Film Reviews by CH

Are Vladimir Arseniev's journals widely read here? Certainly in Russia they continue to be popular, and they were even well known in Japan. At the beginning of his career, Akira Kurosawa wanted to make a film from them but soon realised that he would need more experience behind the camera - and to make the film in the wilds of Russia itself.

Come the early-Seventies, he was able to set to work. Great good fortune brought him Yurly Solomin to play Captain Arseniev and Maksim Munzuk as Dersu Uzala. The latter is a huntsman, a long-time inhabitant of the forests, whom he and the rest of the surveying force encounter while they seek to find pathways through seemingly inexplicable terrain cut through by a fierce river.

Such is Uzala's knowledge - borne of experience and instinct - that he is able to guide and save them through the seasons, especially as the winds get up and snow descends.

That is essentially the story, which lasts almost two and a half hours. And rarely has there been anything so gripping, whether time is given to treks beneath the sun or constructing a hut from shrubbery to fend off the imminent hand of Death, which also lurks in a river as it heads towards the torrents - not to mention a tiger with whom Uzala is in as much communion as the rest of us are with a pet cat.

Exactly how Kurosawa achieves this is a mystery which might be solved through scene-by-scene analysis but, even on repeated viewings, this is not something to induce one to press the pause button. Such is the photography, one should travel dozens of miles or more to see it upon a large screen.

It is one of the best films, and its making must have been as arduous as any of the original expeditions (indeed, Solomin had been in a sanatorium before hearing that Kurosawa was set to make the him, and, in getting to the auditions, was startled to find that he was to have a starring parth father than be one of the foor soldiers). Here is as individual, and as affecting, a study of the noble savage and purported civilization as any to have found a place in our consciousness since Dryden created the phrase 350 years ago.

As others have pointed out here, the film is spread across two discs (although it would fit onto one). Ask for the second disc if it is still not listed as two discs.

It is a familiar scenario in films made during the post-war years. A man travels abroad set upon seemingly simple task only to find himself caught up in such intrigue that he meets further opposition every time he thinks that the way ahead is clear.

Venetian Bird (1952) is a few years, and some way, after The Third Man. In this case, Richard Todd arrives in Venice - Nino Rota music playing as he does so - to carry out the instructions of a now-millionaire whose life was saved in the war by a brave Italian whom he now wishes to give a reward. The only thing is that, apparently dead, he is even harder to find than Harry Lime. All this is taken from a novel by Victor Canning - a familiar name upon spinning bookracks in his time: his The Rainbird Pattern was the basis for Hitchcock's last film, Family Plot (1976). Where Greene's script for events in Vienna had been memorable in its economy, Venetian Bird, adapted by Canning himself, is cumbersome with dialogue as exposition (and not always clear at that).

There is, though, much going for it, with the title referring to a painting in one of many well-photographed interiors, and the well-nigh obligatory sultry woman whose lips prove a distraction. These scenes were filmed in England but Venice is as much the star as any who cross its squares, bridges and, crucially, rooftops. The director, Ralph Thomas, comes into his own with these - and is also able to handle a British cast who have to turn their hand to playing Italians. Most startling of these is Sid James. He makes a good show with the accent, a far cry from the throaty chuckle he was wont to give in those films directed by Thomas's brother Gerald. Venetian Bird - foolishly re-named The Assassin in America – is a whole darker angle upon Carry On Abroad.

“I've brought an embrocation. This will take the sting out of it.” Embrocation is a word to locate Nightbeat in a time -1947 - and place: a would-be smart night-club off Piccadilly. Its owner, who has done time, is Maxwell Reed, and his offer of a bottle of soothing champagne on a sofa in his flat is designed to ease one of many complications in the amatory involvements which propel this film through an engrossing crew of spivs, wide-boys - and a fair spectrum of the police force.

Developed from a story by Guy Morgan, and directed by the versatile journeyman Harold Huth, it has much more going for it than was perhaps apparent at the time. A lorryload of soldiers are dropped off near Parliament Square on their return from the Far East - and before long a brawl breaks out in a pub after one of them (Ronald Howard, whose face later brought him a television role as Sherlock Holmes) has palmed off somebody with shoddy black-market clothes. He is saved from greater damage by fellow wartime soldier Hector Ross, who is in love with Howard's sister, the ever-prim Anne Crawford (who was to die a few years later from cancer). Trouble is that, during the war, Anne Crawford was lent a flat for little by Reed; Ross's hackles rise as much as his suspicions.

For lack of any other work, both men join the police force and there are interesting scenes of their training. Some of this is directed and edited at too slow a pace, but one's interest is quickly re-engaged, not least because this includes the most unlikely Sid James pairing before his appearance in the terrific Hell Drivers with Sean Connery a decade later. Here, he plays a pianist in the club's band - and accompanies Christine Norden during some sultry singing which makes demands not only upon her tonsils but the rest of her anatomy as she swivels in the spotlight.

Who was she? Here she plays a good-time gal, and her own life appears to have been wild (she left some memoirs still too torrid to publish). In the film she recalls wartime experience with a GI (“nylons dripped off him like sweat”) and, on a sofa, when told, “no! don't you know the meaning of no?”, she replies, “it wasn't in any book I read at school.”

The plot has many turns, it is good value, with quayside glimpses after dark. If neither Hector Ross nor Ronald Howard shine in their leading roles, there is so much else here. Maxwell Reed is just right for the club owner with hopes of a better life thwarted by old associates and the temptations of Christine Norden's flesh. He offers her a key to a flat, and she asks, “where's the catch?” “On the front door.”

For all that, it is a shame that, in general, Reed did not take the advice of Joan Collins (he was her first husband) and loosen up in his acting style. He could have become better known.

Meanwhile, one is left to wonder whether Sid James could play the piano - and to recall Samuel Johnson's definition of “embrocation”: “the act of rubbing any part diseased with medicinal liquors or spirits.” Such a waste of champagne, even while Reed subjects Christine Norden's calf to close attention.

Four decades after Airplane!, it can still seem hard to take disaster movies seriously. That is to reckon without Jet Storm (1959) which itself was a decade after Brighton Rock. What is the connection between a film about a transatlantic airliner bound for New York, a bomb somewhere aboard, and one set amidst race-track gangs? In both Richard Attenborough is a troubled villain. He has planted the bomb in hopes of killing the man who escaped a hit-and-run charge after killing his daughter - and among the passengers is Hermione Baddeley, who had also been set against Attenborough in that film set on the South Coast.

These are but two of an array of passengers who board the aeroplane at Heathrow in those days when there were stairs to its entrance, with a chance for photographers to do their stuff rather than be thwarted by the hidden tubes and travelators of nowadays. Their object of attention is Marty Wilde. As the plot unfurls, there is no chance for him to anticipate the guitar-playing nun in Airport and Airplane!, for his instrument has been stowed in the hold.

As a film, this is a lesser one than Brighton Rock but it can equally be said that Richard Attenborough gives a more subtle performance here. To say any more would give away too much (the end has echoes of the earlier film). Within the confines of cabin and cockpit, not to mention another deck which sports, below a spiral staircase, a curved - and crucial - cocktail bar, there is a gathering of people which includes a pleasingly comic turn by Harry Secombe and Sybil Thorndike who find themselves side by side, each urging the other to accept the free champagne offered to one and all by the Captain - a great turn by Stanley Baker who tries to calm the situation while some passengers form a cabal to taken matters into their own hands. (Curiously enough, there is reference to an earlier flight with trouble caused by two Zulus, an unwitting anticipation of Baker's film Zulu five years later.) One might even detect a touch of Coward as a couple, destined for the divorce court in America, bet upon their sharing of assets while playing cards.

“If you're making a peace overture, dear, I wish you'd do it more subtly.”

“That's the thing about a divorce case, it's the only time if they find you guilty, they set you free.”

Meanwhile one woman snarls at another, “yes, just keep on being wise - it will get you a good pew in Heaven!”

And another troubled couple exchange sharp words: “I'm not an angel yet.” “There can be no doubt about that.”

Curiously, one passenger goes by the Wodehouse name of Mr. Mulliner. Was this an in-joke by its writer and director Cy Endfield? Who knows? There is so much in this film to savour, and one has not even mentioned the budding romance between the co-pilot and a stewardess on her first voyage as turbulence lands a kiss in the vicinity of a breast.

Oh, and there is an early appearance by Paul Eddington. And a touching one by David Kossoff. And one would like to hear the memories of Jeremy Judge, who was nine while asleep during these ninety minutes above an Atlantic which lose nothing for remaining in Shepperton.

Soon after 10 pm, Robert Ryan is in a downtown hotel room and thinking about time. That is, at thirty-five, he is approaching the end as a boxer - especially as he is due to face a man a dozen years younger (Hal Baylor) when it is his turn to enter the ring, unaware that he is part - literally the fall-guy - of the eponymous set-up.

In all this, he is urged to chuck it in by his girlfriend, the brilliant Audrey Totter, and take up a new life, however humble. Directed by the ever-adaptable Roberty Wise, The Set-Up (1949) is a far cry from the film for which he is best known, The Sound of Music. Its seventy minutes are the exact time of events between that room and the end of events across the road in a ring whose audience is the frequent object of leaping and murderous yelling montage (women in particular). Here are all the tropes of classic noir, including a dodgy manager (George Tobias) and vulgarly-besuited mobster (a splendid Alan Baxter). The lighting, the pace are managed wonderfully, with sufficient shots of timepieces to keep one aware as Audrey walks the town - a moment on a railway bridge is matched by every moment of all this, inside and out.

The wonder is that it was adapted by Art Cohn from Joseph Moncure March's verse novel, one which is now harder to find than The Wild Party, which was itself filmed in the mid-Seventies. There are signs that verse novels are making a return. Is it too late for a film version of Vikram Seth's wonderful depiction of San Francisco in The Golden Gate?

Strange to think that we are now further in time from the 1969 Moon landing than it was from Frau im Mond (1929) - often translated as Woman in the Moon. This was a seemingly unlikely work for Fritz Lang, his last silent film. In fact, he had a penchant for the idea of space travel, and in working upon it (from a script and novel by his then-wife Thea von Harbou), he also drew upon scientific advice prescient of the actual Moonshot (a series of rockets, each separating from the rest of the craft). What's more, it so much anticipated German rocket work that, later in the Thirties, Hitler banned its showing.

Some say that, in the fullest restoration, at over three hours, it is too long. In fact it goes by at a clip. Everything begins with Klaus Pohl who, in the 1890s, had put forward proposals for space flight, only to be met with such derision by his peers that he became a wild-haired outcast; in this bedsitter state, he meets and collaborates with Willy Fritsch upon such a flight, which the young Gerda Maurus, caught in a love triangle, insists upon joining.

That is the barest outline of a film which, for the most part takes place on Earth and with many a smoking jacket on display, so much so that one wonders why Noel Coward did not think of an inter-galactic play. Even when not much is happening, one's attention is gripped by the cinematography, Lang's mastery of angle and focus - and the way in which straps hang from the rocket's ceiling, as redolent of nooses as they are those which keep passengers upright on a hurtling Underground train.

As for the lunar surface, the film's title means that one gives nothing away by saying that the craft lands there. What's more, no creatures leap from the darkness but something far worse: gold, showing all those miles away that indeed the love of money is the root of all evil.

While watching this, you find yourself holding on tight.

“If you don't have a dream, / How can you have a dream come true?” Those lines, from South Pacific, come to mind while watching a film contemporary with it - though its composers, including John Cage, are a far stave from that musical. Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947) was produced and directed by Dadist Hans Richter who also drew upon contributions by fellow surrealists, including Ernst, Duchamp, Ray, for a series of seven short episodes which turn around a man who has landed a small flat but, being an artist, lacks the wherewithal to pay the rent.

He receives wise advice. As somebody who can look into his own mirrored eyes and see all manner of unlikely images, he realises that he should indeed set up in trade as somebody who can supply the dreamless with all manner of fantasical images to leaven their dull existence.

And so it is that they come through his door in turn (including a hapless accountant and blind man led by his grand-daughter). Many film techniques are used, including stop-go animation put to such use as the romance between a pair of mannequins which was the work of Léger, with lyrics by John LaTouche who was esteemed by Gore Vidal.

It is a rich brew on top of a rich diet, images tumbling upon images in a way that prose can but stumble in an attempt to catch up. Filmed in a wonderfully muted colour, with some voice-over redolent of film noir, this makes for a diverting eighty minutes which one might happily re-run now and then - along with the bonus shorts on the British Film Institute's disc: three Richter works from the Twenties, with such delights as bowler hats moving across a sunny lawn while some men stroll into shot, and disappear behind a tall, narrow streetlamp which just happens to be there. That puts digital trickery to shame.

If you are one of those whom this might make exclaim, “that's barking mad!” then this is not for you. Others, especially in this bizarre year of 2020, when many say that they have had epic surreal dreams night after night, this could be just the thing to soothe the soul.

This film outlives the contemporary dismissal of it by James Agee (a great on-the-hoof film reviewer) who, among other things, said, “I rather liked the only music by John Cage that I've heard, to date, though it doesn't sound as original as often advertised; more like Japanese court music simplified for an appreciation class.” One so enjoys reading Agee that one is happy to disagree with him.

Many assume that a film brings a novelist fame, even fortune. Who now, though, finds Charlotte Armstrong's name springing to the lips? That said, it could be well worth seeking out her books, for one of these was the basis for Don't Bother to Knock (1952) - its script the work of Daniel Taradash - and a high point is the entrance in a Manhattan hotel doorway of... Marilyn Monroe.

Astonishing to think, this was her eighteenth appearance on screen, and she was yet to make the films for which she is best known (one thinks also of Bogart's numerous early rôles). And it remains one of her best, and should be better known.

Hotels, like boarding houses, are invariably a good basis for a film. This opens with another bonus, the first appearance on screen of Anne Bancroft who sits on a stool and confides in the ever-wise barman: she laments that her man, a commercial pilot, is one of those who, in current parlance, refuses to “commit”; with which, the light goes low, she spins round, and takes to the stage for the first in a series of standards (such as “Where or When?”) which appear throughout the film, sometimes heard on the radio system in the building's bedrooms and suites.

Particularly vexed by this sound is her unsatisfactory lover, Richard Widmark who, aghast at being well-nigh dumped, has taken to his room with a bottle of rye. Through a slatted blind he sees Marilyn Monroe in a room across the courtyard, and, brazenly, assumes that she might be up to providing him with a little consolation.

She, though, has problems of her own - to say any more would detract from the turns taken by this film. Directed by Roy Baker, an Englishman, it opens, searing Lionel Newman music and all, in a way that suggests film noir but it incorporates melodrama, comedy, some Hitchcockian touches (rope, windows) - with more than a hint of tragic-toned farce as doors open and close in the nick of time. Marilyn's performance shows what how good she could be; she brings out that “silk and sandpaper” quality of which Widmark accuses her during that evening/night (the film lasts some seventy-five minutes).

Still with us, as they say, is Donna Corcoran, the young girl whom Marilyn was hired to babysit that evening. Little did she realise in 1952 that, ever after, she would be in the slipstream of legend. As the surviving fragments of Marilyn's last film show, she was good with children, she could make them laugh - though, in this case, Donna screams magnificently

“Claude!” This is perhaps the most-uttered word in Black Christmas (1974), and a sign of the wit which underlies this pioneer of what became known as slasher movies. The name belongs to a large, furry white cat who is the one male living in a Canadian sorority house.

Among the students is Olivia Hussey, her boyfriend aspirant classical pianist Kier Dullea. Seemingly proper - the opposite Margot Kidder who is so drunk that she assails a desk-sergeant -, Olivia Hussey is pregnant. This is but one situation in a plot which moves apace as one student disappears and obscene telephone calls continue (with some notable scenes in a pre-digital exchange). Written by Roy Moore and directed by Bob Clark, this was made on the hoof, with none of those involved aware that it would - after a while - gain a status which duly shifted from cult to popular.

There is no time to linger but everything is properly filled out, and a good deal of the effect comes from adroit use of sound (including Carl Zittrer's music). In particular there is a montage of carol singers on the doorstep while a dagger plunges into flesh upstairs. Had this scene been filmed in black and white, a clip could be mistaken for a prime piece of German Expressionism.

Here is something for more than horror fanatics, although piano lovers might shudder.

RINSO SAVES COAL EVERY WASH DAY. To watch such a film as West 11 (1963) six decades on is to be struck by such advertising signs, and pervasive Ascot water-heaters as well as huge prams,. These would have simply been a part of daily life for contemporary audiences. This film, though, remains far more than one of period interest.

Directed by Michael Winner, from a script by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, it springs from the familiar world of boarding-house life (complete with severe landlady, Kathleen Harrison) as Alfred Lynch throws in his job at a men's outfitter on the Strand, and hangs out in the tall, terraced building where he has a room at the top - all filmed in excellent black and white.

This was a time when it was well-nigh shameful to admit to living in Notting Hill, and to smuggle Kathleen Breck into one's bed needed all the skill of a wartime operation - not mention recourse to the communal bathroom. Talking of wartime, Lynch is followed from the outfitter's by Eric Portman, a palpable spiv whose war service one might doubt, and so ensues a scheme which brings the element of a thriller to all this.

Along the way, there is many a scene in cafés and bars, not to mention crowded parties in small rooms (Diana Dors settles for anybody who offers a ride home in a taxi), and there is a strong showing for jazz. The music by Stanley Black features Ken Colyer and Acker Bilk. And one is unnerved by the chance appearance of a demonstration by the Britain First Party, whose speaker inveighs again immigration before violence erupts: there was another, troubling world beyond what one of jazz crowd calls “the same old bars and the same old beds”.

A shame that Alfred Lynch, whose character has a veritably misplaced energy throughout all this, did not appear in more films (he made notable stage appearances at the Royal Court). This is one to watch again - and to reflect that, early on, Michael Winner had a subtler hand on the camera than was to become the case. Among the extras, though, is a scene that was pruned for the released version: and perhaps it was better to leave to the staircase shadows and one's imagination the spectacle of a naked Kathleen Breck taking a tumble. When a landlady's ire is aroused there is no time to put back on what seem to be extraordinarily large bra and knickers.

Reference is made to “crispies”: fresh paper money, a term which goes back to Wodehouse and before, but not like to survive the contactless era.

That phrase is Graham Greene's, from his 1937 review of Pépé le Moko to describe a woman (Mireille Balin) who has been drawn to a man for his money but on their arrival in Algiers chances into the Casbah, where she becomes in thrall to a hoodlum (Jean Gabin) who cannot leave those tight and twisted streets, those plentiful nooks, as he will be picked up by the police for his part in a Parisian heist.

Gabin already has a woman (Line Noro) who has much with which to put up, such is the violence of his hands and mouth, but he becomes smitten by Mireille Balin, who in Greene's full phrase, is “acquisitive, prehensile, risen from the ranks, and groomed for chromium concubinage”. Equally, she looks set to change (something which Greene said elsewhere is the hardest thing for a writer to describe).

Greene called this film - adapted by Henri La Bathe from his novel with its director Julien Duvivier - “one of the most exciting and moving films I can remember seeing”. What's more, as Gabin succumbs to fatal allure, “we do not forget the real subject in a mass of detail: the freedom-loving human spirit trapped and pulled at the chain. A simple subject, but fiction does not demand complex themes, and the story of a man at liberty to move only in one shabby, alien quarter when his heart is another place widens out to touch the experience of exile common to everyone”.

That should surely inspire you to read all of Greene's film writings (collected in Mornings in the Dark). What's more, some have suggested that all this - along with a police go-between - may have suggested to him some of the plot of The Third Man. And one could add that the treatment handed out to the hapless informer amidst Gabin's gang inspired some of Brighton Rock, on which Greene was working at that time.

There is so much more to be said about Pépé le moko, not least that its cinematography is as much a character as that in The Third Man - and that its ending is as heartbreaking as the one upon which Carol Reed insisted for Greene's script, and indeed the one eventually chosen for the on-the-hoof making of Casablanca.

And, of course, those British and American films turn around music - as does Pépé le moko: quite a moment when now-swollen Fréhel puts a 78 on the turntable and listens to her youthful voice emerge from the horn. That is something at which a modern-day actor might balk. One can only admire Fréher for doing so - and seek out more of her discs.

There is something to be written about a husky voice in the movies. Naturally, it sums up many a dame in a bar, but there is also Marlon Brando's struggle with his tonsils in The Godfather. Some, though, might make the case for Charles Laughton who plays a tyrannical magazine publisher in The Big Clock (1948) where every dip in the circulation brings explosions to those troubled lips as they order firings.

He has an obsession with time and money, so much so that the smart lobby of the Manhattan building features a near-atomic clock which links to many places around the world - and fuels those clocks within all the offices - while his ravaged-voice soliloquy during a meeting lists the exact number of seconds, each one a heartbeat, in the average human lifespan.

This is strange, driven territory, buttressed by daily life in a skyscraper. One of the staff, a crime expert, is Ray Milland, whose wife (Maureen O'Sullivan) is more than miffed that, after seven years' marriage, they have still not had a honeymoon, such is his misplaced devotion to work. Their delayed honeymoon/vacation is due to start the very evening of the film (with a young son along for the ride).

Things do not turn out that way, for a glance at the clock tells Milland that he has missed the train on which they were due to meet. Clocks, and other timepieces, recur in the film, as they do in the well-nigh real time of The Set-Up. Symbolism does not obtrude, though, while the pace increases to great effect. It was directed by John Farrow, from a script by Jonathan Latimer, himself a fine thriller writer, who worked from a novel by Kenneth Fearing (a great name for a noir writer, and one must seek out the poems by which he set greater store).

And, of course, there is a dame. Rita Johnson. Not perhaps a name known to many. She plays a mistress to Laughton, and Milland becomes smitten with her when, in a bar, she hints at all the torrid behaviour she has endured at the hands of that corrupt figure. They have a wild night, after that missed train, and encounter, along the way, a glorious Elsa Lanchester in an after-hours antique shop.

To mention these few scenes is but to hint at so much going on in this film. It has a huge cast of extras, such as those who fill the elevators and those who operate its buttons while fending off flirtations from those with palpably bursting buttons.

To say any more about the plot, which combines claustrophobia with depth of field shots which rival those in the similarly tyrannical Citizen Kane, would spoil it. Worth saying, though, that the film lifts off with the arrival of Rita Johnson, who, it seems, may have had some real-life experience of dodgy men leaving her bruised. And, in a turn to events the very stuff of noir itself, she suffered a brain injury when one of those now-vanished, head-encasing hair-dryers collapsed upon her, and she could not work again: a situation which brought on the alcoholism which duly killed her.

She was terrific. She is not in The Big Clock for long - but she makes it all her own, especially in the bar scene when the waiter almost chokes at what he is asked to add to a stinger. As for Ray Milland, one must wonder whether he will fulfil that promise to his wife that, after all this, he will return to small-town journalism to “report church fairs, write obituaries, and set type.”

“Opening out.” How often the phrase is used to describe the way in which a play becomes a full-blown film. One thinks, perhaps, of a half-hour play by Noel Coward transcending that railway-platform café to emerge on screen as Brief Encounter. Has there, though, been so dramatic a transformation as the leap from the confines of a diner which was William Inge's play Bus Stop to a Cinemascope film which included a protracted, open-air scene at a much-bucking rodeo for which there would certainly have been no room in that original halt somewhere in the wilds of Montana?

The difference is that the wide-screen film contains Marilyn Monroe who, like Sally Bowles in Cabaret, cuts a wow (“That Old Black Magic”) on a hick stage that would have been an international sensation in real life. The thrust of all this is that naïve cowboy Don Murray, no woman having passed through his arms, becomes in thrall to her, so much so that he cannot grasp that she has her eyes on Hollywood rather than getting on the 'bus with him and being taken back to the farm.

Preposterous as the film is, often feeling longer than its ninety minutes, and outlandish as Marilyn's accent sounds, there is so much to engage one's attention - her instinctive grasp of comedy and sharp retort - that one can suspend disbelief now and then.

And, one might surmise that the children with whom Marilyn banters in that snowbound diner are probably still with us – and, even now, reminiscing about her instinctive way with them.

“I was a passionate reader of Close-Up which was edited by Kenneth Macpherson and Bryher and published from a chateau in Switzerland. Marc Allégret was the Paris Correspondent and Pudovkin contributed articles on montage.” So Graham Greene recalled of his time at Oxford in the Twenties, where his enthusiasm for film - necessarily silent film - increased, and was an influence upon his writing of fiction.

One would like to know if he saw Borderline (1930). This was a silent film written and directed by that editor Macpherson himself, and, along with Bryher, it featured her close friend the poet known as HD (Hilda Doolittle) - as well as Paul Robeson and his wife Eslanda.

This is set in a Swiss village, where Eslanda has not only caused outrage by having an affair with a white man but brought marital difficulties for all concerned. That is the broadest outline of a film which turns less upon narrative - with scant inter-titles – than an abundance of montage, of dissolves from one image to another, faces caught in half-shadow as revenge and despair work alongside each other, with a knife to the fore at one moment. Close-up is indeed the term which it brings to mind throughout its seventy minutes.

One surrenders to it, is caught up by the pacing, and watches it a second time (it gains from knowing the outline the next time around). For the current DVD issue, there is a modern-jazz soundtrack by Courtney Pine, who talks very interestingly about his work on this during an “extra” item on the disc, and the excellent music works to best effect with the volume lowered: its switches of pace are of a piece with the fast editing of the film itself.

Pine remarks that he saw the film “about thirty-seven times” (a curious mixture of the general and the specific) while writing the music. A contrast with Miles Davis, one reflects, who improvised his score for Lift to the Scaffold while watching it screened for him.

A film, then, in which to lose and find oneself - and perhaps explore the Bohemian lives of those involved in its making (Bryher's novel about a teashop in the Blitz has just been reissued).

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.