Film Reviews by CH

There are two musical interludes in San Quentin (1937). One of these finds Ann Sheridan on stage in a night club. Of the other - a rendition of “I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles” -, well, I shall not reveal any more except to say that here is another of those tremendous Warner Brothers movies so hard boiled that one relishes the shell cracking as these sixty-seven minutes move relentlessly to a tragic conclusion.

Ann Sheridan is sister of Bogart who, since adolescence, has fallen in with a bad lot and done time in Reformatory and gaol before landing back there for ten years. As chance has it, she finds that in her bar's audience is a man - Pat O'Brien - who becomes smitten by her just as he is about to be seconded from the Army to take charge of the gaol.

Which is quite a complication - all the more so as he is decent man who likes to see the best in all but the worst (the latter he reckons to be a distinct minority). Even so, he is up against the inmates' hierarchy, a pecking order way beyond the cage of any henhouse. Alongside many a hemmed-in scene (cell; office) there are several on a parade ground where a careless taunt can bring brawls - including one by a prisoner who has turned, vocally, to the Bible, and snaffles a gun to prove his point (blessed are the rifles, one might almost say).

Much of this is owed to a taut screenplay sharpened by another Humphrey: Humphrey Cobb. He died a few years later, and would gain wider recognition when Stanley Kubrick filmed a novel based on his Great War experience: Paths of Glory.

It had been too long since watching Robert Altman's 3 Women (1977), in which time it does not figure - one finds – in the knowledge of many who try to be sedulous in foraging through ever-proliferating screen fare. It is now, though, on DVD, with different labels offering a variety of extras.

How, though, does this film which has shimmered in the memory strike one when shown in its vanilla version? That was the form in which people were first surprised by it over forty years ago when explanatory matter was scant (and this usage of vanilla unknown). Put simply, pig-tailed Sissy Spacek, looking younger than her years, has fled from Texas and arrives for a job helping invalids at a Californian spa on the desert's edge. Here, she is guided by a colleague Shelley Duvall, who shows her such things as the strictly-checked time-clock and gives instructions in the art, or mechanics, of getting wobbly people into the hot pools.

It feels a prison from which daily escape is welcome. Altman depicts the Californian exteriors with relish. And yet this corner of the State soon becomes as much a trap. To use a current phrase, it is peopled by weirdos and misfits, some of whom haunt a bar run by Janice Rule, who also owns the poolside apartment block where Shelley Winters has a small place and has offered the extra bed in her room to Sissy Spacek (which the expectation she will adjourn to the rollaway when necessary).

These two have, of course, distinctive faces which suit these two hours' heightened reality (Sissy Spacek had been so effective in Badlands and Carrie). Shelley Winters affects bravura, suggesting that men are there for her asking, especially if she has dinners for which she creates some of the grimmest food ever to appear on screen

(cheese was injured by the nozzle of aerosol cans in the making of this film). With Sissy Spacek much put upon, life's shadow darkens in the sunshine; a counterpoint to which is Janice Rule's painting of strange murals upon many a surface.

What do all the details mean? Why does Shelley Winters's yellow dress always get trapped by the door of her open-top automobile? There is more happening here than one can take in, and yet it is never frustrating, but tantalising, as events take a tragic parabola, in effect a road movie which stays in one spot.

And what a delight to see again Ruth Nelson, who, prominent in New York theatre in the Thirties, had not appeared in films for three decades until the previous year's now-elusive The Late Show with Lily Tomlin. She was to appear again in an Altman film, 1978's glorious ensemble work A Wedding, which has also now escaped general viewing.

Altman himself was to endure eclipse. Buoyed by the success of Mash, he found himself carried on that wave of a new Hollywood which yielded such things as One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, Night Moves and All the President's Men until running into 1978 and the Star Wars buffers. Altman kept working, and was, after a while, to find new general, sleek success with The Player and Gosford Park while Short Cuts and Cookie's Fortune were truer to his earlier spirit.

Startling to think that he has now been dead fifteen years. It still feels as he is with us, for his varied approach to film making ensures that he is not stuck in time. Not only is there an urge to watch again the little-known Images but also to seek out the Criterion Collection disc of 3 Women - an American issue - which contains his detailed director's commentary. Nobody, even Altman, ever made a film quite like this, even if - the three women being one - some claim that this is a West Coast Persona.

Here is a film with added resonance in our era of savouring the sight and sound of bird life amidst the encircling chaos of pandemic and climate emergency. What's more, if one missed the first few frames of Tawny Pipet (1944) one could easily take this for an Ealing production. Here we are in the wartime countryside, somewhere in Gloucestershire. A fighter pilot (Niall MacGinnis) recovers from injuries, accompanied by his nurse (Rosamund John). They are turning this enforced leisure to account by rambling the hills around the village and taking the opportunity to enjoy a shared hobby of bird-watching.

To their delight they chance upon a pair of the eponymous creatures which have not been seen upon these shores for some time. What's more, these ground-nesting birds are protecting some eggs.

Such are ornithological circles that news of the discovery spreads within the village and, ominously, beyond. The villagers are united in protecting the avian visitors and their potential offspring. An open-air meeting is addressed to that effect by wheelchair-bound Colonel Barton-Barrington, played by Bernard Miles who co-wrote and co-directed the film with Charles Saunders.

With the village setting, and a gathering of such types as a schoolteacher, mischievous but good-hearted children, a vicar, a publican, one is reminded of, among other things, Went the Day Well? a year before. Tawny Pipet is equally well photographed. Some might deem it sentimental but there is a tough edge, it springs surprises (including Julian Huxley in the credits alongside the two birds who did such stirring stuff).

Has there ever been quite such a confrontation with a tank? The very vehicle itself appears to back off, such is Rosamund John's passionate reason. And as surreal a moment as a Russian who, on a propaganda mission, regales the villagers from the back of a truck with tales of how she herself felled hundreds of Germans? Far from the hodge-podge this might sound, the film has a compulsive glowing logic which can fell the cynical from forty paces.

As indeed it did James Agee when it reached New York a few years later. “It is an almost unimaginably genteel picture, and if you had, as it were, to sit in the same parlor with it, you would probably suffer a good deal. But at this comfortable distance in blood as well as space, I was able, rather to my dismay, to take all this extreme Englishness almost in the spirit in which it was offered...in spite of its profuse cuteness and genteelism, it has a good deal of genuine charm, humor, and sweetness of temper.”

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.