Film Reviews by CH

We are so used to seeing films set in the past that it is salutary to see one made in 1930 itself: a cloche hat and bobbed hair were a simple fashion item of rather than the work of a research team. The thought comes to mind while watching Mary Duncan, who works in a small but crowded Chicago diner, all steaming urns and jostling elbows at the counter. This is a far cry from a wheat farm in Minnesota whence Charles Farrell has been sent by his fierce patriarchal father to sell the imminent harvest on the volatile market.

Farrell is a man, in thrall to his mother, who is not cut out for that harsh world, and - as he orders a meal, over which he utters a silent blessing - he enters into talk with Mary Duncan, to the chortling badinage of the stranger who sits beside him.

They are smitten, so much so that, within a day, he suggests that she quit her bedsit beside a railtrack (where a plant is ailing from the soot and a caged bird is forlorn), and marry him there and then - before the next train leaves.

Whirlwind is the word for this romance - and, before long, literally for the wild landscape of the farm which she has pictured as a pastoral idlyll rather than the seething atmosphere she duly encounters.

Farrell's father - played by David Torrence - makes his displeasure known, even slapping Mary Duncan (a contrast with his gently brushing wheat dust from a large bible). Inside and out, in city and country, every scene is wonderfully filmed by Murnau, whether surging thunder, railroad wheels, a crowded attic. A team of itinerant harvesters is holed up in that room, among them Richard Alexander (as Mac): he is a dead ringer for Jack Nicholson, salacious look and all, as he suggests that he can take Mary Duncan away from the unfortunate situation in which she has found herself.

How will it turn out? That is not for me to say. These ninety minutes go by swiftly, the cinematography transcends melodrama, so much so that one is involved at every moment. And it is, in some ways, redolent of the continuing conflict in America between city and country.

Did I say that it is silent? If you are one of those bothered on that front, set aside such thoughts, and revel in this delight.

That phrase is coined by one of the staff in a Bath hospital, where - between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP - news has gone round the premises that a patient has arrived with a virus caught from her son who had returned a fortnight ago as steward on a Merchant Navy ship which set sail somewhere in the East.

Earlier that day, in the heavy snow of January 1st, 1963 (the Beatles duly recorded their LP on February 11th), a doctor, Richard Johnson, had been at a New Year's Eve party with his wife, a former nurse (Claire Bloom): the atmosphere was taunt with the presence of flighty Yvonne Dolan with whom Johnson had succumbed to a fling a while ago - as her husband, another colleague, suspected. Should ancient flings be forgot.

This was one of several early-Sixties films made by Val Guest in English towns and cities. There was Hell is a City (Manchester), Jigsaw (Brighton) and The Day the Earth Stood Still (London), all of which were thrillers with a noir tinge and a domestic undertow. Despite the dramatic subject, a virus which puts at risk of death the eponymous 80,000 Suspects (the number of Bath residents who have to be tracked and traced), the domestic angle in this film is more to the fore. That said, there is many a shot of those residents queuing by night and day for, well, a shot - often referred to as a scratch. Among them is a fat man who, as the needle descends, faints into Claire Bloom's arms, which is a leap, or rather a collapse, across time, for he was Graham Moffatt, a familiar stooge from Will Hay films in the Thirties (on which Val Guest had first worked).

A curious sight throughout the film is a huge device (the “Big Beast”) in which hospital staff have to put their clothes and possessions for decontamination. It resembles a cremator,; indeed, towards the end, Richard Johnson lists the professions (including prostitute) of those who have died and remarks, “the urn's always the same shape”, a phrase which has something of Sir Thomas Browne about it. In that end a fat man and a thin one wildly signal the same curves.

Happily, though, Claire Bloom is still with us, and soon after the appearance of the Beatles' LP and this film, one suspects that there was many a frisson as audiences saw that she was slightly slow to pull a towel around her curves when surprised during a necessary shower in the room next to the Big Beast. Those split-seconds must have compensated for the all-too-understanding soliloquies by Cyril Cusack as a Catholic priest.

Critics are in the habit of affecting omniscience. Better, though, to say that one is coming to something fresh (“admit” would denote needless shame: none of us can claim to have seen everything: life lays tosh across one's path as well as masterpieces). This is the first film by Sergei Parajanov that I have seen (he died, at sixty-six, three decades ago), and it is one which brings immersion from the opening moments.

We are in nineteenth-century Ukraine, in the countryside, against the Carpathian mountains, where folk song is to the fore on the soundtrack and animals stroll to and fro, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the director must be hoping they do not lurch out of shot. The thrust of the story is that Ivan Mikolaychuk is in love with the daughter of a neighbouring landowner, a man of dubious worth, and the tragedy is that she dies, her spirit suffusing everything which happens afterwards.

This, though, is not a film which one watches for that drama as such; it is suffused with the spirit of place, a way of filming which it would be lazy to call “painterly”; in traversing folklore, ritual - the very facts of life and death -. it says something, while switching between colour and black and white, about human survival. As such, in these times, it invites, even obliges one to watch it again before saying any more.

“Don't ever change, Tiger - I couldn't take it if you had a heart.” So says Dan Dureya who, while living in a torrid bedsit, has pulled off a $60,000 blackmail case after learning of a local corruption racket. Trouble is that, in the opening moments of this 1949 film, that briefcase of greenbacks landed in another open-top car, one being driven through the hills outside Los Angeles by Arthur Kennedy - alongside is his sharp-tongued wife Lisabeth Scott.

She had not wanted to visit their smart friends who make her feel low at heel. And now, after their turning back and a chase by the money's “rightful” owner, the marriage is even edgier, she urging him not to hand over the money to the police. And striking up that necessary friendship which leads to the affectionate name of Tiger.

As if this were not enough, Kennedy's sister (Kristine Miller) lives across the hallway, and it is clear from the start that she, an equal tiger, does not approve of this wife, whose first husband had killed himself.

To get its main stars cost the studio a significant chunk of the budget, which meant that when it came time for the cameras to roll, much use was made of the same interiors; this adds to the intensity of a drama, which often has only two characters in a scene; even when others come along, the continued circling of one another takes, shall we say, interesting turns. Quite a lot happens by daylight but this is quintessential noir.

It is a surprise that neither its writer (Roy Huggins, from his novel) nor director (Byron Haskin) liked the finished film: each blamed the other, and they cannot have been pleased that, despite some good reviews, it did not get wide distribution. For many years it was out of circulation, available only in roughly-copied versions. Happily, it has recently been restored to decidedly smart effect - and, on disc, it comes with an extra which includes some comments by Dan Dureya's son, who recalls that, although he played an array of villains, off-screen he never shouted at anybody, “except his agent”.

During the Second World War there was a public taste for succour and solace in Classical works, whether in bomb-shelter sanctuary or during duty as a rooftop warden. The thought comes to mind while watching a lesser-known Ealing film Fiddlers Three (1944).

This springs many a surprise, not least that it is directed by Harry Watt, who had made many a notably serious documentary. This could hardly be called one of those. It opens with Tommy Trinder (a music-hall veteran) and Sonnie Hale on their way by tandem to join the Navy at Portsmouth, before which they chance upon a WREN in need of a lift. She (the pretty Diana Decker, who died last year) perches on front while the weather turns rough, and they try to take a short cut via Stonehenge, where they seek sanctuary beneath a tomb. That is not enough. Lightning strikes - and they find themselves not only back in Roman times but at the mercy of... James Robertson Justice, who, living up to the surname, sentences them to a year-long voyage to a Italy ruled by Nero (Francis Sullivan, a swollen dead-ringer for Zero Mostel), whose sultry wife (Frances Day) strokes a breast in a way to suggest that she is not averse to rival offers.

All of which leads to the time-travellers not only becoming part of various song-and-dance routines (with lyrics by future, brilliant, sadly-doomed director Robert Hamer) but seemingly on the point of being chomped upon by snarling lions who, one might surmise, were not fooled by Sonnie Hale's bravura turn in a Carmen Miranda outfit complete with puns about Eddie Cantor in Roman Scandals.

Naturally enough, and in the nick of time, all turns out well - but anybody who watches this might prefer not to return with the three of them to Stonehenge but to stay in Rome and risk the lions in hopes of watching again a wonderful turn - perhaps the film's best few minutes - by singer Elisabeth Welch who found such renewed fame decades later.

Meanwhile, how much did all this influence, in the mid-Sixties, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum? Among its cast was... Zero Mostel.

The orthodox view is that Laurence Olivier, a notable stage actor, was slow to adapt to the screen (the late-Thirties Q-Planes was splendid) and that he ended in in a similar, Seventies slough of such things as The Boys from Brazil and other lumbering villains. That can be modified by Perfect Understanding, which appeared in 1933, its credits including the story and dialogue being by Miles Malleson and its editing the work of Thorold Dickinson - oh, and Oliver's co-star was Gloria Swanson, long familiar in silent movies (and living long enough to campaign against the adulteration of food with sugar and to support John Lennon's campaign to remain in America when Nixon tried to throw him out).

One's hopes for the film could, reasonably enough, falter in the opening fifteen minutes, when it looks as though we are in for a country-house comedy/drama so lumpen it appears to have emerged from the cook's pot - indeed the cook uses a kitchen implement to stab a maid whom she glimpses in the embrace of a previous lover.

So much for downstairs. Upstairs, well-heeled Olivier (with a neat moustache) and heiress Swanson meet, passion inspiring them to pledge marital vows that they will be adult and understanding in the face of the world's take on marital behaviour. And so ensues the best, middle part of the film. From low farce, we are now in pleasingly brittle comedy with more than a hint of Coward as the couple's honeymoon duly dissolves into his going to Cannes while she stays in London to supervise the decoration of their flat (there are some good shots of Piccadilly Circus by night).

And so it is that, in the bright day of Cannes, we find coastal vistas, art-deco interiors - and a parade of poolside women in one-piece bathing outfits redolent of those surviving scenes from the lost, Twenties incarnation of The Great Gatsby, their eyes fixed upon the trunks of well-chested men who dive from on high fearless of the waters which will greet them seconds later. The atmosphere, which includes a near-fatal, cocktail-driven speedboat race, is louche. There is no doubt that, off-screen, bathing costumes will be cast aside as soon as sundown permits, and, what's more, Olivier does not resist another's allure.

All this is stylishly filmed, with some sharp cutting from sea to shore and back again, as it is when Oliver returns to London and, inside that flat, he confesses all; with which Gloria Swanson, initially forgiving, has a fling - to his obsessive chagrin.

There is more to it than this, but the pace slackens when matters turn to the Courts, although there is some sport to be found in watching nineteenth-century stage veterans surface as bufferish barristers.

A curiosity, perhaps, but one which snuck past a Censor who grew stricter in the next year or so. Easy as it is to dismiss as a whole, as Olivier himself did, Perfect Understanding has quite a bit with which to reward those who resist the eject-button (the modern-day equivalent of a 1933 whisper in the dark, “shall we go and have a drink instead?”)

Browse in Graham Greene's Thirties film reviews and one often finds René Clair mentioned in passing as the epitome of stylishly incisive film direction. Come the War, when Clair left France and was denounced by the Vichy government, he was able to bring that spirit to his Hollywood creations. And so it is all the more dismaying to catch up with Les Grandes Manoeuvres (1955), which he made on return to France and was the first time he had essayed colour.

To watch this, one would not believe that Truffaut and others were in the offing. The scene is the summer of 1914, in a provincial town where soldiers, with glinting swords, have arrived upon horseback to prepare for tumultuous times.

Not that one would know it from this scenario. Naturally, these officers assumed that no such earth-churning scenes would ensue. It is all a bit of a diversion, in the spirit of which they lay bets that Gérard Philipe will, or will not, be able to seduce whichever woman wins a prize at a well-heeled raffle for the Red Cross. This turns out to be Michele Morgan, a divorced hat-maker who has been brought from Paris by a lover who plans to marry her when the fuss has abated.

There is no denying that Clair brought an alluring palette to all this, the pastel shades have never been matched, as if some black and white had been added to the mix before Technicolor was set upon the spinner. Such blue skies, such dark nights! A narrow divide, though, separates the elegant from the stilted, and farce from the haunting; all this, scene after scene lasting too long, tries the patience, so much so that the delayed result of an off-screen duel is not something to stir one's feelings either way.

For all this, one does keep watching, distractedly.

Before his film career began, Dirk Bogarde appeared on stage. Boys in Brown (1949) gives one a glimpse of that - after a fashion. He is one of a group of young men joined in Borstal by well-meaning but weak Knowles (Richard Attenborough) who is invidiously persuaded against his better judgment to join in a pointless break-out. Part of their cover is a production of a scene from Julius Caesar which is shown in gym-room rehearsal and upon the stage - where the Ides echo to Bogarde's reasonable attempt at a Welsh accent (which makes one wonder how Shakespeare sounds with an all-Welsh cast).

Written and directed by Montgomery Tully, who soon became a prolific director of B-movies, this is in something of the manner of those made by Basil Dearden who treated social issues in a liberal, sometimes wooden manner. Here is a Governor (Jack Warner) who is at pains to emphasise that he has his charges' best interests at heart but, when trying to inspire them to look ahead, finds himself forever up against spirits soured by upbringing and experience (there is an interestingly brief sub-plot - potentially a film in itself - about his attempt to persuade a now well-married, clip-voiced woman, with a child glimpsed upon a garden swing, to give a home to a son whom she last glimpsed as an illegitimate infant sent out for what proved to be drunken fostering).

Well-filmed, whether in close up (the inevitable telephone) or long shots of the prisonesque establishment, with some fine night-time moments when a raid upon a wardrobe goes horribly wrong (watch it to see what that phrase means), here are eighty minutes which transcend their origins as a play (which had also been shown on television). Other well-known figures provide a turn, including a brief one by Thora Hird as Attenborough's mother - and one of the opening moments' hoodlums who landed getaway driver Attenborough in it was... Clive Dunn, he of that number-one song “Grandpa” which should have brought him, the children's chorus and all who purchased it a long stretch with no remission.

What is it that makes one return to familiar tales? Time and again, a book appears about, say, The Beatles; one knows that it will probably not add much, if anything, to all those chronicles that have previously sat upon one's lap, and yet, and yet. Perhaps it is a return to childhood, when repeated readings of a book were demanded of one's parents. That is an apt observation to make, as it happens, of The Happy Prince (2018), for it opens by turning a variation upon the equally much-told life of Oscar Wilde.

He is sitting beside a bed in a Chelsea house and reading the eponymous fairy tale to his two young sons (they straddled an era: one died in the Great War, the other lived until 1967: “All You Need is the Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name”).

With which, its cuts away to a cross-Channel ferry at Dieppe in 1897, two years after the author had been consigned to two years' hard labour in Reading Gaol, a glittering career snuffed. Here, in a film written and directed by Rupert Everett, as well as featuring him as Wilde, one finds him during the two years before he expired in a cheap Paris hotel.

This is promising. So many accounts of Wilde pall after his three Trials and his incarceration. They were certainly dramatic. And yet so much happened afterwards. His eagerness to meet again his wife Constance (well depicted here by Emily Watson), his fatally succumbing again to Lord Alfred Douglas, the allure, in free-and-easy Naples, of youths whose trousers fall to their ankles for a consideration.

What is so often overlooked is that Wilde could have been on the cusp of a return to creative fervour. Not only was there his great Ballad, but he sold the outline for a play which one wished that he had written himself - and he set about crucial additional dialogue for the first published edition of The Importance of Being Earnest.

Naturally, textual emendations - a man sitting at desk with a pen - would hardly be the stuff of a gripping film, but this one lurches far, far, too far in the opposite direction. Blink, and the scene has shifted several times, which would surely be to the bewilderment of those who have no idea who Robbie Ross might be.

Here, amidst contemporary techno music, with suffocatingly dramatic lighting - whether in seedy hotel or music hall -, is Wilde as pop video. One would not be surprised if Elton John's “I'm Still Standing” blasted from the soundtrack (and one suspects that Wilde would have enjoyed its well-muscled video).

For all this, we could yet find a sequel. There is no doubt that Rupert Everett makes a great Wilde, the best on screen. One should like to see him directed by somebody else: as the Wilde who, in Worthing during the summer and autumn of 1894, was at work on Earnest in the company of his family while trying to accommodate visits from Douglas - and enjoying trysts on the seashore which, observed by agents acting for Douglas's father, would be re-played in the High Court soon after that play had been briefly acclaimed as the masterly depiction of the subterfuge to which Wilde awoke day after day.

How many people on Earth at any one time might be watching The Counterfeit Plan (1957)? Perhaps few, but, as is the way with such films, it has stayed around. Sixty-three years on, it keeps one's attention from the start as a horse and wagon block a French country road as part of a plot to spirit condemned murderer Zachary Scott by aeroplane to the Sussex countryside, where former forger Mervyn Johns has a startlingly large country home in grounds large enough for that 'plane to land.

Scott wants more than a bolt-hole. He is keen to pull a new, huge scam. This was not the time of izettle and contactless cards. And fivers were large, with only somebody of Johns's skill able to match the devices by which the Bank of England tried to stay ahead of the hoodlums.

Ably directed by the wonderfully-named Montgomery Tully, who was adept at making a small budget look bigger, the machinations are followed in close detail as the network of “associates” takes in the whole country, with the camera focussing on the area around Brighton station as spivs convene as well as such fronts as poolhall premises for other discussions.

All of which is to reckon without a pretty woman, and the return of Scott's distracting desires. No time to pause, everything runs more smoothly for the viewer than those hurtling about the country under the delusion that they would never have it so good.

TOKEN AT THE FLOOD

From the very first moment, this thriller - set upon the mid-Sixties New York subway - makes one gasp.

Having fully expected it to be in that era's garish colour, one thrills to find that it turns out to be in wonderful shades of noirish black and white as, gone midnight, sundry people - mostly couples - head towards stations to coincide upon a train which is bound for 42nd Street.

Among these are a pair of low-life pool-hall jerks ( Martin Sheen, Tony Musante) who have, after hours, stabbed a man in an alley after finding that he has only eight dollars upon him. As they now see it, their task is to taunt those among whom they find themselves in the carriage as it hurtles, clangingly, onwards while a supine drunk is as oblivious to it all as the infant clutched by a couple who have fretted over the likelihood of their being able to afford the upbringing of another one. Meanwhile, mindful of such a turn-up to events, Donna Mills has been fearful of surrendering her virginity to the self-styled alpha male who, strapped for cash, has tried to take her on a station bridge; and it's not all youth, for here one finds the glorious Thelma Ritter who gives her weedy husband a hard time, as does Jan Sterling who - in long legs upon perilous heels - is equally disappointed in hers; and Brock Peters, part of a Black couple, has a chippy attitude, first seen when trying to buy a twenty-cent token, which had dismayed his pragmatic social-worker wife (who endeavours to read a History of Western Art during this fraught journey). Also present is a gay man who appears to have propositioned a doctor - also aboard - whom he had encountered in a late-night bar's lavatory. And, as if this were not enough, here are two Army men, one of whom, from Oklahoma (Beau Bridges), has a month's sick-leave as an arm is in plaster.

This might bring to mind The Taking of Pelham 123 a few years later. The difference is that those above ground have no idea of what is happening as the carriage clatters along while the two thugs, one equipped with a knife-blade, pounce upon the passengers in turn and, in effect, call upon them to address their own inadequacies (one should not reveal too much, but nobody can be surprised when Thelma Ritter lets face-slappingly rip at her husband's cowardice).

All this was brilliantly realised by director Larry Peerce who had worked on a minimal budget from Nicholas Beer's script which had first been aired as a television play. Although those origins are evident, here is a film whose hurtling, close-packed second half is well anticipated by its depiction of the varied places whence all these people find so hard a perch upon a subway's metal bench, so curiously overlooked by a poster which proclaims, “Work With The Mentally Retarded. The Pay is Great”.

How does one gauge a film's renown? Well, I have never heard anybody mention it, but I shall urge it upon one and all. Here is as much a sleeper as that sozzled fellow (who gets the closing shot) and the child: in a fascinating thirty-minute extra, Peerce reveals that, understandably enough, she was kept from much of the filming - and reveals that Thelma Ritter, not somebody given to improvisation, was inspired to do brilliantly within that carriage. What's more, Peerce's confidence was shaken at a preview when, behind him, a couple saw that the film would be in black and white - and left there and then. They missed a treat.

Journeyman. The word is often used disparagingly, when in fact it denotes adapability and skill. Such was the case with Walter Forde, who began his career on the music-hall stage, turned to acting in silent movies during the Twenties before becoming a scriptwriter in Hollywood and returning to England to make two decades' worth of films which catch so much of the country's spirit through tumultuous times while never being less than entertaining.

Signs are that people are waking up now to the tremendous achievement of Rome Express (1932). This has a fair claim to be the first of the train movies (although Forde had made a now-lost 1931 version of The Ghost Train, to which he returned at the end of the decade). A huge set was constructed, in England, to resemble the Gare de Lyon, where the events begin but most of it takes place upon the train, through whose windows one glimpses the passing European countryside by night and day. This was film from a compartment on the actual train and then projected beside the suitably claustrophobic stage set, all locked compartments and bustling corridors, with the enviably well-appointed dining car offering scant relief from the diverse machinations of those aboard.

Here is a film driven as much by character as steam engine. From a story by Clifford Grey, the script was developed by Sidney Gilliatt, soon to become a great force in British film-making. The mainspring of the plot is that a gloriously evil Conrad Veight knows that somewhere aboard the train somebody else has concealed a stolen van Dyck - and he wants it, so much so that human life is a side issue in that quest. For all that, one's unslackening interest is maintained by those who, unwittingly, become entangled by this. Here, for example, are an adulterous couple chanced upon by a golf-club bore known to the husband, who has to fake a passion-quelling excuse; a philanthropist businessman travels with a male assistant upon whom he lavishes nothing, a penny-pinching nature at odds with the headline-seeking reasons for his donations; there is a silent actress - all tight dress and long cigarette-holder - and her cigar-chomping publicist who promises that arrival in Rome will bring her career new directions; and more, these carriages populated by Cedric Hardwicke, Joan Barry, Hugh Williams, Esther Ralston. Gordon Harker, Finlay Currie. The smallest part fits into a well-meshed whole, all of it caught so well by Gunter Krampf's cinematography which owes something, but not too much, to German films of the previous decade. As Graham Greene noted when watching a revival of it three years later, “Mr. Conrad Veight and Mr. Donald Calthrop brought to the screen a devilish ruthlessness and a mean cowardice which even the trivial plot about a stolen picture couldn't cramp”.

Extraordinary to think it was made ninety years ago (Forde lived until 1984). One can imagine the gasps from those who filled a cinema - though we have something they never imagined: not only a DVD but - if you buy the disc - a splendid booklet by Neil Sinyard about the film's creation. Rent it but, afterwards, you are sure to want a copy yourself, and continue invite people round to share it: they will not be disappointed.

One might well imagine that, after the midwife slapped Clark Gable into life, he did not cry but had that twinkle in his eye which he so often did in films where a woman takes his charm amiss - as happens in The King and Four Queens (1956). Directed by Raoul Walsh, this Western sticks to one location, Wagon Mound, a compound near a small, remote town, but it has all the pace for Walsh is renowned, as well as his sense of place and subtle cinematography, here realised in beautifully bright colour, whether this be the landscape or an array of dresses.

Fine dresses - and, indeed, tresses - in such a spot? The script is by Margaret Fitts, from her own story, and a far cry from her lumpen adaptation of John Meade Falkner's Moonfleet the previous year. When fetching up in town (the start of so many a Western and a thriller), Gable heads to a bar and, on emerging, encounters a man who is delivering a gravestone to Wagon Mound. It is the latest one for which a widowed mother has saved up, her funds derived from hens and their fitful laying of eggs.

Ma (Jan Van Fleet) had four sons, three of whom died while stealing $100,000. Another survived, and she lives in hopes of his returning to claim the hidden loot. Also on the premises are the men's four wives/widows, all under the thumb of Jan Van Fleet - her thumb beside the trigger to ward off anybody who comes close to this run-down house, and its tower is home to a warning bell.

In the years since the robbery, the widows, among them Eleanor Parker, have become - how can one put this? - frustrated. Their craving for flesh is only kept in check by the thought that chastity could be rewarded with cash when the survivor returns. When you're good to Mama, Mama's good to you...

An inch the other way, and Gable would not have made it to the front door. As it is, he is patched up, a matter of a bare chest for a while, and even the rifle-packin' Mama is not immune to his blandishments. As moonlight works its wonders, Gable switches from a hymn upon the organ - in an opulently run-down sitting-room - to a hoe-down and, as the sultry turns salty, the air is rife with innuendo which could have sprung from the other side of the Hays Code (I shall not quote any of it - this is all the better in context, and sure to bring a smirk even to the po-faced).

A new angle, perhaps, on something which was called a women's picture. They certainly hold the fort, literally and metaphorically.

“Sparkle, Shirley, sparkle!” With those three words, Mrs. Temple successfully encouraged her daughter to do her best in front of the cameras. This is a world away from Coward's Mrs. Worthington who is advised that her offspring has “a loud voice, and though it's not exactly flat, / She'll need a little more than that / To earn a living wage” (in cabaret versions, he sometimes added a final, salty verse). Both come to mind in watching Visconti's Bellissima (1951), which followed Obsessione and La Terra Trema in his early Neo-Realist phase.

It opens, however, in the full-operatic mode with which he is often associated. A radio broadcast is underway of Donizetti when it is interrupted with the announcement that a film studio is seeking a young girl, around the age of seven, to appear in a film. Auditions are being held and some will then have a screen test.

Small surprise that the scene cuts to the outside of these Roman studios, and, as the camera pans across the hordes of children (none of whom look into it), the noise level grows, and does not cease for another couple of hours. Upon the screen for most of the time is Anna Magnani, forever in black, as, ever excitable, she scrimps to provide her daughter (Tina Appicella, in her only film) with a dress, haircut, photograph to boost her chances, all this kept from her husband (Gastone Renzelli) who sits around, Kowalski-fasion, in a gross vest while dreaming of building a house far from this tenement whose balconies echo with the cries and calls of so many frustrated housewives while films are sometimes shown in the garden to the delight of star-fixated Anna (who is smitten with Burt Lancaster).

All moves at a pace, its script by the prolific Suso Cecci D'Amico (she also worked on Bicycle Thieves and The Leopard), with enough detail of film-making not to distract from such things as a spiv (box-office star, Walter Chiari) who fleeces Anna Magnani of savings garnered through her rest-of-the-day job which finds her traversing the city to plunge a hypodermic into male and female buttocks to ease diabetes - a process which finds yelps scarcely muffled by pillows.

Perhaps only Rocco and His Brothers would come close to the bravura style of this Visconti film, in which he was aided by the young Rosi and Zefferelli (both of whom recollect its making in a half-hour documentary on the DVD, along with Suso Cecci D'Amico, who was to die at close on a hundred). Visconti, with The Damned and Death in Venice, is often described as “painterly” in his use of colour. Here, though, as in his other early films, the black-and-white cinematography catches the diverse locations in a way that feels more accurate than colour would have been. A sign, perhaps, that here is something which draws you in, the pause-button redundant.

“Yes, they are men - and you're not the only woman!”

Juliette Gréco has reason on her side. Aboard a large freight barge - the Clementine - upon the Rhine, she upbraids the Captain's needlessly jealous wife (Muriel Pavlow).

That said, the Captain's wife, did she but know it, has equal reason to be suspicious, for Juliette Gréco is on the run from a criminal, money-laundering lover (William Silvester) who, in the meanwhile, has shot dead another man while trying to find her. A sign of his callous nature is when, along the way, a waitress, says to him, eyelids fluttering, “I am going off at eleven” and he replies, “you've been going off since you were eleven.”

Adept as all the cast might be (including the Captain, Marius Goring whose wild hair has something of the Gene Wilder about it), it is Juliette Gréco who tops the bill (and sings, in English, over the opening credits). One might more readily picture her holding a microphone in a boite than a ship's wheel at the blaze of noon; moreover, her only black clothes are a briefly-glimpsed nightdress; for the rest of the time - though she does hangs a black bra on a washing line, which must have set many a 1959 heart aflutter - her long legs are encased by blue jeans in a film whose shifting river background is filmed in Eastmancolor. And yet it works, she carries a film whose ninety minutes are rarely without her on screen.

The opening moments are the classic stuff of fast-paced shoot-out but, upon the water, the pace slows without one's interest ebbing, and, indeed, gasping at the very end - even after the river has turned briefly red. As for the shoes which herald this review, they are in fact clogs, which are quite possibly the last garment on earth in which one would have imagined Juliette Gréco. How that comes to be – well, see for yourself. And if its director Lewis Allen is not a name on many lips (he worked mostly in television), never forget that he had made one of the paciest thrillers, Suddenly (1954) in which another singer, Frank Sinatra delivered another surprising on-screen appearance.