerged after a day at the typewriter to ply the harbourside in quest of dangerous trade. Had he favoured a life of ease and luxury, he would have lost the very stuff of his fiction which, the embodiment of noir, embraces a black panther on the loose and the view of a murder in an apartment across the way.

One of the most surprising films made from his work is The Chase (1946). Directed by Arthur Ripley from a screenplay by Philip Yordan, it opens with an amnesiac veteran Robert Cummings who finds a wallet with some money in it on the pavement. He uses a little of this to treat himself to much-needed food, after which he elects to return the rest to its owner, a smoothly evil Steve Cochran whose address inside the wallet proves to be a swanky Miami house, all curved staircase and random statues, complete with a portly manservant as well as a sidekick played by Peter Lorre, whose very looks always denote duplicity.

Not to mention an elegant wife, Michele Morgan, esteemed all her long life in her native France.

Cummings soon realises that she is a virtual prisoner in the place when he takes up the bemused Cochran's offer as a job there as chauffeur. He does not even appear to rue the fact that he should have kept the eighty-one dollars, for it is chump change to a man who, obviously and viciously enough, uses that palatial home, with real Napoleon brandy in the cellar, as the front for a trade well the other side of the Law.

After all, he tests Cummings's driving skills by means of a throttle by the back seat which he himself operates, letting it hit a hundred while the driver is left with only the steering wheel to avert disaster.

So far, the stuff of many a noir, one firing on all cylinders, no gaskets blown. And it does not falter when moving into another dimension but has all the logic of the subconscious. To say any more would be unfair. All is carried aloft, and below, by the cinematography which enhances a tale mostly related after dark, the lights of Havana glimpsed across the ocean as waves break on the shore: the work of Frank Planer who did the same for dozens of esteemed movies.

Whether running a bar or commanding a horse-and-carriage, here is an array of people as possessed as Woolrich himself. They are stuck with their demons; we can relish them for these eighty minutes.

The double – Dr. Jekyll, Dorian Gray – is a theme upon which many a variant has been made, along with growing conflicts between twin-born children (Elizabethan drama, eighteenth-century novels). The prolific director François Ozon turned to this with L' amant double (2017), adapted at some removes from a novel by the even more prolific Joyce Carol Oates.

Slickly filmed, in chic offices and apartments, the plot turns around Marine Vacth who, after a career as a model feels rootless, feels beset by childhood traumas and amatory dissatisfactions; these take her to a psychiatrist, Jérémie Renier; a passion springs up, which means he can no longer treat her, a situation compounded by their moving in together despite his lack of sympathy for her faithful cat, Milo.

So far, so much Eric Rohmer, you might think. Early on, in the opening moments, viewers have, though, been greeted by medical close-ups along a vagina which is lit to feel rather like a fairground ride. Mirrors are frequently broken; intimate moments are seemingly attended by others, including Renier's twin brother whom Marine Vacth has sought out as a replacement therapist.

This is certainly a new twist on transference.

Events long past certainly have a continuing effect on all this, for all concerned (not least Jacqueline Bisset, who has, naturally enough, two smaller rôles, effectively done).

Is all this worth one's time? Probably not, but Ozon is an accomplished, if variable director who supplies enough here to hold, if vex, the attention: there is interesting biology to be learned here from the nature of twindom, but, as it turns upon the screen, buy-one-get-one-free is not necessarily the best value for us.

Brightly lit, in colour or perhaps one should say color, and opening with a high-school bop, The Unguarded Moment (1956) might look at first to be, at most, a diversion. After all, its star – on screen for most of these ninety minutes – is Esther Williams. In fact, no water was injured in the making of this film, but pain is felt by many of those involved as events prove creepily at odds with this small-town setting.

After all, a woman's body has been taken away from a pavement after a murder one night. Another surprise is that all this is based upon a story co-written by Rosalind Russell.

Esther Williams is a music teacher who has received messages from an infatuated pupil, one whom a detective – George Nader (who appears to own one jacket) – believes could be that murderer. After all, the pupil (John Saxon) has been brought up by a man (Edward Andrews) who is more than embittered after his wife left him when their son was a few years old.

All of which, with a duplicitous school Head (Les Tremayne), could have been the stuff of a noir movie a decade earlier (not least a scene filmed from within a wardrobe). Director Harry Keller had by this time become better known for his work on television series. He had, though, made a film, lasting less than an hour, called Red River Shore. That title is now far better known as a song by Bob Dylan. Could Dylan, a great one for watching films and adapting their dialogue, have seen it one some late-night American channel?

As it is, with teacher-pupil relations the stuff of life and films the past sixty decades and more, it is well worth looking at this effective take upon that scenario – and the school's separating into brawling gangs was ahead of West Side Story.

What pleasure can there be in a criminal life? Any job which has been pulled off soon entails continuing uncertainty, as much from others involved as any pursuers. The task is not something about which one can speak, no chance of adding it to general conversation. It is a solitary pursuit born of social ineptitude.

These are but some of thoughts prompted by Bresson's Pickpocket (1959). Of course. to watch a film about criminals can be entertaining; they are a better on-screen presence than the saintly – doing bird rather than feeding them. The technique of lifting wallets from jackets and hiding them in a folded newspaper is as close as Pickpocket comes to any form of heist. Its interest is not so much in suspense as its attempt to enter a criminal mind – that of Martin LaSalle, who appears satisfied, however much he lifts, to eke out life in a scarcely-furnished bedsitter while, elsewhere in Paris, his mother is seriously ailing, not visited by anybody except her young neighbour, Marika Green.

Partly inspired by Dostoevsky, all this is redolent of that post-war French thought popularly deemed to consist of sitting in cafés and sporting a black, roll-top jumper.

There are some locations, including streets, a railway station and the glimpse of a race course, but much of the narrative haunts mundane premises in which those involved are more likely to be looking into the distance than at one another.

Made in black and white, the film turns around three main actors (including LaSalle's friend Pierre Leymarie) who were all new to acting, their seemingly gauche attitudes no accident but the result of Bresson's insisting upon dozen of takes: LaSalle had to toil up a curving staircase some forty times. This hour and a quarter is no B-feature. It has a studied air, one – as always with Bresson – which sets it apart from, say, the emergent nouvelle vague.

Symbolic of all this is the jacket – perhaps fashionably unlined - worn throughout by LaSalle, even when gaoled.

The edition of the film issued by Artificial Eye has an extra disc, much of which is a documentary with visits to those three actors for their reminiscences across almost half a century. No easy task, for one part of this involved a visit to somebody who had taken up a medical career; another who, via New York, now lives in a remote corner of Mexico City: twists and turns as fascinating as any in Pickpocket, and an aside which prompts one to seek out Bresson's book Notes on Cinematography, which is not, apparently, as dry as its title might suggest.

A brick viaduct, rain, a wandering cat, noisy pubs, backstage dressing rooms, scant furniture in tiny lodging-house rooms. This is the stuff of noir - and a great English use of these, and more, is Cavalcanti's They Made Me a Fugitive (1947). This Brazilian-born director has become better known in recent years for the films he made here, such as Went the Day Well?, although his French works are harder to find (there was once a National Film Theatre season). And now, such is the circle of death, it coincides with renewed interest in the novels of Jackson Budd, some of which have been reissued in the British Library's crime series.

One of these, yet to appear again, was adapted for the screen by Noel Langley for this film, and perhaps he hit upon the surreal turns which this seemingly gritty work takes. Here are many scenes with notices on doors, and framed sentiments on walls, including Auden's “It's Later than You Think”. All of which pale beside the opening scene which finds some functionaries who sigh and sweat as their overcoated shoulders bear a coffin into the, yes, Valhalla Undertakers; its rooftop surely defies all Planning laws, for upon it there are the huge, vertical letters R I P.

One does not give away much by saying that this coffin will cause many more deaths; it conceals contraband cigarettes; in a variant on those who carry violin cases, the top-hatted men are part of a gang headed by Griffith Jones who announces that the operation needs the added class which will be provided by an RAF veteran down on his luck after escaping from a Prisoner of War camp: Trevor Howard.

As with all gangs (and much of human society), factions emerge, partly fostered by rivalry for the women in their midst. Howard's end is precipitated by his balking at a coffinload of drugs. A stint in a misty West Country gaol only determines him to prove his innocence.

Everything – dialogue, pace, light and shade – coheres, including a scene in a house on the Moors which could be a film in itself. If one had to sum up the theme of this remarkable film in a phrase, it is that in this world and the next it is hard for all concerned to rest in peace.

The credits take some while to roll at the end of the new version of West Side Story, and one learns that many digital artists had been involved in its creation. This, though, has been not at all akin to dinosaurs who purport to traverse craggy mountains which, for all the technology, so often seems more risible than suspension of disbelief.

First filmed sixty years ago, that version remains in the mind as rather too clean-looking for a gritty tale of gang warfare. Steven Spielberg, with screenwriter Tony Kushner, has brought a darker hue to this tale of young love traversing racial boundaries, creating an almost-Shakespearean power for its ending. While, rest assured, never losing the brio of the music, lyrics and dance which made this a feat of collaboration by Bernstein, Sondheim and Robbins.

The time goes by swiftly (two hours and forty minutes, with the closing credits, which, happily, have orchestral variations upon the score). Nothing is out of step. The undubbed singing is excellent, and a great move was to have a cast unknown to most of us – except, of course, for Rita Moreno, who, at almost ninety, brings a subtly bravura turn to a rôle which, this time around, finds her running a bar where she dispenses beer and advice. It is not for me to reveal the surprise she springs.

Hoodlums and police alike are all brilliant turns, from Tony (Ansel Elgort) to Officer Krupke (Brian d'Arcy James), and a continually wistful Maria (Rachel Zegler): one could highlight everybody, but the the real point is that here is ensemble playing: nobody steals a march on the others.

It is exhilarating – and resonates over here, in a Britain riven by the street warfare that is Remain and Leave.

Meanwhile, do browse Sondheim's first huge volume of lyrics and commentary, Finishing the Hat. Here are lyrics dropped on the road, and a reminder that some of the unused music resurfaced at the beginning an equally engrossing work, the Chichester Psalms.