Film Reviews by CH

This film cannot match the 1941 novel on which it is based but, in the Buchan/Hitchcock way of a man caught up in more than he expected, it is diverting. With a surprside appearance by... Thora Hird.

The last of the films which Marlene made with Von Sternberg is patchy, partly told in long flashbacks by one of the men whom she has led astray. It does not draw one in, although there are many moments in which one can relish the command of light and shadow. The previous one, The Scarlet Empress, is as preposterous but rather more beguiling.

An extra with the disc includes one of its makers saying at the time that it could not have been created six motnhs earlier. Now that computerised "effects" are everyday, and so often dull, in films, it is heartening to go back to this pioneer of them and find wit and ingenuity bearing upon a story and characters, including a dog who was ahead of The Artist, which are geuininely involving.

Made in 1934, this take on Catherine ll sneaked in ahead of the Code, which means that not only does Marlene have a romp in the hay (interrupted by a horse) but there is a brief shot of a clock at the Court which contains a figure in an overcoat who flashes on the hour. The pervasive American accents add to the hokum, along with somebody drilling a spyhole through the eye of a portrait while the backs of chairs sport goulish sculpted figures. And yet it has to be seen for, at quite a clip, all this is pervafed by von Sternberg's Expressionist past in Germany: light and shade, tolling bells in close up, crowds surging across the open land and these Imperial buildings - not to mention a montage of executions in the opening minute.

Magical. The word has become overused, but there is no other adjective for Karel Zeman’s Invention for Destruction (1958). To describe it is to convey only a part of the effect it has. This is far from the routine would-be thrills of those who try to adapt Jules Verne. In this case, a lesser-known novel provides the background in which a gang of pirates, who operating from a hidden cave, have as part of their fleet a submarine. This plys a fish-laden ocean bed from which it rises to plunge into the hull of many a ship so that, as those crews drown, men in suitable suits emerge from the submersible to requisition trunkloads of treasure.

Add to this a beautiful surviving young woman and a kidnapped inventor, and you might imagine the hand of Hammer.

But no, Zeman’s work comprises animation, hand-drawn backgrounds sometimes traversed by a human cast which, now and then, morphs into stop-go techniques, all of which had an effect upon, among others, Terry Gilliam.

When the world has staled of computer-generated imagery, it will return to the sheer beauty of something which time and again has one going “wow!” - not least when an octopus does its stuff.

Never has black and white been so colourful.

The very spirit of Ealing, this 1963 film has Peggy Mount as one of several women - and, at one point, dozens - who lead a neat campaign to save their terraced street which sends property developers and the Stock Exchange into turmoil. And the ladies are aided by one of their lodgers, a former colonel, none other than Robert Morley, whose eyebrows are in particularly fine form. A delight, this film: a cast which understands ensemble playing.

When did the Modern begin? The question comes to mind again with von Sternberg’s The Last Command (1928) which was six years after that fabled year of 1922 which saw the appearance, in full, of Ulysses and The Waste Land. There is, though, something to be said for silent film as a progenitor of new styles of narrative in prose -for all that cinema had to rely upon intertitles for everything that could not be conveyed in a look or even a stare.

Written by Lajos Biro, from an anecdote apparently relayed to him by Lubitsch, this film - these films, rather - turn around the production in Hollywood of a tale set amidst the Russian Revolution which, naturally, requires quite a cast of extras who chance to include a man - Emil Jannings - who had fetched up on the West Coast after his earlier life as a General in St. Petersburg: which is the very subject of the film about to be made by director William Powell (as suave voiceless as he was to be in the overlapping banter of The Thin Man) who, what’s more, had been one of the revolutionaries who last saw Jannings before he was bundled off the train - to apparent death - which forms a large part of the Russian section of the tale.

Amidst all this, of course, there is a beautiful woman (Evelyn Brent), her feelings caught between revolution and sympathy (and more) for the portly Jannings. Here, then, is a double narrative which could sound implausible but, from the start, one is drawn into it as von Sternberg takes all the emergent tropes of cinema - close-ups on cigarettes are prominent, so are mirrors - and makes as much use of light as he does shade (from grandeur to trench), so much so that the viewer forgets that there would now be a third perspective: a film about “the making of” a film about making a film.

For anybody who dismisses silent film as either slapstick or lumbering, catch The Last Command to enjoy something which matches anything produced, in any medium, in that heady decade.

A real find this one, which is sold on Diana Dors's name but all rôles are well handled, and it is wonderfully filmed, within and without - and one does not mention the surprising twists it takes. A raw subject unflinchingly depicted.

The recent death of Sylvia Syms prompts a look through the catalogue of her films, and brings with it the pleasing discovery of Bat out of Hell (1966). Filmed in five twenty-five-minute episodes, this was shown week by week on BBC 2 at the end of 1966 - and seen at a swoop six decades later proves a diverting take on events murderous around Chichester.

Presented by Francis Durbridge, this was another of that prolific author’s way with cliffhanging thrillers. In this case Sylvia Syms has been married for several years to prosperous and incredibly stuffy upscale estate agent Noel Johnson while taking up with his assistant John Thaw.

Such is this illicit passion that they opt for disposing of him - and, indeed, he gets to appear only in the first episode even though there are signs that he could yet rise from the grave. One can well imagine a version of this going the rounds of provincial theatres but, here, it gains considerably not only from an array of interiors (from a sweet shop, large jars and all, to a manor house) but well-filmed exteriors: it is a shot of the well-known Black Rabbit pub beside the river outside Arundel that makes those in the know realise that we are indeed in West Sussex.

All concerned are on good form, diction clipped to good effect, although one might question the nose of the Inspector (Dudley Foster) which appears to have been stuck on at an odd angle while he appears to aspire to, without achieving, the enigma that was Priestley’s eponymous character.

Of course, one should not overlook the part played by motor cars, from a workhorse Cortina to a stallion substitute Aston Martin - and the unseen Bentley forbidden by the wife of its prospective purchaser.

How many pianists go off the rails? Probably no more than anybody else, but their misfortune - and recovery - tends to be more visible than others’. The thought comes to mind with Five Easy Pieces (1970) co-written by director Bob Rafelson whose series of Seventies films were some way from the television series he created for the Monkees.

Far from a keyboard, the opening scene finds Jack Nicholson at the hard tasl of working upon oil wells somewhere in the West while living with a big-haired woman, the equally brilliant Karen Black. What is is that has driven him from the instrument he had played from an early age in a well-heeled household upon an island off the East Coast? (That he can play, we learn from a scene in which, during a protracted traffic hold-up, he leaps from the vehicle in which he and a fellow-worker are trapped and leaps aboard an open-back truck to play upon the upright one being transported, a performance which only has the encircling horns blaring all the more.)

The film has its set-pieces, including that well-known one in which Nicholson gives vent to his stock-in-trade furious soliloquies when confronted by a diner’s set-menu upon which there can be no customer-led improvisation - one almost match by a hitchhiker’s tirade against the trash on which people spend good one. As a whole, however, it proceeds as a mood piece in which discontent with life makes for sour asides and briefly-seized opportunities, often of a carnal nature.

That this is a raw existence is mirrored by the way in which events unfurl when he learns that his father has suffered a stroke and his brother a neck injury. Return to that family home, in its muted colours, proves as on-edge as it had been in the series of trailer-parks and motels where he and Karen Black had holed up.

Is there residual honour in all this? Or is it all-round irresponsibility? How does one reconcile Tammy Wynette and Chopin? At little more than ninety minutes, the film contains more than the scenes and sounds which so often bloat the screen five decades on.

To get the pitch right for a romantic comedy means that it should have an edge, and, in theory there is plenty of this here - but it is almost impossible to believe that a civil sercant will invite somebody, on a second date, to a high-level global conference in Iceland. It becomes difficult to give much credence to what is being said, on all sides, `

To ctach up with this first series has been a diverting time in mid-winter. This is not simply a matter of its being set in Hawaii but in following an array of characters who are just this side of caricature - and often betond it - as guests and staff overlap in in a pricey, secluded resort. The dialogue, often brief, sometimes the stuff almost of monologue, is a delight - perhaps the best set-up since Six Feet Under a couple of decades ago. It has spurred me to watch more written and directed by Mike White.

Written by associates of Billy Wilder and directed by Howard Haws, who was never one to slacken the pace, this is a return to the screwball trends of the previous two decades. As with those, the premise is slight, even preposterous: Cary Grant, married to Ginger Rogers, is on the track of a rejuvenation liquid at a labatory where a secretary is Marilyn Monroe: another early part to which she beings brio - although there are moments when all the cast is outclassed by a chimp and even by a (human) baby. Do not inger over the illogic of it all, but relish one surreal scene after another - and help Grant look for his spectacles.

Five years before Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960) there was the apartment which is the main setting for his The Seven Year Itch. This film, however, is of course best known for that scene in which Marilyn’s white dress billows when caught by a gust through the sidewalk vent of a subway after she and Tom Ewell have been to a showing of The Creature from the Black Lagoon at a Manhattan cinema.

That had been released the year before, one of many details which locates the film in its time - an era when the Catholic church continued to hold sway over what could be depicted upon the screen, especially when it came to the subject of the footloose husbands taking advantage of their wives and children being absent from the fetid city for the summer.

And so what does do Tom when Marilyn rents the apartment above?

Well, he delivers many a monologue about his honourable intentions while giving way to fantasies which take a different tack - including one which parodies the beach scene in From Here to Eternity and another in which, hospitalised, he finds a nurse flinging herself upon his bed (a spirited turn by Carolyn Jones, who became Morticia in The Addams Family). He occupies more of the screen than his neighbour, but Marilyn brings to proceedings a wit and comedy which lift it almost to the level of Wilder’s most notable films.

Strange to say, censorship also lifts the film. George Axelrod’s Broadway play led to seduction forbidden on film, but the latter has all the more of a frisson for its being an unfulfilled possibility.

As with The Apartment, which was inspired by Brief Encounter, so The Seven Year Itch has a Coward connection. One of the fantasies has Ewell imagining himself wooing her by sitting in a cocktail jacket at a piano while playing Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto.

There are enough bravura moments to keep one happily diverted - a view of a sultry summer which eases a chill winter’s viewing, and leaves one also wondering whether it will be revived on stage in its original form - and, of course, eager to seek out The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

As for the wisdom of keeping one’s underwear in the freezer, that is something for each viewer to decide for herself - or even himself.

Only the mention of the start of a football match and its ending make one realise that the eighty minutes of Locke (2013) have not taken place in real time. That is, and also the reflection that had it done so then concrete-expert Tom Hardy would have been arrested for breaking the speed limit.

The film features only him as, strapped in, he drives along a night-time motorway all those 120 miles from Birmingham to London. As it is, the police could have pilled him to the hard shoulder, for he speaks well-nigh continually on his (admittedly hands-free) cellphone.

Written and directed by Steven Knight, who is well known for more conventional television work, this outing stands up well a decade on. Against a continual background of other vehicles’ lights and blue signs upon the bridges ahead, Hardy confronts the meaning of life. (The film’s title is not a reference to the philosopher but this eponymous Welsh driver, first name Ivan.) His career has been given to calculating the correct consistency of the concrete to be poured into the ground to support towers being built around the country. (Presumably he is a subscriber to the long-running, fascinating magazine Concrete Quarterly, whose archive is now available online.) The latest job, in the Midlands, is of particular interest to the powers-that-be in Chicago.

And what do we find? Locke has done a bunk this night before the dawn when the mixture should begin to pour into those foundations which are also the basis for the firm’s future contracts. Furthermore, he is not on the way back to his wife and sons but to the hospital where a troubled woman is about to give birth to the child whom he sired upon her after a casual encounter at some frightful awayday gathering.

All of this emerges amidst his giving instructions to a deputy about arranging the new day’s concrete pouring (which brings the immortal reply, several times, “I’m in an Indian restaurant!”). The motor-car echoes to all these variously querulous exchanges as Locke fixes his eyes upon the road ahead - physically and metaphorically. Among those seen but not heard are Ruth Wilson and Olivia Colman. One might wonder how it would work as a radio play, or read to oneself. Much, however, is gained by the darkness and fluorescence - and by the many expressions which Locke brings to something which would be a familiar scenario had it been otherwise set (if one can use that verb in this concrete context).