Film Reviews by CH

Many books and several films have chronicled the cars, chaos and killings which was the spree upon which Bonnie and Clyde met their own end. It ound a particulary fine rendering in this film.

The other review here covers the essentials - direction, script - and one might add that even those who have seen Bonnie and Clyde should not miss this one.

Varied in time and manner, these are sometimes ineteresting, even enjoyable tales of enigma. The two opening items from the Forties , for example, have the curiosity value of being told beside a fireplace by their author Algernon Blackwood who was then around eighty. As such, they are filmed radio readings, for his presence is not that of a Welles. And there is a variant of a railway film, which combines a commuter route and one in wartime France a decade earlier. The Lake (1978) hints at a malign presence while leaving much obscure but with plenty to enjoy during these thirty-three minutes.

As it is, the adiding effect is of snacks rather than courses in a meal.

All well worth exploring for oneself: others will find different pleasures in it, perhaps. And even seek out the other two sets of two discs under this title.

This was an intriguing prospect but, whatever its effect as farce on stage may have been, this film proved hard going. Shrill - even more so in the case of the noisy children - and frantic, it did not make the best dramatic use of the situation in which two hourseholds share the premises. So much so that this viewer had to bale out - despite the missing more of the brief appearances by Audrey Hepburn, who would soon go on to much more.

To watch this again is to be mightily disappointed.

Very much a period piece, the film is cartoonish in its depiction of a Swingin' London with its attendant criminal element (including Noël Coward).. The dialogue, apart from one or two celebrated lines, is hard work; and the film turns upon the last section, the chase through Italy - but, chances are some might not now get that far, so sluggish is the first half.

Essentially a portmanteau film with a supernatural twist, which is evident from the start as guests arrive at a remote inn/hotel in Wales run by Mervyn Johns and his daughter Glynis. Here is an allegory created to give the visitors a chance to reflect upon their lives so far.

Even though it has Cavalcanti as a producer, the film leaves one wondering what Powell and Pressburger could have done with it - think of such allegorical films as their A Canterbury Tale which also depicts the countryside as a character in its own right. As for Ealing, The Halfway House is on a rung below the supernatural Dead of Night which appeared a couple of years later.

This said, there is so much here that anybody with a taste for Ealing films should not miss it.

It began with Kennedy’s assassination: the emblem of an absurd world in which nothing is certain, destruction everywhere. Prolific artist Jules Feiffer first wrote Little Murders (1971) as what one might call a dystopian novel set in the present; he got stuck, thought it a failure, set it aside, then looked through its original outline and realised that in fact it should be a play.

A few weeks at the Yaddo retreat yielded a first draft, and re-workings had it ready for Broadway - where it lasted seven performances in 1967 but did rather better at the Aldwych in London with the Royal Shakespeare Company in a season which included As You Like It and Ghosts. Time brought a long-running off-Broadway revival a couple of years later. This was enough - when Feiffer’s Carnal Knowledge was also being made - to enable an opened-out film version whose producer and star Elliott Gould brought in first-time director Alan Arkin (who also has an effective, hyperactive rôle in it).

Here is a great core of those immersed in the new, late-Sixties risk-taking style of Hollywood film.

It opens with the assertive Marcia Rodd - mostly seen in television parts - waking in New York and disturbed by the sound outside: a gang of youths are attacking the shy-natured Gould, an artist-turned-photographer specialising in shots of excrement; she goes out to separate them and remonstrate with him for allowing them to do so. In contrast with his demeanour, she is effusive, and she all but dragoons him into a relationship - on his part it is step by diffident step. In quite a turn on a classic trope, this leads to her introducing him to her parents - part of a distinctly Jewish theme (along with a brother who has been sent more than strange by his brother’s).

This is hardly naturalistic, everybody talks and behaves in a style beyond surreal (including a heavy breather on the telephone). Difficult to capture the dialogue’s effect in quotation: monologues are to the fore, sometimes too much so, but fully justified by a long-haired Donald Sutherland’s bravura turn as a minister hired to pace the church while delivering a wedding homily in which he is been forbidden to mention the deity. (but has many ways of doing so)

All around, splendidly filmed by cinematographer Gordon Willis, New York becomes wilder as some try to ignore such violence as a bloodied Gould stumbling through a subway compartment (for stretches at a time he does not say much but is a continual presence).

To extrapolate a philosophy from all this is to under-rate its value as entertainment, the hoots which it provokes. It did not do much business outside large cities but its reputation endured, a cult item which has at last reached DVD - and brings with it a couple of hours’ extras. Particularly good is Gould’s recollection of the play and film, and of more than interest are the those of the work-in-progress by Arkin and Feiffer himself.

Few mention this film but to see it is to urge that others do so.

The main film here is quite a good, if didactic view of contemporary Los Angeles - cars, buildings, a dam - amidst race-track criminals, but hidden is something rather shorter and much better. That is, one of the extras is "Diary of a Sergeant" (1945). In this, Harold Russell re-enacts his coping with artifical hands - hooks - after losing them to grenade practice , in Carolina, before setting off to join the troops which had just begun the D-Day invasion.

In hospital wards, with unflinching views of the stumps, he shows the way in which - learning to button a tunic, type, play a slot machine - he learns new ways of dealing with everyday matters, even going on a date. And also to write his diary by hand rather than dictate it.

In fact it is narrated by Alfred Drake even though Russell is the man on the screen, and there is an uncredited appearance by Roosevelt. This twenty-minute film was seen by William Wyler, who gave him an award-winning rôle in The Best Years of Our Lives.

Five stars for this; three for 711 Ocean Drive.

Any film made from a novel or story by Cornell Woolrich commands interest, even if the result is less than one might expect.

Not as well known as Phantom Lady or Rear Window, Black Angel (1946) - black was a key word for Woolrich - contains many familiar elements: a murder, a nightclub and a sinister owner with criminal connections (Peter Lorre), popular songs, newspaper headlines, thwarted love...

Dan Duryea is a song writer whose wife, a tremendous Constance Dowling, has quit him and is soon found murdered, with the blame and noose laid upon the man - John Phillips - whom she has been blackmailing. Philips’s wife - singer June Vincent - is sure of his innocence; with police assertions which counter that, she is determined to prove her hunch correct and works with Duryea to establish that.

There is some neat camerawork - the director was Roy William Neil who died soon after - including a shot which turns around, of all things, a waste-paper basket. For all this, and some neat integration of pleasingly-rendered songs, the sagging middle makes it all seem longer than eighty minutes.

Those with a taste for noir should certainly seek it out but, without saying too much, the ending, quickly and suspenseful as it portrayed, is more sleight of hand than coup de theatre. As for its contemporary reception, perhaps final words should be left with the view of a Louise Darcy in Biddeford who sent a letter to the New York Times to say that she had seen a trailer for it and that with the sight of “Miss Vincent bewitched by Dan Duryea I gave thanks that I, a much plainer woman, had never been driven to such desperate straits in my search for male companionship” As she put it, George Raft would have been something else: in her great phrase, “a horse on a different racetrack”.

Reviews, such as the first one here, had led me to have high hopes of this. In the event, as others have found, it turned out to be a series of often-enjoyable scenes which did not cohere. Perhaps the studio made cuts at the time. This said, it is worth watching at little more than an hour.

A passing glance at Baby Doll (1956) might have one take it for Jack Nicholson’s first film. What with the hairstyle, the staring eyes forever on the point of leaving their sockets as the voice increases its pitch and behaviour turns maniacal, this turn as a Southern gin-cotton owner in a dilapidated mansion would become so familiar that one can only infer Nicholson learnt much from Kurt Malden here as Archie.

Middle-aged Archie has married the eponymous teenager with the promise to her late father that he cannot deflower her until she is twenty. Played by Carroll Baker (who was in fact twenty-five, and now ninety-three), she is a pent-up nymphet who sleeps in her childhood crib, such is the parlous situation which has led them to kit out the clapboarded mansion with furniture on tick.

For much of the time she sports the eponymous nightware which is the name by which she is always addressed (except by the senile aunt who tends a horrendous line in cooking). The nightgown was created in 1942 as a reaction to wartime fabric shortages but the expression gained wider usage with this film - and surely, such displays as a huge billboard on Broadway of her recumbent posture, were an inspiration for Kubrick’s film of Lolita.

This being the South, there are sinister rivalries at play. A torching destroys a rival cotton trader’s barn (spectacularly depicted with all the light and shade which makes this black-and-white more effective than colour would have been). Nothing can be proved, but that owner - known as the Wop - is determined, or so it seems, to have his revenge by making free of Baby Doll before her husband can do so. This was Eli Wallach’s first film, and he gives as brilliant a turn as the others.

The attempted seduction seethes, on both sides, one afternoon on a swing,. It belies the New York Times’s contemporary description of her character as “a piteously flimsy little twist of juvenile greed, inhibitions, physical yearnings, common crudities and conceits”. There is more going on than that, for this, one need hardly add, sprang from the mind of Tennessee Williams. Deriving from two 1946 one-act plays, his screenplay was the first ever published simultaneously with a film itself: to this Penguin cover was attached a wraparound of Carroll Baker in her accustomed position, and on the front itself an Observer endorsement by John Osborne: “Williams has hit off the American Girl-Woman of the last hundred years... Make no mistake about it - this Baby Doll kid is a killer.”

Elia Kazan knew what he was about, everything fits together under his direction so that, even at close on two hours, there is no slack, no moment in which to fear that all would slide into the self-parody which Williams’s outlandish notions always risked.

Every bare lightbulb sways, Rose - played by Mildred Dunnock - serves up so horrendous a vat of greens that it makes school food look the work of Elizabeth David. A de facto running commentary by the locals outside is a corker which can only be silenced by bullets. It’s that sort of place, this corner of Mississippi.

Among those considered for the title rôle was Marilyn Monroe. She did not hold a grudge but willingly acted as an usherette at its showing for a charity in New York. As for Jack Nicholson, he did get to play Carroll Baker’s husband - in 1983’s Ironweed.

For those who have a relish of post-war English cinema, it is no surprise to find that the man behind the bar of a low-life establishment is none other than Sid James. As did Sam Kydd, he popped up in many such a part. More startling, in No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1948) is that he uses an American accent. With an eye on the transatlantic market, the English makers of this version of James Hadley Chase’s once-shocking novel filmed it in Teddington but set it in New York.

All of the cast had to do their best in sounding American (the sole native was Jack La Rue). The film has been ridiculed for this in some quarters but one soon gets used even to the beautiful Linden Travers speaking from the side of her mouth. She is the eponymous heriress who, about to be unsuitably married, finds herself robbed of diamonds at the roadside while that fiancé is killed in the process. She is kidnapped by a gang over which a bulky mother, Ma Grisson, holds sway and, in the process, falls for one of them - the dangerously smooth, sharp-suited La Rue - with whom she appears to have been previously acquainted, or at least receiving flowers from him.

Stylishly filmed, with several musical scenes in a night club more lavish than those which usually figured in such English films, here is something which was a violent sensation in its time and again deserves to step from the shadows - much as this unsavoury crowd are in the habit of doing - and bring a scream or two along the way.

Place was always as much a character in Ealing films as those who people them. Less well known than Passport to Pimlico is It Always Rains on Sunday (1947). It certainly does in an East End whose roofs and cobbles gleam as much as those in any of the noirs with which it was a contemporary.

True to such form, it opens with the front page of a newspaper - and the headline about a prison escape. On the run from Dartmoor is Tommy Swann, played by John McCullum who has got back to the city and into the surviving air-raid shelter in the crowded house in which Googie Withers who, in the absence of that lover, is married to the stolid, even portly darts-playing Edward Chapman with whom she’s had a son and taken on his two rather older daughters who are embroiled in matters amatory of their own (Sydney Tafler is excellent as a smoothly philandering bandleader).

Startlingly, Googie Withers suggests Swann hides in the marital bed for a while. Many are the turns, some rather bold, taken as day turns to night; in moving from scene to scene - whether pub, kitchen (tin-tub bath and all) or railway track - the pace is tremendous; that route is lined with many a small part cast to perfection and often with more than a dash of humour. None other than Jack Warner provides another of what would be many outings as a police inspector on the trail.

Anybody familiar with Robert Hamer’s next film Kind Hearts and Coronets should be sure not to overlook this one which, in its different way, is as accomplished, owing much to the cinematographer who worked on both: Douglas Slocombe.

A train pulls into a seaside railway station. A man strolls to a cliff-edge house by night. Somebody falls from a cliff., and the man finds that his wife has also died. One would have thought that here is the opening of an engrossing thriller which highlights early-Fifties Hastings and Bexhill. Rare, though, is anybody who can follow the plot which gives the film its title. That said, why award it as many as three stars? For all the tangles of what is going on, the filming of the place, with a notable cast, means that scene by scene there is plenty to absorb the interest against a background - amusement arcade, beach - which brings with it other, smaler-scale dramas.

Another dawn becomes another morning when a prospective knock on the door of another boarding house yields another landlady with that trademark steely gaze which heralds a refusal. So it might seem as Women of Twilight (1952) first rises upon the screen a decade before The L-Shaped Room.

There is, on this occasion, another dimension to so familiar a setting. Before there were the Angry Young Men there was an angry young woman: Sylvia Rayman. While eking out life as a waitress, she had worked on an all-women play first staged in small theatres the previous year. Its appearance on the screen overlapped with continuing stagings in the West End and on Broadway - and was something of a contrast with Coronation year.

With a tremendous set of performances, the film is mostly set in a basement - and plumbs depths a world away from those waving flags at the side of the Mall. Some miles away and far from regal, a uniquely sour landlady Freda Jackson is a veritable Borgia. Under the guise of A charitable disposition, she offers unmarried mothers lodgings which are, did the tenants but realise it, her first step in baby-farming their offspring for adoption. Thankful to find at last somewhere to ease her feet and growing womb, Rene Ray has not only a birth to face but a death. Each day she attends the trial for a murder committed by the father-to-be. The film adds the man himself, one of Laurence Harvey’s early appearances - which here finds him singing, at any rate painfully dubbed, on a night club’s small stage. Rather more resonant is their meeting again either side of a prison visiting room’s glass partition.

Rather more dialogue takes place between those well-nigh imprisoned in the boarding house as it to becomes clear to Rene Ray what lies beyond all this. Allegiances are formed as events and births - and untoward deaths - occur while cash changes hands for infants as soon as practicable after their nine-month tenancy of the womb is up.

That such a play was being staged at a time when legend has it that all was drawing-room comedies waiting to swept aside by Osborne and others is evidence that one should not set undue store by the demarcation lines of history. More is always going on, and here is a version of a boarding-house play that one should like to see on the boards.

Some have acclaimed this tale of mistaken twins and time travel to supply Hitler with the Bomb has a comic masterpiece. Trouble is that the plot is so tangled as to defy summary, let alone to follow events as they progress. the result is that it appears more as though an extended Monty Python sketch - with no foot coming down to squelch it ot somebody to enter and proclaim "too silly!"

This said, others might disagree. At least it is avaialable after being elusive for many years.