Film Reviews by CH

An epic film made soon after publication of the novel on which Katherine Anne Porter spent two decades, Ship of Fools has gone the way of many of its international cast. Unfairly so. True, many of them depict a type and the plot is more worthy than subtle (often the case with Kramer) but it is so well done that the time passes without any cinematic inertia. Set in 1933 with news of the Nazis coming to power as the ship makes its way from Mexico via Cuba and Spain to Germany, much turns around the Captain's table - and those excluded from finding a place at it. Shot in effective black and white, albeit with some hairstyles and even clothes better suited to the Sixties King's Road, this moves at a pace which scarcely gives one pause to wonder why people do not keep their cabin doors locked and how one of the best brawls this side of Destry Rides Again does not have them coming through those very doors to witness that fracas in the corridor.

Anything with Barbra Stanwyk commands attention, which means that she keeps one busy in seeking out such items at this which, although made in black and white, heralds those red-hued luxuriant small-town melodramas to which the cosmopolitan director Douglas Sirk turned in the Fifties. This one is in fact set in 1910, an era when news of her failure to make it on the Broadway stage would have been less likely to reach the family, and lover, from whom she fled with such hopes. It is a plot as creaky as the one in which her teenage daughter plays at high school - and which she has returned to see.

Ignore any doubts about this - one's own and others'. Such is the way in which Sirk handles it that one is transported from one's own sofa to those on which this brilliant cast wrangle and canoodle.

Rock Hudson was a good actor. Such was his life and fabled collaboration with Doris Day that one can forget that he showed up to good effect is several Fifties works by Douglas Sirk, such as this one in which, as a tree expert, he plays a gamekeeper to Jane Wyman's small-town Lady Chatterley. Her husband is dead rather than crippled, an academic distinction when it comes to the town's tongues.

It is worth pointing out that a part is accorded to an off-stage television salesman - and the eventual arrival of his product. Some might say that this film is a kindred spirit of those soaps which filled it day after day. That is to miss the point. Sirk uses the soap conventions to subvert the very world which gave rise to them.

This is close to a masterpiece.

To return to this film after some while is to appreciate all the more how much there is in it. To embrace farce, smart dialogue and drama without a creak is a marvel made all the greater by the dexterity with so many of the cast switch national costume as they fend off a Nazi plot to kill off the underground in wartime Warsaw. Those who have seen it will know something of this; those who have not done so should be assured that here is cinema's plenty., the actors revelling in their work.

It is hardly news that Mark Chapman is a killer. Less known is that this is the name of the killer in Scandal Sheet. From near the start one realises that the editor of a New York paper (played by Broderick Crawford) has been rersponsible for the death of his estranged wife, the sort of subject on which he has focussed a once-worthy paper in a bid to boost circulation and receive a bonus.

True to newspaper movie form, there are two reporters on he staff in a quest for the true story, and all moves as swiftly as papers do from the press (that familiar stock scene in such fims as the front page leaping from the machinery to fill the screen). A shame that the novel by Samuel Fuller which inspired it is hard to find now. The film met with his displeasure. The rest of us must surely decide otherwise.

And all the more so as this disc contains the equally brisk Shockproof. Again an authority figure - a parole officer (John Derek) - finds a place on the rack as he falls for a woman released from gaol after taking the rap for a smooth-talking gambler. By contrast with the night-time world of Scandal Sheet, Shockproof features many scenes of sunlit Los Angeles. All moves brilliantly, the atmosphere darkening, with many an on-the-tun trope well handled - that is, until all is upended by an ending out of kilter with what has gone before. The director (Douglas Sitk, again behind something as unlikely for him as Summer Storm a few years earlier) was si upset by this subverting of what he intended that he returned to Euope for a while. And, needless to say, Fuller was equally appalled - and hoped for better when he took to directing as part of a multifarious career.

Put in this disc for a double-barrelled evening.

Why is It Happened in Hollywood not better known?

Made in 1937, it turns around what has become a theme of films: a talkie about the advent of talkies and the effect upon those who could not adapt.

The opening itself is a well-managed trick, made all the better by the revelation that it takes place not in the West but the ward of a children's hospital. Sometimes sentimental, it is also broad farce, and even romance (with Fay Wray), as a former cowboy star tries to make good again.

Crucial to this is a fifreen-minute scene in which many of Hollywood's finest appear to enjoy a sunny garden party and utter their most famous lines. Say no more - except also watch the short documentary about the making of that scene. Along with that there are two more early works by Sam Fuller: the wartime Power of the Press is a sombre, doubly topical work (including the revelation that the phrase "fake news" is almost ninety years old).

Many books and several films have chronicled the cars, chaos and killings which was the spree upon which Bonnie and Clyde met their own end. It ound a particulary fine rendering in this film.

The other review here covers the essentials - direction, script - and one might add that even those who have seen Bonnie and Clyde should not miss this one.

Varied in time and manner, these are sometimes ineteresting, even enjoyable tales of enigma. The two opening items from the Forties , for example, have the curiosity value of being told beside a fireplace by their author Algernon Blackwood who was then around eighty. As such, they are filmed radio readings, for his presence is not that of a Welles. And there is a variant of a railway film, which combines a commuter route and one in wartime France a decade earlier. The Lake (1978) hints at a malign presence while leaving much obscure but with plenty to enjoy during these thirty-three minutes.

As it is, the adiding effect is of snacks rather than courses in a meal.

All well worth exploring for oneself: others will find different pleasures in it, perhaps. And even seek out the other two sets of two discs under this title.

This was an intriguing prospect but, whatever its effect as farce on stage may have been, this film proved hard going. Shrill - even more so in the case of the noisy children - and frantic, it did not make the best dramatic use of the situation in which two hourseholds share the premises. So much so that this viewer had to bale out - despite the missing more of the brief appearances by Audrey Hepburn, who would soon go on to much more.

To watch this again is to be mightily disappointed.

Very much a period piece, the film is cartoonish in its depiction of a Swingin' London with its attendant criminal element (including Noël Coward).. The dialogue, apart from one or two celebrated lines, is hard work; and the film turns upon the last section, the chase through Italy - but, chances are some might not now get that far, so sluggish is the first half.

Essentially a portmanteau film with a supernatural twist, which is evident from the start as guests arrive at a remote inn/hotel in Wales run by Mervyn Johns and his daughter Glynis. Here is an allegory created to give the visitors a chance to reflect upon their lives so far.

Even though it has Cavalcanti as a producer, the film leaves one wondering what Powell and Pressburger could have done with it - think of such allegorical films as their A Canterbury Tale which also depicts the countryside as a character in its own right. As for Ealing, The Halfway House is on a rung below the supernatural Dead of Night which appeared a couple of years later.

This said, there is so much here that anybody with a taste for Ealing films should not miss it.

It began with Kennedy’s assassination: the emblem of an absurd world in which nothing is certain, destruction everywhere. Prolific artist Jules Feiffer first wrote Little Murders (1971) as what one might call a dystopian novel set in the present; he got stuck, thought it a failure, set it aside, then looked through its original outline and realised that in fact it should be a play.

A few weeks at the Yaddo retreat yielded a first draft, and re-workings had it ready for Broadway - where it lasted seven performances in 1967 but did rather better at the Aldwych in London with the Royal Shakespeare Company in a season which included As You Like It and Ghosts. Time brought a long-running off-Broadway revival a couple of years later. This was enough - when Feiffer’s Carnal Knowledge was also being made - to enable an opened-out film version whose producer and star Elliott Gould brought in first-time director Alan Arkin (who also has an effective, hyperactive rôle in it).

Here is a great core of those immersed in the new, late-Sixties risk-taking style of Hollywood film.

It opens with the assertive Marcia Rodd - mostly seen in television parts - waking in New York and disturbed by the sound outside: a gang of youths are attacking the shy-natured Gould, an artist-turned-photographer specialising in shots of excrement; she goes out to separate them and remonstrate with him for allowing them to do so. In contrast with his demeanour, she is effusive, and she all but dragoons him into a relationship - on his part it is step by diffident step. In quite a turn on a classic trope, this leads to her introducing him to her parents - part of a distinctly Jewish theme (along with a brother who has been sent more than strange by his brother’s).

This is hardly naturalistic, everybody talks and behaves in a style beyond surreal (including a heavy breather on the telephone). Difficult to capture the dialogue’s effect in quotation: monologues are to the fore, sometimes too much so, but fully justified by a long-haired Donald Sutherland’s bravura turn as a minister hired to pace the church while delivering a wedding homily in which he is been forbidden to mention the deity. (but has many ways of doing so)

All around, splendidly filmed by cinematographer Gordon Willis, New York becomes wilder as some try to ignore such violence as a bloodied Gould stumbling through a subway compartment (for stretches at a time he does not say much but is a continual presence).

To extrapolate a philosophy from all this is to under-rate its value as entertainment, the hoots which it provokes. It did not do much business outside large cities but its reputation endured, a cult item which has at last reached DVD - and brings with it a couple of hours’ extras. Particularly good is Gould’s recollection of the play and film, and of more than interest are the those of the work-in-progress by Arkin and Feiffer himself.

Few mention this film but to see it is to urge that others do so.

The main film here is quite a good, if didactic view of contemporary Los Angeles - cars, buildings, a dam - amidst race-track criminals, but hidden is something rather shorter and much better. That is, one of the extras is "Diary of a Sergeant" (1945). In this, Harold Russell re-enacts his coping with artifical hands - hooks - after losing them to grenade practice , in Carolina, before setting off to join the troops which had just begun the D-Day invasion.

In hospital wards, with unflinching views of the stumps, he shows the way in which - learning to button a tunic, type, play a slot machine - he learns new ways of dealing with everyday matters, even going on a date. And also to write his diary by hand rather than dictate it.

In fact it is narrated by Alfred Drake even though Russell is the man on the screen, and there is an uncredited appearance by Roosevelt. This twenty-minute film was seen by William Wyler, who gave him an award-winning rôle in The Best Years of Our Lives.

Five stars for this; three for 711 Ocean Drive.

Any film made from a novel or story by Cornell Woolrich commands interest, even if the result is less than one might expect.

Not as well known as Phantom Lady or Rear Window, Black Angel (1946) - black was a key word for Woolrich - contains many familiar elements: a murder, a nightclub and a sinister owner with criminal connections (Peter Lorre), popular songs, newspaper headlines, thwarted love...

Dan Duryea is a song writer whose wife, a tremendous Constance Dowling, has quit him and is soon found murdered, with the blame and noose laid upon the man - John Phillips - whom she has been blackmailing. Philips’s wife - singer June Vincent - is sure of his innocence; with police assertions which counter that, she is determined to prove her hunch correct and works with Duryea to establish that.

There is some neat camerawork - the director was Roy William Neil who died soon after - including a shot which turns around, of all things, a waste-paper basket. For all this, and some neat integration of pleasingly-rendered songs, the sagging middle makes it all seem longer than eighty minutes.

Those with a taste for noir should certainly seek it out but, without saying too much, the ending, quickly and suspenseful as it portrayed, is more sleight of hand than coup de theatre. As for its contemporary reception, perhaps final words should be left with the view of a Louise Darcy in Biddeford who sent a letter to the New York Times to say that she had seen a trailer for it and that with the sight of “Miss Vincent bewitched by Dan Duryea I gave thanks that I, a much plainer woman, had never been driven to such desperate straits in my search for male companionship” As she put it, George Raft would have been something else: in her great phrase, “a horse on a different racetrack”.

Reviews, such as the first one here, had led me to have high hopes of this. In the event, as others have found, it turned out to be a series of often-enjoyable scenes which did not cohere. Perhaps the studio made cuts at the time. This said, it is worth watching at little more than an hour.