Film Reviews by CH

Before BACS transfers there were weekly runs by trucks with cases of smackers aboard for allocation to those who toiled in company offices and factories. Human nature being what it is, there were frequent attempts to prevent these from reaching their rightful destination.

Such is the case in Payroll (1961). Based upon a now-vanished novel by Derek Bickerton, it was adapted by George Baxt, who worked on various films at this time, including that cult item Circus of Horrors, before himself turning to crime fiction - notably with a series featuring one Pharoah Love. This script supplied director Sidney Hayers with ample material to fashion his depiction of a gang of crooks whose efforts take place in a wonderfully deliniated Newcastle (that said, they are all readily comprehensible) where light and shadow - within and without - become characters themselves thanks to the work of cinematographer Ernest Srewart whose visual take merges well with the percussive nature of Reg Owen’s jazz-inflected music.

As for the characters themselves, the gang is led by Michael Craig, a man of smoother aspect than the cohorts in whom he has placed what, inevitably, turns out to be undue trust. Things go wrong from the start, during a brilliantly choreographed raid on the van. With a policeman dead, it is now more than a matter of money; for one thing there is a grieving and sassy widow (played by Billie Whitelaw) whose counterpart is Francoise Prévost: in a hapless marriage, to one who is in on the details of the raid, the Frenchwoman hankers after the finer things in life; the embodiment of sultry, she is the driving force of the film.

Scarcely a moment lacks suspense, which is no mean achievement, something which keeps the plot aloft even when it appears to be guying the conventions of a heist scenario. Some two thirds of the way through there is some disintegration of the narrative, as if it has come to bear too much, but it has been sustained so well, with every character distinct, that one watches with near-wonder as events lead to an inevitable ending whose very image brings to mind that of Armored-Car Robbery a decade earlier.

Armored Car Robbery (1950) appears to concern exactly that. As in any heist, what counts is not so much the haul as the aftermath. A small fortune has been taken from a Los Angeles racetrack as part of a meticulously-plotted raid but, for all the work being done amidst gas, something goes wrong. The gang is spotted, chase is given, bullets ring out, two of them hitting flesh through windscreens.

Minutes into this, and time is already catching up with those who thought that money could bring a better life across the border. This was made by Richard Fleischer two years before his masterly Narrow Margin with which it shares pace and an eye for those hours between dusk and dawn when shadows conceal so much more.

Charles McGraw is a policeman out to avenge a colleague killed in the shoot-out and gets hard on the trail of gang leader William Talman who, of course, is smitten with a burlesque dancer (Adele Jergens) whose on-stage scenes are given added heat by her being already married to another member of the gang.

Filled with now-vanished curvaceous automobiles, any number of location scenes, and several moments at the game appears to be up. For all the dextrous performances, the start of this is the camera which, at every moment, brings a sense of the shades between the black and white of order and law - and there is a surprising reference in the dialogue to the young Norman Mailer. Watch a b-movie and you can be so much better rewarded than items first presented at red-carpet showings.

Who is the star of Cleo from 5 to 7 (1961)? On the face of it – and what a face it is -, this is the eponymous singer played by Corrine Marchand who is on screen for most of a film which takes place in something close to real time (there are as many clocks in it as in The Set-Up). While she traverses contemporary Paris, its buildings, cafés, parks, squat automobiles and more form as much a character as she does.

Written and directed by Agnès Varda, it turns around the singer being anxious about going to keep an appointment that afternoon/evening to see whether she has cancer. That might make it sound sombre but there is such a brio to the way in which the film is made – very much nouvelle vague – that one is carried along by it, revelling in the variety of camera angles which capture a city in flux and coming to a halt now and then.

Along the way, she calls in at a songwriter (played by Michel Legrand himself) and visits the studio where a friend (Dominique Davray) who is modelling for a life class; their continuing journey includes the delivery of a film to a cinema whose projectionist invites them to watch it there and then: this is Seine-side pastiche, a few minutes long, of a slapstick silent film which stars, amazingly, Godard in a fine lovelorn rôle.

Unlikely as it might appear, this surreal interlude fits perfectly as the prelude to the onset of evening and the uncertain news which had been heralded by the film's opening section where Tarot cards were turned (mercifully, and fittingly, the only part in colour).

Here, though, is a celebration of all that life can entail (and on disc there is an array of extras well worth watching). All of which leaves one only able to reflect how galling it must be for the Académie française that the French for happy hour is... le happy hour.

How well known is The Paper Chase (1973) these days? The title refers to first-year Law students who are eager to stay the course at Harvard. As such, they are beholden to their professor, a steely, perhaps charismatic John Houseman (the jury is out on that).

One would like to know what the film critic Philip French made of it. He once observed that, with a background in memorising all the FA Cup scores from the beginning and then doing likewise with thirty cases while studying Law at Oxford, one could gain a good degree.

In this film, Houseman takes the opposite tack; he chastises a student who claims to have a photographic memory - and the students are put through it. Among them is Timothy Bottoms; he never displays that part of himself during the recurrent shower scenes to which dorm mates have recourse after fervid discussion of possible exam questions; still less does he do so during close encounters with Lindsay Wagner who, on the point of divorce, turns out to be the professor's daughter.

Skilfully done as all this is, one's verdict has to be that it comes down on the wrong side of hokum. That said, there is a curious interest in seeing how Seventies hairstyles and beards appear in conjunction with the formal dress requested upon an invitation.

More diverting than essential.

It is a great opening – as is all that follows, and went before. This is D.O.A. (1949). In fact, Edmond O'Brien is still alive when he arrives at the San Francisco police headquarters to report a murder: “my own”. In his end is our beginning, for the story cuts back to proceed through the events which brought him to the police. A suburban insurance agent, who has left his secretary (Pamela Britton) behind, he is in the city for a holiday when he finds himself caught up in a neighbouring room's party which decamps to a brilliantly-filmed jazz dive, where he becomes ill.

This is no surprise, for, amidst some furious drumming, the camera has cut to the switching of the drink bought for him at the end of the bar. For a small-time agent, he is to discover that he has become unwittingly caught up in murderous events. Should he be asked, he can testify, with the aid of a document in his possession, that a jump from a balcony was a push. Time is not on his side. In what remains of it, he has to scour the city, and make a détour to Los Angeles, in a quest for his killer. All the while assuring his lovelorn secretary by telephone that he is all right.

The plot might sound preposterous, but there are slow-acting poisons and the fast pacing of this film leaves scant room for doubt. Written by Russell Rouse and Clarence Greene, it is directed by Rudolph Maté in a way which makes full use of the city as seen by cinematographer Ernest Laszlo (some terrific runs through crowded streets) during day and night.

Film noir is a term which occludes its variety, and this one turns many of these upon the familiar retinue of Mr. Bigs and their mercilessly self-seeking, smartly-dressed women with a cigarette between manicured nails which also serve to scratch. Nobody is above suspicion. Malevolence pervades society. Even the viewer feels guilt by association.

There is much talk now of the way in which human labour will be supplanted by robots. As it was ninety years ago, when René Clair made A nous la liberté (1931) which more than inspired Chaplin's Modern Times (to Clair's delight).

The plot is simple. Two men (Raymond Cordy; Henri Marchand) are in gaol, their days spent at the side of a conveyor belt. After hours, in their cell, they are engaged in the more primitive task of breaking out by dint of sawing through the high window's bars (one standing upon the other to do so).

Come the break-out, only Cordy makes it. Ever quick to improvise, he becomes the owner of an impressive gramophone manufacturing company; this time, he is in charges of others who toil at a belt as the components speed by.

For all its dialogue, this straddles the end of the silent era. Much of one's interest is in watching rather than listening – although the ears are of course called upon to relish Auric's music as these visually emoting characters caper and chase in the very spirit of slapstick. Marchand also escapes, only to find himself a humble employee at this factory which is as whistle-driven as the gaol. After the camera has moved to and fro, as light has contended with shade time and again amidst these huge sets with towering doors at every turn, the inevitable comes to pass. Greed is exposed on all sides, top hats caught on the wind as thousand-franc notes elude grasping hands while the pair, escaping re-capture, walk into the sunlit countryside.

To relate so much of the plot is not unfair, for this is all less a story than a fable – something which depends upon its telling, as Clair does so well here. So much of subsequent film technique, around the world, is anticpated here, but it should not be regarded as the stuff of the lecture room: here is great entertainment.

This disc includes a fifteen-minute interview with Clair's widow, made for his centenary in 1998. Even more fascinating is that an extra is his 1924 twenty-minute film Entre'acte

From the beginning, cinema has turned upon chase scenes impossible to capture on stage or in prose. Little mentioned, though, is one of the best, Entr'acte. Not only directed by Clair, it has a scenario by the artist and polemicist Francis Picabia (admired by David Bowie); as if this were not enough, the music – which anticipates John Adams – is by Erik Satie, who appears in the opening scenes as somebody launching a cannon; this shot brings much in its (literal) wake, not least a scene in which Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp are engrossed in a game of chess. Along the way, at varying speeds, are dancers – and flowers which appear to be doing so, in a way that anticipates the unfurling women who recur in Busby Berkeley's films.

What is going on? To ask the question, as the cannonballs fly and bicycles are vigorously pedalled, is to go against the spirit of Dada as it merged into Surrealism. After all, who ever heard, in France, of a hearse being led by a camel, let alone one as bemused as this? Small wonder matters go awry, and, soon pilotless, the coffin speeds away. This downhill pursuit is a miracle of filming.

One might think that it could not be capped – but it is, and prepare to gasp, even when the final credit comes up. A joy.

GLAMOUR AND GRIMMER

“We must love one another or die.” This is, of course, a famous line in a poem written by Auden in a New York dive-bar as Germany invaded Poland. He later observed, “after it had been published I came to the line 'We must love one another or die' and said to myself: ‘That’s a damned lie! We must die anyway.’ So, in the next edition, I altered it to ‘We must love one another and die.’ This didn’t seem to do either, so I cut the stanza. Still no good. The whole poem, I realized, was infected with an incurable dishonesty – and must be scrapped.”

This comes to mind when watching Thorold Dickinson's Secret People (1952). This opens with an exile (Charles Goldner) who lives above a London café where he receives a letter with tidings of a friend's likely death at the hand of fascists – as in Greene's The Confidential Agent, Franco is implied - and that his daughters are waiting downstairs for his help. That letter quotes Auden's original line as something to live by. The only thing is that this scene is set in 1930 – almost a decade before Auden wrote it.

As such, it is an emblem of the way in which this film appears realistic – steam from the coffee machine – and yet is almost an allegorical depiction of that decade's struggle. Dickinson, who is perhaps now best now for the original film of Gaslight (that and the Hollywood version have their different merits), brings his own form of poetry to all this while, with a leap to 1937, those sisters (Valentina Cortese and a young Audrey Hepburn) make their way in London while figures from the past – those secret people – meet clandestinely, intent upon assassination.

As a thriller, it has longueurs – perhaps, paradoxically, because Ealing cut it to about ninety minutes when it could have gained from elaboration of its many close observations (one to survive is the startling moment when Valentina Cortesa gently slaps Audrey Heburn's left buttock to spur her at a successful audition to join a ballet company). Secret People has many such moments – what Christopher Isherwood called Forster's “tea-tabling” of drama; all of which enforces the explosive moments (Forster had a propensity for sudden deaths).

Such were the hopes for this film that Dickinson engaged the young Lindsay Anderson to write a now-scarce book about its making. Perhaps, come the Fifties, the subject had missed its moment; it is, though, a perennial one: how far can the quest for liberty entail the death of innocents?

A film is not a pamphlet. What makes Secret People so rewarding is that it is a continual work of composition; everything has its place, as it does in the work of Henry James. How does he come into this? The latest DVD of the film, wonderfully restored, has a ten-minute talk by a James expert, Philip Horne, who has also edited an absorbing book about all of Dickinson's work, which is one fit to set beside Dickinson's own study of film.

Naturally, many remark upon this being an early appearance by Audrey Hepburn but it is also a chance to see Irene Worth, more usually regarded as a stage performer. What's more, it is yet another film in which a few seconds' screen time has one exclaiming, “that's Sam Kydd!”

Whatever happened to Killer Riders of Wyoming? The question comes to mind while revelling in The Smallest Show on Earth (1957). One scrambles to see whether this existed, for considerable trouble must have been entailed in filming those scenes which surface upon the small screen of a rundown cinema in the town of Southborough whose air is dominated by its glue factory.

But no, this and several other Western scenes were especially made – fast horses, speeding trains, cliff-edge tumbles and all – for a delightful, moving comedy written by William Rose who was responsible for many other films of an Ealing hue; this was made by British Lion, and it should be as well known as his other work.

It opens with a postman on his rounds, who reaches up to hand Virginia McKenna a letter for her novelist husband (Bill Travers). Once he rises from his typewriter, he opens it and finds that he has come into an inheritance, something which could make all the difference to their impecunious state (desirable as their London home appears sixty-five years on).

Full pelt (first class) to Southborough, and, in time, down to earth, for the junior solicitor Leslie Phillips's sad task is to inform the young couple that the long-lost great-uncle's legacy is a cinema – the Bijou -, whose rafters and lighting are regularly shaken by the adjacent railway line. Such is the state of the place, it could do with rapid application of the liquid produced by that glue factory.

All in all, a legacy which would make a 1957's publisher's advance appear the stuff of dreams.

What's more, the Bijou comes complete with three ancient members of staff from its glory days: at the box office and piano is Margaret Rutherford while at the projector and whisky bottle is Peter Sellers (who, in his early thirties, was dressed to look close on eighty) while, equally bewhiskered, there is Miles Malleson who multi-tasks as janitor and commissionaire.

To say anymore about the plot is not necessary. It is the familiar one of modest forces in battle with a conglomerate (such as 1939's Cheer Boys Cheer did so well, its subject rival breweries). All this takes but seventy-five minutes, including those preposterous Westerns, but contains so much that one cannot help but want to sit round for the next showing to savour again the rapid dialogue, the ready humour, the pathos, the skilful plotting: here is everything to fuel a term at film school (including Virginia McKenna's hapless attempt to sell ice cream during the interval).

All of the cast, directed by Basil Dearden, must have had as much fun in making as this anybody will do if at all tempted to watch it.

What exactly is Swept Away (1974)? A precise answer cannot be given. That is hardly the point of this film, written and directed by Lina Wertmüller, which provides uneasy entertainment off the coast of a sunlit Italy.

Events begin aboard the deck of a private yacht engaged by the husband of Mariangelo Melato for a pleasurable voyage, their nautical and catering needs met by a crew from the South which includes Giancarlo Gianni whose staring eyes are set in a bearded face, all of which is redolent of a man at odds with settled order which finds him below decks and enraged at his culinary skills called into question by the pampered few.

A tense atmosphere becomes all the more so as she demands a journey upon a smaller vessel of which he takes charge. With a failure in its outboard motor and a switch in the current, they become adrift. A dead calm turns otherwise and they reach an uninhabited island where his resemblance to Robinson Crusoe becomes all the more marked. There is also something of Lawrence about all this – even of Castaway – as the relationship between man and woman, peasant and grandee, is played out amidst a struggle to survive, he taking the opportunity for revenge upon her previous denigration of him now that she needs his skills to seek out and then render that flesh into food.

To say more of the narrative would undermine the surprises it contains – and the questions one asks for some while after the credits have gone by. A brilliantly-shot film which plays in each viewer's mind as much it does upon the screen.

Two decades before the villainous cast of Reservoir Dogs were named after colours, there were those who addressed one another by similar monickers while hijacking the eponymous New York subway train in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974). Four men, all dressed alike, sought a cool (used) million in exchange for releasing the eighteen passengers (including two children) left aboard that carriage as, after a halt, it hurtles southwards in something close to real time while, above ground, police sirens wail and transit chief Walter Matthau barks into a microphone and the City's mayor whimpers upon a 'flu-ridden bed.

No animator or computer generator could ever hope to match the movements of Matthau's face; this always moved from threat to barbed aside in an instant, all of it with a humane thrust, here superbly aided by David Shire's jazz-infused music; and, if anybody needs to be shown the part played by film editors, then step forward Gerald Greenberg and Ronald Lovett: the way in which they cut between scenes as the clock ticks is matchless.

One might wonder quite how Joseph Sargent came to direct this film, for previously and afterwards he was by and large occupied with tv movies. No matter, here is an accomplished film, one of the most exciting ever made, not least because it turns upon character, wit, closing doors and brake-pedal

And it sprang from a brisk novel by John Godey. He knew that raw Manhattan well: another novel turned around a snake on the loose on Central Park, which one can well imagine that this was optioned for a film but, alas, it was never made.

Hard-pressed residents at that time must have found it startling to nip out for a snack and find themselves asked to stand back on the sidewalk, out of camera shot, while a full-pelt, “hard-rubber” scene was made (I think that's the term I heard).

Five decades on, this must be called a masterpiece.

In these times when dependence upon food has become paramount, the opening scenes, set in Ukraine, of Dovzhenko's Earth (1930) resonate across a near-century. This is, right now, perhaps even more startling than looking upon those recent telescope images of the way in which the universe gathered force whenever that was (difficult to get a handle upon the eons of time and space).

Here, though, in this, one of the last silent films, is a reminder that, while, for example, people were bustling around Piccadilly for anything ranging from the latest Aldous Huxley to an Edgar Wallace, others were in those remote plains, some on the point of death, as wheat and fruit were fortified by the sun or beset by the wind - as they had been for centuries.

Harvest was all. Every stage of the future depended upon it. As we now find.

As Graham Greene observed a few years later, Earth had a “magnificent drive... a belief in the importance of a human activity truthfully reported”. These eighty minutes' narrative are not the main thing: their essence is one of life itself while collectivisation entails the loss of individual land as machinery cuts across many more acres than a man with a scythe can do. One might recall those scenes in Hardy, some four decades earlier, when steam engines did likewise – and indeed of those years after the Second World War which saw England's hedgerows torn up to give way to combine harvesters and the loss of bees' habitat which now prove vital for us all.

Thankfully, despite all this, and for us, Earth is not a pamphlet; it is something, literally, much more moving: clouds cross the sky, people traverse the countryside in memory of a man killed for his belief in the land as inherently a greater force than bureaucracy's egotistic craving to submit it to a form-filling régime.

Even those who do not read poetry appreciate that the land provides it. An onion, an apple, these have the shape of a sonnet; a field is an epic which we need to celebrate.

What's more, startlingly, Earth celebrates those who find that the land's magnetic force has pulled off all their clothes to bring them to a state of Paganism.

Here is something whose open faces speak to us more cogently than anything the latest masked Marvel character can ever hope to do.

How many films open with a close up of ducks in a bath? The only one that comes to mind is Imitation of Life (1934). And it lifts off from there. The other occupant of the bath is the infant daughter of widowed Claudette Colbert. As chance has it, there is a knock at the door from Louise Beavers, a black woman who is also a single parent who offers to work in the household. The women strike a bond which combines the cooking skills of one with the marketing prowess of the other (no prizes for guessing this division of labour).

All this was bold for the Thirties. It is based on a novel by Fannie Hurst, who, after a struggle, became a bestselling, often-filmed author much given to social issues which, such is fame, was to have her consigned to relative oblivion after a long life; signs are, she is becoming esteemed again. As for this film, directed by John Stuhl, it is as bright as ever (Preston Sturges had a hand in the script).

There is a schematic shape to it all. As the enterprise grows, so do the daughters, which, as always brings new problems, not least an amatory tangle as bold for the time as the racial one (partly driven by a case of “passing” which had been the subject of Nella Larsen's eponymous novel (1929)). There are moments, including death, when it appears to become maudlin, but the script – as well as the camera – pulls back, and moves on at a pace which makes one surprised to find that it has lasted almost two hours. One can never miss an appearance by Claudette Colbert – and must wish that Louise Beavers had been to the for more often.

When did cigarette cases pass from general view? This had occurred to me while reading again The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), whose plot turns around an inscribed one. Such an item – also engraved – surfaces in An Affair to Remember (1957) which finds almost all the men sporting hats (except for one who declares, “I'm so stupid, I ain't even ignorant!”). Come Kennedy, hats would be gone and perhaps cigarette cases before them.

The plot is familiar, partly because it is a re-make of Love Affair (1939) which was also directed and written by Leo McCarey, a man with an undoubted sentimental side but let us not forget that he made that masterpiece of mayhem Duck Soup; that familiarity is also resonant because it was to inspire that run of Nineties romantic comedies such as Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail. The plot is a variant upon such shipboard romances as the one which made Anything Goes steam ahead. Aboard a liner – the Constitution - both Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, he a playboy painter, she a singer, are engaged to well-heeled others who are busy in America with their business dealings. Between Europe and New York, there is a dalliance (“let's get some air” “I'll show you the rudder” sounds faintly indecent), which is stoked by a halt on the Riviera, where Deborah Kerr accompanies Grant on a visit to his grandmother (Cathleen Nesbitt).

This is a protracted scene which, although elegantly done, goes on a bit (as does the film itself at close on two hours). And, as it is, with Grant then fifty-three, Cathleen Nesbitt should have been at least a hundred. No matter, here is a woman who hugs Grant and, a leap across time, may have recalled while doing so that she once had in her arms another handsome man, Rupert Brooke: she was one of his various girlfriends (her memoir is coy about their involvement).

There are, amidst the furs and cuff-links, enough sharp lines to alleviate the inevitable sentimentality. “My mother told me never to enter a man's room in months ending with an r.” And later there is the eternal wisdom of “never is a frightening word”.

Some notches beneath Ninotchka, that unsurpassable romantic comedy, here – complete with Christmas scenes – is grand entertainment which reminds us that should anybody utter the greeting “top of the morning!”, the correct reply is, “and the rest of the day to you!”

EAR DEFENDERS

“Name?” “Rivett.” Not perhaps cinema's most resounding exchange, but it is a neat joke for, in the space of an hour, Michael Powell's Red Ensign (1934) tells an absorbing tale – inspired by a newspaper story - of an attempt to revive the Scottish shipbuilding industry. For all its air of a quota quickie, it has much in common with the decade's documentary movement.

Here are many shots of moribund yards, and some well-nigh exciting scene of very loud rivetting as Leslie Banks, a designer and shareholder in the firm, plots to build a fleet which will bring renewed prosperity to the area, and to the country. He is not only up against his own Board but there are attempts to sabotage it all by a rival (a pleasingly unsavoury Alfred Drayton). This recalls the arson which gave Powell's film earlier that year the title of The Fire Raisers. It also starred Banks, whom Powell called an actor's actor, and Carol Goodner who reappears here as a trustafarian on the Board and, naturally, provides piano-playing love interest.

Powell called her “my big discovery”. He had seen her in the West End in an American play. “She hadn't got much of a figure, but she had expressive eyes and a quiet intensity that was quite unforgettable. In addition she was highly professional. I decided that what I liked about American actresses was that they were not content with speaking a lot of words: they knew that there was a real woman hidden somewhere amongst all that verbiage and they were trying to find her”.

As he also recalls of the contemporary audience, they did not know what to make of it. “The elaborate staging of the shipyard, the big, sweeping exteriors, the high standard of performance and sincerity of the actors, the overall seriousness of my approach to directing our story, made them run for cover."

No need to do so now but savour it in its own right – and as a prelude to his great run of films with Pressburger.

“Have you brought an adding machine?” It gives nothing away to say that From Here to Eternity (1953) contains a famous beach scene in which, as the waves break on the shore, Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr grasp one another upon their clothes. Less often recalled is this line of dialogue. Why, in the throes of passion with his superior's wife, should a Sergeant feel the need of so mundane a device? Then again, this is a film in which, for all the current events at an Army base in Hawaii in the early part of 1941, all those involved have a backstory (as they say).

Lancaster's been told that Deborah Kerr has been free with her favours while she and her husband were at another posting; meanwhile Montgomery Clift has sought a transfer after killing somebody in one of the service's boxing bouts; first glimpsed with a broom in his hand, Frank Sinatra is as much a bundle of insecurities as his bête noire, Ernest Borgnine who runs a prison with, literally a rod of iron; and the beach scene is intercut with an encounter at the New Congress Club, which is aptly named, for its staff are prostitutes, including Donna Reed who is saving to return to the mainland and the life of respectability which had been hers before being jilted at what she has assumed would be the altar.

All this, and more, two hours of it, was adapted by Daniel Taradash from James Jones's novel, one of those sprawling late-Forties novels which tried to make sense of everything through which the country had been put before the Bomb dropped and all our woe.

As directed by Fred Zinnemann in effective black and white, it is, for all the bawling marching exercises, a big-screen chamber drama. Scene after scene, even a bar-room brawl, takes place in confined space, notably the night-time moment when Sinatra and Clift hug each other, almost passionately, one last time. This is accomplished film-making, of which Manny Farber said at the time, it “happens to be fourteen-carat entertainment. The main trouble is that it is too entertaining for a film in which love affairs flounder, one sweet guy is beaten to death, and a man of high principles is taken for a saboteur and killed on a golf course”.

And yet, Farber, like anybody who sees it, was gripped (as one is by Lumet's equally pounding The Hill a decade later). How one should like to leap From Here to 1953 and listen to talk, in the bar afterwards, and learn from the discussions between those who had elected upon it as something through which to hold hands on a date-night. Did it foster argument or passion? Or both?

What surprised audiences at the time is that the seemingly innocent Deborah Kerr took on a salacious rôle. Of course, we now know, from Michael Powell's memoirs, that in Thirties England he had a similar encounter with her, albeit not upon a beach but on a rug in front of a lodging house's gas-fire. We shall never know whether this went though her mind when asked about the adding machine.