Film Reviews by Count Otto Black

Samuel Fuller is best known for making gritty, uncompromising dramas about subjects which were sometimes extremely controversial back in the day, such as racism and prostitution, along with several films pointing out that war is very nasty indeed and should be avoided if at all possible, and a number of westerns that were quite ferocious for their time.

Unfortunately this movie of none of the above. It's very atypical for a Sam Fuller film, being so lightweight that it was nearly made as a musical. When, three-quarters of the way through, a thug gets a brutal beating he thoroughly deserves for doing something far worse, it's as jarring as Mary Poppins suddenly pulling out a gun. It's also one of the very few scenes which can honestly be called action. Most dramas about newspapers involve reporters chasing down major stories. "Park Row" (the title, by the way, refers to the US equivalent of Fleet Street) does its best to hide its miniscule budget by making ingenious use of its rather small main set - Fuller's skill as a director is most apparent here - but, apart from several other even smaller interior sets, it can't afford to take us anywhere else, so nearly every newsworthy event happens offscreen and we're told how spectacular it was, in the grand Shakespearean tradition of two soldiers coming in and telling the king they're an army of 50,000 men, most of whom are waiting outside.

Shakespearean is not the word I'd use for the dialogue. It's one of those historical dramas in which everybody somehow manages to constantly mention famous people and events so that you know how historical it is, even though normal conversations aren't like that at all. Some of the dialogue literally consists of somebody listing all the famous people who were present at a glittering event that was too expensive for us to actually see. There are also rather a lot of quirky ethnic stereotypes. Their purpose is obviously to show how cosmopolitan and unprejudiced this new journal is compared to all the rest, but quirky is a thing you can tire of very quickly indeed. As for the lengthy discussions about such riveting topics as the technical difficulties involved in building an automatic typesetting machine, I wish it had been a musical after all, because some of the songs would have been Pythonesque in the extreme - I'm sure Eric Idle would have enjoyed composing the lyrics to: "Oh Dear, We've Run Out Of Paper!"

It means well, but it's incredibly clunky, and very little actually happens. As for the romantic subplot, well, put it this way. When the male and female leads dislike each other intensely at the start of the movie, but she's the only significant female character in the film, and they're shown kissing on the poster, what do you suppose will happen? As with nearly everyone who got the dreaded "And Introducing..." credit, Mary Welch sank without trace, this being her only movie. I'm not surprised; she's a mediocre actress who has a peculiarly irritating smirk on her face almost every moment she's on screen. And there's something oddly unlikable about the hero too. This was Sam Fuller's favorite of his own movies, but having seen well over half of them, it's my least favorite so far.

Most critics have praised this film to the skies for its subtle, thoughtful approach to the subject of aliens landing on Earth. Personally I think they may have overrated it simply because it's so rare for a serious film about extraterrestrial visitors to portray them as anything other than terrifying monsters, in the same way that some people thought "Batman Begins" was the greatest movie ever made because it depicted the activities of a superhero almost plausibly.

The best thing about "Arrival" is that its "heptapods" are genuinely alien. Their motives aren't just unknown but unknowable, and the entire point of the film is that something as basic as asking them why they're here is an almost impossibly difficult problem, but it has to be solved quickly because the entire planet is getting increasingly nervous. And it does indeed make a nice change to have completely passive aliens sitting around doing nothing, while it's the humans who provide the ticking clock of dramatic tension by worrying about them to the point where they're thinking of launching nukes from sheer xenophobia.

The worst thing about it is its third act. For most of its running time, "Arrival" is superb. But its final half-hour unravels in very odd ways, as if they were having trouble thinking of an ending. After numerous scenes in which the difficulty of communicating with these beings has been explained in very logical ways time and time again, suddenly they've got every amazing superpower required by the script, and they literally know everything except a few very specific things that would ruin the plot, such as how to communicate in even the most basic fashion with humans. It's almost like that trope whereby Doctor Who knows everything about the past and future of every planet in the Universe so long as the information is trivial and useless, but is strangely ignorant about the planet he's on right now where rubber monsters are trying to kill him.

I found myself thinking: "Oh come on, these aliens can't be that clever and that stupid at the same time!", and my willing suspension of disbelief went up in smoke. Other details began to bother me too. The government of a major world power, having failed to get through to the heptapods in human language, tries using a ludicrous method of communication absolutely guaranteed to result in misunderstanding just because at this point the plot needs ET to say something that sounds like a threat. And there's a very odd surprise revelation that has nothing whatsoever to do with the aliens, and requires two major characters not to mention the elephant in the room for almost the entire movie just to throw a totally pointless plot-twist at us very late on.

The other thing that has to be said is that if the Razzies were real awards as opposed to a talentless clique's boring ego trip, this film would get one for its cinematography. The entire movie is weirdly murky, including scenes taking place outdoors in broad daylight, and at times it looks so bad that if it was old and obscure, I would have assumed they couldn't find a better print. The aliens and their environment are minimalist to the point of being dull, and the Surrealist hovering rock spaceship is kept offscreen in an extraordinarily clumsy way for as long as possible as if it's going to be a huge surprise, despite being on the poster, and then presented to us in a very matter-of-fact fashion that makes it look strangely undramatic. I've never seen a major movie in which the director was less aware of the visual elements. And that does kind of matter when you're making a film.

Overall it's a bit of a muddle that's two-thirds great and one-third woefully contrived. And it really does look amateurishly terrible in places. I'd say it's overrated in a very unfortunate way, because it's nearly superb, but makes some inexcusably clumsy mistakes.

This visually gorgeous film is one of quite a few Japanese movies in which samurai, whose inhumanly strict code of honor requires them to behave like emotionless fighting machines, are revealed to be passionate men who care deeply about something or other, usually something that conflicts with their duty ("Harakiri" is a particularly fine example of this genre). It's also a film intended purely for the Japanese market, so you may have difficulty understanding why the characters behave they way they do unless you have a basic grasp of historical Japanese culture, in the same way that Japanese viewers might be confused by "Witchfinder General".

Lady Kesa, who is really the main character, inevitably comes across as a bit helpless and passive because that's how Japanese women were expected to behave back then. She is literally her husband's property, and could suddenly belong to somebody else if the dim-witted shogun her husband serves thinks that would be appropriate. So when minor samurai Morito saves her life by taking on overwhelming odds, falls madly in love with her, and as his reward for this and other brave deeds, asks for her to be made his wife, she's in a tricky situation. She's also somewhat conflicted; she loves her husband because he's a very nice man, but this other fellow has spectacular ways of getting her attention!

Unfortunately, heroic though he may be in battle, Morito is a borderline madman. When he dedicates himself to a cause, he'll fight with such single-minded determination that he's a superb warrior, and he'll denounce his own brother rather than betray a master he has sworn to serve. The trouble is, his concept of being in love runs along exactly the same lines, to the point where "love" is entirely the wrong word for it. That's not a spoiler because it's clear from the start how obsessive Morito is. Kesa's husband Lord Watanabe, on the other hand, is a truly noble man who shrugs off incidents a more stereotypical samurai would take very seriously indeed because he knows how absurd it is for supposedly rational men to fight to the death over wounded pride. What he lacks is Morito's ferocious intensity, and it seems as though when they eventually fight, as inevitably they must, he won't have a chance.

Apart from the superb cinematography, this film's strength is the way it shows how human beings locked into a totally artificial set of rules are still human, for better or worse, and may define such things as love, honor and heroism in very different ways, some of which are ultimately more valid than others. In a thinly veiled critique of the social values which had recently dragged Japan into a disastrous war, a man with a severe personality disorder who acts as if he's at war with everyone all the time is hailed as a hero, while another man is constantly criticized for behaving sensibly, and the nobleman whose orders they all have to follow is a pompous fool.

What lets it down a bit is some rather stylized acting, and a very simple plot which doesn't give the main characters enough to do in the lengthy midsection. In particular, it's obvious that the moment Lord Watanabe finds out how serious the situation is, a showdown must occur, and that'll be the end of the film, therefore he has to spend most of his screen time in blissful ignorance doing nothing much. He seems like a nice guy, but it's not exactly riveting. Still, it all looks absolutely gorgeous.

I tried to like this. I really did. But there's something horribly wrong with it. The acid test of comedy is how often you laugh, and I laughed a lot less often than I thought I would. The earlier series of Q in Volume 1, though not perfect, have many more memorably funny moments, and the Goon Show, recorded 20 or more years before, is still consistently funny today, with far more hits than misses. It's the other way round here. Constantly, Spike gets a much bigger laugh from pointing out that a joke didn't get a laugh than from the joke itself. I got the distinct impression that the audience were hyped up by the fact that, at the time, Spike Milligan was officially the funniest man in the world so they expected to laugh, and if a completely unknown comic had tried to win them over with material this weak, he'd have been met with stony silence and perhaps even boos.

Sketches often make absolutely no sense. By popular demand, the Idiot Boy Scouts return, but this time around they're not funny. A promising idea about a ridiculous British space rocket designed by a moron, which launches an unsuspecting working-class couple's home into orbit and causes them all kinds of confusion, forgets what it's supposed to be about halfway through, and suddenly the whole point of it is that firemen are so stupid that they sometimes try to put out fires in houses that obviously aren't on fire. We're supposed to roar with laughter because the Queen has a tuba on her head for no reason at all. And so on. The mostly very bad supporting cast, some of whom had a television career simply because Spike was their buddy (or, in the case of the huge-breasted and utterly talentless Julia Breck, he was sleeping with them), fluff their lines and laugh at their own wackiness, which gets bigger laughs than the script because laughter is infectious.

And the political incorrectness has to be seen to be believed, though it actually got worse in Spike's final series for the BBC, "There's a Lot Of It About", which I expected to be part of this compilation because it was Q10 in all but name. It's hard to laugh at a sketch in which Arabs are repeatedly referred to as wogs, and portrayed as obnoxious terrorists who spit in people's faces and have sex with goats. At one point, I had to rewind the DVD because I couldn't believe what Spike had just ad-libbed, but yes, he did indeed threaten to gas the studio audience with Zyklon-B and kill them like the Jews if they didn't laugh louder! Too often, this isn't so much comedy as a man who is starting his descent into severe mental illness saying and doing totally random things, and being indulged because he's famous. And the musical numbers weren't even a good idea at the time, though presumably nobody dared to say so in case Spike had one of his tantrums. Sometimes it's funny, but mostly it's just odd, and ultimately rather depressing.

Firstly, if you hate spoilers, too bad; the previous reviewer told you the entire plot. Anyway. This is one of those "landmark" films which made a big impression all right, but was somewhat overrated because you should never buy the prototype. It's a fascinating window on the very early sixties just before everything changed because the Beatles happened, but to be honest, Albert Finney's "hero", though realistically unlikeable, is basically a smug git who doesn't genuinely seem to learn that much or change significantly as a result of his misdeeds, the consequences of which are, as he says himself, no worse than what he's had before, and nothing he can't shrug off. And why not? I've been beaten up far worse than that (and for much less reason), and it didn't really change anything except that I had to lie down for a while.

At no point was I genuinely interested in this man, nor did I want him to find true happiness because he's difficult to care about that much. Albert Finney's performance is a little odd, and some of the scenes where he provides voiceover narration almost made me laugh, because I kept thinking he was going to go all Four Yorkshiremen and say: "There were 26 of us living in a paper bag in a septic tank..." Alex in "A Clockwork Orange" is a much nastier and therefore much more interesting person learning similar lessons in a much more dramatic way. And "Get Carter" (the original version, obviously) shows us a very similar slice of working-class life a decade later, but is far more compelling. The minor characters in that film mostly don't go any further than the supporting cast in this one, but there are many scenes where it has a similar vibe but is more vibrant, if you catch my drift.

I don't give a damn about the living conditions of real working-class people in the Midlands before I was born, any more than I agonize over the Napoleonic Wars, but I'm willing to be drawn into any narrative which involves me because it's well written. This movie is very strangely written indeed, and although I haven't read it (and I don't intend to), the source novel presumably must be too. Minor or downright marginal characters kept getting my attention more than the central protagonist, but everything that happens revolves around him to an excessive degree, so most of them either fade into the background or behave in unrealistic ways. A particularly weird example of this is the black man who is established at the very start to be our hero's friend, an early example of taking the curse off a not very nice main character by lazily telling us that if he isn't a racist he must be basically good, no matter how badly he treats everyone else. The black guy, having appeared in the movie for precisely long enough to establish that he exists and serves as a very specific plot point, vanishes and is never mentioned again.

Which neatly sums up this film's flaws. It's interesting in a curiously perverse way, because I kept wishing it was about just about anyone in it except the person it's actually about. But if this is an autobiography, I can't help feeling that the author must left out an awful lot that made him look like an even worse person than he does in this whitewashed version. By the way, check out the number of people in the crew, including director Freddie Francis, who ended up making horror movies for Hammer. It's probably irrelevant, but hey, it's a thing!

Akira Kurosawa made some great movies. Unfortunately this early film isn't one of them. Oddly, it has approximately the same plot as the much later "Blue Steel" starring Jamie Lee Curtis, one of the last people you'd expect to step into the shoes of Toshiro Mifune! Talking of whom, he's not as over the top as he sometimes was, probably because he's not playing his default character, the incredibly stern samurai who looks as though he has barbed wire for breakfast, but I constantly had the impression that this man wasn't ideally suited for police-work, being both emotionally unstable and not over bright. That other less celebrated frequent member of Kurosawa's ensemble, Takashi Shimura (you may remember him as the leader of the Seven Samurai), gives a far better performance, and is much more plausible as a competent policeman.

The film's strength lies in its characters. Almost everyone we meet, including the criminals, is a believable human being with complicated motivations that aren't one-dimensionally good or bad. The hero is, as another character points out to him, irrationally obsessive about the crimes committed with his stolen handgun by somebody who would otherwise have done exactly the same things with a different gun, so really he's more concerned about his wounded pride than anything else. The "stray dog" of the title, although he remains unseen for almost the entire film, is repeatedly shown to be no supervillain, just a weak, muddled man doing bad things for confused, pathetic reasons. Even minor characters are allowed odd little moments where they do something quirky, such as admiring the night sky simply because they've just noticed how pretty it is.

The film's weakness is that it's very slow, and not much happens. Almost all the really dramatic incidents take place offscreen, and we're shown way too much footage of Toshiro Mifune wandering down streets or sitting in rooms waiting for somebody to eventually reveal a vital piece of information. I expect this is an accurate depiction of what real police-work is like, but it's not terribly interesting. I'd give it two and a half stars if this site allowed me to, but I'll go the extra half because Kurosawa was clearly trying to do his best. But his best was yet to come, and in 1949 he had a few things still to learn about plot structure.

Ignore that hastily-typed synopsis written by somebody with poor literacy skills who hasn't seen the movie. This is a made-for-TV pilot which didn't lead to a series, and that should tell you rather a lot. Its main problem, apart from the painfully low budget, is that it's a superhero origin story in which the hero doesn't have the slightest idea what's going on until halfway through the film, and doesn't really get the hang of it until the last few minutes. I suspect the main reason for this was that special effects cost money, and the scriptwriters were under strict orders not to include too much magic in a story which was supposed to be entirely about magic. For example, as in the comic, Doctor Strange's love interest is called Clea. In the comic, she's a platinum blonde magic space pixie from the Dark Dimension who wears psychedelic tights and her dad rules several universes and his head's on fire. In this film, she's a normal human being who needs to be rescued. Which neatly sums up what's wrong with the entire movie.

That, and the abysmal acting of almost everyone involved. John Mills as the Ancient One (Tilda Swinton isn't the first non-Chinese actor to play him!) is the honorable exception, but even he gives an unenthusiastic performance which implies he knows it's a load of tosh but he needs the money. Some bloke you've never heard of is painfully wooden as the hero who doesn't really do all that much until very late in the film, and in the opposite corner, we get King Arthur's evil half-sister played by an actress who would probably have eaten the scenery if there was more of it (the Dark Dimension looks about the size of my living-room), some sort of luminous muppet, and a couple of demons whose costumes are so cheap we don't get a proper look at them. Even Doctor Strange's origin story, which constitutes most of the plot, is greatly changed so that they don't have to bother going to expensive locations like Nepal. Watch last year's remake instead - sometimes more really is better.

Doctor Strange is one of the most cinematic of superheroes, since his powers have always been far more visually interesting than almost anybody else's; instead of firing a boring old ray or simply punching people, elaborate mandalas leap forth from his hands and have all manner of effects on his foes. And the places he visits in the course of his adventures are downright Surreal.

This movie, one of the best entries so far in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, does not disappoint visually, and Benedict Cumberbatch is excellent as the brilliant but selfish neurosurgeon who learns to be a better man in the course of becoming a very peculiar superhero. If you've seen the abysmal "Green Lantern", you may experience an odd sense of déjà vu, since it's almost a remake; an arrogant and thoroughly unlikeable man goes to a superhero academy where he's given visually interesting powers which he initially struggles with, his instructors bully him until he gets the hang of it, the baddie he fights for most of the film is the dupe of the real Big Bad, who is basically a giant floating satanic space head, and one of his allies is a good guy whom anyone who has read the comics knows will be the bad guy in the sequel. Fortunately, unlike "Green Lantern", they get it right.

Well, almost. If you've seen "Inception", you'll notice that the exact same CGI software developed for that film is in constant use here, and frankly it gets a bit tedious. I don't know what the rules of magic are supposed to be, but it seems that a disproportionate number of spells cause architecture to elaborately rearrange itself, and I can think of more interesting enemies for Doctor Strange to fight than a revolving corridor! Or indeed the villains who cause all those corridors to revolve. Some bloke with minimal backstory whose pact with the Dark Side causes him to develop incredibly seventies eye-makeup, his three nonentity minions, and a weirdly cartoonish hovering head that's supposed to be The Worst Thing Ever? The sequel needs to do better! And talking of the rules of magic, there's no real sense of what Doctor Strange's limitations are. His powers seem to vary from being slightly less useful than having a gun to godlike as the plot requires, and that's very lazy scriptwriting.

On the plus side, the standard of the acting is almost uniformly excellent. Right-on PC criticism has been leveled at the casting of Tilda Swinton as a character who in the comic is both Asian and male, but you know what? The Ancient One as envisaged by Marvel over half a century ago is such a clichéd racial stereotype that portraying him accurately would have been less politically correct than casting a white woman. I notice that nobody's whining about the fact that Mordo being black and not being a baron shows bias against Eastern European aristocrats, but that would make just as much sense. Some people won't be satisfied until James Bond is a disabled Eskimo lesbian. They should be happy that poor old Wong finally has a personality! It's not a truly great film, but it's far better than anything the Official DC Cinematic Universe has given us yet, and Benedict Cumberbatch inhabits the character superbly, making me eager to see what he gets up to next, now that his origin story is over and done with.

Fun thing to watch out for: although, like all Disney films, this one never, ever shows anybody smoking in case that causes the entire audience to rush out and get cancer, Stan Lee is briefly glimpsed reading and thoroughly enjoying a book advocating the use of illegal hallucinogenic drugs. Go figure.

Firstly, as noted by previous reviewers, if you've seen "The Talented Mister Ripley", this film won't hold too many surprises for you, since it's the first screen version of the same story, and Alain Delon's character is indeed called Tom Ripley, despite not by any stretch of the imagination being plausibly American.

Apart from that, Delon is astonishingly good as the psychopathic anti-hero. Since it's almost a one-man show, he has to be. Fortunately the screenplay develops the character in sufficiently interesting ways to make us care about him. Initially he's willing to be the lackey of the rich people who employ him or treat him as a casually disposable "friend", taking what scraps he can from their table and hiding his envy and resentment. But the way he's treated, especially the incident referred to by the original French title (which means "plenty of sun" - not too snappy in English, hence the meaningless substitute), makes us understand why he might reasonably feel that he'd been pushed too far. Though of course, he himself pushes it even further. And then some!

Halfway between the unstoppable, implacable Hannibal Lecter and the twitchy, desperate Norman Bates, you've got Tom Ripley, a psycho who really will do just about anything, but isn't quite as clever as he thinks he is, and is at the same time smart enough to worry about this, not necessarily in time to avoid screwing up. French cinema has always been far better than Hollywood at putting utterly twisted people front and center and making them worth watching - just look at "Rififi" or "Les Diaboliques" - and here we have another superb example. Delon's interplay with Maurice Ronet, playing his obliviously crass "buddy", is absolutely perfect, for which Ronet (basically a French version of the unfairly forgotten Robert Shaw) deserves a lot of credit.

Unfortunately some of the other supporting cast are treated less well. The very sweet Marie Laforêt doesn't have enough to do, and since the lady can actually sing, she should have been given a proper chance to do so if they were going to have her strum a guitar and go "la, la, la" at all. And what's with that ballet school? I assume it's a major subplot in the original novel, which I haven't read, but here it seems to have been randomly inserted for no reason at all. So it's not a perfect movie. But as a portrait of a man tiptoeing along the edge of a razor for reasons that are (almost) entirely his own fault, it's very good indeed. And the whole thing looks so gorgeous that you'll probably want to go on holiday at the locations on the off-chance they're still unspoiled (I wouldn't know, but somehow I doubt it). Early sixties European cinema at very nearly its very best. Highly recommended.

This film is chiefly notable for two things: establishing Vincent Price as an A-list horror star, and overdoing 3D to such an extent that one scene, involving a paddle-ball toy, gave several lucky cinema-goers detached retinas! Unfortunately it's not a particularly good film. The direction often seems listless, perhaps because of the extra size and weight of the 3D cameras, and Price, though he's very believable as a weirdly polite madman who combines creepiness with charm, is absent from large stretches of the movie, and doesn't really do all that much except at the beginning and end. The middle section is overlong and not terribly interesting, being more concerned with finding excuses for irrelevant objects to loom out of the screen than thrilling or horrifying us. Though we do get to see an unknown actor called Charles Buchinsky, who would later change his surname to Bronson, playing a deaf mute called Igor.

Some of the problems result from the omission of important elements in the 1933 film "The Mystery Of The Wax Museum", of which this is a remake, and which is included in its entirety as an extraordinarily generous DVD extra. In particular, the earlier movie is completely dominated by Glenda Farrell's hyperactive wisecracking girl reporter, whose character is absent from the 1953 version, no doubt because she doesn't behave at all like a good girl should. Instead, we get Phyllis Kirk having to double up as the damsel in distress played by Fay Wray in 1933 and the plucky young lady who finds the vital clue without misbehaving the way her predecessor did, which of course means that she's nowhere near as much fun.

The earlier version, despite being filmed using a very odd and short-lived process meaning that it's almost in color but not quite (or perhaps because of that), has a far weirder atmosphere, some nice sets obviously influenced by German Expressionism, and although the 1953 film actually has several action scenes the earlier one doesn't, the 1933 version seems much livelier and far more tightly edited, even though it's only seven minutes shorter. It's also grittier in some respects. The police are casually brutal and corrupt, the female lead drinks, swears, and attends autopsies, and the character who in the remake is an alcoholic is a junkie. Lionel Atwill as the mad sculptor isn't a patch on Vincent Price, but you can't have everything. And it's very nice to get a whole extra movie you weren't expecting, especially as it's arguably better than the main attraction.

"How do you kill mud?" asks the hero of this movie, a question that has surely never been asked before or since, except perhaps by a few people who really hated glam rock. This early Hammer film was made before they discovered gothic horror. In 1956, their biggest hit so far had been the sci-fi shocker "The Quatermass Xperiment", and this movie is a blatant attempt to copy that formula right down to the clumsy title including a capital X to prove it's not kids' stuff, as sci-fi tended to be in those days. It's also very similar to "The Blob", and would be an obvious rip-off had it not been made two years earlier, so maybe it inspired Steve McQueen's bizarre screen debut. Another thing it's extremely similar to is early seventies "Doctor Who"; it's easy to imagine Jon Pertwee coping with the strange problem of a monster that eats nuclear power stations (many modern viewers will no doubt be rooting for the monster). But in 1956 Time Lords hadn't been invented yet, so the task falls to a certain Dr. Adam Royston.

Herein lies the main reason why this film isn't the minor classic it could have been. Just as the charmless and permanently drunk American actor Brian Donleavy was cast as the title character in the first two Quatermass movies and ruined them, Dean Jagger plays the hero of a film set in Britain where everybody else is British because Hammer thought this would improve its chances of being a hit in the USA. Which turned out not to be the case, because he's absolutely dreadful. He's got as much charisma as the mud he's trying to kill, and sometimes he pauses in mid-sentence in such an odd way that I'm pretty sure he was reading his lines from cue-cards. Peter Cushing would have carried it off magnificently, especially the laugh-out-loud "scientific" explanation for all this nonsense, which is worthy of Ed Wood, but alas, this is proto-Hammer, and none of the familiar faces are present (except my uncle's old drinking buddy Michael Ripper, who was in just about all of them somewhere or other - that's him playing the army sergeant).

The other problem is the monster. In the first half, where we don't see what it is, only what it does - and one of the deaths is very graphic indeed for 1956 - it's genuinely menacing. And then we find out that it looks like chocolate pudding, and for some reason it's not scary any more. Also, its actions become totally predictable a bit too early, meaning that all the peril in the latter part of the film is extremely contrived. But overall this is nearly a very good sci-fi/horror B-movie, let down by one terrible bit of casting.

Considering it was made in 1945, this is an astonishingly frank portrayal of what it's like to be a hopeless alcoholic, and Ray Milland gives the performance of his life as the utterly wretched central character, right from the opening scene where, with twitchy desperation, he tries to convince his wearily skeptical brother that he really is staying on the wagon this time, a promise the audience knows he isn't even going to try to keep because the very first shot of the movie has shown us his cunningly concealed bottle.

The trouble is, it's very hard indeed to feel any sympathy for the person in whose company we spend almost every minute of the film. He's the reason why it's a terrible idea to go into a bar on your own; somebody like this will inevitably sit next to you and subject you to his "I coulda been a contender" monologue that all the regulars have heard a thousand times, and it will soon become obvious that he never coulda been anything except a pub bore. Our hero's personal tragedy is that his teenage ambition to be a Great Writer didn't work out, self-pity drove him to drink, and now he's got two things to feel sorry for himself about. He's 33 years old, he's been living on his brother's charity since dropping out of university, and he spends his days telling bored bartenders what a Great Writer he'd be if only he could remember all the purple prose booze inspires him to spout when he's sober enough to type.

He's a noisy, tedious drunk who does mean-spirited things and doesn't really seem to care about anyone except himself, and I didn't care whether he sobered up and wrote a Great Novel or staggered in front of a bus and died. I also found it completely implausible that a girl like the one played by Jane Wyman would have stuck with this whining wretch through three years of broken promises (oddly, there's another character in the film who seems far more likely to have put up with such behavior, but is wasted as the setup for a contrived plot point which ends up being all about our sozzled hero). There's some superb acting going on here, and as a pseudo-documentary about substance abuse it pulls very few punches, but my complete lack of empathy with the main character or concern about his fate left me feeling that I was watching a film which was technically great without really getting emotionally involved in it, to the point where, during moments that were supposed to be intensely dramatic, I found myself wondering how come an alcoholic who will sell anything he can get his hands on to buy his next drink lives in such a well-furnished flat.

A movie with a plot as goofy as this one has ought to be a riot, but in the sort of rôle Vincent Price or Boris Karloff could really have sunk their teeth into, Robert H. Harris is basically Donald Pleasance without the talent, and bumbles through most of this sub-B-picture like that uncle everyone says is nice but you get the feeling you probably shouldn't ask him to babysit. Talking of lack of talent, halfway through the film, everything stops while we're subjected to an atrocious and irrelevant song and dance routine, featuring some kid who tries so very, very hard to be Elvis that I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

I suppose it's an ingenious ruse for the permanently cash-strapped American International Pictures to use their own studio as the main set, and recycle two fairly successful monsters from recent movies in such a way as to be able to blatantly advertise both those films throughout this one. Unfortunately, the completely bonkers plot - an embittered monster makeup expert uses mind-control foundation cream he just happens to have invented for no reason at all to turn actors into killers - would only work if this film was either an outright spoof, or had been made by someone like Ed Wood who was prepared to go completely over the top with a perfectly straight face. What we get is a monster movie in which the actors don't have to wear their monster makeup all that often, and when they do, they're hardly ever doing anything monstrous, because that would be too expensive. The giveaway is the scene where the film-within-the-film is shooting a titanic battle between Teenage Frankenstein and Teenage Werewolf, and we get to see precisely one second of it!

A cast of nobodies who mostly can't act and lackluster direction make the whole movie feel very flat, and the enormous amount of padding doesn't help. For example, the lengthy interrogation by not very bright cops of a boring character to establish why he didn't hear somebody being murdered, when we already know it was because the guy was sitting in another building hundreds of yards away listening to the radio, and this has nothing to do with anything. It does liven up a bit at the end, when, after a whole hour shot in black and white to save money, suddenly it's in color! And suddenly Robert H. Harris thinks he's Vincent Price in "The House Of Wax"! Of course, he's sadly mistaken, but all those monster props from much better B-movies hanging on the wall are fun to see in color. I always assumed the aliens in "The Invasion Of The Saucer Men" were green, but it turns out they're orange. Which sums up the why this movie is a damp squib. If the best part of a film is spotting all the things left over from other films that keep turning up in it, you're far better off watching those films instead.

Although it's set almost 400 years ago, this film is really a savage indictment of the mercilessly rigid code of honour and duty which still to some extent dominates Japanese society, and certainly did until the end of World War 2. And by extension, all societies which value total obedience to pointless rules above simple humanity. Though fortunately not many societies require men who are perceived to have broken meaningless taboos to ritually disembowel themselves.

Tatsuya Nakadai is absolutely magnificent as the unemployed samurai who comes to a noble house seeking this gruesome privilege. At first, his thousand-yard stare and burned-out stoicism threaten a one-note performance that's going to become wearisome. And after the terrible fate of the previous man who asked the same thing is revealed to him, and us too, in flashbacks that are harder to watch than any horror film because what happens is so hideously believable, and he isn't deterred, it looks very much as though we're running out of plot with three-quarters of the film still to go.

And then we start to find out what's really going on, in a story told mainly in flashback, and Nakadai gets to show off his full range as an actor, as we find out how a samurai who honored the code of bushido all his life eventually discovered in the hardest possible way what it was worth compared with basic human decency. Not many actors could pull off the feat of showing us the many sides of this character, from the loving and kindly family man to the implacable avenger driven by cold, hopeless rage, and quite a lot in between, but Nakadai genuinely convinces us that this is the same person at different times in his life, depending on how fate has been treating him. And unfortunately fate really has it in for him.

It's slow-moving, but in a way that builds the tension steadily, with new layers of plot constantly being added in flashback as the protagonist explains how he reached this point to a crowd waiting with increasing impatience to see him die. And although it's not action-packed, it's not action-free either, and sometimes it gets downright ferocious. This is a landmark of Japanese cinema that deserves to be far better known, and a searing indictment of the hypocrisy of cultures that think their traditions, however cruel and useless, matter more than the people whose lives are controlled and sometimes destroyed by them.

This lesser-known and extremely atypical Kurosawa film is one of those odd movies that you can't truly dislike because every frame tells you that the numerous extremely talented people involved think it really matters and are giving it all they've got, which is a pleasant change from the relentless greed of today's soulless blockbusters in which some of the actors aren't even alive. But at the same time you can't help admitting that it doesn't quite work. The elephant in the room is that the hero is a saintly simpleton who never tells lies or hides how he feels. Masayuki Mori acts his heart out, but how much complexity can he possibly bring to a character who has none at all? And he has to keep it up virtually non-stop for two and three-quarter hours.

"The Man Who Fell To Earth", which was obviously influenced by this film in many of the scenes where it departs from its source-novel, works far better because its protagonist is an extraterrestrial, so it makes sense for him to have an impossible mix of elements in his personality. Here, the hero is required to have a very specific form of post-traumatic epilepsy that I doubt any doctor has ever actually seen, which somehow makes him into Jesus Christ because he has brain damage, and his stupidity is counterbalanced by infallible wisdom and intuition so acute that he's at least borderline psychic. He comes across less as a person than a set of tropes. He doesn't even have any backstory beyond the one event that simultaneously made him resolve to be a better person and drove him insane - being sentenced to death but reprieved at the very last moment. By the way, the synopsis on the General Info page is, as usual, slightly wrong. Kameda isn't a war criminal; he was mistaken for one, and the error was discovered just in time. So we don't even know whether he's atoning for terrible things he once did, or just a bit mental.

Toshiro Mifune is more restrained than he usually is, but Akama is so obviously a man with an exaggerated personality which just happens to be the exact opposite of Kameda's that he even says so himself. Setsuko Hara provides the best acting as the woman who forms the third part of the love triangle central to the plot, but she too is not so much a person as a game-piece whose own life-shaping trauma has left her with a few very specific and very intense personality traits. It's all terribly intense, but not as moving as it wants to be because these people and the situations they get into seem as symbolically stylized as the weather - if this film is to be believed, in Hokkaido it's always Winter. For a film about various kinds of raging passion, its artificiality sometimes makes it seem as cold as the cast must have been trudging around in all that snow.