Film Reviews by CH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does it rain more often in the movies than elsewhere? The thought comes to mind again with Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once (1937), the second film which he made after arriving in Hollywood from Germany. It is as imbued with his Expressionist angles as Metropolis and others from the Twenties, and rain suits this as well as faces framed by doorways and sunlight making shadows across the floor as it traverses prison cells.

Before Bonnie and Clyde there was Gun Crazy and, before that, this. All turn equally enjoyable variants upon those lovers who took to the steering wheel and gun, with the tyres squealing as much as their victims. In Lang's case, he has Sylvia Sidney (she had also been in Fury) who works in a Public Defender's office but is smitten, and more, with a habitual criminal Henry Fonda who is soon to leave gaol for the third time. She sees the good in him, but, inevitably, society does not, things slide from hope to despair - a process which provides plenty of excitement, so much so that one cannot help but feel a voyeur of suffering.

The film moves from an unexpectedly comic opening in which a market-stall holder tries to bring a case against a policeman for his daily pilfering of apples while on patrol (nothing comes of that), after which there is a romantic mood as Sylvia Sidney and Fonda light upon a house for sale, complete with garden swing.

Lang keeps up a pace, with time for such symbolic moments as two frogs in a garden pool (it turns out that, like penguins, they mate for life). All of this anticipates noir, with such moments, places and people as gasoline stations (one of which has a till whose design would now command a far greater sum than it contained any single day), rebarbative governors, and, of course, a well-meaning priest (William Gargan) with an Irish accent. And any pane of glass which hoves into a close-up is at risk of being smashed.

At eighty-two minutes, the script (by Gene Towne) contains a great deal, with room for many who have but a minute or two of screen time - such as the couple who run an inn, the husband duly exclaiming, “well, I'll be hog-tied” (meaning: well, I'll be blowed) when looking through his collection of crime magazines and realizing that his hunch was right: they have a jailbird in the honeymoon room.

Despite combing several times through the double columns of Jonathon Green's great three volumes Dictionary of Slang, I cannot find the phrase therein, but I shall make shifts to use it at the first opportunity.

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?