Film Reviews by CH

How many who enjoy Danny Green as a crook in Alexander Mackendrick's The Ladykillers recall that he appeared, again as a heavy, in a film which was the first upon which that celebrated director worked? This was Midnight Menace (1937), its initial story supplied by Macendrick. Three years before enemy bombers appeared over London, this is exactly what happens in the film - albeit robot controlled and on behalf of a fictional country rather than Germany.

The plot - seemingly fantastic as it is, even more presciently making use of a flatscreen television screen on a wall - is the usual one of a few, working on a tip, against both mighty forces and those who, more preoccupied with England's fate in the Test Match, dismiss such fears as scaremongering.

One reporter has been driven fatally off the road by the enemy agents in the opening moments, and his sister (Margaret Vyner) who is also on the newspaper soon works in tandem with its political cartoonist (Charles Farrell) who finds that adversity requires more of him than ink and pen as he comes up against sinisterly smooth diplomat Fritz Kortner (familiar from Pandora's Box).

All this is the stuff of derring-do, of hiding off smart corridors and in low alleys as events turn skywards, searchlights picking out the planes. That so much of this is the work of models does not lessen an impact which also owes something to much-populated scenes redolent of League of Nations meetings subverted by the demands of arms manufacturers set to prosper yet again upon war breaking out anywhere.

A film which should be better known.

Here and elsewhere, The Brutalist has divided opinion. What would it have been like at two hours and shorn of those statements about architecture - such as the visit to an Italian marble quarry - which aspire to the meaningful? The turns taken by the plot are preposterous, all the more so in the second half. At the end of these three-and-a-quarter hours there is no sense of catharsis, it leaves one unmoved.

Some way after the Conrad novel which appeared three decades earlier, this take on the ever-present threat of terrorism is very much a series of set-pieces. Table to bus; crowded cinema to grand restaurant; a market stall to zoo... all this is, along the way, a thronging London panorama from which step forward actors able to make this wild tale convincing.

Before and after the twenty-three years of films between Edge of the World and Peeping Tom, Michael Powell made a fair number which are undoubtedly lesser ranking - but full of interest. These discs find him at work on films of about an hour apiece (many extras about him include some silent films in which he appeared). These include some comedy, a hint of thriller and mystery. If not all of these cohere, if none of them make the best of some ingenious plotting which invariably hurtles to a conclusion, they do point the way to The Spy in Black and Contraband where he was in a more realistic mode than, say, A Canterbury Tale. He has sport with a decaying inherited hotel, a company atop a tower, a Surrey inn - and, in all of them, an array of players, as they were known at the time, who were very much of their time with evident experience in repertory theatre.

Perhaps the best of these films is Her Last Affaire (1935). This has the unusual, somewhat French plot of a young man (Hugh Williams) who works for a pompous politician (Francis Sullivan) and has fallen for his daughter (Sophie Stewart) but marriage is forbidden as Williams is the son of a traitor, something which Sullivan’s delicate but lascivious wife (Viola Keats) is in a strong position to refute. To this end, Williams accompanies her on a jaunt to a Surrey inn (proprietor, a particularly censorious, Bible-reading John Laurie). The mutual implication is that Williams will satisfy her desires (there is a charged bed-making scene). All of which - a situation redolent of Mrs. Robinson's - brings a smirk to chambermaid Googie Withers who, in a continually entertaining performance, suggests, while turning on the wireless, that she too would not be averse to his favours.

There is adroit cinematography in the contrasting Westminster home (a footman in attendance) and the inn, along with fine footage of an aeroplane landing at Croydon. All of this ranks it higher than many of the stagebound films which went by the title of quota quickies (it began as a play SOS by Walter Ellis, and it would be curious to see the 1928 film version of that).

The title suggests something of this turn to Viola Keats’s amatory endeavours. As for her daughter and Williams, there is perhaps a happier ending than the last minute or so make plain.

Here is something which comes closest to Powell’s later work - and one hopes that more of the quickies will emerge. All of these he chronicles, not at all favourably, in two huge volumes of memoirs which are well worth browsing.

Who knew that there were so many aerials above Bratislava in the early-Sixties? This is but one of the inights offered by a film which should be better known as part of those which ushered in the Czech new wave of film-making. Here we find, on the roof of these numerous apartment buildings a teenage pair undressed for the sun. The summer will separate them, he off to the fields to harvest, and thresh, corn and take up with somebody else while she finds succour with somebody at the waterside, a relief from the household dominated by a mother who has lost her sight for reasons which become clear amidst all this emotional stress. Such is some of a plot which builds scene by scene in a way that is underlaid by as much optimism as bleakness

Has there been such a gag-laden script as Duck Soup? Both verbally and visually there is so much, so lightly carried, with all its crazy punning logic, these seventy minutes never stale. Even scenes - and there are some - without the Brothers have an allure.

Laugh, and laugh again, at what Graham Greene called Groucho's "vulpine stride" , a gait which also finds a part in several musical numbers which do not hinder proceedings. So effective an anti-war, anri-dictator film is this that Mussolini banned it - and, on the contrary, Churchill did not let the small matter of Hess's crash landing interrupt his evening: "'Well, Hess or no Hess, I'm off to see the Marx Brothers."

Made at much the same time as Went the Day Well?, Cottage to Let turns around German agents undercover in a remote part of the United Kingdon. In this case, somewhere in Scotland - beside a Loch into which Spitfire pilot John Mills has baled out. No mention is made of the aeroplane's remains, and we are left to assume they fell unobserved beneath the water but it is equally easy to realise this dapper figure is not all he appears (certainly by thr time he speaks into a telephone he has disconnected)..

Which can be said of several, even many among those gathered in and around the manor house where Leslie Banks (who was also memorable in Went the Day Well?) works in a retort-laden laboratory while his flightly, well-meaning wife is givien to malapropisms when tending to such matters as a fund-raising fête and the double booking of Alastair Sim as tenant of the nearby cottage which had meanwhile been requisitioned as a hospital. Canniest of all is twelve-year-old Cockney evacuee George Cole who smells sufficient rats to justify a visit by the sanitation department. As it is, Scotland Yard and MI5 have taken an interest in this curious outpost - but, enough! The plot is preposterous but sufficiently controlled to be this side of plausible as accusation brings retort.

A slow start sets rewarding snares. There is comedy along the way, not to mention a love interest which brings the invitiation to close eyes and make a wish beneath the New Moon which yields a dangerous snog ("that's not what I was wishing for!").

A few moments are tense enough, but the abiding memory is of fun to a purpose - something much needed at a time when Spitfires were not only visible in darkened matinée cinemas but, without a ticket, when glancing up at the afternoon skies.

There is something to be written about cats in the movies. The Suspect, a near-masterpiece, offers a feline who makes for as tense a sofabound moment as the one ouside in one of those cobbled alleys which haunt The Third Man. Say no more here about either case except that Robert Siodmak's take on London early in the twentieth century is, for all its contrivances, as vivid as Reed's post-war Vienna..

Often thought to give gung-ho, lung-bursting performances, Charles Laughton here turns his portliness to that of an officebound man whose underlings are as subservient as his wife is domineeringly cantankerous. So sedulously does Siodmak build up the atmosphere, which owes much to his German origins, that one feels for Laughton, whose late-flowering passion drives him to dispose of those lying between him and happiness with Ella Raines.

He reckons without Inspector Huxley (Stanley Ridges) whose calmly awkward questions do not let up. This is not the stuff of gore but steely voices, whether real or sometimes in the mind. For all its depiction of foggy streets and gaslit interiors, the abiding impression left by The Suspect is of a world in which minds toubled by disappointed hopes are let loose .

It also leaves one eager to see out the James Ronald novel on which it is based. Perhaps inspired by the Crippen case, it could prove worth setting alongside the work of Patrick Hamilton.

Hitler hated it. Mussolini gave it a place in his own collection. Many others have heard of Ecstasy; fewer have seen it, and they veer between those Thirties dictators' views of thrse eighty minutes. Some admit to being attracted by the prospect of its early instance of unabashed wild swimming, that scene in which teenage Hedy Lamarr plunges into a lake only to leap from it , no time to dress, as her horse, inspired by a similar sense of freedom, takes the opportuntiy to bolt across the land. Lo and behold, this flight leads to well-fit Aribert Mog who, with others, is at work on a nearby road. Clothes and horse restored to her, Hedy finds that all this amounts to an unusual meet-cute, something of which she is in great need as she has recently married an older man (Jaromir Rogoz) who, preocciupied with tidiness, so failed to deliver earthier pleasures that Hedy had returned to her father (Leopold Kramer).

That sounds melodramatic, and it will take similar wild turns - including some intimate gasps - which led the New York Times to greet its belated American release as "so much cinematic porridge". It is better than that, although it could be called lumpy. Made as sound was coming to the fore, it is more a silent film with audible additions as part of its array of montage: heads and figures against expansive backgrounds, deeply focussed half-lit interiors, every detail - a speck on the carpet - replete with the possibility of significance. Moments are when viewers themselves might hanker for a cool dip.

All of which leads to a conclusion - a tool-wieding montage against bright skies to extol work - which, at some length, might be lauding a need to serve the Fatherland rather than seclusion of satisfying private desire.

How many would now wish to have a copy themselves of Ecstasy - or even to stream it onto a device in tribute to Hedy's part in the invention of cellphone technology? Almost a hundred years on, there is, whatever the cavils and caveats, so much here that it is closer to essential than curiosity. A fragile medium, film survives tough-it-out politicians.

This opens well, with a post-prohibition stance by bootlegger Edward G. Robinson to make an honest trade of his brewing plant only to find that there is no market for his gassy product. Gassy soon proves ro be the term for the film itsel. For all the lustre of its creators, the relentless pace does not have the substance of true farce, let alone dialogue anything other than shrill. Better to see Robinson guy himself in one of the two rôles he takes in the little-known but glorious The Whole Town's Talking (1935).

I gave up some fifteen minutes into this, and wondered whether the rest of the film would have proved to be as dull. It is reassuring to look through these reviews and find that my supposition was right. It almost makes one think that Mel Brooks's Spaceballs would be preferable - but I am not inclined to put it to that test.

It was fitting to watch this after The Most Dangerous Game (1932) for it was made at the same time, and both films concern a mind whose two sections are split between characters. The Jekyll and Hyde instance is well known, and exists in its own right as a novella. This first sound version brings to the story a distinction different that of prose itself. Here, we see one team's view of the London setting (made in Hollywood) and the way in which the characters look - in particular the transformation of one eponymous character into the other. This is a marvel of early cinematic technique, and the film as a whole makes remarkable use of close up, light and shadow, and has one of the most provocative displays of a female leg - made all the more so by the sheet from which it protrudes.

All this well nigh amounts to noir long before before noir took its mid-Forties shape. Not that technique swamps the story. That is the familiar one of mystery and pursuit, which springs its own surprise in Stevenson's telling. If a film cannot match that particular technique, here is so much to savour that nobody should miss this version which has been restored to its original length.

A treat after dark.

The previous review has described the plot and the making of this engrossing film. The action, the chase across the island's varied and terrible terrain is but a quarter of the running time. This leaves plenty of room for philosophical discussion in the lounge of the ship soon to meet its end destruction. Only Joel McCrae survives shark-infested seas, from which he emerges to spend even more time upon such talk in the even greater space of a Count's (Leslie Banks) imposing home. Here, a previous arrival, Fay Wray soon loses her brother (Robert Armstrong) to the Count's evil plans.

This sounds the stuff of many a horror film., but there is another angle to this. McCrae plays a hunter for whom, say, a tiger is fair game; he now finds himself the target of the Count's pursuit. The hunter becomes the hunted, and any tiger might cheer on the Count in the task. Are McCrae and the Count aspects of the same person? What does it take for anybody to kill another? This was, apparently, the thrust of the long story - once well known in America - to which this film added a female rôle.

Within this hour, much happens amidst interiors and exteriors to give free range to expressionist cinematography better seen than described. This was the first film with Leslie Banks, a noted stage actor. Be sure to see anything with him in it (such as Went the Day Well? where he is another form of overlord). We must lament that he died suddenly at sixty-one. Anybody drawn to the Dorset village of Worth Matravers by its celebrated small pub The Square and Compass should also be sure to include a visit to the nearby graveyard and, in this very different landscape from the Count's island, pay tribute to this fine actor who is buried there.

An early struggle, boarding houses and all, brought Fannie Hurst material for novels and stories which made her so famous that there was even a market for a memoir, with recipes, of her dieting while the public was also eager for news of her greedy dogs. What's more, all this led to three-dozen films, including two versions of Imitation of Life (as well as a late-Forties Mexican incarnation).

The more subtle of these, with Claudette Colbert, was made soon after the novel appeared in 1933. Better known is the one with Lana Turner a quarter of a century later. In which time, colour had come to the fore - and was never so vivid as in the Fifties work by director Douglas Sirk who, after a varied career in Europe and America, found a whole new subject in this late flourish as a chronicler of suburban American life.

In this take on the story in which two single women - one white, one black - come to share a minuscule downtown flat while bringing up a child apiece, Lana Turner is a stage aspirant who, with success, takes that ad hoc maid (the inspired Juanita Moore) to her series of greater houses. What do their daughters make of this and the parade of men who find a place in a tumultuous narrative? The plot turns upon that, teenage angst exacerbated by an attempted "passing" as white which provokes a sidewalk fight scene with music suddenly redolent of West Side Story.

Summary makes it all sound as clumsy as it it undoubtedly is, never more so than the turn which reveals that the hard-pressed maid had been salting away sufficient money for a funeral which somehow includes a solo turn by Mahalia Jackson herself and, from nowhere, a crowd which the police struggle to keep on the sidewalk as four white horses pull away the black carriage and coffin. For all that, one cannot help be involved, there is so much to savour even if one's taste is more to return to the 1934 version (and watch again Humoresque, that wonderfully preposterous noir which turns around a violin and also sprang from the pen of Fannie Hurst).

Imitation of Life was Sirk's last film although he lived another three decades. In that time, and beyond, his reputation turned from that a man who had worked with whatever material came to hand (both Chekhov and Fannie Hurst) to a savant and auteur. Better perhaps to appreciate him as a man who dealt in both superior entertainment and such clunkers as, from Faulkner, The Tarnished Angels.

Considering the many pivotal moments determined in Touch and Go by black-furred Heathcliff, it is surprising that the cat who played him is not mentioned on the cast list. On the credits of course is the screenwriter William Rose who had envisaged that feline element. This year of 1955 was the same one that his The Ladykillers appeared - and has overshadowed this lighter comedy in which Boccherini plays no part though there is a good jazz moment with Kenny Baker.

The plot is simple. Frustrated at forty in a job with a design company which is oblivious to modern trends, Jack Hawkins chucks it in and determines to take his wife and reenage daughter to make a new start in Australia. That they qualify for an assisted passage is suprising, for they have a desirable house in Chelsea near the river. The timescale is compressed as they are soon ready to go (although the jewelry is not packed) and much happens a day or so before their departure, not least seeking a new home for Heathcliff who - cats know these things - makes a bolt for it and is saved from the river by an engineering student (John Fraser): he and the daughter (June Thorburn) become smitten, the thought of swift parting painful.

Even if the viewer does not feel any of the agony which many of the cast display at the thought of such transplantation, there is so much which is well done here that it makes for something agreeable - and one's only sadness is to learn that a decade later June Thorburn died, pregnant, with thirty-six others when a flight from Spain crashed into a flock of sheep on Blackdown Hill in Sussex.