Film Reviews by CH

There is something to be written about the rôle of the truck in American films - and also the propensity for automobiles to take a tumble over a cliff. Framed (1947) could find a place in both studies. At the wheels of a truck whose brakes have failed, mining engineer Glenn Ford arrives with a smash in a small town where he soon falls victim of a racket which turns around despatching him to a plunging death one night in a car - as envisaged, his body mangled, he would be taken for the married man who has made off with a cool $250,000 from the town bank belonging to her family.

Those are a few noir tropes - added to which is the familar bold one of Janis Carter, lover of that banker and first encountered at work in a café - premises which contrast with her glamour. Play with her at your peril. She seems to know what she is about, but, but..: plotwise, any viewer, at one stage or another, might pull to a halt more swiftly than that opening-minutes truck as her dealings unravel in parallel with Ford wising up.

That said, all this happens at such a pace that there is no time to linger over such items as conveniently-sited, boldly-labelled poison bottle. Well lit, whether the dark of a bar or the light of a highway, the settings play quite a part in carrying one along, relishing it all.

Many a film turns around a courtroom scene. Few, though, have mentioned one of the most dramatic, which occurs halfway through Never Take Sweets from a Stranger. Although filmed in and around Bray, this purports to take place in small-town Canada - and with a child in the witness box. She is interrogated - which is the word - by a brutish defence lawyer, his client the elderly, expressively unspeaking Felix Aylmer who has coaxed her and a friend into dancing naked for him in exchange for sweets.

A bold subject, even now six decades on, for this foray by Hammer into social issues. The young girl, well played by Jenina Faye, tells her headmaster father and mother what has happened while the town conspires to silence them, for the man in question is the elder of a family which has created the town's existence around its business.

In these eighty minutes characters are as sharply played as a narrative which plays well against the light and shade within buildings as well as without.

What's more, the soundtrack is by serialist composer Elizabeth Lutyens. As often, music that many might not be willing to hear on its own proves effective accompaniment to tensions which comes thoughout so well plotted a work. There is a forty-minute account of her as one of several extras which are a part of this cherishable disc (another extra is a revealing interview with Jenina Faye).

Curiously, two years later, Jenina Faye appeared in Don't Talk to Strange Men - another one to seek out amidst these English films which deserve to be better known than they are.

Made a few years before Rear Window and also from a story by Cornell Woolrich, The Window has much in common with Hitchcock's take on a murder seen across the way. Unlike his, this was filmed in New York itself and in an effective black and white, fire escape and all.. Much of the screen time is filled by Bobby Driscoll, a young boy so given to lies which others might call fantasy that nobody - parents, police - believe his claim to have witnessed neighbours topping somebody (for reasons never explained). From the beginning, it is tense, and does not let up - to the extent that one almost does not pause to ask why he is left home alone in a perilous tenement and one or two other matters.

The Mob is pitted against the FBI in a tale which was derived by Fuller from newspaper reports. Front pages figure largely in the narrative after events which have see many felled along the way (including a bicycle, no..., better not give it away: gasp for yourself). With so many villains on display - not so much Mr. Big as Messrs Big - there can become something close to monotony, even confusion. Thank goodness, all is alleviated by Fuller's adroit way with close ups and the use of black and white.

One hardly questions some of the turns which range from poolside to alleyway, both perilous, and yet one might pause to ask why there are no spectators to a prolonged scene which culminates in THE END filling the screen?

Would that Dolores Dawn had appeared in more films rather than returning to teach others in acting school.

Based on a pre-war French film with Chevalier, this American re-make lights upon a purported London as the setting for a serial killer who taunts the police with verses which allude to Baudelaire each time he is about to strike. It is hardly a film noir, and stays in the mind as a film of three parts, including a love story which fills the middle section (and a sequence with Boris Karloff could have become a film in itself).. Lucille Ball, as the dancer for hire who agrees to work undercover, is a star turn, and George Sanders is wonderfully, creepily sleek as a man about town whose line in patter has obviously worked in his favour before now. Not a typical Sirk film but shows some of his path to the Fifties dramas for which he is best known.

The first cases on this disc establish the shape of six films to come. Each opens with a shadow and a whistle, all that we see of a narrator who sets out something of what is to follow in the next hour. They both have Richard Dix as lead - but he plays different charcters each time. In the first, he is a man so grief stricken by his wife's death that he enagaes somebody to kill him - at a time he does not know in advance. A terrific premise ably managed.

In the second, a down and out notices a newspaper item which seeks those who have money being held for them by a small-town bank. Richard Dix shares a name with one of these - and sets about obtaining what is wrongfully his. The tale is a lesser-known one by the great Cornell Woolrich and features more of his low-world life, including cheap hotel tooms. Filmed with terrific use of light and shadow, and leaving one keen to see more of Janis Carter, it again moves at a pace to leave scant time to question the turns which lead to a perhaps surprising conclusion.

These two films are enough to make one ready to see the next six, although without bingeing. They should be mixed with others, as befits - b-fits - their original status.

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.