Film Reviews by CH

A curious film, this. It opens with an urgent voice-over against shots of a noirish Piccadilly Circus, and cuts to a nightclub - but the real drama is a four-hander, largely filmed inside, with a deep and wide lens which makes something well-nigh Gothic of tale which turns upon lust and revenge - all of it carried by a performance from Dennis Price which deserves to be better known. Some might say that it is stagey (it derives from a play) but it is transformed sufficiently to become a work in its own right. And, in any case, what chance does one have of seeing it on stage?

Such lines occur frequently in this London-set film (1964), much it taking place beside a low-tide Thames. "There's enough junk here for a two-year calendar!" "There are few masterpieces in the world - but there are many millionaires." And these lines are only in the scenes with an extraordinary turn by Richard Attenborough as a gallery owner and himself an anguished painter of calm scenes (with a young Judi Dench as secretary). He has been visited by Stephen Boyd, an American television broadcaster based in London and esteemed by the nation as a rock-steady commentator. In fact, he and Attenborough shared a widowed psychiatrist, who dies, an apparent suicide, in the opening scence with an enigmatic whisper to the housekeeper.

The psychiatrist's fourteen-year-old daughter - a remarkable performance by Pamela Franklin - is certain that there was foul play, and enlists Boyd's help. This sounds preposterous but the acting carries all with it. Elements of the customary procedural tale are there, but this is a film notable less for adroit plot turns (a fine script by Robert Joseph) than its filming: director Charles Crichton owes much to the often deep-focus cinematography of the ever-reliable Douglas Slocombe. Even small rooms assume epic proportions, with faces in half-shadows redolent of the With the Beatles cover (as with that photograph, the film would not have worked in colour).

Dream, nightmare and reality overlap, with an emphasis on chalked messages upon Thameside walls, where also stands, or rather sits, a statue of Hans Christian Andersen, who has a bearing on events.

If all this sounds rich (in both senses of the word), it is but a small part of a film which also, at one fraught moment, brings allegation of Lolita-like situations, one of them upon a four-poster bed.

Say no more.

It is a continually unsettling film, not least with something almost unspoken, if not unspeakable, about the past in the life of a Judge - Jack Hawkins, no less: he unbuttons, literally and metaphorically, after sitting through another day in the life of a detailed industrial-espionage case.

Why is this film not better known? Give it a whirl, and you will be sure to spread the word. And, meanwhile, word is that a strand of the plot, with Patricia Neal, was cut after filming. That would have made it too long, but would be fascinating to see if the footage survives somewhere. All too often Crichton is mentioned for a late-career return to cinema with A Fish Called Wanda. Make no mistake, The Third Secret us far better.

Strangely, the Radio Times Guide persists in grudging this two stars out of five.

Others of us might say that this maritime-based tale is a near-masterpiece of British noir, superbly filmed by Robert Hamer (who adapted it from a novel by Howard Clewes which should also be sought out). The title refers to the long prison sentence endured by John Mills for a crime that nobody committed.

Duly released, he is out for revenge. Things become more complex than such a black-and-white matter - and, indeed, the filming, whether beside the Kent shore or the side of the Thames in London is a marvellous sequence of shades of grey; of the Sun dappling pebbles before moonlight heightens wet cobbles (complete with cat). The tangle of sub-plots never drags under a narrative which finds a place for clanging squad-cars and the long barometers of suburban hallways (where, upstairs, a married couple have a narrow bed apiece, separated by a table upon which a telephone rings at awkward moments).

Psycho is all very well, but has any film turned so much around a shower that it is well nigh a character? That is the case

with Cockles and Muscles. So much is it used - singly or in company - that the continually exasperated father (the least of his problems is being cuckolded) takes out the fuse from it at one point. Billed as a comedy, it certainly has elements of that distinctive French take on farce, but gains from an undertow of sadness, a sense of life passing as a new generation rises. As for the shower, it gets an extra to itself.

With three 50-minute films per disc - nine per series -, these swiftly told stories are naturally variable, but show variety, and are never less than interesting. To single out one, Urge to Kill, this displays a small-town boarding house redolent of Cornell Woolrich. The murderer is apparent from the start; that is no destraction, for everything turns upon the amount of killings before the inevitable end. Eyebrows might now be raised at the performance of one suspect but this is an affecting one (say no more). A great interest of these series is to spot actors early in their careers (or at the end of them): ever suave, Paul Eddington not only pops up as a villain in one of these films but indulges in violence of the chair-on-head variety; as one might put it: the bad life.

In this brisk hour and a quarter, there is adroit use of Hastings and the area along the coast - as well as equally moody interior scenes filmed in Merton Park studios. Anybody who starts this film will be sure to sit until the end - and then grasp the title of this review of a film far closer in time to Mrs. Woolf's novel than now. The film has a larger cast than her novel, with many neat small parts, such as the supercillious landlady of a modest hotel.

The two on the first disc - Present Laughter and Blithe Spirit - are a delight, with Peter Wyngarde notable in the first one and Hattie Jacques in the second. They are well staged, and the television adaptation is fine. The very thing for a civilised winter's night. Each play is introduced by Coward, who is unduly defensive of his work when, at the time, the kitchen sink was to the fore. Time has shown, however, that there is also a place for the drawing room.

"A gin, please."

"With what?"

"A glass!"

Snappy dialogue in J.B.Priestley's glorious 1957 telly play - Now Let Him Go - about an ailing painter Simon Kendall - redolent of Augustus John (then still alive) - holed up and ailing in a remote pub's bedroom. His niece is named... Felicity, played by June Thorburn, who ded, five months' pregnant when an aeroplane crashed on return from Spain in Sussex in 1967. She was terrific. And a ticket inspector is played by John Schlesinger. A welcome addition to the growing fresh interest in Priestley's work.

Also on the first disc in this set is Pinter's A Night Oit (1960, soon after it had been broadcast as a radio play): almost a Classical tragedy, this hour about the consequences of a domineering mother.

Screwball comedy was a Thirties delight, and this film, which is perhaps lesser known, has much to relish, as the script and camera move swiftly between the members of a family which almost makes the Addams one look starkly realistic. Its mainspring is one of wonderfully warped logic, not least in a surprising bathroom scene. Here is the higher frivolity - and, as such, highly recommended.

Another disinterment, as it were. This is a leap across time - twice over. Made in the early-Seventies - with safari jackets, dinner parties, a store of candles for the three-day week -, each surviving episode turns around an earlier presence in the house, such as a woman who fell from a window around 1910 and now haunts Anna Massey in "A Woman Weeping" by the excellent playwright John Bowen, whose novels should be better known (BFI has reissued his television play Robin Redbreast, also set in a country cottage: highly recommended, available here). Each of these films is fifty minutes long - and contains much more than so many that are now stretched out for hours.

Each episode is twenty-six minutes long (short) but contains so much that one has to ration oneself rather than binge.

A delight.

I am surprised by the churlish reviews here.

An excellent, well-made film, redolent of Forties films themselves, with the film within a film adoitly done (an echo of In Which We Serve?), and

the lighting is superb.

The way in which the film gathers pace is very much the point of it: accelerating lives in wartime.

Turn the lights low, pour a glass of wine (or perhaps pour the wine before lowering the lights), enjoy it - and wonder how one would have coped as the bombs fell, while perhaps joining in as Bill Nighy sings "Wild Mountain Thyme" (I kid you not). The Minister of War is another surprise. See the film to get the title of my review.

A civilised joy in these times, Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett's script for Ball of Fire: a reclusive team's encyclopedia work stalls at S, including Gary Cooper's entry on Slang, as he realises after a visit from a Sanitation worker. Words beginning with S echo throughout, often uttered by Stanwyk (Barbara), and there is neat use of lines from Shakespeare's Richard III.

To say nothing of a performance by Gene Krupa and his band. Sensational.

Not great, some might say not even good, but Murder in Soho (1939) is always watchable - with some neat (and some crass) comedy - as it features the many interiors of an elegant, criminal-run nightclub eighty years ago. Generous measures at the bar evidently did not eat into the establishment's ill-gotten profits. A leap across time in so many ways. And there's an early appearance by Bernard Lee, who always brings character to proceedings (think of his panache in the sewers in The Third Man a decade later). One is left to wonder whether the screen going black after the gift of a pearl necklace meant that this came with a fleshly price. As such, there is a pleasingly louche atmosphere to it all. Very easy as it would be to pick holes in this film, there is much to be enjoyed in the rest of the fabric.

At first this film appears simply comic, and it keeps that up, with some droll dialogue throughout, but there is an underlying, genuine fear which goes deep, an echo of J.B. Priestley's original novel (Benighted) which is rooted in post-Great War disillusion.

Everybody who saw Gloria Stuart in Titanic (1997) should be sure not to miss her appearance in this, sixty-seven years earlier. That is surely a leap across time.