Film Reviews by CH

A knife. This is – almost literally – at the heart of The Boys (1962), as it was at an earlier trial drama: Twelve Angry Men (1957). While that was confined to the jury's deliberation room one New York afternoon, Sidney Furie's London film not only takes place in a courtroom over which Felix Aylmer presides but it incorporates flashbacks, sometimes repeated, to scenes as recollected by witnesses of the events which ended with a night watchman killed.

Amidst those recollections are some by the four flashy youths accused of the crime, whose defence lawyer is none other than Robert Morley. This might sound preposterous but he, Groucho eyebrows and all, turns in as engaging a performance as the prosecuting counsel, Richard Todd.

At two hours, this has led some to say that it is a swollen production (although shorter than most trials); in fact, there is so much happening, with an array of character parts, including Steptoe as a lavatory attendant, that one's attention is continually engaged. Whether in the street, pub or atop a 'bus, the London of that era is wonderfully caught in a few moments of screen time. To say any more about the twists of events would be unfair: the title of this review gives an indication of the forensic detail.

Here is a film which should be far better known – and cherished for a Judge who asks, “what do you mean by yobboes?” This is on a level with the Judge who, a year or so later, would ask, “who are these Beatles?”

Another period detail. Nowadays, jurors are not allowed to wear hats. But in 1962, all of those three women upon the jury sported headgear.

Incest. One might even now be startled to find this the underlying theme of Banana Ridge (1941) which had appeared in the West End three years earlier. All the more so as it is a farce with the requisite number of doors - and even a wardrobe.

Ben Travers had a long series of these produced at the Aldwych Theatre in the Twenties and Thirties. Most were filmed, and are often dismissed as stagey when in fact they are more than a record of the era's acting styles. Robertson Hare and Alfred Drayton are part of a company which deals in rubber (with the former on leave from a Malayan plantation). Along comes a charmingly insinuous Isabel Jeans, who reminds them of their lodging at her mother's house as officers during the Great War. It appears that either of them could have sired a son upon her (Jeans) – the very fellow (Patrick Kinsella) who is waiting outside, and even then beginning to romance Drayton's daughter (the great Nova Pilbeam) – and he simultaneously would Drayton's wife, Pilbeam's mother.

Small wonder that Drayton is aghast at his possible son marrying his certain daughter. Hence his being bundled off to the eponymous plantation (by dint of a money and some rain showers, this was filmed in Hertfordshire). All concerned give dashing performances (literally and metaphorically), not playing it for laughs but taking it seriously, which is the necessary requirement of effective comedy.

And it is a repository of vanished phrases. When one wife tells another that she does exercises every morning, she is asked, “don't you find that terribly heating?” And one husband, when told to do something, expostulates, “I'm sugared if I'll do so!”

Travers was to have a revival in the Seventies – and, at the age of ninety, a new play, directed in the West End by Lindsay Anderson. If at the moment, sightings of them are rarer, these film versions are a chance to discover a master of mayhem.

“Give my best to Mrs. Cross.” “Yes, I'm going to meet her at the lodge,” replies Vincent Price in Shock (1946), a line which has one chortling – and horrified.

Why should this be? The dialogue appears unexceptionable. It gives nothing away to cite it because, in the opening scenes, we have witnessed Price club her to death with a candlestick in a San Francisco hotel, where he keeps an apartment, before he returns to the grand, out-of-town asylum over which he presides with elegant authority.

While leaving a flunkey to send the trunk, the late Mrs. Cross therein, to the mountainside lodge which is his bolthole from matters medical.

Not only us, but also Anabel Shaw has witnessed the murder across the way from her hotel suite. She had checked in, anxiously, as she had assumed her serviceman husband (a fresh-complexioned Frank Latimore) dead these past two years only to hear that he has survived and that they will meet here. Her anxiety, heightened by his unexplained delay in fog and the candlestick, leads her to a state of collapse, with a wonderful nightmare sequence which lays her out on the sofa.

As fate has it, Price is summoned to help her – and he finds that her subconscious gives voice to sentences which, in the circumstances, only he is in a position to understand. Under guise of concern, he offers to take her to his sanatorium – something for which the delayed Latimore is grateful.

And all our woe.

Long before Nurse Ratched, there was Lynn Bari – and wow! As the mistress whose sultry presence led Price to clobber his wife, she repeatedly quashes any remaining scruples he is about to summon. Hers is such a bravura performance that anybody should seek out whatever else she appeared in. And, by contrast, has there been a rôle to match Anabel Shaw's? Fiercely sweet-faced, she is mostly in a horizontal position as, wincingly for us, she becomes victim of Price's smoothly-administered needles, part of his process to convince everyone that she is delusional.

In the annals of asylum-set films, can anything match the stormy night when another patient (John Edwards) goes on the loose for several crackling minutes which bring his hands to Anabel Shaw's throat? Director Alfred Werkler is not well known (some of us relish his News is Made at Night, which also features Lynn Bari), but he commands a pace, one of such velocity that, here, it brought to Vincent Price to the fore – and the rest we know.

There is much more than this to see in these seventy minutes. Do so for yourselves.

The middle-European tangle of events which yielded the Great War has brought much commentary. What all can agree is that these had roots which went back centuries, and all grew rapidly around 1910. And yet, even with the shooting in Sarajevo in 1914 many did not anticipate the War and all its consequences.

No historian has mentioned the part played in all this by Marilyn Monroe.

As she puts it, “your Balkan revolutions, you have them all the time!” She is addressing the Regent of Carpathia, which did not exist but sounds as though it should. How does she find a place in territory chronicled by A.J.P. Taylor and Christopher Clark? She is the eponymous hoofer in The Prince and The Showgirl (1957) who has stayed in London in 1911, and is among the cast visited backstage by the Regent who is also there for the Coronation of George V.

He is so struck by her that she receives an invitation to meet him at the Embassy in Belgrave Square. Flattered, she also wises up when she realises that there will be only the two of them (cold food means that flunkeys are not needed to serve it). Marilyn is in well-nigh every scene – and blows the Regent off the screen. An achievement all the more remarkable in that the he is none other than Laurence Olivier who also directed but did not dissuade himself from giving one of those hammy performances to which he was prone. The accent! The hair! One fully expects him to give her (oft-wiggling) bum a cackling slap, a routine which Sid James made all his own.

Written by Terence Rattigan from his own play, it would be far less without Marilyn who understood comedy and is well supported by an array of English actors, among them Sybil Thorndike as something of a comic Dowager while the chorus line includes Vera Day and Jean Kent – and, in another outing as a supercillious official, Richard Wattis gets to wear a costume grander than his usual suit and tie. The plot turns around the succession in Carpathia, the King-to-be played by Jeremy Spenser who a few years earlier had given a tremendous performance as a troubled boy in Edge of Divorce.

Born in 1937, Spenser is the only main player in this film who is still here. He vanished from the scene in the late-Sixties. Would that somebody could prevail upon him to recall his work on this and other films. As it is, The Prince and The Showgirl is now perhaps not as often seen as the charming My Week with Marilyn (2011) which sprang from Colin Clark's memoir of working with her and Olivier on this very film.

At almost two hours, The Prince and The Showgirl is perhaps too long but it makes good use of a limited set, from which it sometimes breaks out for a ballroom and the Abbey, and Rattigan's dialogue includes such sharp lines as a showgirl's assertion, “I wouldn't miss the Coronation for the whole Body of Guards!”

Meanwhile, Marilyn makes another apt political point: “that's the thing about General Elections – you never know who is going win.”

Ha'Penny Breeze (1950) is not as well known as Ealing Studios' films, but this depiction of post-war life beside the River Orwell has much in common with them. Directed by Frank Worth, it is from a story which he wrote with Don Sharp, who also stars in it as an Australian who had been in a prisoner-of-war camp and is invited by Edwin Richfield to his home village of Pin Mill.

The film opens with their walking, kit-bags in hand, up a quiet lane. All of which is very pastoral, but reality intrudes with a turn of the corner and their finding the small shipbuilding yard in disrepair. The place is bleak. Richfield's family come in sight to explain what has happened. The mood is sombre, even despairing but, having got this far, Richfield is not one to be daunted. He proposes they continue to build the yacht on which he had worked before the war and use it as a means to bring purchasers for more of them: a new world beckons. Such a notion runs up against objections from the old guard who look askance at such pleasure-seeking notions.

Into all this comes a familiar cast: a vicar, a genial publican a beautiful young woman – and a bounder intent upon scuppering the race for which the yacht is eventually entered (Darcy Conyers, who also produced the film). Put like this, it might sound whimsical but its strength owes much to the cinematography by Gordon Lang and George Stretton. Buildings and landscape (including the river) are made as much characters as those who act out their destiny in the foreground. There is something almost Expressionist about the way in which a single head fills the screen in profile each time events take dramatic turns.

“She's a real live, livin' doll.” No, it's not the Cliff Richard song. Two years earlier, in San Francisco, one of a group of querulous Italian-Americans had praised Tony Curtis's dancing partner (Marisa Pavan) this way in The Midnight Story (1957).

And she certainly is. As for Tony Curtis, think of him in the Fifties and there inevitably come to mind the same year's Sweet Smell of Success - and Some Like It Hot (1959), where he himself tried to be a livin' doll. The Midnight Story is in the shadow of these, and shadows it contains (along with hills if not cliffs). It opens with a priest caught in an alleyway at night, and killed; the rosary is between his fingers when he is discovered.

This is filmed in cinemascope, alas, for this late noir is very much one of confined spaces; happily, it is in black and white to match the nuns' outfits at the orphanage where Curtis grew up and was helped by that priest, who found him a job in the police.

He is shaken by the killing, and, although in the traffic department, suggests he help the homicide team; his offer declined, he turns in his badge and goes underground in pursuit of the man (Gilbert Roland) whom he saw in a strange state at the priest's funeral. Roland combines fishing with selling his catch is a restaurant while sharing a house with his cousin (Marisa Pavan) and her widowed mother (a strong, ever-aproned turn by Argentina Brunetti). In a manner typical of noir plotting, Curtis coins a story sufficient not only to get him a job with Roland but become so much a part of the household that he falls for Marisa Pavan.

Love and detection are uneasy partners. No need to say more about the course of events, Curtis frequently conferring with his erstwhile, otherwise stumped colleagues. Except one has to pause to credit a key, brief turn by a potential witness: Peggy Maley is here the archetypal flowsy blonde married to a man whose night shifts mean that she does not have to shield her roving eye. One could watch her in anything.

Joseph Pevney is not widely known as a film director. He worked mainly in popular television series whose audiences took scant notice of the figure behind the camera, but he should be esteemed for here bringing a noir turn to the domestic drama which was the work of Edwin Blum, who certainly knew what he was about: he had written Stalag-17.

“I'm not scared of bachelors! Married men are the worst.”

Who, at some time in life, has not been in love with Jessie Matthews? Well, perhaps not Graham Greene. Less than gallantly he referred to her “long tubular form... the curious charm of her ungainly adolescent carriage”. This is to ignore that face, those winsome eyes which look directly into others', a mask of innocence – a probing of the soul - worn to traverse the farcical situations in which life lands her. Could any other woman flutter her eyelids in the way she did? One might even say that Liza Minnelli closely studied that gesture.

The Thirties were her time, and early on came There Goes the Bride (1932). Adapted by W. P. Lipscomb from a German story, it is a farce which, as prose, could have attracted Wodehouse to swathe in in his glorious wordplay. As it is, directed by Albert de Courville, the film is diverting. Aghast at the prospect of being married off (to a briefly-glimpsed Basil Radford) as part of a business deal, Jessie Matthews bolts – and climbs aboard a train for Paris.

These opening scenes, with her expressive face, are in effect a silent movie, and she might even bring Louise Brooks to mind. No need to delay over the circumstances which find her after dark in the City of Light – and prevailing upon a man (Owen Nares) to hide her away until it is too late for that cattle-market marriage to go ahead.

That chic apartment has many doors, through which there come and go several of his top-hatted, drunken cronies, a fierce housekeeper – and, of course, his fiancée (Carol Goodner). By now, some fifteen minutes in, there is almost an hour to go, and it does so entertainingly. Scenes are as varied as a grand house, all ballroom and curving staircase, and a wide bath in which Nares recovers while reading a newspaper: this is L' Intransigeant, a real one but singularly misnamed: by now it had shifted from its left-wing, nineteeth-century origins to a distinctly conservative stance. We are left wondering whether this long night, complete with songs and dance, will change his point of view.

Two women share a bath while others loll upon the floor beside it as their gossip and barbed asides echo around the walls of a high-ceilinged French château. The beverage within their grasp, however, is nothing stronger than tea. This is the early-Forties, and they are holed up in a building requisitioned by the Germans to intern Brtitsh women who had not made it out of the country before the Occupation.

There are moments, with the banter between this mixed bunch, when Twenty Thousand Women (1944) could almost be the stuff of a boarding-school romp or that rooming house of Stage Door. A febrile atmosphere, and what a cast for a film written and directed by Frank Lauder and Sidney Gilliatt.

Here are Phyllis Calvert, Patricia Roc, Flora Robson, an especially sultry Jean Kent, a glimpse of Thora Hird (and her own infant daughter). Their voices are crystal clear, they are well outfitted, and – as with the confines of these writers' The Lady Vanishes – comedy blends well into a thriller which turns around some airmen baling out only to find their parachutes have directed them into these grounds by night.

It would be easy to deride the plot but, as it picks up speed but has to resist doing so but relish such things as the most unusual card game ever filmed – and a stage show, which could have been a West End hit and almost brings to mind The Producers.

“I'm going to play it by the book, I'm not even going to trip over a comma.” So private investigator (Mark Stevens) informs a police detective (Reed Hadley) after relocating from San Francisco to a rundown New York office with the sound and sight of the elevated railroad a few yards away. Oh, and between times, he has been in stir, stitched up by former business partner, a suave Kurt Kreuger.

He is, evidently, used to the rough and tumble of his trade. In adding to this, The Dark Corner (1946) plays by the noir book, with many commas along the way. Here are such noir tropes as shadows, staircases, wet streets, venetian blinds, outstretched nylons – and a jazz band (a chance to see Eddie Heywood).

What one might not expect to be part of these captivating chapters is Lucille Ball. First seen at desk with the word private in reverse on her side of the glazed office door, she is the newly-hired secretary to Stevens with scant knowledge of what his work involves.

She is set to learn far more as the elements of the plot cohere and her fast typing is outpaced by her talking: wisecracks are as much in Manhattan's water supply as its gin joints. Stevens's erstwhile partner has not gone away but is entangled with the wife of a Fifth Avenue art dealer so elegantly sinister that Clifton Webb was best placed to play the rôle. He and Lucy do not get to share a scene; that would be too heady a cocktail, especially one with an ingredient which is William Bendix: outsize, he sports a white suit which makes him an even more obvious tail as Stevens goes about the next job: saving his own life.

All this is accomplished with style, even if the film could have lost some of its running time to regain the spirit of its inspiration: a story by Leo Rosten which had appeared in Good Housekeeping. Goodness knows who plays a briefly-glimpsed taxi driver but he taught me more than any of his cohorts have done: the phrase “to take a brodie”, which, I find, means to endure a fall.

If the lovers in Brief Encounter had spawned a child, it would be Background (1953). Philip Friend is an ambitious barrister married to Valerie Hobson; their well-clipped accents are rather different from that of a long-serving housekeeper (Lily Kann). Talk echoes around their smart suburban house where the children are on holiday from boarding school; it takes nasty turns as the marriage founders and another man (Norman Wooland) appears on the scene to enjoy a round of afternoon cinema and teashops and plans for life on a Dorset farm.

All this is given edge by the three children – Jeremy Spenser, Jeanette Scott and Mandy Miller. They dispute amongst themselves, and even brawl in a way that is rather more convincing than many an adult fight in Fifties films. Such is the venom caused by the parents' news that Jeremy Spenser fixes a photograph to a dartboard and pierces it with a well-aimed shot.

This splendid performance is a harbinger of the startling turn in the film's second half. Sufficiently opened up by screenwriter Warren Chetham Strode (perhaps best known for The Guinea Pig) from his own play, here is a film with more to savour than might at first appear.

If The Long Dark Hall (1951) is by no means a great film, it is very well made. As its jury will do, consider the evidence.

Written by the excellent Nunnally Johnson, it sprang from a novel by Edgar Lustgarten, well known in his time, and co-directed by Anthony Bushell (who also appears as a lawyer).

All are wonderfully supported by cinematographer Wilkie Cooper who, with an effective score by Benjamin Frankel, brings a noir tone to every setting, whether it be a bar, a lodging house or suburban Richmond. Curiously, Manny Farber said that it was a “dillie... shot without electric lights in a dark walnut courtroom”. What a dillie might be in this context is uncertain, but that oppressive courtroom is as well depicted as the rest of the film.

What has led to that scene in which white wigs stand out against dark walnut?

Here are familiar notions. A married man (Rex Harrison) has fallen for a West End showgirl (Patricia Cutts) and so wants to help her that he is more than tetchy at the thought of her “seeing” any other man. And there is his downfall. He lets himself in at her lodging house, to which she has given him a key against the orders of forthright landlady (Brenda de Banzie) who is one in a long line of those who tell the police (including Raymond Huntley), “I keep a respectable house”.

Harrison finds the girlfriend dead – and panics, a moment's mis-judgment which brings all his woe. To relay all this here is not to give anything away, for these few minutes have seen the killing itself, by a brilliantly creepy Anthony Dawson, who will re-appear to taunt Harrison's wife (so well played by Lilli Palmer, calm incarnate) just as he did his first victim, none other than Jill Bennett.

And it all has a tinge of metafiction. Now and then the narrative cuts to a room in which a detective tells a novelist about the case, and teases him to suggest its subsequent turns.

If this makes it sound as though there are several films unreeling beside one another, that is a fair point, M'Lud – but any jury has to bring in a verdict of... quality.

Headlines appear as newspaper pages are turned in Cat and Mouse (1958) - and bring a running commentary.

BISHOP BRAINS BOBBYSOXERS

“Well, I bet he has a bit of fun himself.”

DOPE FIEND SWITCHES SEX

“The things people get up to, Sarge!”

As it turns out, all this makes for a crucial moment but to cite these droll remarks does not give anything away. Here is a film with curious origins. Adapted from one of the many hundreds of novels by John Creasey, it was directed and co-written by none other than Paul Rotha who was, of course, best known for his documentaries praised by Graham Greene with the caveat that they were “seldom free from a certain prettiness and self-consciousness”.

Prettiness is not to the fore in this tough tale, apart from Ann Sears. She arrives at a bedsit house somewhere in London in answer to a summons by a wonderfully creepy Hilton Edwards who had witnessed the crime for which her father was hanged twenty years earlier: the killing of a man during the theft of some diamonds which, Hilton asserts, do survive – and he wants his share.

This is but a prelude, for he takes a tumble – and the noise of their altercation is heard by a man the other side of the door: Lee Patterson. As suave as he is insecure, he hits on her and a plan to collar the sparklers. Far from documentary – apart from its nighttime scenes in the West End -, most of the film is a matter of interiors. Some might question the implausibilities but, then again, one can do so of Hamlet. There is enough happening here – ample mcguffins – to carry one through its seventy-five minutes with a relish aided by a fine musical score, the work of Edwin Astley (he of The Saint and much more), whose daughter was to marry Pete Townshend a decade later.

There is surely much more of John Creasey that could be filmed. He knew how to plot, and others could supply snappy 2022 dialogue.

“They can get courage from a bottle – but we've got lipstick.”

So says one woman to another in one of the many fraught dark moments which comprise the eighty-minute running time of Split Second (1953). That sounds the stuff of film noir dialogue but this was also the decade of hostage drama (so well caught in the Sinatra of Suddenly) and one in which an unfettered Bomb loomed. All these elements are drawn together in a film directed by Dick Powell who had moved from musical comedy to a noir starring rôle – and he is now so effectively behind the camera as events unfurl in a remote spot where a town has been cleared for another mushroom cloud to reach for the sky as dawn breaks.

What is the need for these Bomb testings? The effect had already been shown in practice.

For all that, at the time, Manny Farber said of the film, “an unusually good performance by Stephen McNally”. He has broken out of gaol, a flight which has landed a comrade with a chest wound: that bullet needs retrieval to fend off a festering death.

One way and another, an unlikely crowd – half-a-dozen others - chances to be fenced in. The very spot upon which the Bomb is likely to render all their immediate preoccupations a tawdry concern, these bright open skies a variant upon an old dark house.

And very good it is too.

What's more, McNally's repeated threat that others should not dare to be “cute” - that is smart - prompts one to look up Jonathon Green and find that this usage dates from eighteenth-century low-life.

Here is a masterpiece.

“Boy, before the evening's over, I might poison him.”

“I'll toss you for it!”

Such is the exchange between two Broadway showgirls on the pavement in Twenties Manhattan after they have been introduced to a gag-laden, straw-chewing Danny Kaye who had just arrived from hixville to ply his cornet in a band which plays to audiences in a swanky hotel. He persuades them to head to Harlem and hear a hot player (Louis Armstrong), with which one of them (Barbara Bel Geddes) afterwards falls in love with him during a taxi ride southwards.

All this, some two decades making for the two hours of The Five Pennies (1959), is based upon the life of Red Nichols, who himself supplied the soundtrack for the fingering well mimicked on screen by Kaye. Manny Farber wrote of it at the time, “even a schmaltzy jazz delight like Danny Kaye's hot cornet film The Five Pennies, has a solidity and thoroughness that belongs in an Encyclopedia Britannica discussion of post-Dixieland music”.

As musical bio-pics go, this might not rank as highly as Love Me or Leave Me, Young Man With a Horn and Yankee Doodle Dandy but Kaye's is a bravura performance whose comedy is given heft by his on-the-road, card-playing life being transformed by news that his daughter Dorothy has fallen victim to polio (a growing rôles shared so well by Susan Gordon, who died soon after Nichols's daughter, and Tuesday Weld).

Talking of which, Kaye and Barbara Bel Geddes talk during a dance-hall scene of having “a real corny, old-fashioned family”; with which, she informs him that she is “three months' corny”, which appears to be a one-off term for pregnant.

How well is this film now known? It provides more than enough to make one want to see more of Danny Kaye.

“Simone de Beauvoir is not on trial!” So proclaims the defence lawyer (Charles Vanel) when her name is mentioned during a murder trial, his client Brigitte Bardot in the dock of a crowded courthouse which is partly the setting for La vérité (1960).

The author's name had been mentioned as part of a reflection upon the way in which women are oppressed in society, with catastrophic results. That reference might lead some to recall that Simone de Beauvoir had written a long, philosophical article in 1959 for Esquire about Bardot, soon reprinted as a paperback book.

Bardot, to her own horror, was everywhere as the Fifties became the Sixties, but one might now ask how many watch those films then thought sensational. (John Lennon had a photograph of her on his Liverpool wall and encouraged his future wife to dress like her.) To miss La vérité, though, would be a tremendous shame: it shows how very good she could be. Directed by Henri-George Clouzot (he of half-a-dozen masterpieces such as The Wages of Fear), it was created, from true-life inspiration, by him and several other screenwriters (with sections suggested by Bardot herself). This befits a film which cuts from the court room to the several strands of a narrative which lands Bardot with her hands on the wooden dock as she gives vent and has to be silenced by the Judge.

The magnificent black and white cinematography brings out the shades of grey which make something complex of the gunshots of subsequent events. (One might also think, around that time, of Ruth Ellis in Hampstead and of that great film with Diana Dors, Yield to the Night.) Put simply, Bardot has joined her sister (Marie-José Nat) in a Parisian rooming house where they share a room which one of them has to vacate when matters amatory are in prospect.

Location scenes catch so well this era in Paris: streets with cars as curved as many of those on the pavements; strolls from one night-time café to another (topically, one is called Le Spoutnik); television screens are watched through shop windows; one almost expects a glimpse of Sartre struggling to re-light his pipe - but there isn't. Into the fray comes Sami Frey, a handsome student of conducting. His affections volley between Bardot and her sister; that love triangle has to take second place to the podium of an orchestra whose work includes some forcefully rendered Stravinsky.

Here ensue rows worthy of Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee. The walls of these humble rooms close in, before cutting back to the expanse of the court room where the two lawyers engage in jousting which parallels those rows (Paul Meurisse for the prosecution). All this is as free-flowing as the emergent New Wave, so much so that, afterwards, it is a surprise to find that the film has lasted well over two hours. No scene is superfluous.

Bardot, like Marilyn, could bring tremendous resources to the screen when the likes of Clouzot and Wilder were behind their cameras. A process which, on set, could be as fraught as any of those encounters which make La vérité an enduring reflection upon the way in which passion can dwindle into a power struggle with so many in its wake.

As for John Lennon, it is said that in the late-Sixties he and Bardot briefly met but, one way and another, communication was hopeless: “worse than meeting Elvis.”