Film Reviews by CH

The hills are alive with the sound of... murder.

Perhaps most widely known for an epic account of the von Trapp family, Robert Wise began life as a director with a number of brisk thrillers such as the real-time night of The Set-Up, the masterly Odds against Tomorrow and, most startling, Born to Kill (1947).

From a now-very scarce novel Deadlier than the Male by James Gunn, it opens in Reno where sultry Claire Trevor - to the hilt what was once called a mean broad - is now divorced. New-found equilibrium is disturbed by her chancing to find - and flee from - the bodies of an attractive woman and potential lover freshly killed in a dark kitchen by a hulking, psychotically jealous Lawrence Tierney.

Come the railroad station, they meet on the platform, unaware of this connection. They talk, and, naturally, all this takes such a noir turn as his meeting her again amidst the San Francisco hills and wide staircases of the house where he meets, and marries, her rich sister. Such a man, of course, remains dangerously smitten, and Claire Trevor does not brush him off.

All the while, did he but know it, there is a Fury to match Ida from Brighton Rock. Esther Howard is the redoubtable landlady of the Reno rooming house who has her suspicions and, what’s more, has engaged the services of private detective Walter Slezak, a man born for rôles as sleazy as his surname. The trail hots up, with the strange diversion of Tierney being aided - even to the point of sharing a bed - by that familiar fellow, the slight, ever-nervous Elisha Cook.

Here is no star-driven “vehicle” but ensemble playing which risks treachery at every step (the detective gives a masterclass in the niceties of being bought off). Born to Kill carries its superior hokum aloft. Wise reaches for the familiar haunts and dark streets of noir while keepng up a pace which also allows time for the characters to talk - beguilingly or threateningly, as circumstances require.

It would be difficult to picture Julie Andrews in any remake of this. With all its shades of the creepy, here is a cult item - a status enhanced by David Lynch adopting the name of its first victim Laury Palmer as the Laura of that ilk whose early end caused so much trouble in small-town Twin Peaks.

There is even a reference here to the aroma of coffee.

A damn fine film.

Anything with Herbert Lom commands attention, but even he cannot lift the sluggish Snowbound. It turns around a film writer sent undercover by the Intelligence services to report upon those gathered in a ski hotel. A plot which will do service many times over fown the decades, for the Nazis were not eradicated with the Allies' arrival in Berlin. Variously funded, pockets of them survived in hopes of funding enough to resume the Reich. Trouble is that, a few good moments apart (including an opening on a film set), the sleepy script is not enough to wake a fine cast.

For much of the time, out in the wilds by night and dawn, the fiml is pleasingly slow moving as police and suspect go in quest of a buried murder victim. There is much intermittent talk, with the suggestion that life is more complicated than this quest. One is drawn in, fascinated while naturally wondering exactly what has happened and how it bears upon these lives - and then in the last fifty minutes, with a daylight return to town, and a prolonged autopsy, the mood is broken, attention falters and it becomes more irritatingly than tantalisingly enigmatic.

There is a second disc of extras (I bought the film rather than rent it), which are perhaps something to watch after seeing more fims by a director who certainly commands the attention.

A newspaper editor called Ellington (John Stuart) is so often late at work that his wife (Antionette Cellier) visits a smooth-talking acquaintance (Anthony Hawtrey) one evening. Nothing happens, though it could have done so one might surmise, for there now arrives an earlier friend, who had become more than that, indeed pregnant, a fate which brings her a fatal bullet - and he is on the run.

All of which is of interest to Ellington’s paper, where a star reporter is Brooksie (the ever-suave David Farrar) who never quite gets to spend enough time with somebody else on the paper (Anne Crawford).

Such a set-up does not take long to establish. All of it is done with some style if not exactly the brio of His Girl Friday - although there is some good badinage with a rival’s reporter, Wiilliam Hartnell whose face is so constructed that a vital bone could be called the sardonica.

At less than seventy-five minutes (no newspaper copy editor could sigh, “much more is there?”, things move briskly (the director is capable if unsung John Harlow) Much of it takes place, one way and another, on the telephone, with several moral quandaries and a train ride as evocative of 1943 as a small cinema at Waterloo (in making this film, the producers evidently obeyed the edict: don’t mention the war, and it could be taking place a decade earlier).

A sometimes surprisingly louche scenario, this side of noir, with a key part played by a bespectacled obsessive (Richard Goolden), all capably brought to the screen, Headline is more than a soft feature.

Nobody should turn to this in expectations of its being yet another crime drama. True, It opens with a helicopter descending upon a field in northern France. Nothing unusual in that, even when it proves to be lifting a dead cow from a field.

Except a body had been found in the creature.

A pair of hapless detectives set about solving the case, only to confuse matters as they do so (much careering about in a small car). What with further deaths - and the machinations of a group of children, including the eponymous one whose sour face is something to behold - this is continually unpredictable.

Accept this as a take upon provincial life which lends itself to surreal extrapolation, and here is high entertainment which also includes a view of how people find a place in the society around them.

It is all enough to make one want to see, in a while, the sequel which was made by Dumont four years later.

Astonishing to think that Shiraz (1928) was made almost a hundred years ago. Directed by a German, Frank Osten on location in India (to which he had moved), it has many interior shots of an Expressionist hue alongside those outside which, naturally lit, often find caravans of camels ambling by.

This is the background to a tale of an epic seventeenth-century love tangle. As a child, a princess is lost to the desert after a raid by brigands. She is found and rescued, to be brought up in a village where her new, eponymous brother falls in love with her. Alas, she is sold as a potential sex slave at market some years later. She is taken up by an Emperor who comes to love her but they cannot marry as she is apparently not royalty. Her grief-stricken brother watches from afar for eighteen years, and goes blind while events take a different turn within the Palace.

To summarise the story - and there is much more - is to miss the way in which the viewer become involved: the drama, the passion, the spectacle (there are many elephants). As so often in silent films, eyes are more than expressive, and the same can go for a kiss..

Now restored, partly with funding by George Harrison’s Estate, the film has a remarkable crispness, fittingly accompanied by Anouska Shankar’s new score. This is perfectly judged to savour all the intimate moments while carrying along a narrative which has soon shaken off any suggestion of the preposterous.

And this is not to reveal an ending which might yet take some by surprise.

Pedigree. If any film has this, it is State Secret (1950). And yet how well is it known?

Adapted and directed by Sidney Gilliat, who had worked on Hitchcock’s international spy thriller The Lady Vanishes, its cinematographer was Robert Krasker who had just brought such a spirit to The Third Man’s take on post-war Vienna. Among the cast is a pivotal, ever-sinister Herbert Lom. He is startled along the way by American surgeon Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and showgirl Glynis Johns whom circumstances have flung together in a bid to escape - The Thirty-Nine Steps-style - after Fairbanks’s adroit way with a scalpel means that he is embroiled in political events during a visit to collect a Prize in a mid-European country called Vosnia.

What’s more, all this includes Jack Hawkins, who - echoes of Claude Rains in Casablanca - is not only a suavely brutal factotum who works on behalf of Vosnia’s President but is given, apparently, to speaking in Esperanto for much of his rôle (one gets the gist, which is rarely pleasant).

A narrow partition can divide hokum from the engrossing - and State Secret lands distinctly on the latter side. There is comedy along the way, notably when Fairbanks ducks into a theatre to avoid pursuit (another film-chase trope, one fatally emulated in November 1963 by... Lee Harvey Oswald) and hears a version of “Paper Doll” as cringingly rendered by Glynis Johns (the rest of the music is by Alwyn). All the while, there is a continual awareness of political malignancy, particularly so during the crowd scenes’ close-ups as a wide-eyed populace awaits a glimpse of their elected dictator on a balcony.

There is also something to be written about films which which end on a hill or mountainside, as does State Secret, a hundred minutes after a prelude in the self-same spot. This is brilliantly done - and it gives nothing away to say so here.

Be sure to make this film better known. A worthy aim, and a great treat.

There is much to enjoy in this film, which changes gear in the middle to embrace enigma, and yet, as a whole is is not that enjoyable. Which character is each of the two of them assuming from scene to scene, and even within scenes? Unreliable narrators are all very well, but the film feels like a latercomer to post-modernism (with a glossy hue). That said, other people have enjoyed its take upon the tropes of European film. A writer, a restaurant, an art gallery, a hillside: you get the picture. Well, at least a Marvel character does not loom from within a public statue in a square.

The threat of nuclear war appeared in many films in the Fifties and Sixties, perhaps beginning with Seven Days Till Noon (1950). An unsual take on this is Nigel Kneale's The Crunch (1963), whose fifty minutes turn around a former colony's embassy threatening to detonate the bomb which has been created in its London basement.

England has a sober Prime Minister while the colony has a beserk President who is kept in check, almost, by an Ambassador.

Preposterous, but, as usually ther case with Kneale's work, one is carred along. Here is a corner of a deserted London with car horns parping throughout offscreen while the Prime Minister sits it out with the Army and Police while tanks are to the ready (although one is left to wonder what these could do).

Dark-hued, dense, it is involving - even if a late turn remains puzzlingly fantastic -, and leaves one eager for the later films on this disc. One of them at a time feels best.

Diverting enough, a simple story stretched across several years with an interval during which young lovers are parted by an ocean and then chance upon one another again in a Paris which seems to spring from other films as much as the place itself. Without the btio of the best of the nouvelle vague, it does not immerse one in the characters' lives, one can look away wgile being drawn back. Intelligently done, and something for ninety minutes when one is not in the spirit for something demanding.

As others have said, a tremendous film. It is worth adding that the disc contains several extras, including films on which Dickinson worked about Spain and the Civil War. It is a shame that he did not make more films. There is a very good collection of essays about him edited by Philip Horne whose other great subject is... Henry James.

As the previous review says, this is dubbed, though it is not the worst instance I have seen/heard of that. I think the original can be bought in a new edition. Although the film is sometimes called an epic, and it is widescreen with some highly-populated scenes as troops mobilise, it is essentially a chamber drama with large and small interiors as the factions vie with one another, and treason looms. Do see it.

Three very different Maugham stories, each with a twist neatly done, and all excellently characterised. The longest is Sanatorium in which an ailing Ashenden visits the eponymous establishment - somewhere in remote Scotland - and finds himself amidst people who have elected to stay on even though they appear the picture of health (after a fashion). Amongst the yoinger residents/patients are Michael Rennie and Jean Simmons whose walk in the woods becomes, for some, the stuff of scandal. Much recommended, all three, as a way to round off an evening.

Mention films that involve boxing, and one can be sure that certain titles are immediately mentioned. Among them is unlikely to be The Extra Day (1956) but its longest scene is a boxing match in which one of the participants is none other than Sid James. He is not only involved in a racket but the incident is a link with this being another film about filming.

Written and directed by William Fairchild, it turns around the final reel of a film being lost as it tumbles from a van between the set and the studio. Needs must, the choleric émigré director (Laurence Naismith) determines to round up the main cast and the others which makes for a punning title about another day’s shooting.

This sounds like a routine, even whimsical English comedy, but the cast, which also includes Bryan Forbes, Beryl Reid, Jill Bennett, Joan Hickson and Simone Simon, make much of the diverse plot lines which such a set-up involves as it moves between the fraught and the comic from moment to moment. There are continual surprises, the effect is far more surreal than one might expect at first - and room much be found for Dennis Lotis. In his time, pre-Cliff, he had become a good-looking figure on the English musical scene with a vocal style which owed something to Sinatra. Here he is the object of a Fan Club which goes wild in a way that anticipates Beatlemania (among them Beryl Reid). And he died only this year, at ninety-three, after a life whose turns could make for an enjoyable documentary if not a full-blown biopic.

Well worth your time.

Incomplete works, whether on the page, canvas or as sculpture, can have as much fascination as those deemed finished (if anything ever is).

At an hour long, Passenger is but a fragment of what it could have been, and the missing scenes are mainly, one infers, those to have been filmed upon a boat some time after a guard and prisoner - both women - had become embroiled in a Polish death camp. The shipboard sequences, for which stills are supplied, provide a counterpoint to a brilliantly and harrowingly re-creation of a camp (beds which are but holes in a wall, for example) at the evil heart of the Holcaust. The relationship, the taunts, the forced marches to the ovens: these have, of course, become familiar but Passenger - such an innocent-seeming, nautical title - also does service to describe those who made a one-way journey, their ticket marked Oblivion.

There is no film like this, and it should be better known.