Film Reviews by Count Otto Black

This isn't the most action-packed western ever made, though it does include sufficient gunplay to make sure we know that the looming threats hovering over the main characters throughout could erupt into real violence at any moment. Where it scores over just about every other western of the fifties is the complexity of both its psychology and its morality, which prefigures the amoral spaghetti westerns that would come along a few years later.

With the exception of one absolute scumbag of a villain, whose despicable actions motivate everything that ends up happening, no-one is entirely good or entirely bad. Townsfolk too cowardly to solve their own problems hire quasi-official lawman Henry Fonda, along with his even more dubious sidekick Anthony Quinn, a duo closely based on Wyatt Earp (whom Fonda had played earlier in his career) and Doc Holliday, to clean up their town, while pretending to disapprove of the fact that obviously people are going to get killed. Meanwhile, Richard Widmark, a good man with a shady past and, apparently, a rather low IQ, decides to do the right thing despite enormous pressure not to, gambling on the fact that most people are basically decent and will support him, and until very late in the film we have no idea how well this is going to work out for him.

Alongside this main plot, almost every major character and most of the minor ones constantly rearrange their positions like chess pieces that are allowed to switch sides, which in one way or another almost all of them do at least once. Right from the very first scene, where the western cliché of the cowardly, useless sheriff is presented in such a way that we completely sympathize with him, cardboard stereotypes we've seen in a hundred westerns are trotted out to go through their paces, and then surprise us by showing unexpected character development. Seemingly reprehensible people show their good sides, while good guys can sometimes be very nasty indeed.

Fonda is brave, decent, steely when it matters, and maybe not quite the hero he thinks he is. Widmark is frankly a bit wooden, except when events get him worked up, which fortunately happens quite a lot. But Quinn steals it as one of the weirdest characters in any fifties western, a club-footed gunfighter with an agenda all his own who is very obviously a closet homosexual, though since this is 1959 he can't possibly admit it. And DeForest Kelly, a frequent bit-player in westerns before he was forever typecast as Star Trek's Doctor McCoy, gives a bravura performance as the bad guys' cynical, slimy, and incredibly annoying court jester.

By the way, Warlock is the name of the town in which the movie takes place, and no witchcraft whatsoever is involved. I wonder how many people have rented this film in mistake for that weird horror-comedy starring Richard E. Grant?

In this unsubtle allegory, a mega-rich man whose surname is Royal (like I said, unsubtle!) builds a 40-story tower-block intended to function as microcosm of society, with everyone's social status indicated by how far up it they live, instals himself in a heavenly penthouse accessible only by a private elevator (so basically he's God), and assumes his innovative social experiment will work out just fine.

It doesn't. Beset by the very specific ills of Thatcher's Britain, in which the film is set - class inequality, power outages, and mounting piles of garbage - the tenants of the lower floors rebel, the upper classes strike back, and by the time equilibrium has been restored, the survivors are ragged savages living among the debris of civilization and eating roast dogs.

Almost nothing in the film is the slightest bit subtle. The basic premise, that all the occupants of the block spontaneously cut themselves off from the outside world (which somehow doesn't notice) in order to wage a symbolic class war, doesn't even pretend to be realistic. Every character is a symbol rather than a person, they often talk in oddly stilted ways, and none of them are particularly likable, though the poorest tenants are portrayed as the nicest, while the richest are monstrously decadent one-dimensional caricatures.

Ben Wheatley's films have consistently shown that, while he's a technically accomplished director willing to explore the blackest of black humor and the most grotesque of situations, his worst failing is that he doesn't know where to draw the line. Sometimes, especially in his debut feature "Down Terrace", the humor becomes so dark that it isn't funny at all, and the grimness is so relentless that it's downright depressing.

Here, given by far his biggest budget to date, he meticulously creates a complex environment with a great deal going on in it, but it's never as involving as it should be, because we simply don't care what happens to most of these horrible people. And once you lose interest in the characters, it soon dawns on you that the scenes of them doing unpleasant things frequently go on for much longer than necessary before the plot advances.

As for Tom Hiddleston's "hero", he's literally an Everyman, the ultimate social mixer who ironically becomes the only tenant to truly fit in while inadvertently triggering the Apocalypse, and he drifts passively through almost all the action, most of which is supplied by a secondary character, the unsubtly-named Wilder, who ought to be the official hero of the film. In a book, it's fine for the protagonist to wander around allowing us to see the action through his eyes but not really doing much himself. In a movie, that function is usually performed by something called a "camera".

It looks splendid, though often in an unpleasant way, but ultimately this film is hollow at its core, and casting the talented and charismatic Hiddleston isn't enough to hide the fact that he's playing a nonentity. Luis Buñuel's 1962 Surrealist masterpiece "The Exterminating Angel" explores a very similar situation on a vastly lower budget, but it's a far better film because Buñuel understood that even if you disapproved of the decadent upper-class characters (which Buñuel, being a member of the Communist Party, obviously did), to enjoy the movie you had to care whether or not they survived. Ben Wheatley needs to work on that.

I used to like the Coen brothers. I really, truly did. But increasingly they're coasting on a wave of their past glories before splattering messily on the polluted beach of shameless self-indulgence. It's true that Hollywood movies made over 60 years ago look dated today. That's kind of inevitable, and not in itself funny. It's also true that some of them starred actors who weren't terribly good, but were massively hyped at the time for commercial reasons. Portraying movies from this period as terribly dated and their stars as talentless idiots who are literally at least borderline retarded is a cheap trick just about good enough to carry a five-minute sketch aimed at people old enough to remember where it's coming from. This is a feature-length comedy containing maybe three halfway decent jokes, the best and most relevant of which you won't get unless you remember John Wayne's 10-second cameo in "The Greatest Story Ever Told". Which, since it wasn't meant to be funny, ended up being a lot funnier than this entire movie (catch it on YouTube - it'll take you about as long to find it and watch it as it will to load this disk).

Is it hilarious that sailors in a spoof fifties musical sing about their yearning for women while dancing with each other, and it ends up looking more than a bit unintentionally gay? Perhaps, but if you think that's funny, you might as well watch the "Nothing Like a Dame" sequence from "South Pacific" this scene is directly based on, which has been mercilessly parodied for that very reason since long before most of you were born. Is it hilarious that big stars such as George Clooney play unlikeable characters with the IQ of live yoghurt? No, unless they actually get funny lines (which they don't), instead of plodding through the same tired schtick their buddies the Coens resort to every time they run out of ideas.

This film has almost no plot, and coasts along on the notions that the past was automatically funny because the people in it were more primitive than you, and deliberate bad acting is an adequate substitute for actual comedy. I'm not saying those Coens aren't talented, because they obviously used to be. I'm just saying that, on their recent form, this looks like the beginning of the end. Or possibly the middle of it. Seriously, Joel & Ethan, one more film like this and your careers are in trouble. Two, maybe three at the most, and your careers are over. And maybe it's about time.

Anthony Mann directed some of the best westerns of the fifties. Unfortunately this isn't one of them. Henry Fonda brings his trademark solemn intensity with a hint of desperation to the rôle of a hard man with a soft center, but he's given strangely little to do other than dispense sage advice to Anthony Perkins on how to be a better lawman (including that clichéd two-minute shooting lesson that somehow instantly turns the inept pupil into a master gunfighter), awkwardly romance a pretty widow with whom he has a conspicuous lack of screen chemistry, and spend far too much time being nice to a little boy who, like most child actors, can't act. If you build up the hero of a film to be a deadly and ruthless bounty hunter, the audience expects to see evidence of this, but we don't really, other than the dead body of some guy he shot before the movie started. Though given his unwillingness to dispense lethal violence, viewers could be forgiven for assuming he happened to find a dead outlaw lying around and thought he might as well claim the reward.

Anthony Perkins gives the same performance he always does. His twitchy man-child constantly reminded me of Private Pike from "Dad's Army" (the TV series, not the recent lousy movie); he's the kind of person who practices twirling his guns like a dime-novel gunslinger when he thinks no-one's watching, and inevitably drops them. He's also literally too stupid to live, and only escapes a pointless death that would have been entirely his own fault because the bad guy's a lousy shot. One of the few bits of on-screen violence in the movie is when Henry Fonda punches Anthony Perkins because he knows he'll get himself killed unless he's unconscious, but doesn't hit him hard enough and is very nearly proven right.

About that violence: westerns are an intrinsically violent genre. You expect a bit of shooting, especially when the hero is supposed to be somebody who kills outlaws for a living. But this film is extraordinary lacking in physical peril. Apart from one brief scene near the start which ends inconclusively, there's nothing resembling a proper action plot until halfway through the movie, and absolutely no genuine tension until the last few minutes. The one-dimensional bad guy, a vile racist bully with no redeeming features whatsoever, doesn't really do much except shoot some random extra in the back and sneer a lot, and secondary villain Lee Van Cleef is defeated far too easily. Of course, we know that Anthony Perkins will eventually man up and stop behaving like a little kid playing sheriff, and by putting into practice the things Henry Fonda has been telling him he'll triumph over that sneering bigot, but by the time he finally does this, we've been waiting an hour and a half and the film will be over in a couple of minutes. Anthony Mann was an excellent director, but he wasn't perfect, and this is very far from being his best work. In fact, it's rather dull. Try one of the Mann films starring James Stewart instead.

Ancient and primitive though it is, this is one of the greatest movies of the silent era, and it needs to be appreciated as such. It's also the only version of a frequently filmed and adapted story, including the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, to stick fairly closely to Gaston Leroux's source novel, in which the Phantom isn't a composer driven mad as a result of being facially disfigured in a fire, but a man alienated from birth because he's simply that ugly. By the way, when the Phantom's mask comes off, that's Lon Chaney's actual face, hideously distorted by very painful prosthetic makeup. When audiences first saw it in 1925, some of them fainted, because nobody had done anything quite like that before. I'm not sure many stars would be willing to do it today.

The story doesn't really make very much sense (though it's actually true that the Paris Opera House has a lake in the basement), but it works perfectly as a fairy tale in the Grimm tradition, where the internal logic is all that matters. Which is just as well, since one major character is lifted directly from the novel, but because it's a silent movie, he never gets to properly explain his backstory, so we just have to take it for granted that a weird person made up to look vaguely foreign is wandering around explaining important plot-points (in the book, he's working for the Shah of Iran - never mind why). But the truly magnificent Surrealism of the whole enterprise is present throughout. Since CGI wasn't a thing back then, whenever they show a huge audience applauding a performance on the stage of a vast opera house, you can be sure they actually built the set! The most extreme example of that kind of thing was the life-size replica of Notre Dame Cathedral they built for "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" (also starring Lon Chaney), which you can glimpse in the last few minutes of this movie when the mob pursuing the Phantom run past it.

Although it's usually shown nowadays in black and white, this print uses digital technology to restore the extremely ambitious tinting throughout the film, including a few scenes that are nearly in color, thanks to a combination of an experimental prototype of Technicolor that didn't include blue (a handful of movies were entirely shot in this weird format, most notably "The Mystery of the Wax Museum") and some other scenes where every frame was hand-painted. But what really holds it all together is Lon Chaney's performance as a monster who, like all the best cinematic monsters, is more tragic than truly evil. He effortlessly steals every scene he's in, and acts his heart out through makeup that made every facial movement agony. If you don't feel sorry for this monster, you're a lot less human than he is!

With its modest budget, brisk running-time, and uncomplicated plot, this is in many ways a bog-standard early fifties western. What makes it stand out from the crowd is the willingness of director Anthony Mann to experiment with what were at the time surprisingly gritty themes prefiguring the spaghetti westerns of the next decade, and the superb lead performance of James Stewart.

Nowadays we mainly remember him as the hero of hideously sentimental Frank Capra films like "It's a Wonderful Life" - basically a marginally less dim and irritating Forrest Gump. This does a serious disservice to a very fine actor. Here we can sometimes see that side of him, but he uses it to express the social awkwardness of a good man who was brought up bad and doesn't quite know how to act around the nice folks he desperately wants to be accepted by. But when danger threatens, he easily passes the classic James Bond Test: do you believe this man would kill you? Yes, I believed that James Stewart would have killed me and enjoyed it, then been very guilty indeed about enjoying it, too late to give me much comfort.

If you've seen a few westerns, you'll be able to join the plot dots very early on. Two hard men with dubious pasts meet up, have some adventures, save each other's lives, and become close friends. Then they have to choose between doing the right thing because it's right, and doing the wrong thing because they'll get rich. They take different paths and end up as mortal enemies. The best example of this kind of film from this era is the superb "Vera Cruz", but there are many others. And you won't have much trouble figuring out that when the perpetually sneering Arthur Kennedy pops up three minutes in, he'll turn out to be very bad news indeed. What ties it all together is James Stewart struggling to be good while having to revisit the bad side of himself far more often than he wants to because people are shooting at him, which he portrays very well indeed.

On the minus side, it's a little rudimentary in places. Some of the fight scenes could have been better, not all of the actors are fit to be on the same strip of celluloid as James Stewart, and unfortunately there's Rock Hudson. The studio obviously insisted on throwing another big star into the mix at the last minute, therefore the movie got saddled with a major character who nobody, including the director, had the slightest idea what to do with, meaning that he's literally a waste of space most of the time, and at one point logically ought to die but doesn't because he's Rock Hudson. Oh, and if you're a stickler for political correctness, you might have problems with a certain black actor by the name of Stepin' Fetchit. Though to be fair, embarrassing though his thankfully limited screen-time is, the director seems to be going out of his way, albeit clumsily, to have the white actors treat a black man as an equal. It's even implied, if you watch this film from a modern perspective, that Mr. Fetchit and one of the white actors are a long-term gay couple, though I'm pretty sure that's accidental.

It's not the greatest western ever made, but for its time it's way above average, and there are moments that will probably surprise you. If you like this, try Anthony Mann's other westerns, especially those starring James Stewart, and Budd Boeticher's westerns from the same period, especially those starring Randolph Scott.

Firstly, ignore the synopsis, which was yet again written by someone who hasn't actually seen the film, and misses the point completely.

Secondly, if this sounds like the kind of movie you might want to see, check out Georges Franju's Surrealist masterpiece "Les Yeux Sans Visage" first, because this film rips off a great deal from it without being anywhere remotely near as good. Then watch this one if you're some kind of obsessive cinematic face transplant completist.

Thirdly... well, frankly, where do I start? By telling you that the "hero" spends almost half the film being so obnoxiously selfish that he makes "Green Lantern" look like "Forrest Gump", and the rest of it being maybe 10% nicer? By pointing out that in 1966, a doctor whose entire job consisted of replacing the lost body-parts of damaged people with realistic-looking prostheses probably wouldn't have considered supplying a rubber mask to a man with hideous facial scars so that he could leave his house without wrapping his head in bandages precisely equivalent to the fictional Baron Frankenstein's corpse-reanimating crime against God? By saying that mild mental retardation doesn't turn people into subhumans who have extra senses because they're animals?

I get that 50 years ago, Japan was such an intolerant society that if you had anything whatsoever wrong with you, you were literally a "monster", and this is a ham-fisted protest against such attitudes. But since it also states that physical injuries damage your soul, and any cosmetic alteration that makes you unaccountable to the laws of a repressive society automatically turns you into an amoral psychopath, I fail to see what point is really being made here. Cosmetic surgery is evil, possibly? I really don't know.

This is an ugly, mean-spirited, depressing film, and the random touches of pretentious but irrelevant Surrealism add nothing. Avoid.

The minimal plot of Ridley Scott's debut film puts Keith Carradine's thoroughly decent hero in a classic nightmare scenario. Due to the conventions of his time, class, and profession, he is obliged to put honor above all else and, if necessary, fight duels for extremely minor reasons, and he has the misfortune to offend a completely bonkers fellow officer (Harvey Keitel) who insists that they fight to the death for essentially no reason at all. And, like the Terminator, Keitel's psychotic antagonist simply will not stop until one of them is dead. Which would make this a very short film, were it not for the repeated failure of both men to finish the job.

The atmosphere of the Napoleonic Wars is beautifully realized, and although the modest budget doesn't permit any battles to be shown, we're constantly aware of the effect the conflict is having on everybody (in this respect, as well as the increasingly obsessive adversarial relationship between two protagonists who seldom meet, it's similar to "Witchfinder General", which I suspect may have been a major influence). And the multiple duels are excellent, running the full gamut from gentlemanly swordplay to bloody savagery to mirror the escalating irrationality of why these men are trying to kill each other.

Where it falls down a bit is that Ridley Scott's weaknesses are on show almost as much as his strengths. Stacy Keach inexplicably provides a voice-over (thankfully not very often) even more insulting to the viewers' intelligence than the one in "Blade Runner", and sometimes, especially in the last third, he's so busy showing us the "Pride And Prejudice"-style good life c. 1800 that the pace flags badly.

Also, although Keith Carradine is mostly pretty good, there's one scene where he shows the absolute terror of a man forced to risk his life for an utterly senseless reason which had me thinking that if his entire performance had been like that, I would have been on the edge of my seat, instead of frequently noticing how well the scenery was filmed (or occasionally wasn't). If an actor is capable of giving that kind of performance some of the time, a truly great director will concentrate on getting it out of him all of the time. Instead, Scott ruins that particular scene with clumsy, confusing flashbacks and muddled continuity, as if he's making a 30-second commercial for hitting people with swords on horseback.

This is a good film (with a very unexpected yet oddly perfect ending), but it's no masterpiece. In particular, I would have liked Harvey Keitel's one-dimensional villain to have been given far more characterization, because although Keitel is very convincing indeed, there's only so much you can do with a cardboard cutout. And watch out for the scene near the end where a tense situation is rendered Pythonesque by the meaningless inclusion of the rear half of what is clearly a stuffed donkey. You'll definitely know it when you see it...

I feel a bit mean giving one star to the only feature film the Goons ever made, but watching it makes it pretty clear why, although their radio show would continue to increase in popularity for almost a decade, they never attempted to make another full-length movie. The lightning-paced anarchy of the Goon Show is replaced by a leaden plot involving spies trying to steal a secret formula which isn't the least bit funny, and meanders all over the place before being tied up in the last three minutes with a bit of clumsy slapstick, one of the few times the film gets at all lively.

Harry Secombe, who is obviously ill at ease in front of the camera, has to deliver a constant stream of very feeble puns, many of which rely on the desperately contrived plot device that he recently played a policeman called "Bats" in a totally irrelevant play which we don't actually see. Spike Milligan plays Eccles, a character who works on the radio because we imagine him to be a bizarre creature similar to a good-natured Bigfoot, but on film is simply Spike Milligan doing a silly voice while pulling a goofy face. Peter Sellers plays an early version of Major Bloodnok who has yet to develop any of the outrageous personality traits that made him entertaining and is almost a straight man, except when contrived excuses are found to have him behave out of character, so, despite giving by far the best performance in the movie, he's not all that funny. And Michael Bentine, who quit the team just after they made this film (or was kicked out, depending on who's telling the story), is embarrassingly dreadful as a mad scientist who you may just possibly find quite amusing if you're five years old.

Along the way, subplots such as Secombe being wanted by the police for a totally uninteresting reason fail to go anywhere, romance gets in the way of what comedy there is, very dated song and dance numbers slow things down still further, and towards the end a concert is staged because the scriptwriters couldn't think of any other way to allow Sellers to briefly demonstrate the extraordinary talent for playing multiple rôles which he should have employed throughout the film, or for Bentine to do something less desperately unfunny than the rest of his performance for a couple of minutes. If you're writing a biography of Harry Secombe, or a history of British comedy, or something along those lines, you should probably watch this movie. But if you want to be entertained by the Goons for an hour, you should definitely listen to any two episodes of "The Goon Show" instead.

What, exactly, is the point of this movie? The legendary critic Roger Ebert once said that remakes should only be made of films which had something wrong with them in the first place. "Dad's Army" is generally reckoned to be one of the best sitcoms ever, almost all episodes of which still exist (and can be rented here). And by the way, a movie spinoff was made in 1971, and despite starring the original cast, it was a flop, like so many film adaptations of half-hour sitcoms which don't translate well to the big screen because they were never meant to.

Anyone familiar with the original series (and this movie is riddled with in-jokes you won't get unless you are) will constantly be comparing the performances of the mostly talented cast with the original actors, and they seldom come anywhere close. It's not their fault. Actors who are asked to not only play fictional characters, but to play them as if they're impersonating other actors who played them for a decade but are sadly unavailable because they've died of old age, have their work cut out. Daniel Craig didn't get the rôle of James Bond because of his ability to impersonate Sean Connery fairly well, which he almost certainly can't (they tried that once; two words: George Lazenby). Unfortunately, Toby Jones got the rôle of Captain Mainwaring not because he's a good actor, but because he's a good actor who is physically capable of more or less pretending to be Arthur Lowe pretending to be somebody else.

If you're a fan of the TV show, you'll know something's wrong when the film opens with a totally serious sequence involving Nazi spies in which somebody actually dies. The whole movie has the same problem. Our heroes spend far too long losing every semblance of dignity before becoming truly heroic after all (this kind of thing works better in a 30-minute sitcom episode), and then their moment of glory is too important, because this is a movie, not a sitcom, so they have to win World War Two. Personal backstories that were gradually hinted at over the course of the very long series are brought front and centre at the expense of the actual comedy these absurd characters were designed to provide. Modern tastes are catered for with crudely lavatorial humor inappropriate to the context. And there's a feminist agenda because no modern movie, even if it's set in 1944, is allowed to exist without a nod to Political Correctness. We even see the two surviving members of the original cast shoved in front of the camera for a few seconds in a desperate attempt to achieve some kind of continuity.

It doesn't work. It's basically the equivalent of a Beatles tribute band in a world where the Beatles never played a single live gig and you can still experience everything they ever did by listening to their records. Everybody involved seems to be doing their very best, but it's simply ill-advised from the get-go, and a lot of fine actors (plus a few not-so-fine ones) are hampered by the necessity to ape somebody else's performance. This is a weird, forgettable misfire which tried too hard to capitalize on nostalgia. Not every episode of the original series is a work of unqualified genius, but most of them are far better than this; and inevitably, the original actors playing the rôles created for them are far better than this ludicrously belated tribute act. So rent the original instead. Even if you rate this film purely on its stand-alone merits, the good jokes don't exactly come thick and fast in comparison.

This film is almost a century old, so you have to cut it some slack. In particular, it's silent, therefore everyone overacts because that's what they had to do to get the point across without sound. And you have to remember that what pass for "special effects" really were pretty special in 1922. Oh, and, in case you hadn't noticed, it's four and a half hours long. Also, although this has nothing to do with the movie itself, what's with those ludicrously bad English translations of the subtitles?

But you know what? It's magnificent! From the extraordinary 20-minute opening sequence of Dr. Mabuse masterminding a crime so elaborate that nobody else even realizes what happened and the fortune he ends up with is perfectly legal, while simultaneously overseeing an empire of crime so cunningly hidden that its activities look like ordinary things done by ordinary people, many of whom are Mabuse himself in his impossibly numerous secret identities, the film draws you into a nightmarish world where a dangerously charismatic evil genius schemes to become a living god by taking control over a society so decadent it doesn't even notice what he's doing, and probably wouldn't especially care if it did. If that sounds familiar, some of Mabuse's rants about supermen and the triumph of the will are so eerily prescient that I honestly wonder if Hitler might have pinched a few of his most quotable lines.

Dr. Mabuse is a fascinating monster, and Rudolf Klein-Rogge gives a performance which makes the one everybody remembers him for, Rotwang in "Metropolis", seem downright dull. And since he's the star of this movie rather than a supporting character, he gets much more to do, and by golly does he do it! Horribly seductive as the psychopathic psychiatrist who surely must have inspired Hannibal Lecter, utterly bestial when he lets his hair down and gets roaring drunk, and tremendous fun in the various bizarre disguises he constantly adopts, none of which, given Klein-Rogge's extremely distinctive features, would have fooled anyone for a second, but hey, it's a movie! Oh, and he may technically be the first ever movie supervillain, since he does have actual superpowers.

While all this is going on, we're treated to a whirlwind tour of the rotten underbelly of early 1920s Berlin, from smoke-filled illegal gambling dens that offer poker or cocaine depending on your tastes, to the opulently decadent haunts of the idle rich - one dissipated aristocrat lives in a mansion so horrifically over-decorated that even the characters in the movie notice it's a bit much! Oh, and of course there's a heroic cop, and a few other people who are at least halfway good. But it's Dr. Mabuse who steals the entire film hands down; Fritz Lang always was far better at portraying baddies than goodies. And while this movie isn't as visually astonishing as "Metropolis", it's no slouch in that respect, and the story zips along with incident after incident, some of them not terribly plausible (logic was another of Lang's weak points), without at any point getting bogged down in all that preachy allegorical stuff that keeps cropping up in "Metropolis" just when you'd much rather see more of Rotwang going completely nuts, or that loopy nympho robot.

This film is both a true cinematic classic and a tremendous amount of fun! Watch out for what appears to be a cameo appearance by Spike Milligan before he was born - maybe that Charlie Chaplin mobile phone footage is for real? One little word of warning, though. This company will send you the two discs as separate rentals, and since they appear to have only one copy, you may have to wait a fortnight to see the second half of the movie like I did. You can probably get a classic film like this through your local library, and they'll definitely let you have all of it at once. Only rent it here as a last resort.

Boy, does this site overuse the word "classic"! Describing this disc as a double bill of "forgotten classics" is half right, because they're certainly forgotten, but that's as far as I'd go. Even calling it a "double bill" is a bit of a stretch; these two B-movies have a total running-time of two hours, so this is clearly a double bill with two supporting features and no main attraction.

Oddly, the film listed first, "The Painted Smile", is by far the lesser of the two. Three young men (including a pre-fame David Hemmings in a nothing part) behave ever so slightly rebelliously in a very early sixties London that isn't swinging yet, where listening to a crooner who makes Cliff Richard sound like Alice Cooper and daring to wear a loud tie are evidence of a despicable lack of moral fiber, and illicit sexual desire gets you involved with people so evil that one of them has an orthopedic shoe, because nothing says "psychopath" like a physical disability! Cardboard characters, not all of whom can act, have an underwritten adventure that feels like an episode from a very old TV cop show, and learn that it's always better to conform to the values of a society that would implode under the weight of its self-repression in the very near future. The only genuinely exciting moment is when you see a police box exactly like the Tardis, and expect the cybermen to show up for the one second it takes you to remember that this is 1962 so it's just a police box.

"Rag Doll", though still a very minor film, is a big improvement, with vastly better acting and far better realized characters, nearly all of whom occupy a moral grey area instead of being good or evil stereotypes. It also does a fine job of conveying that the feelings a pretty, naïve, and potentially exploitable 17-year-old girl arouses in men can be quite complex, and may bring out the best and worst in them simultaneously. Unfortunately the fates of the main protagonists, while suitably bleak, are also paint-by-numbers predictable if you've seen a few American movies in the noir genre. It's fairly watchable, but rather depressing without being all that interesting, and it's blatantly trying to copy an American genre that was already very nearly obsolete, and doing it in a peculiarly restrained British way.

The most notable thing about both films, especially "Rag Doll", is the way they deal with controversial subjects, which must have been quite daring at the time. But nowadays it all seems very dated and tame, and except in a few scenes, both movies lack the grim intensity that proper film noir needs if it's going to work. Probably of interest mainly to historians wanting a glimpse of what being a teenage rebel in London was like just before the Beatles sparked off the revolution that made it fun to be under 25.

In this pitch-black comedy produced by the legendary Roger Corman, we basically see what would happen if Dick Dastardly went head-to-head with Mad Max (whose franchise was directly inspired by this film). 21st. century America, which, like all low-budget futures, looks amazingly similar to the USA in the year the film was made, is a grotesquely cynical dystopia where life is cheap, entertainment for the masses has reached the ultimate low, and the xenophobic hypocrite who runs the place blames all the nation's woes on the few foreign countries he hasn't invaded yet. Like I said, this is an absurd sci-fi satire bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the way things actually turned out, or look as though they just might. Of course not.

The idea of a sport in which the competitors score points by killing random passers-by, with an emphasis on desensitizing the masses to the notion of casually murdering anyone who is either a burden to society because they're old, or likely to increase the population because they're a young woman or a child, is as dark as they come, and the scenes in which people do suicidally stupid things just to briefly get onto a hugely popular reality TV show are alarmingly prescient, as well as being much easier to believe than the concept of David Carradine (in a gimp suit!) once having been a far bigger star than third-billed Sylvester Stallone.

Naturally you have to cut this utterly insane little movie some slack for its low budget, but like the best of Corman's cheap and cheerful output, it uses what money it has extremely well. A modern remake with state-of-the-art special effects could have been outrageous fun, but, just like the reboot of "Robocop" (which borrows some of its grim vision of the future from this film), they dumped the savage humor in favor of a toothless tale which existed primarily to be resold as a computer game. Check out the one and only original instead, with its cast of ludicrously horrible characters (Sly plays a thug who not only casually brutalizes women, but is so moronic that he can't eat without getting half the food on his face), its ridiculous cartoon death-traps, and its vision of a future in which idiots in fancy dress will play chicken with weaponized cars driven by psychopaths just to be on national television for a few bittersweet moments. Which, of course, could never happen for real...

Alan Partridge is one of the great comedy characters, and will forever figure in Top Tens that include the likes of Basil Fawlty, David Brent, Captain Mainwaring and Father Ted. But there comes a time when every such character has to be retired, and I'm afraid Steve Coogan doesn't seem to know when to stop flogging a dead game-bird.

"Knowing Me, Knowing You" worked because Alan Partridge constantly interacted with many other even more outrageous characters. "I'm Alan Partridge" worked on a more subtle level because it dealt with every aspect of his life as a Z-list celebrity who thought he was at least D-list. The surprise hit movie worked because it was about an unexceptional man trapped in a very dramatic situation he's totally unqualified to cope with. And all of them worked because Alan Partridge is completely blind to the fact that he's about as good at any form of broadcasting as Mister Bean is at brain surgery.

This disappointing no-budget continuation doesn't work because it's simply Alan Partridge sitting in a very small room being bad at his job, mostly accompanied only by "Sidekick Simon" (Tim Key), whose main contribution is to sit at the back making faces to emphasize how inappropriate Alan's comments are. His guests are pale reflections of the ones from "Knowing Me, Knowing You" to the point where a couple of them are watered-down versions of the same characters, and one is even played by the same actor. And his impatience with everybody he's talking to, mostly disembodied listeners' voices on the phone, is counterproductive because cutting people off before they've had a chance to make their point stops being funny by the fourth repetition at very most, while depriving him of the chance to properly interact with potentially interesting comic foils.

The jokes are mostly very lazy, and go on far too long. Middle-aged men tryin 2 get down wid da yoof isn't exactly original, even for Alan Partridge, and Steve Coogan should be enough of a pro to know that convincingly acting drunk is incredibly difficult unless you actually get drunk on camera, which he obviously didn't. Even the ever-present running gag about Alan being stuck in a time-warp doesn't work as well as it used to, because some of what he says is so retro that lengthy explanations for feeble one-liners have to be clumsily inserted into the dialogue for the benefit of viewers too young to know what he's referencing.

The last episode even features a sequence in which heavy snow stops most of North Norfolk Digital's staff from getting to work, meaning that Alan has to present an entire day's programs all by himself, and ends up completely running out of anything whatsoever to say. This, along with the feel-good finish (remember the old days, when he might end a series by accidentally killing one of his guests?), strongly implies that Steve Coogan knows Alan Partridge has run out of steam, and he won't be back in any significant way. Unless of course Hollywood opens its boundless cheque-book once more...

If this site allowed half stars I'd award this film one and a half, because it's not absolutely dreadful, but nevertheless it's pretty bad. The Boulting brothers were best known for their comedies, so a gritty spy thriller about germ warfare was something of a departure for them. It didn't work out too well.

One of the most important elements of a spy thriller, especially one with a name like "Suspect", is to keep the audience guessing as to how guilty the various suspects may or may not be - see "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" for further details. The Boulting brothers' idea of suspense is to theoretically suggest that Peter Cushing might be a traitor, assume we'll automatically think that he might be because in horror films he played both good and bad guys, and then introduce Donald Pleasance as a totally unambiguous baddie who is in no way connected with Peter Cushing, and whose cunning plan is in no way concealed from the audience. Oh, and there's absolutely nothing resembling action or suspense until literally two minutes before the credits roll.

Ian Bannen gives a very committed performance as the only remotely complex or interesting character, but he also represents a hideously dated concept of physical disability, which is treated very crassly indeed. And when having both your arms blown off in Korea isn't tragic enough unless your ambition was to be a concert pianist, you know the scriptwriter was laying on the clichés with a shovel. Peter Cushing is as professional as ever, but makes less impression than usual because he's cast in a nothing part. Donald Pleasance is that creepy guy he always played when he was hired to be Donald Pleasance on autopilot. And Spike Milligan provides totally misplaced and embarrassingly unfunny "comedy", as does Thorley Walters as a ludicrously absent-minded spymaster.

Oh, and the plot? Given that the scriptwriter casually lumps together Communism, Fascism, and Scottish Nationalism as approximately the same thing and equally undesirable, and jokingly suggests that the list should also include Zen Buddhism just because it's foreign and weird, it shouldn't surprise you that other aspects of the film's morality are by today's standards grotesque. A woeful misfire all round, and not really worth even 78 minutes of your time.