Film Reviews by CH

When did Laurence Olivier encounter The Zombies? No, this is not a little-known science-fiction endeavour (curious as that would be) but a reference to a scene in Otto Preminger's Bunny Lake is Missing (1965). As a decidedly straight-backed Superintendent from Scotland Yard, he has taken young Carol Lynley to a pub for nourishment amidst the disappearance that morning of her four-year-old illegitimate daughter known as Bunny.

So far, what with Olivier invariably accompanied by a Sergeant (Clive Revill), this might appear a thriller sprung from an episode of Edgar Wallace Presents... Nobody, however, is a stock figure, even the junket-making cook at the School from which Bunny vanished. With a script by John and Penelope Mortimer (with some anonymous work by Ira Levin), this makes something well-nigh Gothic from Evelyn Piper's novel. The appearance of The Zombies on Ready, Steady Go on the pub's 23-inch television is but one of of the details that take all this out of the ordinary.

Did any pub feature a television, let alone in a film, at that time? Then again, this is a film in which Olivier suggests that it would be futile to seek out those aboard the 'bus which took Carol Lynley and Bunny to school earlier that day: “bus conductors are rarely observant - they tend to be dreamers and philosophers, a form of self defence.”

Already suspicions are aroused by Anna Massey's creepy turn as the School secretary, a School whose founder (Martita Hunt) keeps to a cluttered top-floor flat where she works, well-nigh obsessively, upon a book about children's talk. This is but one of many great performances (and how one hopes her Fifties television rôle as Lady Bracknell might yet surface).

And, yes, is there any more unsettling performance than that by a now large-eared, shuffling Noel Coward as neighbouring landlord of the flat into which Carol Lynley and her brother (Kier Dullea) have moved this same, crowded day? Dressed not in a silk dressing gown but a woolly jumper and clutching a tiny dog, Samantha (one imagines he asked to be paid more to do that), he appears at first affability and concern, even though stating “no caged birds, no livestock of any kind” (a catalogue which includes children). As the sky turns dark, he is given to suggestive moves while proclaiming, “I am told that my voice is extremely seductive. It has seemed to unleash whole hurricanes of passion in the breasts of women who watch me on the BBC.” And if that is not enough to tempt them to drop before him, he takes a whip from a wall of wooden African heads and cracks it with practised ease (even if one cannot quite credit the claim that “I sung rude old Welsh ballads”).

“Bloody pervert, if you want my opinion,” as Revill says to Olivier, who, in a nice turn, suggests he temper any prejudice during this investigation. Coward's fairly brief appearances linger in the mind, but a key one is Carol Lynley not only obeying her brother's order to bring him a cigarette in the bath but sitting in the edge of it - gaze not averted - for some while as they discuss the situation. Their shared past has not gone away, imagination and fantasy loom throughout, heightening Preminger's marvellously shot widescreen, black and white cinematography,. This works to equal effect inside and out, a masterclass in pace and rhythm, leaving no moments for doubt. Even slower scenes have a necessary tension, all of them making this a high-clamp production.

The wonder is that - as Carol Lynley says in a recent interview included as an extra on the DVD - much of this was filmed at night in order to accommodate Olivier who, earlier in the evenings, was on stage as Othello. In many strange, seemingly logical turns Carol Lynley visits that night a real, gaslit Dolls' Hospital in Soho where Finlay Currie plies his trade. As Carol Lynley also recalls, Currie had been on stage that day - indeed, for two performances - which led him to ask if, aged 84, he could play the part whi

“The closest you've ever come to a bird is a boiled egg.” Such is the banter in one of the many coffee bars and cafés frequented by Joe Brown and Marty Wilde in What a Crazy World (1963). One such bird is Susan Maugham, Brown's on-off girlfriend, the off segments caused by his embarrassing lack of funds, a situation compounded by his inability/reluctance to find a job.

All of which brings frequent dinner-table, plate-wiping monologues by his father, Harry H. Corbett (Steptoe's son) a dog-racing working man who is bringing up three children in a sharply-detailed tenement block, the flats reached by an outdoor corridor with a view of the bombed-out land south of the Thames. The film derives from a musical by Alan Klein, who also appears as one of Wilde's gang, a posse not exactly from West Side Story but startling indeed with their first number, “The Layabouts' Lament”. This is surely unique for taking place in a Labour Exchange and, what's more, now likely to raise other eyebrows than those of the hapless man (Michael Ripper) behind the counter: in the queue are immigrants dressed in costumes from their various countries to which the tune plays homage with such things as a calypso turn.

It is only some way into the film that one finds Brown is an aspirant songwriter as he tries out the title song in the safety of his bedroom - on a banjo. Meanwhile, he and Wilde have found enough spare change to go to what is promised to be a great group at a club. This turns out to be a British Legion hall, and the entertainment is provided by Freddie and the Dreamers (he of those extraordinary spectacles favoured by potential murderers holed up in boarding houses). One of their songs is a version of “Short Shorts”, amidst the singing of which Freddie divests himself to reveal more pairs of striped baggy underwear than Benny Hill can have ever dreamed of. As if that were not enough, Freddie then turns to a song “Sally Ann” which has all the group dressed in Salvation Army hats.

Well, Guys and Dolls this is not. There is, though, a suggestion of Brecht refracted though Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons. Lo and behold, the hapless man in charge of the Legion hall where a fight breaks out is the same one who was behind the counter down the Labour, and also, amongst much else, pouring the tea in the café while Susan Maugham sings one of her laments. He is indeed billed as The Common Man. And it is extraordinary to think that he did not change his surname from Ripper (though perhaps it helped to get him work at Hammer).

By the time that this was released in December 1963, the pop world had changed. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was Number One, with “She Loves You” duly returning there. That said, What a Crazy World is a notch or more above those films which had bundled singers into a scant plot in order to belt out recent hits. Here are real glimpses of kitchen-sink London, with relief provided by bowling alleys and a Bingo Hall (a surreally-dressed figure calling out the numbers) - and a montage of discs in citywide jukeboxes which could have appeared in a German film in the Twenties. And some salty dialogue: “He just grunts and turns over.” “My Bert's the same.” And, in the Legion Hall, a strange way to praise a woman's figure: “Look at that and the price of fish!” And one might reflect that just as Steptoe's son appears here (and, Heaven help us, sings), so Steptoe himself would appear memorably a few months later in A Hard Day's Night.

Best of all, however, is a sequence in which Brown tries to sell his song to music publishers on Denmark Street. Sportingly, several real premises allowed themselves to be filmed - while turning down the proffered ditty, until Brown lands a modest job with an invented one-man outfit and, by some subterfuge, gets the song taken on. The publisher duly exchanges a cigarette for a cigar as the sheet music rolls off the presses alongside copies of New Musical Express proclaiming it a

“I'm a man of action.” So says a Scotland Yard Inspector (played by John Stuart) in The Missing Million (1942) in a Soho café, where Linden Travers replies, with a flash of her eyelids, “I might make you prove that one day.”

Such a flashy moment enlivens a film, where so many words have been used to explain who has been where, when and perhaps why, as Miss Travers's brother (Ivan Brandt) has gone missing shortly before marrying the daughter of a well-to-do Treasury official.

All this springs from an Edgar Wallace novel. Does anybody read him now? He was in the habit during the Twenties of dictating his thrillers over a weekend, and reaping the royalties from those who read them at a similar speed. He had a way with a plot – shown, two or more decades after his death, in the Fifties and Sixties television series inspired by his work.

He turned variants upon a metropolis where sundry Mr. Bigs held sway. In this case there is one who leaves porcelain pandas after he has paid a visit to a scene of interest to him. And so it is that, with a blackmail threat against him, Brandt vanishes, as does the million pounds which became his when his businessman father died.

What is going on? In the ordinary course of events, one might not linger, especially as there is repetitive misogyny from a safecracker (Charles Victor): “married? I may have been in prison but I've not fallen that low!” Against his performance one must set the stylish turn by Linden Travers, who appeared in films for too short a time - and had inspired Graham Greene five years earlier to laud her rôle in the sultry Brief Ecstasy, notably for “the buttocks over the billiard table” as an emblem of “the ugly drive of undifferentiated desire”.

There's nothing to match that here as many of those around her duly receive a slug in the chest while it becomes clear that for the Panda matters are never black and white - but one's patience is further rewarded in the final moment by seeing the irritating safecracker making a gay advance (I kid you not), which would certainly count as a specialised taste.

Who will complete Woody Allen's last film? This is hardly a tasteless question, for the end of life recurs in his films (notably, the remark in Annie Hall that all the books with Death in the title belong to him). Such is his continuing rate of production, with several works on the go at once, that, amidst one's own life, it is sometimes unfortunate to miss a new one. Three years on, Wonder Wheel (2017) turns out to be rather a treat.

It could have been called Carousel, for that ride - operated by James Belushi – figures more prominently than the eponymous one which towers over a skid-row Coney Island fairground in 1950 where, on the beach, Justin Timberlake, fresh from the Navy, spends a summer as a lifeguard while aspiring to be a dramatist.

Will he succeed? Well, as he admits, in his addresses to the camera, he is caught up in one forthwith. As the sun sets he had chanced upon Kate Winslet, a former actress about to turn forty and unhappily married to alcoholic Belushi who took her on after she had been unfaithful (with somebody else) to her jazz drumming first husband. She has baggage, made worse by now waitressing in a clam bar.

Under the broadwalk, passion smoulders, flares - an apt metaphor, as her young son (an excellently obnoxious Jack Gore) is given to setting things on fire. All this is set against red-hued cinematography which makes something lush of rundown premises, almost as if the wheel glimpsed from inside makes the glazing appear a stained-glass window. Events are further lit up by the arrival of Belushi's daughter (Juno Temple) who had run off to marry a gangster; such are gangsters, that husband turns out to be more displeased than most at being treated in this way by a dame.

This is perhaps to say more about the plot than one often might do when reflecting upon a Woody Allen film. It is better constructed than, say, Bullets Over Broadway and it has no gags at all. For those who did not relish Interiors and September, this might sound ominous. A more apt comparison is with the charming period quality of Radio Days, and it is all more convincing than the spate of Europe-set works - including Midnight in Paris, which felt like a New Yorker sketch extended to a hundred minutes.

Woody Allen has always been terrific in giving women good, challenging rôles, such as the one for Mia Farrow in Broadway Danny Rose (and even Madonna in Shadows and Fog). Here, Kate Winslet is upon the screen for much of the time (one does not get out a stopwatch, that is simply how it feels). And what a performance it is, suspending one's disbelief at such brilliance, such a flow of lines being given to the depiction of an actress who had seen her skills, her life slipping away with her face. This is worthy of Eugene O'Neill - had he been able to rein in some of his harbourside histrionics.

Who knew much about diabetes in 1960? It is now a familiar subject, but Night Tain for Inverness opens in a ward in the, er, Longford Children's Hospital near London; disaster is averted there, just in time, when a nurse prevents another boy's mother from giving Dennis Waterman a chocolate.

He has been there some while but is recovering, and due to go home with his mother (Silvia Francis) to the flat they share with her positive Gorgon of a mother (played superbly by Irene Arnold, her spectacles adding to the domineering horror of her regular egotistical cry of “I was only trying to help”).

In neat symmetry, Waterman's father (Norman Wooland) is returning home. That is, he has been released from gaol after six months for a theft which he had hoped would ease the domestic pressure wrought by life with the mother-in-law. It was not to be, and he has a Court order to stay away, something with which his wife has gone along - she did not realise that his weekly heartfelt letters had been intercepted and destroyed by her mother. This is a tragic situation, if not quite on the level of Hamlet, in which Wooland had been Horatio beside Olivier.

Obliged to hole up in a Euston boarding house, he comes up with a plan to take the boy (whom he meets outside the Hawtrey Prep. School) on a trip as far away as possible, in which he is aided by an old flame (the great Jane Hylton). And so, much of these sixty-five minutes is given to some twelve hours - illustrated by diverse clocks and announcements - of real time as the boy, who does not reveal any need for painful injections, takes the opportunity to gorge upon ice cream and chocolates,. With copious use of the telephone, the police try to discover his whereabouts while, beyond the briefly-glimpsed Euston Arch, the vigorous wheels of a billowing and bellowing steam train head northwards, the restaurant car allowing another form of smoke before diners head back along a side corridor to those wide seats of which passengers can now only dream.

All this is handled well by that proficient director Ernest Morris. Some might pick holes in it - but, then again, one can question Hamlet's construction. And, well, this was the first appearance by Dennis Waterman, who soon became widely known on television as prankster schoolboy William. (The film also briefly includes John Moulder Brown who, a decade and an era later, appeared alongside Jane Asher in the tremendous swimming-pool tale Deep End.) It is an accomplished performance, not least because, for much of it (and far from William), he has to sleep and indeed go into a coma, limp in his father's arms.

Here was work for those on the rise and the decline - and modest but rewarding entertainment for us six decades on.

“It will demand sacrifices, but will save lives.” So says the Prime Minister in a broadcast to the nation.

This might sound familiar at the moment but in Five Days to Noon (1950) he is speaking from a Downing Street which did not have a high barricade at the junction with Whitehall. A postman has been able to amble along, a tune on his lips as he puts the mail through that very door one sunny Monday morning in May of that year.

One of these envelopes turns out to contain a letter which, for all its elegant phrases, is not merry matter for a May morning. A mild-mannered, humane scientist (Professor Willingdon, played by Barry Jones) from an atomic station in Wallingford has gone rogue, and threatens to let off a bomb the following Sunday at noon that will take out London from Rotherhithe to Notting Hill Gate - unless the Government gives up the stockpiling of atomic weapons.

From a story by Paul Dehn and directed by the Boulting Brothers, this takes place some years before the familiar CND marches upon Aldershot. That town, though, is mentioned, and many times at that - as we shall see.

Meanwhile, the initial music by John Addison, with an emphasis upon ominous drumbeats, recurs as it becomes clear that Willingdon - his weapon (the UR12) concealed in a Gladstone bag - means what he says. He skulks around the metropolis, favourite raincoat over his arm despite the heat, as the police, with help from Willingdon's daughter, set about tracking him down.

That pursuit is one thing but a great interest of the film is its time, its place - a panoply of it - as, come Thursday, all is underway to evacuate that tranche of the city.

Here we have vignette upon vignette, with allusion to other films, such as Colonel Blimp being outraged by disturbance in his Turkish Bath and salty comments upon the sewers an echo of The Third Man (and the whole set-up brings to mind Val Guest's The Day the Earth Caught Fire a decade later). Here - as rumours spread in seconds of screen time from the clubs of St James's to back-garden fences in Kennington - we find a spiv hustling a queue with the offer of “a nice hotel, near Brighton, twenty quid a night.” A youth is hurried from a pinball machine whose screen depicts a mushroom cloud beneath the title of Atomic Racer. Animals have to be left behind, and they howl; a jewellery thief is shot dead; a soldier holds a bra against his chest for a moment, and makes off with the matching silk knickers (what's all that about?) while searching for stragglers and even, perhaps, the fugitive Professor. Such a crowd finds fleeing glimpses of those who will become better known (Laurence Harvey, Sam Kydd).

All this is wonderfully managed, but central to it are two women down on their luck. One of these, Mrs Peckett (played by Joan Hickson) is a cat-festooned landlady whose newsagent advertisement is answered by the Professor. She informs him, “I won't allow theatricals in the house. You won't believe the trouble I've had with them!” The claustrophobia of this cluttered boarding house is filmed so well - and she turns out to have a point about theatrical types: the Professor is duly put up for another night by Mrs. Philips - a dog-fixated actress still in forlorn hopes of work - who meets him in a pub and, it is clear, would not object to budging up should he chance to stray into her bedroom. She is played by Olive Sloan, of whom one must hasten to discover more.

Good as everybody is in their part, she echoes most of all in one's mind with her frustrated hopes of joining the evacuation - to stay with a friend in Aldershot. She makes that Aldershot quest as resonant as Pinter's caretaker would do of Sidcup.

One of the great post-war British films, Seven Days to Noon reveals more on every viewing - although one has yet to see the Inspector's tie slip.

"Appearances can be deceptive, Inspector."

"Sergeant."

This exchange takes place between Joan Hopkins, who appeared in too few films, and Laurence Harvey, in one of his first roles, and is typical of the adroit pace at which Man on the Run (1947) moves through a post-war Soho whose pubs, cafés, shops and rooming houses are well caught, a world in which spivs and worse are on the loose.

Derek Farr plays a deserter who has been spotted, blackmailed (by Kenneth More), and gone in search of the requested funds only to find himself caught in a hold-up where a policeman is murdered. He has to hide, and finds shelter with department-store assistant Joan Hopkins whose divorce proved slower than her husband's fatal war wounds, which means that she has a useful pension. It is fascinating to learn that there were 20,000 deserters at this time, many of them with as good reason as Derek Farr to do so; their existence, one of false papers and fear of exposure, laid them open to crime, whether as victim or perpetrator.

To say any more about the way in which events move, with the Thames almost a character in its own right, would spoil things - but it is curious to find that, for the German release, the final two minutes take place in larger premises, and that - but, no, a reviewer should follow Joan Hopkins's example and not give anything away.

The noose often swings at the end of a film. Such a morning at eight occurs early in Tall Headlines (1952), when one son is hanged for the murder of a young woman on Putney Common; the rest of it concerns the next life; that is, for his parents, sister and brother who fear for their chances in tittle-tattle suburbia, and so - undercover of night - they exchange a fine house with a tennis court for somewhere on the South Coast, above the cliffs to the east of Brighton (a number 12 coach is glimpsed heading in that direction).

Also exchanging the family name of Rackham for Blake, the remaining children (Michael Denison, Jane Hylton) take up more modest work than they had expected (motor mechanic, dentist's receptionist) while their father and mother (André Morell, Flora Robson) also fret about the part they may have played in nurturing a murderer - and promulgating fears Denison has the same gene.

There is a continual sense of unease, caught well in cramped settings by director Terence Young (perhaps best known for some of the early Bond escapades), with a measure of light provided by the garage at which Denison works near the cliffs. There he meets, and falls for Mai Zetterling, a situation complicated by her resembling the murdered woman, which brings out the venom in Jane Hylton who is bitter at missing a chance as singer with a band led by Dennis Price (another delightful surprise appearance).

All this must have made for an uncommonly bleak evening at the pictures seventy years ago (although there is a brilliant cameo by Joan Hickson as a waitress who could have inspired many a Monty Python woman: "cold fillet's off!").

It is not perfect, but, then again, it does not up the emotional ratchet into Tennessee Williams territory, but steers more effectively close in such moments as Mai Zetterling looking up from a brass bed to marvel at the New Moon - and then realise that to do so through glass brings bad luck.

To watch Tall Headlines is to realise that we all have a noose around the neck - and scant idea of when it will draw close.

On the face of it, this is a compilation for geeks. It does not take long to realise that here is something for the rest of us, as well as those gripped by a fascination for the evolution of bicycle design since the late-nineteenth century, when the opening short shows women taking to to the road in perilously long whites dresses which are sure to crease as they drag against the chain. Safety is a recurrent feature of these diverse films, in two of which - in one case, after hanging onto the back of a truck for easy speed - the bicycle turns ghostly white and voyages further on: through the Hereafter.

Which is a far cry from Herne Hill, which once had a well-known cycling track.

Children, naturally, surface in these films, such as Tom's Ride, in which a boy and girl discover the virtue of honesty. Meanwhile, perhaps best of all is The Ballad of the Battered Bicycle, narrated in rough effective verse by Stanley Holloway who doubles in rôles as a fairground hawker and a Judge who delivers judgment on the boy who has spurned the Highway Code.

Against the concrete blocks of malls - full of vanished chain stores - somewhere in England, there pull up, amidst the obligatory rain, Capris, Maxis and those Rovers which look as if, at some point, a large animal has sat upon them. Quite possibly one of those animals had supplied the material for the brown, fur-lined car coat sported by a heavily-moustached police sergeant (Sean Connery) who wears it for most of a film from which he is rarely absent. Under pressure, he finds scant relief in a pub where a monstrous Red Barrel keg squats upon the bar, an otherwise grey-hued world made all the more so by an HQ whose narrow corridors are unadorned breeze block, the offices off them partitioned by stud walls and polystyrene ceilings scarcely able to mask the savage turn that interrogations take during the hunt for a child rapist.

Long before Life on Mars, here is England at the time of "Life on Mars?" The Offence (1972) was adapted from his own play by John Hopkins, who was best known (in the critical world) for his television plays Talking to a Stranger but had also worked on Thunderball. Connery's enthusiasm for the play had brought in Sidney Lumet with whom he had worked on another harrowing drama The Hill (1965). The many angles from which The Offence is filmed increasingly adds to the effect of a man cracking up. The opening scenes of a routine procedural turn into something else, all the more so with the arrest of a suspect Baxter (everybody is reduced to a surname, this one played by the excellent Ian Cannen who died in a motor smash towards the end of the century).

A turn to events comes with Connery's return home (a flat whose rooms appear to form odd angles), where he promptly smashes one of his wife's china objects as he lurches for the very-Seventies flip-lid cocktail cabinet and knocks back whisky at a rate which, in ordinary circumstances, would have him incoherent rather than providing that rare thing - a convincingly maudlin drunk scene - as he lays into his dressing-gowned wife, a frazzled Vivien Merchant. This scene, with the two of them, lasts over fifteen minutes, and never stales; nor does one which, equally long, finds him in the company of a superintendent sent to conduct an inquiry - Trevor Howard, who, during several cigarillo-smoking hours (there is a clock on the wall) not only, for once, lets his mask slip but also his jacket and even his tie.

To say anymore about what is going on would be unfair, just as it would be to remark that, at moments, in a certain light, Connery's face anticipates that of Basil Fawlty whose rages would be mild stuff besides those displayed here. On all sides, here is bravura acting directed towards a troubling psychological point of view which had the film little appreciated at the time by the hoards from Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads - especially as the soundtrack, in one version, is by Harrison Birtwistle (curiously enough, the other one largely lacks it).

My typing is my bond: there is much to explore in the other Sean Connery.

"Be careful, they might kill us." So says Lady Loxfield (Mabel Terry Lewis) to her daughter, Philippa (Frances Rowe), who replies, "they were killing me in Bournemouth!"

They are but two of nine people who find themselves outside a closed, heavy door beside a staircase to a city which they can see from these ramparts. After some familiar opening scenes - aboard a train, in Bournemouth, beside a boxing ring and so on - which are suddenly blacked out, most of They Came to a City (1944) takes place beside that door.

This might not sound the stuff of a film, but these eighty minutes pass rapidly, such is the dialogue between those who find themselves on the brink of a utopia - theirs to join, if they are willing to look within themselves and, in some cases, come to agreement with their partners (a vexed matter). All this comes from a 1943 play by J. B. Priestley who, in this film (which has most of that original cast), appears in the opening scene on a Northern hillside where a serviceman and his girlfriend are debating the future when the War is over. She hopes for a new one; he fears that the old guard will hold sway. Priestley - complete with pipe and unlikely hiking gear of his striped suit - sits down with them, and so their debate continues between those who find themselves beside the Door as it opens to allow a closer look at what is on offer.

We do not see that city, but duly hear the differing views of those who come back, either to rejoin life as they knew it or go back to the future.

This was a future - with Scriabin's rousing music to the fore on the soundtrack - inspired by Whitman's lines "The place where a great city stands is not the place of stretch'd wharves, docks, manufactures, deposits of produce merely." That is, there is more to life than meaningless toil for others' gain. For all his roots in Northern life, Priestley - as in An Inspector Calls - was given to allegory and its ally, the didactic spirit. His positing of a brave new world - with such people in it as a bank's branch manager (Raymond Huntley) who comes to see something else in life beyond the trumpery vanities enjoyed by his wife - was contemporary with Beveridge's Report and accorded with the social concerns of the film's director Basil Dearden. Made under the Ealing banner, it states many of the ideas which animated the studio's subsequent, more comic comic scenarios. Some might say that the film had an effect upon the 1945 General Election, which led to Attlee ousting Churchill.

And of course it has an echo in our own times, when many people - amidst the virus - are discussing a future world, with such things as a basic income which will enable people to have a better chance of fulfuilling their potential. Not that we should hold our breath. After all, the Attlee government did not cease hanging people and it continued to hound such gay people as Alan Turing, whose computer work led to the Internet which has lost much of its Utopian 1990s bloom. Looking back, in 1950, Priestley had remarked upon the many thousands of perfomances of the play (not one of his favourites) and the differing interpretations put upon it (about Jung and "even a plea for town planning"). He added, "what is important in the play is not the city but the respective attitudes of the characters toward it". Has it been produced lately on stage this century ? It could be, but recall Priestley's remark: "I should like to warn them against turning it into a melodramatic production with too heavy a bias against the older characters".

As for the title of this review, it is a reminder that the expression did not begin with the title of a famous Fifties film. Priestley's character was using a naval one uttered by somebody safely aboard a lifeboat, ready to be winched up - and to Hell with anybody still in the sea.

"A well-made film." A curious phrase which is not applied to every well-made film. It tends to denote one, perhaps deriving from a novel, in which scant consideration has been given to turning prose into something which sits upon the screen as a film. Cue high ceilings, low lighting and characters whose dialogue pauses only while a maid places a tray beside the flickering fireplaces - or they sit by a candle at a desk to write a letter whose contents bring a voice-over.

On the face of it, The Governess (1997) might not appear innocent of such charges, and yet it keep one's interest. Written and directed by Sandra Goldbacher, who had previously made commercials and would make only one more film before working in television, it opens in 1840s London where two Jewish sisters discuss the prospect of losing their virginity. Any such hopes are dashed by violence in the metropolis and their father's death.

With which, one of them (Minnie Driver) masks her race and advertises her availability as a tutor. This leads to a carriage ride to the Isle of Skye, where her charge is an obnoxious girl whose querulous tone must owe something to a mother (Harriet Walter) embittered by life in this remote spot while her husband (Tom Wilkinson) spends his time in a part of the building from which others are excluded while he studies animals and, in particular, the way in which to create a means to fix photographic images of them on paper before fading.

In various ways, the place is seething, given to obsession, rivalry, all of it beautifully filmed. A look in the eye, or through a lens, is steeped in so much more. And, yes, dinners around a large table are fraught.

We have been here before, and doubtless will do so again, but, in the meanwhile The Governess makes for an enjoyable couple of hours, perhaps on a winter's evening, certainly with a glass of wine - and with it comes the reflection that remote Scottish islands and emotional turmoil have yet to match Powell and Pressburger's I Know Where I'm Going.

"I might not know much about science, but I know what I like." So notes Martin Amis in a preface to his second novel Dead Babies (1975). That sentence comes to mind when watching Tarantula (1955), one of a spate of B-movies produced by Universal during the Fifties which were fuelled by hungry, deadly creatures from the Deep or the Beyond.

Or, in this case, from a Laboratory on the outskirts of the New Mexico desert.

Science very much to like - and fear.

There, a Professor - played by Leo Carroll - has been engaged upon developing large versions of familiar animals so that a burgeoning population on Earth has sufficient food; a point about population being made by Aldous Huxley, among others, at that time, and all the clearer sixty-five years on.

Naturally, the locals - such as a cookie-cutter Sherrif - are doubtful that there is a problem and that a local doctor, played by John Agar, is scaremongering when he questions things more closely - especially when he finds that the Professor's face is mutating into one which resembles the latter-day Auden. A decade earlier, Agar had married Shirley Temple, and begun to appear in films. Their union lasted but a few years, and he was never ashamed that this subsequent turn in life led to appearing in a series of such sci-fi shockers (a remarkable feature of this one is that his elegant jacket remains as impeccable as any worn by Trevor Howard in such adversity).

Along the way Agar meets a graduate (Mara Corday) who has come to help the Professor in his researches. She duly realises, as a roof crashes above her bedroom while giant eyes peer (understandably) through the window, that Agar was right. Something extraordinary is afoot - indeed the creature has eight of them, and looks as if capable of eating baths rather than skulking in them.

One might easily forget to mention that all this takes place in black and white. It is palpable, more credible - black looming against the Sun - than many a computer-generated image, as are the USAF jets which roar across the sky to see off the beast. And here comes a surprise. Uncredited, but distinctly visible, the jets' lead pilot is... Clint Eastwood, who lets rip that fatal blast of a chemical which has the creature sinking upon its eight legs and, in its death throes, definitely not liking the smell of napalm in the morning.

Man cannot live by Tarkovsky alone, and this 75-minute work by the lesser-sung Jack Arnold survives in its own right. One might come to laugh but stays to gasp. There is no doubt that Wittgenstein, who relished such films, would have wished to live to see it.

"Introducing..." This word in a film's opening credits invariably heralds a name of which one never hears again. In the case of Lady in a Cage (1964), however, it is one James Caan, a tight-jeaned teenager whose hairy chest brushes against Olivia de Havilland as he speculates when anybody last nustled beside her breasts.

This, one might already infer, is hardly a typical week's release at that time from such a studio as Paramount, all the more so as it also finds Ann Sothern as a prostitute past her prime. All the while, this July 4th, somewhere in sunny, well-heeled suburbia, traffic - all those huge hoods and trunks - goes by, the occupants unaware of the terror unfolding in a house which contains riches at every turn.

Olivia de Havilland, who has been recovering from a hip operation, has been left for the long weekend by her unmarried, thirty-year-old son who puts on a mantlepiece a note briefly glimpsed in the opening moments (a threat of suicide catches one's eyes). She does not get to see it. In his departure, the son inadvertently knocks into a ladder propped near an electricity cable, which duly causes an outage in the house, at the very moment when she is inside a lift which has been installed so that she need not take the stairs.

And there she stays, a dozen feet from ground, the alarm ignored outside: it alerts only an old drunk, who stumbles inside, grabs and hawks a few items, gets the measure of the scene, hocks these goods and returns to his boarding house where he seeks the help of Ann Sothern to continue with the heist.

Their notion of easy money becomes something else. Written by Luther Davis, who was better known for television series, it is an extraordinary study in escalating violence, a world in which objects become meaningless as the threat of death grows as steadily as disputes between those two are matched by Caan and his two cohorts, one of whom - Jennifer Billingley - languishes some while in the unwonted luxury of a hot bath.

Much of its power, its rising above absurdity, comes with a remarkable music score by Paul Glass. On its own this would seem beyond avant-garde, something unlikely to be played on the gramophone in such a house;. Alongside the varied angles of the cinematography (effective black and white), the music adds to the suspense, to the proliferating events which allow for only clipped dialogue (and Olivia de Havilland's recourse to improvised poetry). Such is her peril, slipping several times towards the very edge of the lift's floor, that one's own armchair feels as if it is no longer safe.

An obvious question comes to mind, especially in these circumstances, but such is the heightened reality of it all that one brushes that aside, as the pace increases while the sun moves across the sky, and, in that turbulent decade, bombs began to fall upon Vietnam: the background to such films, set in diverse eras, as Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs, A Clockwork Orange. Before them all, by quite a way, was Lady in a Cage, and the wonder is that it is not better known.

At a time, in Suspect, when there is a plague affecting many thousands of off-screen people around the world, there is conflict between research scientists (led by Professor Peter Cushing in a rare daylight rôle) and Government bureaucrats (a minister, Raymond Huntley gives several pompous speeches even when in private conversation).

All of which, with a vaccine if the offing after many years' research, makes this Boulting film timely, sixty years on, in 2020.

That said, one might have initial doubts, for, scarcely has it begun than there bursts through the Professor's door none other than a disorderly orderly Spike Milligan, whose, er, comings and goings in a white lab coat are driven by complaints avout a miscreant chimp who continually tries to get the upper paw. This is a far cry from the novel, by Nigel Balchin, upon which it is based, and was added to his screenplay by others. With that out of the way, it settles into something closer to, if not a match for, another Balchin film, Powell and Pressburger's The Small Back Room.

Among those in the lab is Virginia Maskell, a splendid actress who could not be brought round from a suicide attempt in her early-thirties in 1968; which brings piquancy to her broken engagement in the film to a man - Ian Bannen - for whom she still cares after he has lost both arms in Korea, which halts his pianist's career. Chopin and Scriabin fill the speakers at moments of drama, which turn around the possibility of leaking the breakthrough upon which the Government has slapped the Official Secrets Act.

And so develops an observed-of-all-observers plot which draws in an array of familiar faces such as ever-seedy Donald Pleasence, a spivish Sam Kydd and, bizarrely, Thorley Walters whose Secret Service office makes many a Dickens scene appear a pioneer of minimalism.

It would be easy to dismiss Suspect, made in just over a fortnight, as preposterous; perhaps there is a better film lurking with in it, yet there is enough here to carry one through its eighty minutes (time which includes loading the disc).