Film Reviews by CH

A point often overlooked: here is a film in which most of the words are spoken by Debbie Harry.

Or, rather, sung. "Heart of Glass" plays for a considerable time in a Strasbourg bar which has previously mentioned several times, and duly visited by Xavier Lafitte, who plays El, a young artist who has returned - after six years - in quest of a girl with whom he had then talked before the moment passed.

And now, during three days punctuated by brief nights, in a film largely silent but for the clicking of shoes on cobbles and snatches of overheard conversation, he sits outside a café, sketchbook in hand, pencil scribbling, his eyes upon those in groups around him.

José Luis Guérin's film - just 84 minutes long - is very much peopled by jeunesse dorée rather than politicians and bureaucrats. Clumsy, distracted, El is preoccupied, so much so that he sees an elegantly-dressed woman (Pilar López de Ayala) whom he takes for the one who slipped away.

And so, to adapt Klee's phrase, this artist takes a line out for a walk, a very long one: he follows her through street after street while a varied population traverses the scenes - a paunchy man in a vest, a woman with a pram. Does she know that he is doing so? Will they meet?

Scarcely anything is said. It is all the very opposite of the Before Sunrise series. And yet it never fails to let one's interest drop away. One could call it a short-haul Rivette. As such, it has divided opinion in the thirteen years since it appeared (there is a solitary Nokia rather than pervasive smartphones). Do not expect everything to be wrapped up; an enigma remains that - and one might wonder about the brief shot of a newspaper headline about a New Crime.

Nothing can be discounted. This is a tale of obsession lightly borne.

One never knows what, indeed who might turn up in episodes of the Edgar Wallace Presents... series.

In the final series there is an item, Game for Three Losers which largely turns around a very-Sixties office from which a tea merchant runs his business while also making appearances as an MP in the Commons (and its nearby restauants). He is none other than Michael Gough, complete with umbrella and hat, and given to a gait which at times resembles that of Kenneth Williams.

With one secretary leaving to get married, he takes on a temporary one, Toby Robins, a beguiling woman who accepts invitations to dinner but all the while a blackmailer has his claws into her.

A familiar scene, one might say, and so it is, but this is very well played. Unlike many an episode, there is no gunfire, chair-wielding fights and large black cars hurtling along London streets or country lanes. A small-scale drama, complete with a country-house lawn and labradors - and a sad saloon bar.

Insects were harmed in the making of this film. The credits do not say so, but one might infer it.

A year after playing the upright Major in The Third Man, Trevor Howard found himself taking a different turn, an MI6 officer who, for some reason, is obliged to return to London, there handing in his resignation and gun. He maintains similar rectitude, however, and, after a visit to an employment office, decides to take a job for which there have been no takers. He goes down to Hampshire to spend some time in cataloguing a butterfly collector's examples: boxes of these once-fluttering creatures are upon shelves in an elegant house. As chance has it, the collector is played by Barry Jones, who bears an extraordinary resemblance to another such collector, Vladimir Nabokov. The novelist was not widely known in 1950. There were to be several years until Lolita emerged (to use a butterfly metaphor).

Not something that one might mention, except that The Clouded Yellow (a type of butterfly) turns around a remarkable plot, created by Janet Green, and directed by Ralph Thomas who is perhaps best known for the series of Doctor... films but also later made one of the best political-scandal thrillers, No Love for Johnnie, with Peter Finch. Thomas brings a sure touch to all this, with an early appearance by a gamekeeper upon whom Jones's wife - Sonia Dresdel - has a fixation less frequently satisfied than she would like. Meanwhile, said crass gamekeeper also has the hots for her fraught adolescent niece, Jean Simmons, then twenty but appearing rather younger.

Jean Simmons is an orphan, her musician father and mother dead in strange, indeed suspicious circumstances (music for the film was provided by Benjamin Frankel). Why is the aunt gaslighting her, making her doubt her memory of the death scene and forbidding her to play her father's music on the piano?

To say all this does not give away too much, nor to say that amidst these lives of quiet Hamsphire desperation, Trevor Howard falls for Jean Simmons - hence the earlier reference to Lolita. She is in her teens, and he appears at least twenty years older (of course , Howard always gave the appearance of springing forth in the maternity ward with a moustache and custom-made tweed jacket while the midwife slapped him into life).

Events have the pair fleeing, Howard's secret-service past taking them to convenient boarding houses rather than motels, with several English cities filmed in a noir style to rival Vienna's, albeit without any cats to hand but a posse of cyclists causes equal trouble.

Why isn't The Clouded Yellow better known? What's more, why is the current DVD reduced by some ten minutes from the original running time of 95 minutes? The well-filmed ending might appear on the hasty side, but one suspects the loss of some scenes from Hampshire, a hint of which is supplied by the one in which Trevor Howard and Jean Simmons, with a shared net, give chase to a butterfly, fall to the sunny ground, find their captive to be a common one - and let it go.

The erotic charge, the release to the scene makes one wonder if Nabokov saw this extraordinary film.

"What's the matter? Don't you like mortuaries?"

Quoted like that, one might easily think that the line has sprung from one of Raymond Chandler's works. In fact, it is said - behind the wheel of a Rolls-Royce convertible - by well-spoken aircraft manufacturer John Mills to his seemingly respectable wife (Phyillis Calvert). Having become erratic, he has confessed to her that a little while ago he had visited their daughter's spiv boyfriend (Herbert Lom) to pay him off with sufficent money for him to depart the scene. And so it appears to be, until Lom rashly sneers that - in a bold turn for 1951 - he has "already had" the daughter. Outraged, Mills hits out, and Lom does depart the scene, by falling fatally against the fireplace of his rented bachelor pad.

Such is Alec Coppel's script, from his own novel, that events take a turn, and another turn, before another, all spinning from the terror which besets Mills after he has disposed of the body during a black night in a ditch somewhere off a road to the North. Here, in the hands of director Anthony Kimmins, is something which moves between the near-noir (with recourse to many a bottle) and the almost comic, with quite a cast drawn upon to add their bit to a plot which never ceases to surprise. Step forward, Bernard Lee, Raymond Huntley and, best of all, Wilfrid Hyde Whyte whose pride in his mortuary is maintained with a cynical edge as he points towards an array of organs in glass bottles.

A transatlantic edge is brought by the daughter's subsequent boyfriend, Sam Wanamaker, a lawyer whose interest in the unfolding case looks set to scupper things, all the way up to a startlingly amoral, even immoral ending which has left far behind an opening whose brisk credits are delivered as a voice-ove (perhaps the only other film to do so is Aunt Julia and the Script Writer).

How should a film end? All too often, everything is tidied up with a clinch or a shoot-out (or both). Of course, there was doubt during the ad hoc filming of Casablanca about the way things would go at the aerodrome, and Graham Greene was at first reluctant for Carol Reed to have his way in the last minutes of The Third Man - and duly conceded that the director was emphatically right.

The thought comes to mind when Reed completed The Key, a decade after The Third Man. Its ending, steam and all, is of a piece with the better sections of a film which takes place within the confines of a tug boat at sea and a small, converted flat within a once-splendid house - with a staircase to behold - near the harbour.

It is 1941, with Christmas in the offing while U-boats and aeroplanes target those vessels that comprised the Atlantic Convoys. The tugs are waiting to aid any ship that comes a cropper, whether by rescuing the crews or dragging the holed vessel back to shore. As chance has it, William Holden, pre-Pearl Harbor, arrives to join the crew of one tug and re-encounters Trevor Howard, who invites him to the flat whose big brass bed he shares with sultry Stella (an early appearance by Sophia Loren) after being given a spare key to it by somebody who had told him to use it should he himself come a cropper. And now Howard does the same, urging it upon Holden.

There is a convincing claustrophobia - redolent of later kitchen-sink dramas - to these interior scenes, both Holden and Stella beset by differing insecurities as the camera ranges across the oddly cinemascope set-up. This widescreen is better suited to the scenes upon the ocean, which are done well enough but now appear of a piece with many a war film from those years rather than being anything imbued with the distinctive Reed touch.

For all the waves crashing upon decks and down tight, metal stairwells, it is often the small details that linger, such as a shop window which proclaims that it can removes hearts and names from those who have previously been tattoed there. Long before Meatfree Monday, the same was then urged on a Tuesday and Friday.

What endures is the passion and amorality combined in Stella (has Sophia Loren ever been as good, that is bad?). One is eager to seek out the original novel, named after her, by Jan de Hartog.

With its first scene well-nigh a clone of Went the Day Well? - a narrator recollects events against shots of a village, a pub, a manor house - Four-Sided Triangle (1953) bodes well. An early Hammer production, its centrepiece, The Reproducer, makes a 3-D printer appear tame. Two young men have created a device which can makes copies of anything, even the woman for whom they share affections, Barbara Payton. She brings this film such brio as it has; tragically, it marked a bright spot in a life which became ever dimmer, until her early death in 1967. At only seventy-five minutes, it drags, sunk by explication - and, unlike those in charge of The Reproducer, one has no reluctance to press the stop button.

So why allot the disc four stars? There is a bonus feature, The Right Person (1954). Curiosity is well rewarded. For one thing, it is the first script by Philip Mackie, an ever-dependable television writer. It springs a surprise early on. The opening scene is in garish colour and takes in some of Copenhagen. What's more, it is filmed in Cinemascope. It feels as though the ground is being set for an epic chase. But no, everything cuts to the hotel room in which the newly-married Mrs. Jorgensen (Margo Lorenz, who also died young) puts down her bags after a hard day's shopping and awaits her husband, who should have been back by then, ready for dinner after a drink or two. Instead there arrives a man, insistent on waiting for him. Douglas Wilmer is brilliant at depicting an enigma who is, naturally enough, unwilling to give away too much about wartime bonds and fractures.

Tensions and doubts grow, so much that Mrs Jorgensen knocks back the national drink in one - several times..

To say anymore would be unfair, except that, amazingly, all this fills only twenty-five minutes: neither too little nor too much.

The Right Person had first been shown, with a different cast and in black and white, the year before on the BBC. We need more films which make good use of a neat idea rather than "opening it out", a phrase redolent of skin being pulled apart for an operation. The Right Person does not need surgery: it is now sixty-five years old and in perfect health.

"I am a sucker for lighthouses. The lonelier and more inaccessible, the better. And I love comedy-thrillers," recalled director Michael Powell, and so he said yes immediately to working on The Phantom Light (1935) which, in its time, was regarded as another quota-quickie or poverty-row production derived from a now-vanished play. This, though, was a task of which Powell said, "I enjoyed every minute. The less said about the plot the better."

Put simply, in the opening minutes Gordon Harker arrives by train to take up his new job in charge of a Welsh lighthouse where the previous incumbents have come a cropper. Also among the newcomers are Binne Hale (better known for her stage career than a few films) and the now-obscure Ian Hunter who played dashing - in all senses of the word - young men in the Thirties.

Something shifty is happening, and there is a strong suggestion that some of the Welsh are up to no good. However that might be, Powell lavishes superb cinematography upon them, whether in a pub, upon a dodgy automobile, and more. What's more he studied many a lighthouse before setting to work (and combined several in the eventual fim).

For all that, a fair proportion of the film comprises interior shots of a confined lighthouse, with, naturally , many a scene upon tightly-curving stairs. Tightly curving could also be a phrase for Binnie Hale's thighs. Having come a cropper in the water, she is kitted out with Gordon Harker's Sunday trousers, which she promptly reduces - so that they fit - to something which anticipates hot-pants. Whatever the chill of the night air, she scurries about in these, and proves a great foil for Gordon Harker's barbed remarks.

Gordon Harker? Let Powell explain. He "was one of those naturals that every country has - a face to remember: in France Fernandel, in Mexico Cantinflas, in Italy Alberto Sordi, in America Humphrey Bogart, in Ireland Victor McLagen, in Germany Conrad Veidt... He was one of Hitch's favourite faces, and Hitch had helped to make him a star. He had one of those flat, disillusioned Cockney faces, half-fish, half-Simian, with an eye like a dead mackerel. In one of Hitch's first successes, The Ring, a boxing picture, Gordon Harker had played one of the hero's seconds and nearly stole the picture. He was wonderful in silent films, but even better in talkies. He got his effects with all sorts of strange sounds, and to my delight he could hold a pause as long as any actor I had known. Close-ups were made for him, and we both took full advantage of it."

And Graham Greene concurred, remarking in one of his first film reviews that Harker "gives one of his sure-fire Cockney performances". Ever sharp-eyed, Greene also remarked , "that fine actor , Mr. Donald Calthrop, is fobbed off in a small part. Mr. Calthrop has seldom been lucky in his parts. There is a concentrated venom in his acting, a soured malicious spirituality, a pitiful damned dog air which put him in the same rank as Mr. Laughton". Calthrop scarcely appears, but he is brilliant.

All of which suggests there is so much to enjoy here. And, as waves break on the rocks, one thinks of all that Powell would create as more than a backdrop to The Small Back Room and I Know Where I'm Going.

Although this film opens after the war as a villager stands in a churchyard and recalls something of events a few years earlier, in fact the film was made and released in 1942.

Based on a story by Graham Greene which he collected only towards the end of his life (though it had appeared, strangely enough, in a children's anthology), it was directed by Brazilian-born Cavalcanti whom he much admired. Set during the Whitsun weekend of 1942, it tells of a sleepy village (named Bromley End, and filmed in Turville) where its array of inhabitants found themselves at the vanguard of a world turned upside down. Here we have characters ranging from a gentle, strong-minded vicar to a bedraggled poacher who is passing on the tricks of his trade to a very young Harry Fowler. Scenes range from a village store, and telephone exchange to a Manor House lined with pictures along its twisting staircase.

Among the cast are many canny women (among them Elizabeth Allan and Thora Hird), who, as events unfold, come increasingly to the fore, even the fire: there is some startling violence here, all the more effective as it is not drenched in blood but of a piece with a film in which there is continual use of light and shadow, whether by night or day, inside or out. The cinematography is wonderful. As James Agee wrote in his review when the film was duly released in America some while later (mid-1944), he thought the best of it was "in its relating of the people and their action to their homes, their town, their tender, lucid countryside. As the audience watches from a hill, with the eyes at once of a helpless outsider, a masked invader, and a still innocent defender, a mere crossroads imparts qualities of pity and terror which, to be sure, it always has, but which it seldoms shows us except under tilted circimstances. And at moments, when the invaders prowlingly approach through the placid gardens of the barricaded manor in the neat morning light, the film has the sinister, freezing beauty of an Auden prophecy come true".

For some years, even decades, the film fell from sight, even though there is much in it of a piece with eternal Ealing delights. It is now well established as a classic of English film making, one which time and again takes by surprise even those who have already seen it.

"I'm going to spend the evening curled up with a bookmaker." "I've seen better things wash up on Barry Island." "Wake up, it's Saturday - there's fish cakes for breakfast!"

How can so enjoyable a film as The Crowded Day (1954) be little known? It opens, as it ends, with Sid James muttering to himself as the night watchman at an Oxford Street department store. Many of the scenes were filmed at the now-vanished Bourne and Hollingsworth, which was sporting of its owners, for much of the action turns around chicanery, illicit passion, backstabbing - with the milk of human kindness distinctly semi-skimmed.

One can imagine that, in 1954, audiences were startled to be greeted, within a few minutes, by so many bathroom scenes. Not, one hastens to add, with Sid James, though he would doubtless have relished being there, for many of the store's female employees are housed in its own hostel and queue impatiently for an early-morning's bath, their knees duly kickiing upwards during discussion of the day ahead which is due to be capped by the store's smart Christmas bash for its staff.

Notable among the staff is Vera Day, whom one might easily mistake for Barbara Windsor. Never abashed by a man's approach, she is set on a film career, hopes pinned on the following week's screen test. One should not reveal any more about that. And the same goes for the parallel plot lines which defy physics by briefly overlapping before sundown - and beyond.

Scripted by the great Talbot Rothwell, this was an early work - with splendid cinematopgraphy inside and out - by director John Guillerman, whose later films took a different and longer turn, far from this portmanteau creation which, surprisingly, runs just over an hour and a quarter. In this space he manages to combine what must surely be the most unusual take on a bedroom scene (say no more) and some noir scenes replete with railway trains, a mewing cat and a rapist. Meanwhile, the staff surely deserved a bonus for dealing with such bolshie customers as Dora Bryan, Thora Hird and Prunella Scales.

If any film school needs an example of tightly-paced ensemble playing, this is it.

As for Vera Day swifly losing her much-craved earings, she might perhaps look in the bathroom-fittings department: one could push towels through them.

"Avanti!" That cry, of inviting somebody to enter a room, provided the title for one of Billy Wilder's last films and was uttered throughout it by Jack Lemmon. It is uttered but once in Five Graves to Cairo (1943). Neither film is among Wilder's most widely known - but they deserve to be.

In both cases, his scripts developed, even transformed others' original work. In the case of Graves, this was a story by Lajos Biro twice filmed previously as Hotel Imperial. (Biro's script for Knight Without Armour is wonderful.) In all cases, the plot turns around a small hotel caught up in events where a border town finds itself between opposing armies.

The script by Wilder and Charles Brackett transplants this to somewhere in the Sahara, with an opening scene which suggests that a torrid drama is about to ensue. A tank rumbles (do tanks ever so anything else?) across the hilly desert sands, its throttle jammed on forward by a dead man's foot as somebody, apparently dead, falls from the back and turns out to be the dashing Franchot Tone. His accent is distinctly American, but, no matter, for he acquits himself well as a member of the British Forces, one who, moreover, worked in the Bank of England and sported a bowler hat before signing up.

All this he explains to a French maid, played with a mixture of the romantic and sinister by Anne Baxter, who has her own reasons for remaining with the hotel's owner after the German aircraft forced everybody else out the previous night. For all this opening drame, Graves is a film of interiors - brilliantly and darkly shot by John Seitz - and, this being Wilder, much banter which does not slow down the drama.

Although there are many who appear briefly and uncredited in the film, it is essentially a chamber work, turning around a few characters - something which, along with its humour, it has in common with Casablanca. That might make it small scale, but larger than life was Field-Marshall Rommel, played magnificently by Erich von Stroheim. Never has there been such a lunch as the one to which he invites some captured British officers and invites them to put twenty questions to him, which he partly answers by dint of salt and pepper pots. The performance is no caricature but, even in the midst of war, depicting the events of 1942, shows why he commanded a certain respect from both sides (and figured in the title of one of Spike Milligan's war memoirs).

What might be forgotten is that Rommel was one of those implicated in the plot to kill Hitler in 1944. What with the Field-Marshall's popularity among the Germans, Hitler realised that it was expedient to allow him to swallow a cyanide pill rather than be shot, and it all passed off as heart failure.

What one would like to know, however, is whether - one way or another - Rommel got to see this depiction of himself by brilliant émigrés on the West Coast. He would not have been displeased, and perhaps could have explained the assertion that he did not like a woman to bring him breakfast in bed.

Has there been a better jump-cut than the one from Marie Windsor vigorously filing her nails to a railway engine's going full pelt along the track?

This is but one of the many delights of the seventy minutes which find her - a gangster's widowed moll - aboard a train in the company of policeman Charles McGraw who is there to protect her from mobsters hellbent on preventing her from testifying before a Grand Jury and producing a list of top-notch firms implicated in widespread slayings and corruption.

A train always heightens drama, and there is no higher one than this masterpiece, directed by Richard Fleisher (whose memoirs are a fascinating read).

One could quote some of the fast and salty dialogue but it is better springing from the lips of the cast than this keyboard. A treat in store - however many times you watch it.

Fifty years before Air BandB, there was something to give any viewer pause before signing the Agreement.

With the penultimate series of Edgar Wallace Presents..., it had looked as if things might be going off a bit - and then along comes this hour-long drama Act of Murder, which is a corker.

Put simply, a couple in an inherited, antiques-laden Surrey cottage exchange it for a house in central London in order to be immersed in a dozen plays while the other couple (one of whom is Dandy Nichols) can savour the rural air - not that Dandy ever looks likely to doff her heavweight togs any time soon.

Along with the antiques, the cottage is also home to a charming dog, a budgie and some hens (the latter have their own premises).

Naturally, matters take a different turn from that which any of them expected.

You might have your suspicions; I had mine; and we could all keep guessing.

This being series six, the Sixties have moved on a few years, and there is even a nude scene. Well, Justine Lord is filmed from behind, upon a bed as, after a few lines of dialogue, she wriggles into a new nightie. A scence which is as well lit as the rest, much of which takes place in a cottage so laden that it also takes some manoevering (which makes one fear the worst during a party scene).

Three tense days fill these seventy-seven minutes. A model of psychological tension, this film - taken from a play which has fallen from sight -

is a marvel of small-town life turned upside down when a seventeen-year-old pupil disappears one dark night after meeting the Latin teacher upon whom she has a crush. An example of the way in which characters drive plot, this turns many variations upon lives of quiet desperation. Or, in the case of the girl's aunt (Pamela Brown) not so quiet: unable to shake of the end of an affair twenty years ago, she never loses an opportunity to remind people of it. A splendid study in malignancy. No shoestring incarnation of Peyton Place, this depiction of the Home Counties in turmoil has lavish, almost noir attention to detail, from close-ups of a sinister hand pushing coins in a telephone box to the dredging of the river. Seek this out.

The J. B. Priestley revival has continued apace, what with the National Theatre's continually touring production of An Inspector Calls. This film, however, is less well known, despite a dapper performance by Alec Guiness as Mr. Bird who draws together an ensemble cast. Sid James and Ernest Thesiger together is the most unlikely pairing until Sid appeared with Sean Connery in Hell Drivers. In fact, it has something in common with An Inspector Calls, for this is a tale about a small-time salesman who learns that he is going to die - and decides to go on a bit of a spree (at any rate, to somewhere resembling Bournemouth, spiv Sid laments being thwarted in a desire to sojourn in Brighton. For all the realism of this interestingly and diversely populated hotel, Guinness is as much an allegorical figure as the Inspector, one whose presence calls upon the others to study the course of their lives (as he himself has done, after being galvanised by a canny tailor to splash out on some fine jackets). With many an angle - and a neat camera angle - upon post-War Britain, this film resonates as much seventy years on.

Softly lit, her hair shining on the gallows while drums beat and white birds wait upon the Tower roof, Nova Pilbeam is as striking as ever she was during that all-too-brief run of films during the Thirties, one which ended with her husband's wartime death - and a retreat which lasted until her death a few years ago. Tudor Rose is not her best showing, lumbered as it is by the need to explain machinating characters as one follows another through this chunk of history, when Kings and Queens did not get to sit long upon the Throne, and a cannon marked the sound of the executioner's axe for those out of its earshot. A series of sometimes neat scenes (Henry VIII's deathbed is a corker), it lacks dramatic sweep. As indeed could be said of the mid-Eighties incarnation of this sad story: Lady Jane, with Helena Bonham-Carter.