Film Reviews by CH

An early story which later became a play, this Tennessee Williams work assumed a third title as a film which shows that it is a variant of a familiar plot device: a stranger arrives in town - and causes more upset than anybody expected. I

In this case, here is guitar-toting Marlon Brando. Anna Magnani duly falls for him (her ailing husband is in bed above the store in which she offers him work), a situation compounded by wild Joanne Woodward also having designs upon him.

Filmed in black and white, with many night-time scenes, here is one of Sidney Lumet's finest turns as a director. He can sustain a story without losing the baroque dialogue and outlandish situations which enmesh Williams's characters

Or, the put it another way, where there's a Will Hay, there's sure to be an entertaining variant upon a bumbling man who finds himself caught up in something larger and surely of dodgier legality than he is aware.

True to form, this time he is a dim, widowed solictor whose decaying premises happen to be above a bank which is the target of some American crooks who need him out of the way for a while. In an unexpected turn he is the father of a surprisingly pretty young woman who is being looked after at a relation's smart country house. How this fits into a plot which also includes, unusually for a Hay film, a chic London hotel is something for any viewer to savour as events build towards the high farce of Christmas Eve and a chimneyplace.

Here is a film in which, for the rest of us, presents arrive early: another succession of gags and proposterous but seemingly logical situations. Although Oh! Mr. Porter might be Hay's zenith, each of his films is diverting.

Look through the hefty volume of Tennessee Williams's Collected Stories and you will find some more familiar as the classics he made from them for stage and screen. Among these is this one. Possibly his very best and perhaps often staged because it has but four characters - and, if dominated by the mother, Amanda, it shares the workload among them.

Down on her luck, which collapsed with her husband's departure, Mrs. Wingfield is reduced - with grown-up son, Tom, and daughter, Laura - to a small apartment in late-Thirties St. Louis. Himself with an eye now on escape, Tom works in a warehouse while trying to do what he can for Laura whose spirit is further blighted by crippled feet, a situation in ironic counterpoint to the jazz-band 78s which she puts upon the turntable to her mother's irritation.

Such music is of course forbidden while Amanda telephones readers to persuade them to renew their lapsed subscriptions to a magazine. As she decribes the plot of a forthcoming serial, rarely have aspiration and reality been as finely deliniated as here, in her own saga. This is something harrowingly compounded by Tom's match-makingly inviting to dinner a colleague whom Laura knew from schooldays. For those who do not know the play, say no more - except that this cast is superb. That not only includes Katherine Hepburn (her gesturing manner makes one wonder if Maggie Smith ever took the part). No matter that Sam Waterston's haircut is more redolent of the Seventies when this was made - in Buckinghamshire - for television. He is the ideal buttress to Joanna Miles who, like Katherine Hepburn, transforms her appearance for gentleman-caller Michael Moriarty.

There are other films of this play but they are now elusive. This one certainly makes for the closest that one's sitting room can come to one which takes up a stage set in which some of the eponymous, shelf-haunting creatures need replacing from night to night. Of course, their human counterparts are, if anything, more fragile. Tennessee Williams did not shy from symbolism any more than his admired D. H. Lawrence: at their peak, both could merge it with reality.

A charismatic teacher who draws upon poetry to inspire pupils to seek their own destiny amidst the confining spirit of a Fifties private school. Such a summary might bring to mind Dead Poets Society. The Penguin Lessons certainly does that - and more. Where Robin Williams urged the schoolboys to stand upon their chairs in a spirit of libreration, Steve Coogan has them becoming supine on the floor so that they can see a penguin loom over in the way they usually appear to him.

A penguin's perspective? Fanciful stuff? No, this is based upon a memoir of a young teacher - much more so than Coogan - who fetched up in Argentina as it fell victim to a mid-Seventies military coup. During the advent of that junta Tom spent a few days in Uraguay, from which he returned with a penguin (in a rucksack) whom he had been prevailed upon by an (alas) married woman to save from an oily death on the beach.

Keeping this side of sentimentality, he shies at the last minute from consigning the creature to the caged quarantine of a zoo and allows him the run of his room. More unruly than this creature are the Remove pupils - paper aeroplanes and all - as Coogan tries to make them grasp and relish the free-spirit beneath the surface of Masefield's "Sea Fever". In a moment of revelation he calls upon the bird to help him in the task - something kept secret from the stuffy Headmaster (Jonathan Pryce). Parallel with this is the kidnapping of a cleaner by the junta for her subversive behaviour.

If there are broad strokes to all this, it is no less affecting, and one has to marvel oneself at the bird (two real ones were used most of the time in the filming with occasional resort to a digital substitute when demands more arduous than a waddle or a quizzical look would have amounted to cruelty).

As with Goodbye, Mr. Chips near-sentimentality comes with a sadness which makes the tale all the more heartening. As for the ordeal of all those who, like the cleaner, were taken away in daylight, it is a reminder to watch again Costa-Gavros's Missing which turns around the similiar fate of many in Chile during that decade.

Mention the name Hess in any word-association challenge, and most likely a reply is the long-time inhabitant of Spandau rather than the subject of this film: Dean Hess. Dean was his Christian name but he was also a parson who, after the second world war and now married, was troubled to learn that his part in an Allied raid on Berlin had bombed out an orphanage.

Parson Hess sees a way of redeeming this by now joining the American air force as a training pilot in the war which has broken out in 1950 between north and south Korea. The symmetrical upshot of this was that he was able, just in time, to arrange for the rescue of four-hundred orphans who looked set to suffer a similar fate to those German children. Hess's memoir of this was a bestseller in its time and soon proved to be the unlikely basis of another in the varied catalogue of Douglas Sirk's films.

Although mostly taking place in what purports to be Korea, Battle Hymn has some echo of Sirk's Fifties films set in suburban America with the scenes that find Hess's wife at home (and, as she learns after his departure, pregnant). What's more, one might not be reading too much into it all by surmising that there is an unspoken passion between him and a Korean in charge of orphans.

Much of the film - in unashamed technicolor and cinemascope - takes place at the air-force base in Korea (where his clerical background is at first unknown) and in the many scenes in the sky which find these aircraft beset by the enemy. Some have scorned Sirk's depiction of this - feuds in the barracks, explosive blasts from all barrels, terse crackling exchanges between cockpits - as the stock in trade material of war films.

That is to rate it lower than it deserves. True, there are the sentimental deaths and dramatic appeals to reason familiar in such films but Sirk steers it an way that is sufficiently adroit to make it affecting - epilogue, stirring music and all.

Rarely have there been such outsize schoolboys as those here again with Will Hay as their master. A situation which the viewer soon accepts as they taunt the ever-gullible and incompetent man who, true to form, finds that higher authorities are about to sack him. This gives pedagogue and pupils common cause in finding a way to preserve the status quo. That is a phrase that one and all would be as hard put to render into English as they do the French which is the subject of an imminent exam.

No need to explain here how they all pass haut la main, so to speak; sufficient to say that this purported display of linguistic brilliance brings them the award of a visit to Paris. Neatly enough, this coincides with the development of opening scenes about a plot to steal the Mona Lisa.

The plot might sound as creaky as Hay's attempts to speak French but it would not shame the Marx Brothers and, as with them, is more than covered by an array of gags - including a sultry, even bottom-slapping foray to a night club and unabashed references to short and fat people.

Smart viewers could gain an extra mark for saying that the Mona Lisa on display in what passes here for the Louvre (it was made in Islington) is larger than the one which had originally sat on da Vinci's easel. Her enigmatic smile would surely have broken into a broad cackle had she lived to see this diverting film.

What with, among others, They Drive by Night (in its English and American versions), Hell Drivers and Thieves' Highway, trucks - their loads and those at the wheel - have long been the stuff of chicanery upon the screen. Lesser known is this late-Fifties German take on noir. Light and shade are a veritable emblem of a post-war country where a village is swamped by an occupying air force which, from its new base, tests jet planes across these skies.

At ground level there is illicit dealing in the eponymous gravel, beneath which are soon buried a couple killed by a wayward truck. Add to this the rekindling of passion between a driver and a woman who has married one of the American servicemen, not to mention many a scene set in a bar and adjacent brothel, and here, with everybody on the make, is as something explosive as opening which leads to a crucial quest for a missing dog.

How it turns out is told so well, the plot to moving from scene to scene with a logic which defies its outlandish set-up.

A remote location ideal for smuggling under the eyes of bumbling officials, this scenario for Will Hay's Oh, Mr. Porter also does service for Ask a Policeman - and again ends with a supernatural appearance, and another thrilling chase.

The story finds Hay and his cohorts in danger of losing their cushy jobs as they have not reported any of the visible crimes for a decade - and are oblivious to the barrels brought ashore beneath their HQ by a local Squire who doubles as the Headless Rider of a white horse of local legend. In some seventy-five minutes so much is here gag-wise, whether oral or visible that one can only mavel. If any do not hit the mark, another is soon along.

Again, Hay takes on authority, exposes it to ridicule and, just in time, saves his own skin.

Has there ever been a BBC broadcast to rival the one with which this delightful film opens? Be sure to relish these surprises.

Most familiar as director of Fifties suburban dramas which have had him pitched as a techniclor Tennessee Williams, Douglas Sirk had a more varied career than that. Never more so than with the mid-Thirties short films, features and theatrical adaptation which he made before leaving Germany. At last, thanks to a pair of discs assembed by the Eureka company, these are available for wider viewing.

Where to start? Perhaps the most accomplished is The Girl from Marsh Croft. Adapted from a 1908 novel, it takes place in a countryside where the sky is as long as the fields on which one of the toilers is a young woman. As a maid elsewhere, she had been impregnated by her employer whom she condemned in a court case which did not go her way - apart from her refusing to allow him to swear on the Bible as she she did not want her child to be a blasphemer's. (All of which suggests something of Hardy's Tess.) So impressed by this public stance was a farmer that he offered her work - and finds himself more than taken by her despite being tacitly spoken for by a woman of higher standing than him.

Complicated again by his fearing that he stabbed somebody on his stag night (his drink had been laced by an unseen hand). All of which is very much the stuff of melodrama but Sirk keeps up so measured a pace that the viewer enjoys something more subtle than sensationalism. Who can fail to feel for these characters? Some might say that it anticipcates his later work (and shares that relish of domestic settings) but here is in fact the equal of it.

The social order is also a part of the rather different April, April! in which a Fool's Day joke - about a purported royal visit to a pasta factory - is folded back on itself twice over. (Could it have been inpsired by thr 1910 incident when Virginia Woolf and others, suitably disguised, were welcomed upon the Dreadnought battleship as a Prince of Abyssinia with his retinue?) Much sport and romance ensue, all of this as pleasingly unlikely as Two Greyhounds in which two applicants for a bookeeping job assume that the other is the employer-to-be. All that is sustained for half an hour of unlikely but persusasive farce which is better sustained than a period-set abridged take on Molière's The Imaginary Invalid. There is more here (including a version of Ibsen).

A great surprise, here is a set to relish.

With a marriage which not only soon turned sour but is complicated by news of pregnancy, Keri Russell finds sanctuary in a waitressing job in an irascibly-managed Southern diner which allows her to create sweet puddings of her own devising. With parallel plots supplied by the amatory aspirations of two other waitresses and the lifetime's disappointments of a regular customer, here is something which moves briskly between the tragic and the feel-good. There are snappy and snappish lines throughout as these nine months play out and bring with them the longer time-frame of a brief epilogue. Unhealthy as those pies might be for the heart here is a film which warms it without forgetting that the brain also has to be fed.

The only shame is that the writer/director, who also plays one of the other waitresses, was murdered before this splendid film's release.

The two previous reviewers remark that this is a bad print. It is now available here from Paradiso in the better Criterion Collection edition. That said, it proves to be something of a disappointment for the mumbled method dialogue is favoured and the scenario is redolent of the Seventies without reaching the various peaks achieved in that decade. Perhaps that disappointment is also prompted by its not displaying the wit for which Elaine May is reknowned.

After an opening which is not as crisp as the poker playing of many a noir, this gathers pace as Charlton Heston is among those sought by the police and the venegeful near-invisible and certainly psychotic brother of the man that gang so rooked at the table that he killed himself. Not so much a suspenseful narrative, Dark City is a series of tableaux, often cutting to the music of a cabaret club which, if enjoyable in itself ("That Old Black Magic") breaks the mood. For all this, it is well worth watching for Heston in a début which is far from the epics in which he was so often to fetch up.. How did Dark City come to have an ending which, in its setting and lighting beside an aeroplane, is so close to that of Casablanca?

Another curiosity by Douglas Sirk - while waiting some while for the set of his Thirties films made in Germany. He turned his camera to many types of film, even a version of a Chekhov novel, and perhaps surprised himself with the great run of suburban dramas in the Fifties. Here, with Sign of the Pagan, things erupts many centuries earlier as Attila the Hun takes on the Roman Empire in Constantinople and Italy. Many are the scenes in which horses cross the landscape and carry on as their riders fall to the ground. It is difficult to become involved in all this, for - apart from Attila - the characters lack individual spirit. Curiously, the scriptwriter was Barre Lyndon - a name which is close to Thackeray's character filmed by Kubrick.

Leslie Banks again as a villain, this time set upon foiling the emergent and glamorous Lilli Palmer, makes an enticing prospect. It is another Edgar Wallace adaptation. If his best-selling novels - sometimes dictated over a weekend - are little read now, screen versions of these yarns can remain diverting. The Door with Seven Locks has the premise of a fortune left to a young boy to be kept in trust by a lawyer who has the seven keys to unlock the vault when the time comes. This brings rightful heir Lilli Palmer in conflict with the wonderfully bearded, cloaked and monkey-owning Banks whose evil disposition manifests itself in murder (deadly pipes are used) and curatorship of his museum of torture devices,. (An iron maiden springs into action along the way.) Add to this a foul-tempered servant played by Cathleen Nesbitt (with whom Rupert Brooke had been smitten a quarter-century earlier) and all is set for suspense.

How disappointing that this soon dissipates, the promising premise lost amidst scenes which become unduly long and talkative. It is a film which has its moments, and leaves one eager to read what Lilli Palmer made of it in her acclaimed mid-Seventies memoir of a career which began with the little-known likes of this after being driven from a troubled Europe.

The name Richard Rodgers invariably brings to mind the film versions of the musicals he wrote with Oscar Hammerstein. This is to overlook his work with the wittier and more affecting Lorenz Hart, some of which reached the screen after it had appeared on stage (not forgetting the glorious 1934 incarnation of Evergreen with Jessie Matthews). Love Me Tonight (1932), though, saw them supplying the score for the film itself which was directed by Rouben Mamoulian. Very much in the Lubitsch manner, where even tailor Maurice Chevalier's Parisian shop has a glamour about it (top hats!), this is taken from a farce and given a genuinely romantic, abundantly sexual quality.

Put simply, Chevalier is bilked of payment for a suit by a lesser member (Charlie Ruggles) of an aristocratic household whose pile is a drive away from the city. He determines to go there and be paid before returning to Paris, a place which has been wonderfully evoked in the long opening sequence in which "Isn't It Romantic?" is sung by each of the residents whom the camera lights upon as it roves around before ending at the aristocratic castle (over which C. Aubrey Smitrh presides) where the refrain is taken up by a pribcess, Jeanette Macdonald. Married at sixteen to a man in his seventies, she was soon widowed and pines for a man. Even so, she demurs at falling for the charms of Chevalier whom the defaulting aristocrat persuades to pass himself off as a Baron so that he will be invited to stay there while waiting for the payment. (It is perhaps worth noting such a class-traversing situation was the basis for the previous year's now-scarce The Hot Heiress for which Rodgers and Hart wrote a few songs.) One can well anticipate that all will turn out well but, before then, much happens in this brilliantly filmed narrative which is not confined to the building itself but, crucially, ventures without for a hunting scene which arouses the deer-tending rebel in Chevalier and some fine shots of a speeding train.

Nor should we overlook, if that were in the least possible, the innuendo-fortified appeareces by another member of the household, Myrna Loy - and three aunts who in an earlier era would have gathered around a cauldron and cast spells.

From the opening scene onwards, exhilarating is the word for all this. As Hart's successor Oscar Hammerstein would put it in Carousel, such a sunny spirit "is bustin' out all over". Here is radiance - and it's in black and white. And who can resist a scene in which a man, in taking a tumble, exclaims, "I've fallen on my flute!"? And the scene in which, needs must, Chevalier takes his tape measure to Jeanette Macdonald's chest after one layer has fallen from it. Do see it.