Film Reviews by CH

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.

I have only just caught up with this recent film, and its history from six decades ago.

It is very well done. True, there there will be always be the confines of a Hollywood production - and slick digital filming - but, that said, I found that this packed a punch (literally so, at moments).

A Capra for our times.

So many 130-minute movies drag; this one went by at a clip.

I am not sure how widely this well-made film is known. It has excellent pacing, characterisation, all of it unflinching - with a cameo by Marlon Brando, who brings something of Rumpole to the part. Also the child actors are excellent.

As my title suggests, a twist (I had mistyped that as trist, perhaps subconsciously) in this film provides a new angle upon the phrase uttered by T.S. Eliot's Prufrock.

It is a cruder scene - say no more - than those usually associated with screenwriter James Ivory (and perhaps derives from the novel upon which the film is based, but I have not read that).

That apart, it is all a familiar matter of well-photographed Italian settings, elegant manners given an edge by the turn to events. It could all be E.M. Forster a hundred years on, and, indeed, one might sense some echoes of his novel Maurice. That was also filmed by James Ivory, but perhaps to better effect (though it, too, was unduly long).

Strange to think that something set in 1983 is now a period piece (at one moment a Walkman makes a sensational appearance).

Well worth seeing, but not the masterpiece some have claimed. An elegant diversion, and, as such, welcome.

I have just caught up with this, and not read the other reviews here - want to keep it fresh.

Highly enjoyable. What with the lush small-town setting, the wayward police force, the twists between outrageous humour and equally dramatic surprises, not to mention jibes by bolshie teeangers, this is very much Twin Peaks territory - without the cherry pie and coffee.

And it has an adroit ending (say no more).

Although I have a penchant for English comedies of this period, this one is somewhat slack in the telling. That said, it is carried along by the adroit

performances given many of the seasoned actors. And, in these times, there is a peculiar horror to the opening scenes when the pupils take to the school's driveway with placards to protest about the arrival of somebody from France.

An early work by Milos Forman, and discussed very interestingly by him in a 2000 interview as an extra item for half an hour. Perhaps not quite as unified in its episodic structure as the subsequent A Blonde in Love but with a similar humour which - as Forman says - was a way of contending with the Czech authorities at that time (pilfering in an early form of self-service store). And, again, there is a use of Czech pop songs with a distinct beat-group sound.