Film Reviews by CH

Pause, and one realises that anybody who worked on, say, Casablanca or The Third Man could screen in their minds a film different from the one familiar to us. That is, they saw the colours of sets and clothing. Not that this is to crave “colorising” (the vogue for which appears to have passed). Such films were designed with their splendid black-and-white imagery to the fore.

Similar has been done with Ozon's Frantz (2016), most of which is set in 1919 and appears to us in black and white. It appears in keeping with a small German town where much of the events turn around a graveyard, apparently the last spot for a soldier killed in the war. The plot is simple - and complex. To say more would spoil it, as would any discussion of the graveyard in The Third Man.

In grief for the soldier, her fiancé, Paula Beer visits the grave as usual and is surprised to find flowers on it. They have been put there by a visiting Frenchman (Pierre Niney). Discussion ensues, and is welcome - not least because it distracts from a tedious man who is pursing her with an eye on marriage.

The film is a marvel to watch, its rhythm finely paced to bring out all the conflicts within and between the characters (including her parents), so much so that the small town smoulders.

Only one thing is missing. Lubitsch's 1932 film Broken Lullaby, from a play by Maurice Rostand. It is currently unavailable. Whoever has the rights in it would surely do well, for those who enjoy Frantz will want to seek out its inspiration.

Dead at sixty, Peter Finch had appeared in many films. If not enough of them are memorable, such high points as No Love for Johnnie and Sunday, Bloody Sunday make one look at others with some expectations. So it is with Make Me an Offer (1955), and here is, at most, a curiosity.

Directed with scant flair in variable, sometimes strangely bleached Eastmancolor by Cyril Frankel, who died recently at 95 after working mostly in television, it sprang from a play by Wolf Mankowitz whose film A Kid for Two Farthings appeared the same year. In his time, Mankowitz was well known for depictions of East-End life - and must always be esteemed for his work on The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) with Val Guest.

Here, though, is something whimsical - partly realistic, partly broad comedy – with forty-year-old Finch who spurned the chance to follow his father into life as a market trader but struggles to make a go of life in the perhaps more exalted calling of an antiques dealer. Turnover is never sufficient to buy his wife the fur coat she craves. All this was brought about by a childhood visit to the British Museum where he was transfixed by certain objects - and haunted by a newspaper report of some sculptures stolen and never recovered. Events now take him to a country-house auction. In a cottage on the land lives Sir John (Ernest Thesiger) who is visited in turn by various relations, such as the giggling gamine, Adrienne Corri. The plot is of the slightest (and involves a crucial dog), with the main interest being some ten minutes of the auction itself. That is, apart from Thesiger who never rises from the armchair in which he mostly slumbers noisily - and when he does awake, he is never able to utter articulate words. This is a brilliant performance, with a radiant moment when he smiles. It more than compensates for the implausible sight of Finch in an apron while wielding a feather duster.

“Two turbot!” Steam crosses the screen, a frying pan sizzles, plates are piled precariously by a sink, a kitchen hand chain-smokes over the side of meat he is slicing into pieces. Doors swing to and fro in what must be an enormous restaurant, such is the number of black-dressed waitresses who scurry about, again uttering an impatient cry of “two turbot!”

Such - but for a brief walk which goes in a bound from Oxford Street to Trafalgar Square - is the setting of The Kitchen (1961) that it risks that deadly tag of “filmed play” (written by Arnold Wesker). That static format has dogged many a Zoomed play in these times. These seventy minutes, though, come to life; under the direction of James Hill, the camera movements match the bustle and sweat which exacerbate a torrid world riven by pregnancy, flashing knives, bruising and a brush with murder fomented by one of the staff being unable to forget the war. Even an array of fuse boxes appear about to snap.

Small wonder that le patron (Eric Pohlmann, a German playing a Frenchman is a nice touch) goes around the place, muttering to himself “sabotage!” as he ponders his life's destiny being swept away by so unruly a crowd. Against all this there is a fine music score by James Lee - and a single by Adam Faith which, whatever its shortcomings, has the staff breaking out into a dance which finds James Bolam reduced to partnering an upside-down broom. Some of the cast had appeared in the stage version, many of them not to become screen fixtures (one regrets that Mary Yeomans appeared in little else). And, in a neat twist of fate, James Hill was to make another notable film of a play which focusses upon midday London: John Mortimer's Lunch Hour.

How widely is Wesker, who died four years ago, now known? This film makes one suggest that it should be more so.

At a time of year when angle-grinders now echo across once-peaceful gardens, one might fight shy from Le Trou (1960). Its soundtrack eschews music for a series of vociferous hand-driven, improvised tools which a group of prisoners use to break through a series of subterranean obstacles in a bid to break free from a crowded cell and, via the sewers, savour the dawn of the Paris outskirts.

Viewers often marvel at the long, safe-breaking opening sequence of Riffifi. With Le Trou, we are in even more extraordinary territory,. These two hours depict the monotony of such labour. By a miracle of script, cinematography and characterisation, it becomes all the more suspenseful with every blow of a chisel into concrete and its feebler cousin: cement.

What's more, this is based on the true story of a 1947 break-out attempt (the year that Burt Lancaster appeared to such effect in the marvellous Brute Force). In turning to this case, director Jacques Becker (who was dying while at work on it) collaborated with José Giovanni who had written a novel inspired by it. What's more, Becker not only built a replica of the gaol's cells and corridors, but used mostly non-professional actors, including one who had been the diligent brains and brawn of the original escape attempt.

An exception to this was Marc Michel who plays somebody added to the four-man cell while his own was being renovated (Becker's son, who worked with him on the film, recalls how prisons were noisy with such work, an inadvertent cover for the escapees' efforts). Michel's character - young, good looking - is charged with the attempted murder of his wife after yanking from her the gun which she had aimed at him, such was her fury at his embroilment with an even younger woman. Meanwhile, Michel becomes in thrall to the men among whom he finds himself. Here, or so it seems, is new world, more secure than the outside one in which he had been buffeted by his emotions.

Becker's son has recalled that he did not want to reveal too much about the way in which the film was made (as if a magician would give away secrets). And he was right. One accepts the way in which a myriad devices - a small mirror in the cell door's spyhole - contribute to this relentless narrative, static equalled by surge; in which, though the great work of cinematographer Ghislon Cloquet, close-ups of these faces are matched by long shots of corridors and sewers.

As such, it is a ready match for underground terrain of The Third Man. What's more, Becker's film could have been called The Fifth Man, such are the quandaries created by that newcomer to the cell. This is not to place to say more on that front, but to lament its first release (as it were) being greeted with far less than the celebration it has since received.

This is a great film. One can happily watch it in solitary confinement. Watch it with somebody else, though, and you find yourselves discussing it for many more hours afterwards.

And a point raised therein is that, despite the gruel put through the door by guards at 6am, the prisoners are amazingly, ripplingly fit. Could it be that, sixty years after this timeless film, prisoners are fed stodge lest a high-protein diet spurs them to bound over the wall?

By way of Alice and Oedipus Wrecks, matters magical recur in Woody Allen's films. With The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001), they returned to prove a close run with The Purple Rose of Cairo and would remain way ahead of Midnight in Paris's repetitive hackney vehicle.

The proportion of Allen's period settings increases steadily against those in the here and now - though, come to think of it, Annie Hall is now closer in time to the 1940 of The Curse of the Jade Scorpion than it is to 2020. Temporal concerns soon vanish as the camera lights upon the office in which Allen himself is one of the staff of an insurance firm's claims investigators. This is as brown-hued as much of the film, a place promptly lit up by Helen Hunt who has been sent to impose efficiency measures upon an outfit which has given free rein to Allen's handy way with instinct and lowlife contacts (his jacket, though, is well cut).

A path is set for conflict and badinage, with Helen Hunt displaying - whether by command or subconscious - some of the mannerisms and facial expressions which were once Diane Keaton's. A nice touch is that she is an hour late for a meeting in a bar. It does not give away too much to say that when both are prevailed upon to join a works' outing (if one can call a gathering at the Rainbow Room such a thing), events take a different turn as a hypnotist sets to work upon them. While they speak, so many inner thoughts emerge that they would have Freud wishing he'd taken shorthand lessons (a phrase which just occurred to me - perhaps I could offer it to Allen, a small offering for all that he has provided).

Crime ensues. And with it there appears, well-nigh shimmeringly, Charlize Theron in a long white dress, with her hair and cigarette so well poised that she is more than a tribute to Veronica Lake (who could not have away with some of the salty lines uttered here).

To give prominence to the women present here should not overshadow the effective turns by seen-it-all guys Dan Aykroyd and Wallace Shawn on the staff (“you look like my Uncle Jerry right after the United Parcels truck hit him”).

Allen's roots have always been is night-club sketches. He is not one of nature's plotters. The same can be said of some novelists. Their skill is in finding ways around a little local difficulty (think how short are the chapters in War and Peace). With The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Allen has a more cohesive plot than he did in another period number Bullets Over Broadway, which was no match for the front- and back-stage about-turns of Michael Frayn's play Noises Off.

Well, one should not pre-empt too much of what is on offer here, all of which can be summarised in Allen's retort when caught by surprise: “I wasn't spying - I was rummaging.”

Time was, before the Disneyfication of Times Square and 42nd Street, when New York was grime incarnate. A reminder of this comes with The Seven-Ups (1973), directed by Philip D'Antoni, who had produced Bullitt and The French Connection. Despite intermittent sunshine, a bleak, wintry city is made all the more so for a crack team of Police, led by Roy Schneider, on the trail of various, often corpulent gangs who are pulling off large crimes. Any who are caught face a minimum of seven years in gaol - hence the Police team's nickname of the Seven-Ups.

A reminder of what they are up against is painted upon a blind in their weatherbeaten office: keep the blind down, there may be snipers. This is a world in which a fast mumble is the favoured method of discourse, all of it obscuring who might be working for which side.

As a narrative, it is not the best paced, but it does turn around a number of set pieces, high among them two visits to an automatic car wash (small wonder sensible people now prefer “valet cleaning”), a less-than-holy funeral - and, of course, what has a fair claim to be cinema's greatest car chase (the children who jump out of the way could still be having nightmares about their day as extras). This chase, which must have taken longer to film than all of the rest of it, makes it worthwhile.

A French film must be among the cheapest to make. With a good deal in large tables, some product placement by way of wine supplies, a competent chef - and the rest can be spent upon a script whose dialogue echoes across the country air. Such is Julie Delpy's Skylab (2011). So prolific is she - both sides of the camera, and even writing the music sometimes - that one can miss a new work by her, which brings the additional pleasure of catching up.

Such is the case with Skylab. Had history turned out differently, this film would have required computerised imagery but, then again, Julie Delpy might not have been here to make any films. The strange title is redolent of dark solar journeys, accompanied by that electronic music always deemed the thing for inter-galactic endeavour (perhaps, come the discovery of alien life, such expectations will be confounded, when it turns out that the creatures have a bootlegged copy of Matt Monro's greatest hits on repeat-play). Meanwhile, in Brittany during the summer of 1979, the fear under which (literally) Delpy - playing her own young mother - lives is that the eponymous orbiting craft is due to return to earth and quite possibly land upon that corner of France to the most deleterious effect since that endured by the dinosaurs.

Why go there, then? Well, it is her mother's 67th birthday (a great turn by Emmanuelle Riva). The large clan, when making plans and a cake, had not reckoned on such a metal intruder. Tension - with Julie Delpy and her husband (Eric Elmosnino) playing a couple who have abandoned fiscal safety for radical theatre - was always going to be high, what with two of the gathering being at the opposite but equally radical end of human experience: the inability to return to peaceful life after the horrors of war. What's more, Delpy's own father (Albert Delpy) appears again, his incipient senility springing several surprises.

So much Eric Rohmer, a suggestion of Altman, a dash of Woody Allen, but Julie Delpy is always herself. Doubly so here, for the eleven-year-old girl - played by Lou Alvarez - is at the centre of things as she sits on the cusp of adolescence. One very funny scene (her eyes unable to resist dropping low) is as if Rohmer had made Pauline at the Nudist Beach.

Beneath these refulgent skies, the viewer, too, reaches for a good red - and, after a second glass, has a brief image crossing the mind of the fish who look wonderingly at Skylab in their midst. It landed somewhere off Australia, and the wonder is that it has not yet inspired a film of a different nature from this. Who knows what strange creature is biding its time to emerge and to what effect?

When did Laurence Olivier encounter The Zombies? No, this is not a little-known science-fiction endeavour (curious as that would be) but a reference to a scene in Otto Preminger's Bunny Lake is Missing (1965). As a decidedly straight-backed Superintendent from Scotland Yard, he has taken young Carol Lynley to a pub for nourishment amidst the disappearance that morning of her four-year-old illegitimate daughter known as Bunny.

So far, what with Olivier invariably accompanied by a Sergeant (Clive Revill), this might appear a thriller sprung from an episode of Edgar Wallace Presents... Nobody, however, is a stock figure, even the junket-making cook at the School from which Bunny vanished. With a script by John and Penelope Mortimer (with some anonymous work by Ira Levin), this makes something well-nigh Gothic from Evelyn Piper's novel. The appearance of The Zombies on Ready, Steady Go on the pub's 23-inch television is but one of of the details that take all this out of the ordinary.

Did any pub feature a television, let alone in a film, at that time? Then again, this is a film in which Olivier suggests that it would be futile to seek out those aboard the 'bus which took Carol Lynley and Bunny to school earlier that day: “bus conductors are rarely observant - they tend to be dreamers and philosophers, a form of self defence.”

Already suspicions are aroused by Anna Massey's creepy turn as the School secretary, a School whose founder (Martita Hunt) keeps to a cluttered top-floor flat where she works, well-nigh obsessively, upon a book about children's talk. This is but one of many great performances (and how one hopes her Fifties television rôle as Lady Bracknell might yet surface).

And, yes, is there any more unsettling performance than that by a now large-eared, shuffling Noel Coward as neighbouring landlord of the flat into which Carol Lynley and her brother (Kier Dullea) have moved this same, crowded day? Dressed not in a silk dressing gown but a woolly jumper and clutching a tiny dog, Samantha (one imagines he asked to be paid more to do that), he appears at first affability and concern, even though stating “no caged birds, no livestock of any kind” (a catalogue which includes children). As the sky turns dark, he is given to suggestive moves while proclaiming, “I am told that my voice is extremely seductive. It has seemed to unleash whole hurricanes of passion in the breasts of women who watch me on the BBC.” And if that is not enough to tempt them to drop before him, he takes a whip from a wall of wooden African heads and cracks it with practised ease (even if one cannot quite credit the claim that “I sung rude old Welsh ballads”).

“Bloody pervert, if you want my opinion,” as Revill says to Olivier, who, in a nice turn, suggests he temper any prejudice during this investigation. Coward's fairly brief appearances linger in the mind, but a key one is Carol Lynley not only obeying her brother's order to bring him a cigarette in the bath but sitting in the edge of it - gaze not averted - for some while as they discuss the situation. Their shared past has not gone away, imagination and fantasy loom throughout, heightening Preminger's marvellously shot widescreen, black and white cinematography,. This works to equal effect inside and out, a masterclass in pace and rhythm, leaving no moments for doubt. Even slower scenes have a necessary tension, all of them making this a high-clamp production.

The wonder is that - as Carol Lynley says in a recent interview included as an extra on the DVD - much of this was filmed at night in order to accommodate Olivier who, earlier in the evenings, was on stage as Othello. In many strange, seemingly logical turns Carol Lynley visits that night a real, gaslit Dolls' Hospital in Soho where Finlay Currie plies his trade. As Carol Lynley also recalls, Currie had been on stage that day - indeed, for two performances - which led him to ask if, aged 84, he could play the part whi

“The closest you've ever come to a bird is a boiled egg.” Such is the banter in one of the many coffee bars and cafés frequented by Joe Brown and Marty Wilde in What a Crazy World (1963). One such bird is Susan Maugham, Brown's on-off girlfriend, the off segments caused by his embarrassing lack of funds, a situation compounded by his inability/reluctance to find a job.

All of which brings frequent dinner-table, plate-wiping monologues by his father, Harry H. Corbett (Steptoe's son) a dog-racing working man who is bringing up three children in a sharply-detailed tenement block, the flats reached by an outdoor corridor with a view of the bombed-out land south of the Thames. The film derives from a musical by Alan Klein, who also appears as one of Wilde's gang, a posse not exactly from West Side Story but startling indeed with their first number, “The Layabouts' Lament”. This is surely unique for taking place in a Labour Exchange and, what's more, now likely to raise other eyebrows than those of the hapless man (Michael Ripper) behind the counter: in the queue are immigrants dressed in costumes from their various countries to which the tune plays homage with such things as a calypso turn.

It is only some way into the film that one finds Brown is an aspirant songwriter as he tries out the title song in the safety of his bedroom - on a banjo. Meanwhile, he and Wilde have found enough spare change to go to what is promised to be a great group at a club. This turns out to be a British Legion hall, and the entertainment is provided by Freddie and the Dreamers (he of those extraordinary spectacles favoured by potential murderers holed up in boarding houses). One of their songs is a version of “Short Shorts”, amidst the singing of which Freddie divests himself to reveal more pairs of striped baggy underwear than Benny Hill can have ever dreamed of. As if that were not enough, Freddie then turns to a song “Sally Ann” which has all the group dressed in Salvation Army hats.

Well, Guys and Dolls this is not. There is, though, a suggestion of Brecht refracted though Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons. Lo and behold, the hapless man in charge of the Legion hall where a fight breaks out is the same one who was behind the counter down the Labour, and also, amongst much else, pouring the tea in the café while Susan Maugham sings one of her laments. He is indeed billed as The Common Man. And it is extraordinary to think that he did not change his surname from Ripper (though perhaps it helped to get him work at Hammer).

By the time that this was released in December 1963, the pop world had changed. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was Number One, with “She Loves You” duly returning there. That said, What a Crazy World is a notch or more above those films which had bundled singers into a scant plot in order to belt out recent hits. Here are real glimpses of kitchen-sink London, with relief provided by bowling alleys and a Bingo Hall (a surreally-dressed figure calling out the numbers) - and a montage of discs in citywide jukeboxes which could have appeared in a German film in the Twenties. And some salty dialogue: “He just grunts and turns over.” “My Bert's the same.” And, in the Legion Hall, a strange way to praise a woman's figure: “Look at that and the price of fish!” And one might reflect that just as Steptoe's son appears here (and, Heaven help us, sings), so Steptoe himself would appear memorably a few months later in A Hard Day's Night.

Best of all, however, is a sequence in which Brown tries to sell his song to music publishers on Denmark Street. Sportingly, several real premises allowed themselves to be filmed - while turning down the proffered ditty, until Brown lands a modest job with an invented one-man outfit and, by some subterfuge, gets the song taken on. The publisher duly exchanges a cigarette for a cigar as the sheet music rolls off the presses alongside copies of New Musical Express proclaiming it a

“I'm a man of action.” So says a Scotland Yard Inspector (played by John Stuart) in The Missing Million (1942) in a Soho café, where Linden Travers replies, with a flash of her eyelids, “I might make you prove that one day.”

Such a flashy moment enlivens a film, where so many words have been used to explain who has been where, when and perhaps why, as Miss Travers's brother (Ivan Brandt) has gone missing shortly before marrying the daughter of a well-to-do Treasury official.

All this springs from an Edgar Wallace novel. Does anybody read him now? He was in the habit during the Twenties of dictating his thrillers over a weekend, and reaping the royalties from those who read them at a similar speed. He had a way with a plot – shown, two or more decades after his death, in the Fifties and Sixties television series inspired by his work.

He turned variants upon a metropolis where sundry Mr. Bigs held sway. In this case there is one who leaves porcelain pandas after he has paid a visit to a scene of interest to him. And so it is that, with a blackmail threat against him, Brandt vanishes, as does the million pounds which became his when his businessman father died.

What is going on? In the ordinary course of events, one might not linger, especially as there is repetitive misogyny from a safecracker (Charles Victor): “married? I may have been in prison but I've not fallen that low!” Against his performance one must set the stylish turn by Linden Travers, who appeared in films for too short a time - and had inspired Graham Greene five years earlier to laud her rôle in the sultry Brief Ecstasy, notably for “the buttocks over the billiard table” as an emblem of “the ugly drive of undifferentiated desire”.

There's nothing to match that here as many of those around her duly receive a slug in the chest while it becomes clear that for the Panda matters are never black and white - but one's patience is further rewarded in the final moment by seeing the irritating safecracker making a gay advance (I kid you not), which would certainly count as a specialised taste.

Who will complete Woody Allen's last film? This is hardly a tasteless question, for the end of life recurs in his films (notably, the remark in Annie Hall that all the books with Death in the title belong to him). Such is his continuing rate of production, with several works on the go at once, that, amidst one's own life, it is sometimes unfortunate to miss a new one. Three years on, Wonder Wheel (2017) turns out to be rather a treat.

It could have been called Carousel, for that ride - operated by James Belushi – figures more prominently than the eponymous one which towers over a skid-row Coney Island fairground in 1950 where, on the beach, Justin Timberlake, fresh from the Navy, spends a summer as a lifeguard while aspiring to be a dramatist.

Will he succeed? Well, as he admits, in his addresses to the camera, he is caught up in one forthwith. As the sun sets he had chanced upon Kate Winslet, a former actress about to turn forty and unhappily married to alcoholic Belushi who took her on after she had been unfaithful (with somebody else) to her jazz drumming first husband. She has baggage, made worse by now waitressing in a clam bar.

Under the broadwalk, passion smoulders, flares - an apt metaphor, as her young son (an excellently obnoxious Jack Gore) is given to setting things on fire. All this is set against red-hued cinematography which makes something lush of rundown premises, almost as if the wheel glimpsed from inside makes the glazing appear a stained-glass window. Events are further lit up by the arrival of Belushi's daughter (Juno Temple) who had run off to marry a gangster; such are gangsters, that husband turns out to be more displeased than most at being treated in this way by a dame.

This is perhaps to say more about the plot than one often might do when reflecting upon a Woody Allen film. It is better constructed than, say, Bullets Over Broadway and it has no gags at all. For those who did not relish Interiors and September, this might sound ominous. A more apt comparison is with the charming period quality of Radio Days, and it is all more convincing than the spate of Europe-set works - including Midnight in Paris, which felt like a New Yorker sketch extended to a hundred minutes.

Woody Allen has always been terrific in giving women good, challenging rôles, such as the one for Mia Farrow in Broadway Danny Rose (and even Madonna in Shadows and Fog). Here, Kate Winslet is upon the screen for much of the time (one does not get out a stopwatch, that is simply how it feels). And what a performance it is, suspending one's disbelief at such brilliance, such a flow of lines being given to the depiction of an actress who had seen her skills, her life slipping away with her face. This is worthy of Eugene O'Neill - had he been able to rein in some of his harbourside histrionics.

Who knew much about diabetes in 1960? It is now a familiar subject, but Night Tain for Inverness opens in a ward in the, er, Longford Children's Hospital near London; disaster is averted there, just in time, when a nurse prevents another boy's mother from giving Dennis Waterman a chocolate.

He has been there some while but is recovering, and due to go home with his mother (Silvia Francis) to the flat they share with her positive Gorgon of a mother (played superbly by Irene Arnold, her spectacles adding to the domineering horror of her regular egotistical cry of “I was only trying to help”).

In neat symmetry, Waterman's father (Norman Wooland) is returning home. That is, he has been released from gaol after six months for a theft which he had hoped would ease the domestic pressure wrought by life with the mother-in-law. It was not to be, and he has a Court order to stay away, something with which his wife has gone along - she did not realise that his weekly heartfelt letters had been intercepted and destroyed by her mother. This is a tragic situation, if not quite on the level of Hamlet, in which Wooland had been Horatio beside Olivier.

Obliged to hole up in a Euston boarding house, he comes up with a plan to take the boy (whom he meets outside the Hawtrey Prep. School) on a trip as far away as possible, in which he is aided by an old flame (the great Jane Hylton). And so, much of these sixty-five minutes is given to some twelve hours - illustrated by diverse clocks and announcements - of real time as the boy, who does not reveal any need for painful injections, takes the opportunity to gorge upon ice cream and chocolates,. With copious use of the telephone, the police try to discover his whereabouts while, beyond the briefly-glimpsed Euston Arch, the vigorous wheels of a billowing and bellowing steam train head northwards, the restaurant car allowing another form of smoke before diners head back along a side corridor to those wide seats of which passengers can now only dream.

All this is handled well by that proficient director Ernest Morris. Some might pick holes in it - but, then again, one can question Hamlet's construction. And, well, this was the first appearance by Dennis Waterman, who soon became widely known on television as prankster schoolboy William. (The film also briefly includes John Moulder Brown who, a decade and an era later, appeared alongside Jane Asher in the tremendous swimming-pool tale Deep End.) It is an accomplished performance, not least because, for much of it (and far from William), he has to sleep and indeed go into a coma, limp in his father's arms.

Here was work for those on the rise and the decline - and modest but rewarding entertainment for us six decades on.

“It will demand sacrifices, but will save lives.” So says the Prime Minister in a broadcast to the nation.

This might sound familiar at the moment but in Five Days to Noon (1950) he is speaking from a Downing Street which did not have a high barricade at the junction with Whitehall. A postman has been able to amble along, a tune on his lips as he puts the mail through that very door one sunny Monday morning in May of that year.

One of these envelopes turns out to contain a letter which, for all its elegant phrases, is not merry matter for a May morning. A mild-mannered, humane scientist (Professor Willingdon, played by Barry Jones) from an atomic station in Wallingford has gone rogue, and threatens to let off a bomb the following Sunday at noon that will take out London from Rotherhithe to Notting Hill Gate - unless the Government gives up the stockpiling of atomic weapons.

From a story by Paul Dehn and directed by the Boulting Brothers, this takes place some years before the familiar CND marches upon Aldershot. That town, though, is mentioned, and many times at that - as we shall see.

Meanwhile, the initial music by John Addison, with an emphasis upon ominous drumbeats, recurs as it becomes clear that Willingdon - his weapon (the UR12) concealed in a Gladstone bag - means what he says. He skulks around the metropolis, favourite raincoat over his arm despite the heat, as the police, with help from Willingdon's daughter, set about tracking him down.

That pursuit is one thing but a great interest of the film is its time, its place - a panoply of it - as, come Thursday, all is underway to evacuate that tranche of the city.

Here we have vignette upon vignette, with allusion to other films, such as Colonel Blimp being outraged by disturbance in his Turkish Bath and salty comments upon the sewers an echo of The Third Man (and the whole set-up brings to mind Val Guest's The Day the Earth Caught Fire a decade later). Here - as rumours spread in seconds of screen time from the clubs of St James's to back-garden fences in Kennington - we find a spiv hustling a queue with the offer of “a nice hotel, near Brighton, twenty quid a night.” A youth is hurried from a pinball machine whose screen depicts a mushroom cloud beneath the title of Atomic Racer. Animals have to be left behind, and they howl; a jewellery thief is shot dead; a soldier holds a bra against his chest for a moment, and makes off with the matching silk knickers (what's all that about?) while searching for stragglers and even, perhaps, the fugitive Professor. Such a crowd finds fleeing glimpses of those who will become better known (Laurence Harvey, Sam Kydd).

All this is wonderfully managed, but central to it are two women down on their luck. One of these, Mrs Peckett (played by Joan Hickson) is a cat-festooned landlady whose newsagent advertisement is answered by the Professor. She informs him, “I won't allow theatricals in the house. You won't believe the trouble I've had with them!” The claustrophobia of this cluttered boarding house is filmed so well - and she turns out to have a point about theatrical types: the Professor is duly put up for another night by Mrs. Philips - a dog-fixated actress still in forlorn hopes of work - who meets him in a pub and, it is clear, would not object to budging up should he chance to stray into her bedroom. She is played by Olive Sloan, of whom one must hasten to discover more.

Good as everybody is in their part, she echoes most of all in one's mind with her frustrated hopes of joining the evacuation - to stay with a friend in Aldershot. She makes that Aldershot quest as resonant as Pinter's caretaker would do of Sidcup.

One of the great post-war British films, Seven Days to Noon reveals more on every viewing - although one has yet to see the Inspector's tie slip.

"Appearances can be deceptive, Inspector."

"Sergeant."

This exchange takes place between Joan Hopkins, who appeared in too few films, and Laurence Harvey, in one of his first roles, and is typical of the adroit pace at which Man on the Run (1947) moves through a post-war Soho whose pubs, cafés, shops and rooming houses are well caught, a world in which spivs and worse are on the loose.

Derek Farr plays a deserter who has been spotted, blackmailed (by Kenneth More), and gone in search of the requested funds only to find himself caught in a hold-up where a policeman is murdered. He has to hide, and finds shelter with department-store assistant Joan Hopkins whose divorce proved slower than her husband's fatal war wounds, which means that she has a useful pension. It is fascinating to learn that there were 20,000 deserters at this time, many of them with as good reason as Derek Farr to do so; their existence, one of false papers and fear of exposure, laid them open to crime, whether as victim or perpetrator.

To say any more about the way in which events move, with the Thames almost a character in its own right, would spoil things - but it is curious to find that, for the German release, the final two minutes take place in larger premises, and that - but, no, a reviewer should follow Joan Hopkins's example and not give anything away.

The noose often swings at the end of a film. Such a morning at eight occurs early in Tall Headlines (1952), when one son is hanged for the murder of a young woman on Putney Common; the rest of it concerns the next life; that is, for his parents, sister and brother who fear for their chances in tittle-tattle suburbia, and so - undercover of night - they exchange a fine house with a tennis court for somewhere on the South Coast, above the cliffs to the east of Brighton (a number 12 coach is glimpsed heading in that direction).

Also exchanging the family name of Rackham for Blake, the remaining children (Michael Denison, Jane Hylton) take up more modest work than they had expected (motor mechanic, dentist's receptionist) while their father and mother (André Morell, Flora Robson) also fret about the part they may have played in nurturing a murderer - and promulgating fears Denison has the same gene.

There is a continual sense of unease, caught well in cramped settings by director Terence Young (perhaps best known for some of the early Bond escapades), with a measure of light provided by the garage at which Denison works near the cliffs. There he meets, and falls for Mai Zetterling, a situation complicated by her resembling the murdered woman, which brings out the venom in Jane Hylton who is bitter at missing a chance as singer with a band led by Dennis Price (another delightful surprise appearance).

All this must have made for an uncommonly bleak evening at the pictures seventy years ago (although there is a brilliant cameo by Joan Hickson as a waitress who could have inspired many a Monty Python woman: "cold fillet's off!").

It is not perfect, but, then again, it does not up the emotional ratchet into Tennessee Williams territory, but steers more effectively close in such moments as Mai Zetterling looking up from a brass bed to marvel at the New Moon - and then realise that to do so through glass brings bad luck.

To watch Tall Headlines is to realise that we all have a noose around the neck - and scant idea of when it will draw close.