Film Reviews by CH

Filmed in what looks to be the hot summer of 1976 and based upon a decades-old story by E.F. Benson, Mrs Amworth opens with the eponymous Glynis Johns at the wheel of an open-top motor-car as she causes many a collision for which she cannot be directly blamed as she arrives in a village dominated by its church and graveyard.

With a script by Hugh Whitemore, it proves to be all the more topical, for the villagers are going down with a virus which drains them of their energy. Is indeed wildlife to blame? Why do some refuse to have a necessary blood test? Are those who blame it upon gnat bites on the right track?

Made for television, this half-hour yarn has a fair amount of its garish period colour (and appalling taste in men's clothes). And yet, with a bravura performance by Glynis Johns, who appears to have stepped - breast-clinging dresses and all - more from Tennessee Williams than Benson's Mapp and Lucia, it is well worth one's time, as much for the crowded bar-be-que as solitary graveside moments which traverse the centuries.

We need more films made from Benson's supernatural tales (meanwhile be sure not to miss the post-war Dead of Night, part of which derives from him).

The second part of this short two-film disc, Mrs Amworth is the better bet.

Lunar journeys are always more enjoyable on the screen than in reality. Who would want to spend long days in claustrophobic confinement only to get there, and find nothing except a good view of the Earth?

Sixty-six years before Neil Armstrong took that step, Georges Méliès accomplished the journey - there and back - in sixteen minutes. True, he had the help of hundreds, including a bevy of chorus girls.

A well-known stage performer with a sure-handed way of conjuring and sleight of hand, he saw the possibilities of adapting such vanishing-lady stunts to silent film. This was a matter of filming at eleven in the morning for a few hours while the sun was directly above his glass-roofed studio. Other hours were given to the building of sets.

And what sets they are! The spacecraft into which half-a-dozen men squeeze (among them, Méliès himself as the leading Professor) is launched through a huge cannon against a background of smoke as the chorus girls bid the intrepid team farewell and the vessel heads towards a beamingly yellow Moon.

All this had been inspired by Verne and Wells, and, naturally, there is trouble ahead.

None of this is derivative, however, for it is a creation all its own, heart-stoppingly so as the hunched-over, visibly-ribbed creatures fend off these colonisers.

To think that is but one of some six-hundred films Méliès made before the Great War (over half of them now lost) is all the more incredible when when one realises that some were shown in colour. That was a matter of two-hundred women colouring each frame of each print by hand (each woman specialised in a particular colour as they stood side by side in a barn-like premises for weeks at a time).

Such was changing society, especially with the advent of a War compounded by the invention of sound recording, that this was one of many films whose survival owed as much to luck as anything. Four times as long as the film itself is a documentary on the DVD which not only neatly summarises his life - with well-chosen scenes from other films - but shows the restoration process.

This took far longer than the creation of the film itself. By initial good fortune, a print of the coloured film was found in Span, brought back to France - and then came a gamble: the separation centimetre by centimetre of a reel which was close to coalescing into a useless acidic lump. Literally: knife-edge stuff. And it suddenly seems to belong itself to another era, for each revealed frame was copied and then stored upon one of those Macs which comprised a screen which sprang from what looked like an upturned pudding bowl.

There was not the technology to take the task any further at the beginning of this century: a counterpoint to all that had been done on the hoof in 1902. Come 2011 something had been done to improve software, and funding was now available to support a once-quixotic task (the French do not appear to have an equivalent of the word “geek” to which the documentary's sub-titlers have recourse). Things moved as swiftly as frame-by-frame work can do. The restoration is glorious. The film lives again.

Such was the dedication of the Mac-bound technicians that, in due course, they showed it a frame at a time on a large, silver screen so that they could check the colours' consistency. There was puzzlement at a silver streak in the edge of some frames: upon closer inspection, this was revealed to be an inadvertent creeping into the shot by a key which hung by the door of Méliès's studio over a century ago.

Neil Armstrong would surely agree that the return of this film is un grand pas.

Before the series of feature films which brought Eric Rohmer an international audience - at any rate, amongst those with a francophile taste for long conversations of a philosophical hue (with an undertow of amorous aspiration) - he made a number of short, black-and-white items in the early-Sixties.

These find him experimenting with the methods which would sustain the films he made until his death at a venerable age a decade ago. Two have been issued on a DVD. One is The Bakery Girl of Monceau and the other, Suzanne's Career. What's more, two others are hidden in the “special features” (and one of these has Godard in a rare acting rôle).

To focus on the Bakery one. Here is an evocation of Paris in 1963. Yes, those Citroens, cafés, and, of course, the eponymous Boulangerie.

In these twenty minutes or so, Barbet Schroeder - he playing a Law student - sees a woman (Michele Giardon) going by several times and, whether by accident of design, they collide - and become due to meet again (a stock situation of many a story or film); that does not come to pass, and Schroeder, morose, finds consolation in the bakery, where he becomes enchanted by the eighteen-year-old girl behind the counter.

Simple as the plot might appear, and with scant time for it to evolve far, it is absorbing, everything caught on the hoof.

And given plangency by learning that, a decade later, in the mid-Seventies, Michele Giardon killed herself at thirty-six. One should have relished seeing her in much more - but time's ever-rolling credits are a tough ride.

“Captain Scarlet. He is indestructible. You are not.”

That warning comes to mind when watching the opening scenes of Crossroads to Crime (1960). Why on earth should that be the case? This was several years before that puppet series became an international success after Thunderbirds. True, these few minutes feature a Police Constable (Anthony Oliver) who is clinging onto the side of a Ford Zephyr whose driver is making off, somewhere in the vicinity of Slough, with a kidnapped woman (Miriam Karlin) who, a cigarette forever on her lips, works behind the counter of a transport caff which is a front for a racket which takes place out the back as trucks pull up to refill with diesel. And, of course, out of sight, behind all this, there is a smooth Mr. Big in a smart house.

To keep you out of suspense any further: this was directed by Gerry Anderson, with uncredited help from his wife Sylvia. At this time, they had achieved some initial success with their puppets when a telephone call came to ask if they would like to take

on a B-film with humans. The budget was minimal, the time available (a fortnight) even less, and, in their view, the proffered script (by Alan Falconer) as wooden as any puppet.

Needs must, they set to work and - in a hoot of a ten-minute extra on the DVD – they and others recall those two weeks with incredulous horror (Gerry Anderson is filmed in front of a picture of Captain Scarlet).

And yet, sixty years on, these fifty-four minutes pass agreeably enough. After all, any film which turns around trucking heists (think of both versions of They Drive By Night) has an interest, as does the caff (in which Miriam Karlin is as formidable as she was in her fabled part as a bolshie, trade-union worker in The Rag Trade). There is good use of locations (all those near-empty streets), dark nights on the Great North Road, even darker moments in the ad hoc basement warehouse.

In its way, all as effective a cover for operations as Tracey Island.

With the advent of the talkies, cinema lost something at first. They were often far too, well, talkative; composition was lost as filmed theatre held sway. In a while the virtue of selective sound was understood - and every now and then such films as Silent Movie and The Artist have shown that there can be a substantial audience for a silent movie. Diamonds of the Night (1964) is unlikely ever to pack 'em in but its influence these past six decades has been has been quietly considerable.

It is not exactly silent. There are perhaps a dozen lines of brisk Czech dialogue in its hour, and many a sound of gunfire and other noises on the air (where else are noises?). Directed by Jan Nemec (his first film), it was adapted by him with Arnost Lustig from the latter's novel, which was based upon his own wartime experiences.

Two teenagers (Ladislav Jansky, Antonin Kumbera) are heading for the wooded hills, ducking bullets and the usual absurd calls of “halt!”. One is already injured; hobbling, he is aided by the other.

It emerges that they have escaped from a wagon train on its way to a concentration camp. The great success of the film is that a chase up a hill becomes something much greater, for it cuts to and fro in time - back to that hellish train and, so it seems, forwards to escape. As with so much of the Czech new wave, there is a blending of reality and fantasy, the wonderful black and white cinematography becomes, every now and then, a bleached-out cityscape suggestive of delusion under fire. Harrowingly real, it is also surreal, with a Bunelesque use of ants consuming a foot.

No shot (filmwise, that is) lasts long. Here is a masterclass in editing, partly the work of Miroslav Ondricek who was later to work with, among many others, Lindsay Anderson whose own combining of fantasy with gritty takes on contemporary life owed much to his Czech studies.

To say how all this turns out would be unfair - even if one knew. Suffice to say that here is a film whose wartime hillside bears comparison with that familiar from La Grande Illusion.

How do people emerge into the world, soon enjoy playground games and encounters, and yet, within two decades, have tossed aside teddy bears and dolls to relish destroying others - and on a large scale?

Perhaps the answer rests in those playgrounds. Factions and favourites form, the unfortunate are cast into infant exile. Such thought is prompted by Juraj Herz's The Cremator. Somehow this Czech film was made in 1969 but, inevitably, swiftly vanished, and has only become known again here this century. From a novel by Ladislav Fuks, it depicts the life of a man (Rudolf Hruninsky) who gains control of the crematorium in which he works - premises which inspire in him cod-philosophical notions about restoring the corpses, all ashes being equal, to their place in the Eternal Circle. As one might say, the Lord of the Manor becomes tomato fertiliser, and is none the worse for that.

All of this makes carefully combed-over Hruninsky vulnerable when the Nazis arrive and seek his help in disposing of those deemed unhelpful to the cause.

Such a summary, accurate as it is, can scarcely do justice to a film which transcends its subject. Many are the film techniques deployed here - voice-over, jump-cuts, montage, swivelling camera to catch a chase in confined quarters. In some ways, with a glimpse through an oven's window (all this is in black and white), this appears realistic but the light and shade form a journey into a man's mind, those cliffs of fall (in Hopkins's phrase) which can infect a nation.

As such, this is not a horror film but one redolent of Conrad's phrase about a mental void, “the horror, the horror”.

A swift and terrifying ninety minutes in which anybody, without a change of guise, can become a monster.

Many have told Billie Holiday's life, and some have criticised Billie (2020) for not simply doing so again. Its great interest is showing how such a life can, or cannot, come to be chronicled. In 1971, at thirty, a New York journalist, Linda Kuehl, from a Jewish background, decided to set about a biography of her. The process involved tracing and recording many of those who had known the singer.

Throughout this film, directed/assembled by James Erskine, the camera closes in for a few minutes upon a cassette recorder while somebody - a musician, a pimp, a producer, a narcotics agent, and more - recalls incidents, warmly, cantankerously. Surprising how well these tapes have endured (there are subtitles throughout for these recollections). Amidst all this is archive film of Billie, including some of that wonderful performance fro Granada television in England soon before she died (one must regret the colourisation as the price to be paid for the documentary being made).

Of course, research became Linda Kuehl's master. She was forever on the trail, and in thrall (and more) to some of those whom she found (including Count Basie). These cassettes have been used in biographies of Holiday (those by Donald Clarke and Julia Blackburn) but it is something else to hear them - and to reflect that a biographer has his or her life while giving so much of the day to somebody else's. (Michael Holroyd has said that he saw little of the turbulent Sixties while writing the life of Lytton Strachey.) Here, in Billie, are home-movie glimpses of Linda Kuehl in a bikini on the beach, in the waves, seemingly happy.

What happened? Soon after her thirty-eighth birthday she was found dead at night on the pavement outside a Washington hotel. The police deemed it suicide. Her family doubt this. She was found in the night cream which she always applied to her face before sleep. Who would do so before suicide? A noir aspect, akin to the terrible end of Billie herself.

We are now much further from her death than she was from Billie's. Time works strangely, and we must be glad that her cassettes - and her time - did not go to waste.

"Women in Love! Sons and Lovers! The Rocking-Horse Winner!" In any pub quiz about films and D.H. Lawrence, these are some that might be called out but it would be a bold competitor who volunteered Your Witness (1950). Asked to explain and without giving much away, one could make an impressive case by saying that Lawrence plays a pivotal part in this film. Not he himself, of course, for he had been dead twenty years, but one of his poems is read aloud in court (premises, of course, with which he was familiar). The pub competitor could gain extra points by noting that the book entitled Collected Poems in the film is rather slimmer than the substantial one which gathered the work of that prolific author.

Things start at quite a pace - in New York, where Robert Montgomery is a sharp lawyer in the middle of a case which he succeeds in having declared a mistrial with the suggestion of political engineering by the opposing attorney. Meanwhile, his secretary has arrived with a cable, which is from the wife (Jenny Laird) of the Englishman (the unfortunately-named Michael Ripper), whose bravery saved them both at Anzio and is now living at a stables.

A taunt about the siring of a child upon Ripper's wife has led to a man being shot. He is in gaol, a trial is imminent and things do not look good.

Not only did Montgomery appear in almost every scene of this film but he directed it (dual rôles he had recently managed for Lady in the Lake and Ride the Pink Horse). If this one is not on their level, it is capably done. The fast-paced Manhattan opening serves to show that life moves more slowly in post-war England. He arrives in the village, finds lodgings in a pub, overcomes linguistic confusions, and gets a glimpse of the gradations of society.

By contrast with the darts players, there is a straight-backed, stiff-natured widowed Colonel (Leslie Banks), whose substantial house also contains his horse-loving teenage daughter (Ann Stephens) and his sister-in-law (Patricia Cutts) whose husband died in the war.

The formal English legal system means that Montgomery has to find oblique means to bear out his certainty that his wartime comrade is innocent. Even with the trial underway, this takes time. Nothing, and nobody, is quite as clear as all this might appear. Alliances are formed, inferences prove as misguided as they are understandable, and there is a curious, indeed sexual undertow - which is where D.H. Lawrence comes in as the expert witness. As St. Mawr shows, he understood more about horses than the rocking variety - and The Lost Girl shows that he was familiar with the movies. What would he have made of the advent of the talkies?

How can one review Jacques Tati? To watch him is to surrender willingly to a mood which some call slapstick, others the higher whimsy. As with Chaplin and Keaton before him, there is an inner logic to the absurd situations in which he finds himself as a simple man up against the System. In his first feature Jour de Fête (1949) he is a postman in a country town where, for Bastille Day, a flagpole is being erected, at which his assistance is, fortunately for us, inept. Duly plied with alcohol, he is goaded at the showing in a tent of a film about the extraordinary American innovation in delivering mail across that continent - a matter of aeroplanes and helicopters.

Inspired, deluded, he feels sure that he and his bicycle can match this locally. No more dawdling, he is determined the next day to ensure that this holiday he will be more hard-working than ever.

And so it is that the bicycle, often filmed - somehow - with a phantom life of its own, it traverses the lanes and squares at the mercy of a vacant saddle. Against the odds, the wheels survive many a tumble as the hapless Tati chases after it.

As one hoots, mere prose cannot match these visual delights, nor can one rise to the heights of Jean Yatove's jaunty music. The film was made in both colour and, as a safety measure, black and white, but, in the late-Forties, it was impossible to process the former, and so for a long while it was not seen as intended. Restoration of the colour brings a new-dimension to the film: it has a pleasingly bleached quality, one might say the equivalent of sepia; it is perfectly suited to the twin forces of a tranquil town against which Tati's frantic activities take place.

In this bleak midwinter, can there be any better way of alleviating the spirits than watching this with some pastis to hand?

“We've just flown in our broomsticks for some blood.” So says Marjorie Fielding in The Franchise Affair (1951) as she and her daughter (Dulcie Gray) turn up in a small-town teashop (the Anne Boelyn Café!) and find that, amidst their pastries, the other customers have swallowed the local assertions that they are witches who have kidnapped a teenager (Ann Stephens) in the fine house which they have inherited and are hard pressed to maintain.

From a novel by Josephine Tey which was based on an eighteenth-century case, this becomes a matchless depiction of a bruised post-war England in which, bizarrely, a narrowly-focussed Buckinghamshire newspaper is called The Globe. Its front-page headlines echo through the film - capably directed by Lawrence Huntington - as regularly as trays of teapots are placed upon the desks of such people as local, smart-suited solicitor Michael Denison who takes on a case far removed from his usual province of conveyancing and codicils in what was “a quiet, dignified little place” which duly includes a reference to “the situation at Bourne End”.

A resonant time in 2021: somebody says of all this, “they wouldn't put a thing like that in the paper if it wasn't true.”

As it happens, wild rumours fly, brought to earth by a case which reaches the Assizes and the Judge is bound to say, “do confine yourself to English - Standard or Basic” - as testimony becomes fraught, and, earlier, one those involved feels compelled to say, “it's like wanting to be sick, and having to postpone it.”

A strange aspect of all this is that, fifteen years later, Ann Stephens died in equally mysterious circumstances. All of this is, on screen and life, a case, as Michael Denison says along the way, “you can't go through life with a tin can tied to your tail and pretend it isn't there.”

One might wonder whether the surnames “Fielding” and “Gray” inspired Simon Gray's wonderfully immoral character Fielding Gray.

Time was when the portmanteau film could command an audience which appreciated that, done well, this amounted to a full meal rather than snacking at a tapas. Perhaps the supreme instance was Dead of Night, although there could be a case for Kind Hearts and Coronets being a turn upon such a set-up, as was, decades later., Jack Rosenthal's The Chain. With Bond Street, a number of writers came together, commissioned to provide the separate stories behind the dress, pearl, veil and flowers acquired in the eponymous thoroughfare for a bride's trousseau.

And so we are regaled by a great series of characters, the stories not overlapping. In the first, a haughty woman insists that her dress be altered forthwith so that she can attend what is taken to be a cocktail party that evening. Trouble is, the seamstress (Kathleen Harrison) deputed to do the work is in such a rage (anxious to be at the hospital for her teenage daughter's troubled pregnancy) that she rips the dress. Naturally the customer is livid, but there is a twist which restores faith in humanity. Perhaps this section with its de facto sweatshop atmosphere behind that fine façade is the film's early peak. Strange, though, that the toilers at their sewing machines all speak with the clipped accent of their betters.

Similarly, Ronald Howard, a button salesman, speaks with such an accent - but he is a former fighter pilot, an officer down on his luck, so much so that he has ripped the trousers of his only suit, necessary dress in which to ply his trade. He is so glad at Patricia Plunkett's handiwork at a humble invisible mender's that he invites her to lunch, unaware that she is trying to disentangle herself from a low-lifer (Kenneth Griffin) who is trying to pull off a theft. Crime returns, with murder, in the section where a murderer hides at in the small flat occupied by a prostitute (a splendid Jean Kent). Torrid stuff, big brass bed and all, the segment that - of the quartet - one could envisage as a full-length film. As for the wedding, one could do without this farcical turn which requires the father of the bride to woo, and send home, the woman who turns up from Denmark (she helped his son escape after wartime capture). There is a crass tone to this, though one relishes the supercilious cameo by hard-pressed travel agent Colin Gordon. Throughout one can happily spot small parts by those who became better known - and it sits alongside the other work by one of those who handled an episode: Terence Rattigan.

How widely is Erskine Caldwell read nowadays? He died as recently as 1987 (which is in fact thirty-four years ago) but is fixed in the mind as a chronicler of the Depression with Tobacco Road. Set in the wild country of Georgia, it depicts a family hard pressed to grow anything.

The novel soon became a long-running Broadway play and was bought by Twentieth Century-Fox. Anybody coming to the work through this 1941 film could be excused for thinking it an instalment of The Beverley Hillbillies. From the off, we find the indolent, turnip-chewing father Charlie Grapewin at the wheel of a jalopy with a tendency to crash through fences on the journey back to the tumbledown homestead across barren land which has not provided sustenance in a long while. Despite such privation, Gene Tierney, given to crawling across the ground, looks ravishing: she could get up on stage and solve the family's problems with one flicker of the eyelid.

In the event, things get even worse. The rent unpaid, the bank wants this woe-begone property. What remains of the family can either go to toil on the poor farm or join the many other children at work in a city mill.

Another surprise is to find that all this was directed by John Ford who, two years earlier, had made that supreme Depression film The Grapes of Wrath. Where that was harrowing, this is poor farce, one crack-brained scheme following another - such as filling a woman preacher's new, $800 automobile with logs and driving to sell them.

Many the moment when one wants to close one's eyes on this spectacle (in which Gene Tierney appears but briefly as does potential saviour Dana Andrews) - and listen to David Buttolph's fine music which, with many a country jangle, fits the landscape so well.

Whitman-like, each filmgoer can contain multitudes. To watch Saints and Sinners (1949) is to switch many times between exasperation and some delight. Written by its producer and director, Leslie Arliss with Paul Vincent Carroll (from his story), it opens with some fine location work in an Irish village (or one that purports to be) as Kieron Moore returns after two years' absence.

He does not find a friendly welcome. After all, he has been in gaol for purloining the funds collected for new bells at the church, the province of the Canon, Michael Dolan. From the start Moore maintains his innocence, all the for so as he now finds himself rebuffed by Sheila Manahan who has taken up instead with a local bank manager and adds to the insult by offering him work as pot-man in the inn owned by her father. He calls her bluff by accepting (as he says of the cellar, “it's an improvement on the suite I've had for the past two years - I can open this door”).

So far, something almost gritty, especially as it emerges that many of the villagers are hardly on the level: diluted alcohol, a sharpster of an undertaker whose cunning is prompted by the fact that “people are too healthy round here”, and a general penchant for gambling fuelled by one old woman's ability to name a horse who comes in first at 20-1.

Another perspective is provided by the arrival from America of a couple, Tom Dillon and the ever-sultry Christine Norden (as Blanche, a name which often suggests flames leaping from the heart). She has faith in Moore, temptation is aroused (a splendid automobile in which he divests himself of the humiliating chauffeur's outfit as she says “I could make you even more of a human being if you gave me the chance”). It is well lit, the crowd scenes are well arranged, and the landscape (the surrounding hills, the church, a ruined abbey, the waterside) looks splendid. And yet, as the betting predictions signify, there is an Irish whimsy to much of this (mercifully, the appearance of a talking donkey is brief and incomprehensible) which brings fears of the apocalypse at noon in the shadow of which Dolan is in demand on all sides as Hell beckons.

When reined in, the ensemble playing does have something of a lesser Ealing about it - and who can ever resist the appearance of a rebarbative Marie O'Neill?

“A remarkable invention, the telephone - it's the perfect instrument for deception.” So observes Hugh Williams in Talk about Jacqueline (1942) after his wife (Carla Lehmann) has been trying to obscure the fact that her caller was an old flame. There were many men, across Europe, in her life before she chanced upon Williams when he was mis-allocated a place in her sleeping-car on the way north to Paris - and she chanced to meet him again at an English country house and goes in such pursuit (“forget the fox!”) that she takes a tumble from the horse and is soothed by his presence at her bedside while two cracked ribs knit themselves together.

The ribs' progress could be a metaphor as events ensue.

She assures one and all that, despite the doctor's orders, he is perfectly welcome as he is “a second opinion”. Indeed, he does have medical qualification. He is a specialist in snake venom. Presumably, in the laboratory he wears a different outfit. Throughout this film he sports a dinner jacket - except when in a smoking jacket. Hugh Williams - now probably rather less known than his son Simon - was a byword for suave, never more than than in the brilliant Brief Ecstasy (1937).

Here he adds a steeliness to a part in which neither a hair nor a word is ever out of place, even when his wife's past inevitably emerges (curiously a copy of Tatler coincides with “back number” as a contemporary phrase for previous lover) . Curiously enough, for a film made in wartime, all this was adapted by Henry Cass from a German film made five years earlier. His distinct touch was to add a comic element, in which Jacqueline's sister Joan (Joyce Howard) recognises the potentially explosive situation and makes bold to pass herself off as the notorious “Miss Marlow” who has ignited the society columns while Williams has been occupied with real vipers in foreign parts.

Joyce Howard - calling upon herself, needs must, to surrender her natural refinement to don a slinky dress while she knocks back a martini in one (“here's how!”) - gives a bravura performance which makes one wish that she had appeared in more films.

All works towards a country-house gathering in Emsworth, a Hampshire town which inevitably brings Wodehouse to mind (grim though its station is nowadays). There is some of his spirit in all this but its undertow of tragedy makes one keen to seek out the German version which somehow surfaced there in terrible times.

Exchange Clifford Evans for Humphrey Bogart, keep his sister (Patricia Roc) and sweetheart singer (Anne Firth) - if they could both affect an America accent - transplant the action to San Francisco or Chicago, and Suspected Person (1942) could well be something that the French would acclaim as classic noir.

As it is, this English-made film is routinely dismissed as a B-venture, which in unfair for all concerned. Written and directed by Lawrence Huntington, it gets much into less than an hour and a quarter. Newspapers' front pages speed events along from the very opening, when a New York paper splashes (as they say) on two gangsters for whom there were insufficient grounds for prosecution after $50,000 was stolen. Others were involved - and did a bunk to London with the proceeds. One is swiftly seen off in front of a Thirties mantlepiece (the whole film is a small study in interior design) but it turns out, dishonour among thieves, that he had been relieved of the greenbacks by Evans who hankers to rescue his sister from capably running the boarding house to which circumstances have reduced her.

On his trail also comes Scotland Yard's David Farrer, assisted by a pleasingly bumbling William Hartnell (one might reflect that as the first Dr. Who his hair, what there was of it, was longer than that of The Beatles in 1963). Events traverse the suburbs, a night club (with a fetching dancer and a good song), a hotel lobby, an East End pub beside a viaduct, and a railway train with the inevitable treacherous corridor.

No scene lasts too long, there is not a moment to question the logic (what with long journeys to North Wales and back), and one can well imagine that in the midst of war all this was a diversion from whatever might be in the air above – with something of an amoral ending. As such, it is equally entertaining when, eight decades on, we do never know what is in the air a few feet above the ground.