Film Reviews by CH

“People like that don't commit suicide – they're far too busy.” The title Black Widow might lead one to expect a square screen framing black-and-white scenes most of which take place after dark. This 1954 film is in Cinemascope, the camera panning from side to side of large swanky Manhattan apartments whose furnishings are offset by copious sunlight. From one of Hugh Wheeler's mysteries (written as Patrick Quentin), this is a well-upholstered whodunit with no sign of a holster, just the shadow of a body hanging from a bathroom ceiling.

Van Heflin, a Broadway producer, is married to Gene Tierney who leaves town for a while to look after her ailing mother. Reluctantly, he goes to a party given by a neighbour in the block, none other than a Ginger Rogers who is currently in one of his productions and given to greeting many with an insult while her bag-carrier of a husband (Reginald Gardiner) looks on despairingly. Seeking fresher air, van Heflin goes on the balcony (some of the backdrops do not travel that well to Hollywood), and there encounters Peggy Ann Garner, a leopardess who, at twenty, hides her spots while going in for the kill while climbing the ladder of ambition with her typewriter (a sentence which could need editing but that might risk giving too much away).

And so he takes her out for some food more fortifying than Ginger Rogers's things on toothpicks, and, before long, suggests she can use his apartment by day as a writing retreat while his wife is away.

An innocent mid-life crisis?

Detective George Raft has his doubts. Some might call all this stagey, though it might not work on stage. Whichever, it is entertaining, not least with the brief turn of a cleaning lady played – almost Monty Python-fashion - by Cathleen Nesbitt who, some four decades earlier, had been in love with Rupert Brooke.

Think of John Wayne and there come to mind a big gun, an even larger hat and quite possibly a horse. So how, in Without Reservations (1946), does Claudette Colbert fit into such a scenario? Dodge City is hardly the place for a best-selling author. No, this is only a Western in the sense that she is heading West, to Hollywood, upon a sleeper train to discuss the filming, with Clark Gable and Lana Turner, of her highly-regarded book which turns around new hopes for human society.

As the title suggests, she has to make do with lesser sleeping quarters upon a crowded train, which brings her into the company of Wayne, a no-holds-barred, plain-speaking kinda guy whom, despite initial, er, reservations, she realises would be perfect to portray her novel's hero on screen.

She cannot pitch this notion to him directly as she is keeping herself incognito. Much, but not all, of the film takes place aboard the train – one with a dining carriage, a far cry from today's forlorn trolleys (where even those still exist). Directed by Mervyn LeRoy, long adept at fast-moving movies, the dialogue is snappy, with frequent reference to a matter of concern to one and all; that is, “bananas”: no, this is not a health matter but slang for dollars.

Banana can have another slang meaning, if you get my drift – and perhaps that is hinted at it the film's final, lingering screen-filling shot; but this is not the place to reveal that; watch this is, and enjoy the good time with which Claudette Colbert is synonymous, in the nicest possible sense of the phrase.

Oh, and do not blink or you will miss Cary Grant showing that is is a thoroughly good sport. He was born with the twinkle in his eye which he deploys to good effect here. A gentleman can be judged by his eyebrows.

“These old houses creak as much as my knees.” So a landlady tells a young and fetching church organist (Candace Hilligoss) who has rented a room in a small town after, apparently, surviving a crowded automobile's plunge from a bridge into a river at the beginning of Carnival of Souls (1962).

Created and directed by Herk Harvey, who appears throughout as a ghostly figure, this film, rendered in effective black and white, does not succumb to gore but is continually unnerving, not least with the man (Sidney Berger) across the landing, a warehouse functionary creepily set upon deflowering her: he arrives at breakfast time with a jug of coffee laced with spirits (as it were): for which she supplies the wonderful term of “germkiller” (all this,after a classic bathtub scene).

Within and without, the film is stark, scantly populated. How many people know of it? How did it come to be made? Little funding was available, and yet it echoes across six decades, partly driven by music which riffs upon that modest church organ to summon the stuff of nightmare.

The past eighteen months have taken us back ninety years. That is to say, it quickly became clear that to set up one camera in front of a stage production was as uninvolving for the audience as the sluggard nature of early talkies whose directors could not move microphones swiftly lest there be untoward wind effects. The thought comes to mind while watching Denzel Washington's 2016 film of August Wilson's Eighties play Fences in a revival of which he and many of the cast had appeared on Broadway a few years earlier.

Some have said that this film shows its theatrical origins. It does so, but also, by dextrous means, transcends them – and, in its two-and-a-quarter hours is a joy for those of us who did not get to see it on stage (let alone the other nine plays in Wilson's century-spanning Pittsburgh series).

Fences chronicles a few years around the Fifties halfway mark. Denzel Washington plays a garbage collector given to philosophical and social reflections not often associated with such a job (although one might recall the crew in Jack Rosenthal's television series The Dustbinmen). His home life is the focus of the film, whether within the building or on its street and back garden, where the eponymous and symbolic fence-building task is a prolonged one. All this is complex. Much of it is galvanised by his heroic wife, played by Viola Davis, and fraught dealings with a son (Joven Adopa) whose adolescent yearnings remind Washington of failure to make more of himself. “Man hands on misery to man...”, in Larkin's lines.

The film's structure turns upon monologues without lessening its dramatic surprises (not to be hinted at here). It has the spirit of Tennessee Williams, but one might also wonder whether Wilson knew D. H. Lawrence's plays (and indeed Williams adapted one of his short stories You Touched Me!).

Commercial imperatives mean that the film is in colour but, in one's memory, it has an almost sepia quality. One can but lament that Wilson died at sixty, a decade before the film appeared – but glad that he had created this screenplay, and he would be sure that to relish the result.

Chances are that a disc of Let's Make it Legal (1951) will have Marilyn Monroe on its cover. She is only in it for a few minutes, some of which linger upon her swimming costume. One should not feel short-changed. Here is a drama to whose proceedings screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond brings quite a bit of his natural wit (whether the scene involves a baby or outraged policemen).

Proceedings is an apt word, for the plot turns around the imminent divorce of Claudette Colbert and plant-loving, gambling addict Macdonald Carey, whose daughter, Barbara Bates, is keen to prevent this: self-interest is that motive, for she enjoys an easy living at home with her infant daughter, a situation which infuriates husband Robert Wagner. A further complication is the return to the town of Zachary Scott whose sinister moustache is an emblem of his business success and political aspirations in Washington, all of which pale beside his renewed hopes of wooing and marrying Claudette Colbert (hopes from which he is not deflected by a gold-digging Marilyn).

Directed by Richard Sale, things move at a pace – often inside the house itself - in this hour and a quarter, and one can only marvel at clothes which would now fetch a fortune on the vintage racks.

We should be grateful that Matilyn's prescence has kept this film in sight. Of course, she would soon be famous, and, within a decade was dead. Another book has just asserted that she was murdered. Be that as it may, her tragic end has overshadowed that of Barbara Bates who gassed herself in 1969. Bright lights have dark shadows.

Some titles cannot be euphoniously translated. And so they remain La Traviata and Cosi fan tutti. This thought comes to mind when watch Max Ophuls's Everybody's Woman (1934), a coarser title than La signora di tutti.

With the advent of the Nazis, Ophuls sought refuge in Italy before a move to Hollywood. This stay yielded one film, from a cliff-hanging serialised story by Salvatore Gotta. On screen, it opens with film star Isa Miranda's suicide attempt upon a smart bathroom floor and, as the gas mask lowers upon her head in the operating theatre, all dissolves into the sequence of events which brought her to this sorry pass.

The first of the men to fall for her was a married teacher, whose declaration of love is such that he cannot live without her, and dies by his own hand – a scandal which obliges her to leave and spend a year cooped up at her parents' home. Pressure is brought for her to attend a dance in a large, grand house, and there she dances with the son (Freidrich Benfer) who appears to spurn her but she takes on a job as assistant to his well-nigh bed-bound mother (Russian-born Tatyana Pavlova - and to say any more would rob viewers of the suspense of a melodrama whose continual movement owes so much to everything which Ophuls had learned in Germany.

Here, in light and shade, often in deep focus, are dances, a boat upon a lake, many a wide, twisting staircase, glimpses of transcontinental railway trains as one and all – even the servants – are caught up in a drama whose coils appear driven by fate itself.

For all that glamorous Isa manipulates the situations, hauling herself from one situation to the next, it is as if she is trying to make up for that initial adversity of the schoolroom. A pattern is set. As she moves forward she is continually stumbling over herself.

Such is Ophuls's skill that one never pauses to deem it an outlandish scenario. It is ravishing, and should be more widely known.

As films swell in length, it is always heartening to return to those portmanteau items where so much is brought within linked works, each of which fills some twenty minutes. Such is Torture Garden (1967) directed by Freddie Francis who had made Paranoiac a few years earlier. This time, now working in colour, he turns to good effect a script by Robert Bloch (best known for the novel upon which Psycho was based). This takes as its linking theme a fairground sideshow where a barker invites people to part with a fiver, in exchange for which Dr. Diabilo will reveal to them true horror.

And so some, confident of getting their money back if not satisfied, go inside. Beneath the canvas, the Doctor, wonderfully played by the versatile Burgess Meredith, invites each in turn to look at the open blades of shears in front of a still woman upon a throne. With which, the screen dissolves into a story which draws out their malevolent ambitions, none of which involve torture as such, let alone gardening.

The first and fourth are the best. In the first one a starring rôle is taken by a cat who has power over both Michael Bryant who is after the money which his uncle (Maurice Denham) has evidently concealed in a tumbledown house, complete – of course - with basement and all that entails (to make a double pun). That course to madness is captured convincingly. And the fourth segment is a lesson to anybody who has harboured thoughts of collecting things, on however modest a scale: that way madness again lies, as Jack Palance finds when his enthusiasm for Poe takes him to the house of Peter Cushing who has, somehow, amassed unknown treasures from the pen of an author who met a wretched end.

And it not all over yet.

A film which, if you are a holding a glass of wine, is enough to have you running to the bathroom, pulling off clothing and dousing it in cold water before the stain sets in.

“If that's love, I'm a pig's grandfather.” A terrific line but not one uttered by Jessie Matthews herself in Head over Heels (1937). By dint of some back projections, she is living humbly in Paris while performing at night in an open-air café which can run to an orchestra and an array of dancers.

Here she is in a love triangle, torn between Victor Flemying (an inventor who is ahead of the technological game) and actor Louis Borel who could be on the way to Hollywood. The film which falls into two parts, several times over. One could say something similar of Cabaret, in which the stage scenes out-do most of the rest; as Christopher Isherwood himself often observed, if Sally had been as good as Liza, she would have been the sensation of Europe; equally, Jessie Matthews's performances are magical while the scenes in in a rough apartment and elsewhere are lumpen.

The first of her films to be directed by Sonnie Hale, it appears to bear the scars of their fraught marriage. Still there are the songs, by Mack Gordon and Harry Revel. Not only only the title number but “There's That Look in Your Eyes Again” and “Looking around Corners for You”: this last is perhaps the film's high spot: while thinking that all is lost, that Jessie is lost, Fleming walks around a back-projected Paris and chances upon couples in cafés and elsewhere, each time thinking that the woman is Jessie, but she isn't: she herself is superimposed upon the screen as she sings that song, making for adroit montage which could have a claim to be the first pop video.

Jessie Matthews was terrific: play one of her discs with relish: she did not need that winsome appearance to succeed but she is always enjoyable to watch, that flutter of the eyelids which are the mark of an all-knowing spirit staking out the innocent territory.

Pagan. The word derives from the Latin for country. That is, those of such a disposition hail from unsophisticated parts, even villages. So we are reminded by John Atkinson who, looking like a cross between Derek Nimmo and Jeremy Irons, plays a rector in a pleasant house in the Malvern Hills. This etymological point is not part of the sermons which he types on what, even in 1974, was an antique machine, but an observation made while walking across a nearby field with his son, Spencer Banks, who is about to turn eighteen.

Banks is an unusual schoolboy, immersed in Elgar, in particular to spiritual voyage he created from Newman's The Dream of Gerontius. Banks has politics of a country-loving Tory hue, at odds with his time and fellow pupils who, dressed at times in Army uniform, are much given to ragging him (there are moments when one thinks of If...).

Penda's Fen was written by David Rudkin, and to his surprise Alan Clarke agreed to direct it. Clarke was known for gritty films of social realism. Although billed, in some quarters, as a work of horror, it is not exactly that. Rudkin has said that the idea came to him from a road sign in the area which pointed to a village. Its name haunted him, and he looked into its origins: it derives from Penda's Fen, name in honour of a King.

Banks himself is on a quest, a direction in life which, for all its ease and good fortune, is troubled. This will involve him in many strange encounters as angels descend and strange rituals are enacted as reality and dream merge to create a new dimension to existence.

Rudkin has recalled that, at times, Clarke was not sure what was happening. He told him simply to follow the script that it was all in there, it was the only book he need to read about all the myths and psychology – and the life of Elgar – which he had drawn upon in writing it.

And so here it is, a mélange – with many a descending Sun – which carries us along, the dialogue taken at a slightly slower than natural pace, as if all concerned are out of synchronisation with the world around them.

What's more, one learns that part of Gerontius was inspired by one of Elgar's dogs.

There is nothing quite like Penda's Fen, too little known since its first showing in the BBC's Play for Today series.

How can a film as good as Paranoiac (1963) slip from general notice? Rarely has there been one which, in ninety minutes, takes so many turns and brings so many gasps. It was directed, for Hammer, by Freddie Francis, whose earlier career as a cinematographer proves a great force in the shades of black and white in a film set in the vicinity of the Dorset coast.

Working from a script by Jimmy Sangster, which derived from Josephine Tey's novel Brat Farrar, he fashioned a near-Gothic set-up which opens with shots of two sides of a tombstone: the deaths of two wealthy parents followed by the drowning of one of their sons.

Inside the church, as the vicar intones about those events a decade ago, the other son – Oliver Reed – sits at the organ and, as the music swells, his sister (Janette Scott) looks up and faints at the sight of somebody. To the fore comes their aunt (a formidable Sheila Burrell) who took charge of the children in tandem with the local accountant (Maurice Denham) as the day looms when sports car-driving, heavy-drinking Reed is set to come into half a million.

As one can imagine, the atmosphere in the rambling family house is fraught. Is the sister mad? Who is in league with whom?

And what can any of them make of a startling arrival?

Surprises are sprung in the first fifteen minutes, but it would be unfair to reveal even these, for they are the foundation upon which the rest is built. Surprise follows surprise, all of which make the very film a great surprise. Nobody with a relish of the resources shown by modestly-funded British films should miss it. Oak-lined rooms lit by candles bring as much a cliff-edge atmosphere as the sunlit chalk of the cliffs themselves.

There is more to be written about the use of organs in film. What is is about such a great instrument that the very press of its keyboard harbingers the sinister?

What will happen to Hollywood when automobiles are not only driverless but guided by pavement devices which limit speed? Such tyre-squealing chases - often after the real owner has mysteriously left the keys in the ignition – are familiar, and can be enjoyed by those happier with pedals of a bicycle. The thought comes to mind during The Driver (1978). The cars have names (a Mercedes is notably roughed up) but the actors simply go by the task allotted them in a series of heists throughout a raw Los Angeles. The eponymous man at the wheel is Ryan O'Neal, a professional hired for his skill at making a getaway which leaves others standing – or lying on their sides as their car takes a tumble.

This is all too much for Bruce Dern, a decidedly weird detective whose hair aspires to an Art Garfunkel cut. He is determined to bring in O'Neal, even if it means that he has to depute a particularly unsavoury gang to act as go-betweens. Add Isabelle Adjani – well, love interest is pitching it a bit high – and here is something that, on the streets, is indeed explosive; elsewhere, in seedy rooms, it is, as written and directed by Walter Hill, close to the existential. Here are people with chasms between them, listlessness alleviated only by breaking the speed limit and turning the wheel just in time to avoid something coming from another direction at the lights.

Meditative it isn't, but its sparse dialogue is sharp – and one cannot help recall that scene in Truffaut's La Nuit Américaine where a stunt driver wears a long wig so that, on screen, a woman appears to be at the wheel. And one wonders whether Hill had to use day-for-night techniques to bring in all this more safely.

A mystery that The Chain (1984) should be little known, for it addresses two perennial themes: the seven deadly sins and the fraught business, in Britain, of moving house.

With a script by Jack Rosenthal who otherwise wrote, memorably so, for television, this is a portmanteau film in which seven couples get up early, this the day of their moving a rung up a property ladder which can often feel more like a rope turning into a noose. None of them has Ealing in their sights, but the spirit of those social comedies pervades this one.

Not least in its ensemble cast. With no member of it out to hog it, all get to give their best, part of it propelled by the removal firm which is lugging the belongings of a young couple whose bigger place is funded by giving the basement to her widowed, dictatorial father, Maurice Denham whose delaying obstructions will bring him grief.

As happens to a penny-pinching, well-heeled man (Nigel Hawthorne in a horrendous blazer) whose wife (an ever-pained Anna Massey) despairs of him as he unscrews door plates and even reaches for their light bulbs. He is an emblem of Avarice.

The Sins, though, are not laboured. Here, with a suggestion of La Ronde, is pre-AIDS London in the Eighties, a city which embraces white vans and limousines. And, all the while, aboard the removal van there are, among its aching-back crew, Bernard Hill who is asked to test colleague Warren Mitchell about the philosophers upon whom he will be examined during the evening, after this gruelling day, at what appears to be a night school (whatever happened to night school?).

Spinoza and others might appear remote from this daily life but, without over-doing it, Mitchell manages to bring words of wisdom to those in the throes of uprooting themselves. Billie Whitelaw is well known for her work with Samuel Beckett, and here, as a widow who hankers for her native Mediterranean island, she has an accent far from her stage work – but conveys a similar spirit of somebody caught in a bewildering world.

A film to relish – and wish there were more of its kind.

Time was when Fleet Street was in Fleet Street and newspapers dealt in news. True to such cinematic form, The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) has several scenes of the latest issue clattering through the presses and the front page filling the screen with a thud as events unfurl. In this case, with an original script by Wolf Mankowitz and director Val Guest, it turns around the contemporary fear of the Bomb. It has not killed anybody recently but, as two Daily Express reporters discover, several tests of it have tipped the planet off the axis which brought and sustained life up and under these shores.

This is no science-fiction extravaganza. The effects are minimal but well used, and, as is the newspaper, all is in black and white. Except the characters. Here are people, in all their variety, each containing multitudes.

Leo McKern (who recalls that it was all made in an astonishing five weeks) is the newspaper's science correspondent and Edward Judd a reporter forever on the trail of stories while brooding on the divorce which means he rarely sees his son. Guest re-created the Express offices – and used the real-life staff member Arthur Christiansen to the play the Editor (as he does capably enough). Along the way Judd meets Janet Munro, a Government source, who also provides him with sultry distraction in her small flat and at the funfair in Battersea Park. Guest was always very good at making use of locations, and here all the more so as that tilt in the axis brings floods and cyclones while the Prime Minister intones from Downing Street – and, for a few seconds, a helmeted Michael Caine attempts to direct panicking drivers.

All of which means that it has as much contemporary relevance as it did in that period when Bertrand Russell addressed crowds in Trafalgar Square. With the climate emergency sending the planet out of kilter by other means, here is a drama as troubling, and involving, as ever. A gem which gleams from its sepia-toned opening and for the following ninety minutes.

Strange, the way the mind works. While watching Monsoon (1943) there came to mind Robert Ballard's book about his voyage in a submersible to look at the wreck of the Titanic. He remarked of a grand piano that it was now out of tune, which is a masterclass in understatement. The cost of Ballard's journey doubtless cost a sum which would boggle Edgar Ulmer. Born in Germany, where he worked with Billy Wilder on People on Sunday (1929), necessary exile brought him to Hollywood and a by-word for low-budget acumen, displayed so well in Détour and Ruthless.

Less well known is Monsoon, sometimes called – fittingly – Isle of Forgotten Sin. How to describe it? It opens, as dawn breaks, with the female owner of some premises tapping upon slatted doors, the other side of which slumber sultry women. They have to get up, a ship has docked and business is likely to be brisk.

Naturally, one wonders what this might entail. It emerges that downstairs is a casino, although as events unfold, that first suspicion of journeys upstairs are not dissolved.

And one has to question the competence of the carpenters who built those banisters. Fights break out, and the handrails collapse at the first grasp. Even at eighty minutes, the plot is convoluted, and can sometimes slow down things. Roughly speaking, two sailors are on the track of hidden treasure, and neither can trust the other, especially with others getting wind of its seabed location. All of which entails some of the casino's scantily-dressed women joining a voyage to the island where three-million in gold languishes offshore.

Those dresses survive a midnight swim to a cave, during which the soundtrack sports something which sounds as though Wagner had scored the cheesy opening music of The Simpsons.

There are enough slugfests in all this to ruin a lettuce patch. Nobody's passions are going to be turned upside-down, but it is very entertaining, with some surreal lines, such as the one in which a man comes round from being knocked out to exclaim, “well, I'm a horned toad!” And, when one of the women learns of the money at stake, she observes, “that's not hay!”

This film throve upon a hay diet.

The double is a familiar form in films – and Marlene Dietrich was given to guises several times in her work. Those shall not be revealed here but it gives away little of The Flame of New Orleans (1941) to say that this features another one. How well known is the film now? Written by the ever-adroit Norman Krasna, one of those who mysteriously attract the word professional as a near-insult, it is a diverting entertainment with many of those touches that distinguished René Clair (here in wartime exile).

In the middle of the nineteenth century Marlene Dietrich has arrived in town (with her wise maid Theresa Harris), and sings less than one could wish. She is a woman of mystery, necessarily so. She has plied her wooing ways elsewhere, and here is duly rewarded with a necklace by stolid banker Roland Young. Money can't buy him love, though, especially when Marlene hankers for impecunious Bruce Cabot, a man as rugged as the vessel he captains.

For which of these men will it be a case of the gal that got away?

Around this scenario are turned many scenes which culminate in a bravura barroom scene which contrasts with many high-born interiors (if so young a place really has old money). However small a part, each member of the cast plays it to the full (such as the matronly figures who tacitly inform Marlene about the rigours of the bedroom, to which she gives an eyebrow and twinkle unrivalled in film history).

Here is abundant fun.