Film Reviews by CH

On the face of it, this is a compilation for geeks. It does not take long to realise that here is something for the rest of us, as well as those gripped by a fascination for the evolution of bicycle design since the late-nineteenth century, when the opening short shows women taking to to the road in perilously long whites dresses which are sure to crease as they drag against the chain. Safety is a recurrent feature of these diverse films, in two of which - in one case, after hanging onto the back of a truck for easy speed - the bicycle turns ghostly white and voyages further on: through the Hereafter.

Which is a far cry from Herne Hill, which once had a well-known cycling track.

Children, naturally, surface in these films, such as Tom's Ride, in which a boy and girl discover the virtue of honesty. Meanwhile, perhaps best of all is The Ballad of the Battered Bicycle, narrated in rough effective verse by Stanley Holloway who doubles in rôles as a fairground hawker and a Judge who delivers judgment on the boy who has spurned the Highway Code.

Against the concrete blocks of malls - full of vanished chain stores - somewhere in England, there pull up, amidst the obligatory rain, Capris, Maxis and those Rovers which look as if, at some point, a large animal has sat upon them. Quite possibly one of those animals had supplied the material for the brown, fur-lined car coat sported by a heavily-moustached police sergeant (Sean Connery) who wears it for most of a film from which he is rarely absent. Under pressure, he finds scant relief in a pub where a monstrous Red Barrel keg squats upon the bar, an otherwise grey-hued world made all the more so by an HQ whose narrow corridors are unadorned breeze block, the offices off them partitioned by stud walls and polystyrene ceilings scarcely able to mask the savage turn that interrogations take during the hunt for a child rapist.

Long before Life on Mars, here is England at the time of "Life on Mars?" The Offence (1972) was adapted from his own play by John Hopkins, who was best known (in the critical world) for his television plays Talking to a Stranger but had also worked on Thunderball. Connery's enthusiasm for the play had brought in Sidney Lumet with whom he had worked on another harrowing drama The Hill (1965). The many angles from which The Offence is filmed increasingly adds to the effect of a man cracking up. The opening scenes of a routine procedural turn into something else, all the more so with the arrest of a suspect Baxter (everybody is reduced to a surname, this one played by the excellent Ian Cannen who died in a motor smash towards the end of the century).

A turn to events comes with Connery's return home (a flat whose rooms appear to form odd angles), where he promptly smashes one of his wife's china objects as he lurches for the very-Seventies flip-lid cocktail cabinet and knocks back whisky at a rate which, in ordinary circumstances, would have him incoherent rather than providing that rare thing - a convincingly maudlin drunk scene - as he lays into his dressing-gowned wife, a frazzled Vivien Merchant. This scene, with the two of them, lasts over fifteen minutes, and never stales; nor does one which, equally long, finds him in the company of a superintendent sent to conduct an inquiry - Trevor Howard, who, during several cigarillo-smoking hours (there is a clock on the wall) not only, for once, lets his mask slip but also his jacket and even his tie.

To say anymore about what is going on would be unfair, just as it would be to remark that, at moments, in a certain light, Connery's face anticipates that of Basil Fawlty whose rages would be mild stuff besides those displayed here. On all sides, here is bravura acting directed towards a troubling psychological point of view which had the film little appreciated at the time by the hoards from Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads - especially as the soundtrack, in one version, is by Harrison Birtwistle (curiously enough, the other one largely lacks it).

My typing is my bond: there is much to explore in the other Sean Connery.

"Be careful, they might kill us." So says Lady Loxfield (Mabel Terry Lewis) to her daughter, Philippa (Frances Rowe), who replies, "they were killing me in Bournemouth!"

They are but two of nine people who find themselves outside a closed, heavy door beside a staircase to a city which they can see from these ramparts. After some familiar opening scenes - aboard a train, in Bournemouth, beside a boxing ring and so on - which are suddenly blacked out, most of They Came to a City (1944) takes place beside that door.

This might not sound the stuff of a film, but these eighty minutes pass rapidly, such is the dialogue between those who find themselves on the brink of a utopia - theirs to join, if they are willing to look within themselves and, in some cases, come to agreement with their partners (a vexed matter). All this comes from a 1943 play by J. B. Priestley who, in this film (which has most of that original cast), appears in the opening scene on a Northern hillside where a serviceman and his girlfriend are debating the future when the War is over. She hopes for a new one; he fears that the old guard will hold sway. Priestley - complete with pipe and unlikely hiking gear of his striped suit - sits down with them, and so their debate continues between those who find themselves beside the Door as it opens to allow a closer look at what is on offer.

We do not see that city, but duly hear the differing views of those who come back, either to rejoin life as they knew it or go back to the future.

This was a future - with Scriabin's rousing music to the fore on the soundtrack - inspired by Whitman's lines "The place where a great city stands is not the place of stretch'd wharves, docks, manufactures, deposits of produce merely." That is, there is more to life than meaningless toil for others' gain. For all his roots in Northern life, Priestley - as in An Inspector Calls - was given to allegory and its ally, the didactic spirit. His positing of a brave new world - with such people in it as a bank's branch manager (Raymond Huntley) who comes to see something else in life beyond the trumpery vanities enjoyed by his wife - was contemporary with Beveridge's Report and accorded with the social concerns of the film's director Basil Dearden. Made under the Ealing banner, it states many of the ideas which animated the studio's subsequent, more comic comic scenarios. Some might say that the film had an effect upon the 1945 General Election, which led to Attlee ousting Churchill.

And of course it has an echo in our own times, when many people - amidst the virus - are discussing a future world, with such things as a basic income which will enable people to have a better chance of fulfuilling their potential. Not that we should hold our breath. After all, the Attlee government did not cease hanging people and it continued to hound such gay people as Alan Turing, whose computer work led to the Internet which has lost much of its Utopian 1990s bloom. Looking back, in 1950, Priestley had remarked upon the many thousands of perfomances of the play (not one of his favourites) and the differing interpretations put upon it (about Jung and "even a plea for town planning"). He added, "what is important in the play is not the city but the respective attitudes of the characters toward it". Has it been produced lately on stage this century ? It could be, but recall Priestley's remark: "I should like to warn them against turning it into a melodramatic production with too heavy a bias against the older characters".

As for the title of this review, it is a reminder that the expression did not begin with the title of a famous Fifties film. Priestley's character was using a naval one uttered by somebody safely aboard a lifeboat, ready to be winched up - and to Hell with anybody still in the sea.

"A well-made film." A curious phrase which is not applied to every well-made film. It tends to denote one, perhaps deriving from a novel, in which scant consideration has been given to turning prose into something which sits upon the screen as a film. Cue high ceilings, low lighting and characters whose dialogue pauses only while a maid places a tray beside the flickering fireplaces - or they sit by a candle at a desk to write a letter whose contents bring a voice-over.

On the face of it, The Governess (1997) might not appear innocent of such charges, and yet it keep one's interest. Written and directed by Sandra Goldbacher, who had previously made commercials and would make only one more film before working in television, it opens in 1840s London where two Jewish sisters discuss the prospect of losing their virginity. Any such hopes are dashed by violence in the metropolis and their father's death.

With which, one of them (Minnie Driver) masks her race and advertises her availability as a tutor. This leads to a carriage ride to the Isle of Skye, where her charge is an obnoxious girl whose querulous tone must owe something to a mother (Harriet Walter) embittered by life in this remote spot while her husband (Tom Wilkinson) spends his time in a part of the building from which others are excluded while he studies animals and, in particular, the way in which to create a means to fix photographic images of them on paper before fading.

In various ways, the place is seething, given to obsession, rivalry, all of it beautifully filmed. A look in the eye, or through a lens, is steeped in so much more. And, yes, dinners around a large table are fraught.

We have been here before, and doubtless will do so again, but, in the meanwhile The Governess makes for an enjoyable couple of hours, perhaps on a winter's evening, certainly with a glass of wine - and with it comes the reflection that remote Scottish islands and emotional turmoil have yet to match Powell and Pressburger's I Know Where I'm Going.

"I might not know much about science, but I know what I like." So notes Martin Amis in a preface to his second novel Dead Babies (1975). That sentence comes to mind when watching Tarantula (1955), one of a spate of B-movies produced by Universal during the Fifties which were fuelled by hungry, deadly creatures from the Deep or the Beyond.

Or, in this case, from a Laboratory on the outskirts of the New Mexico desert.

Science very much to like - and fear.

There, a Professor - played by Leo Carroll - has been engaged upon developing large versions of familiar animals so that a burgeoning population on Earth has sufficient food; a point about population being made by Aldous Huxley, among others, at that time, and all the clearer sixty-five years on.

Naturally, the locals - such as a cookie-cutter Sherrif - are doubtful that there is a problem and that a local doctor, played by John Agar, is scaremongering when he questions things more closely - especially when he finds that the Professor's face is mutating into one which resembles the latter-day Auden. A decade earlier, Agar had married Shirley Temple, and begun to appear in films. Their union lasted but a few years, and he was never ashamed that this subsequent turn in life led to appearing in a series of such sci-fi shockers (a remarkable feature of this one is that his elegant jacket remains as impeccable as any worn by Trevor Howard in such adversity).

Along the way Agar meets a graduate (Mara Corday) who has come to help the Professor in his researches. She duly realises, as a roof crashes above her bedroom while giant eyes peer (understandably) through the window, that Agar was right. Something extraordinary is afoot - indeed the creature has eight of them, and looks as if capable of eating baths rather than skulking in them.

One might easily forget to mention that all this takes place in black and white. It is palpable, more credible - black looming against the Sun - than many a computer-generated image, as are the USAF jets which roar across the sky to see off the beast. And here comes a surprise. Uncredited, but distinctly visible, the jets' lead pilot is... Clint Eastwood, who lets rip that fatal blast of a chemical which has the creature sinking upon its eight legs and, in its death throes, definitely not liking the smell of napalm in the morning.

Man cannot live by Tarkovsky alone, and this 75-minute work by the lesser-sung Jack Arnold survives in its own right. One might come to laugh but stays to gasp. There is no doubt that Wittgenstein, who relished such films, would have wished to live to see it.

"Introducing..." This word in a film's opening credits invariably heralds a name of which one never hears again. In the case of Lady in a Cage (1964), however, it is one James Caan, a tight-jeaned teenager whose hairy chest brushes against Olivia de Havilland as he speculates when anybody last nustled beside her breasts.

This, one might already infer, is hardly a typical week's release at that time from such a studio as Paramount, all the more so as it also finds Ann Sothern as a prostitute past her prime. All the while, this July 4th, somewhere in sunny, well-heeled suburbia, traffic - all those huge hoods and trunks - goes by, the occupants unaware of the terror unfolding in a house which contains riches at every turn.

Olivia de Havilland, who has been recovering from a hip operation, has been left for the long weekend by her unmarried, thirty-year-old son who puts on a mantlepiece a note briefly glimpsed in the opening moments (a threat of suicide catches one's eyes). She does not get to see it. In his departure, the son inadvertently knocks into a ladder propped near an electricity cable, which duly causes an outage in the house, at the very moment when she is inside a lift which has been installed so that she need not take the stairs.

And there she stays, a dozen feet from ground, the alarm ignored outside: it alerts only an old drunk, who stumbles inside, grabs and hawks a few items, gets the measure of the scene, hocks these goods and returns to his boarding house where he seeks the help of Ann Sothern to continue with the heist.

Their notion of easy money becomes something else. Written by Luther Davis, who was better known for television series, it is an extraordinary study in escalating violence, a world in which objects become meaningless as the threat of death grows as steadily as disputes between those two are matched by Caan and his two cohorts, one of whom - Jennifer Billingley - languishes some while in the unwonted luxury of a hot bath.

Much of its power, its rising above absurdity, comes with a remarkable music score by Paul Glass. On its own this would seem beyond avant-garde, something unlikely to be played on the gramophone in such a house;. Alongside the varied angles of the cinematography (effective black and white), the music adds to the suspense, to the proliferating events which allow for only clipped dialogue (and Olivia de Havilland's recourse to improvised poetry). Such is her peril, slipping several times towards the very edge of the lift's floor, that one's own armchair feels as if it is no longer safe.

An obvious question comes to mind, especially in these circumstances, but such is the heightened reality of it all that one brushes that aside, as the pace increases while the sun moves across the sky, and, in that turbulent decade, bombs began to fall upon Vietnam: the background to such films, set in diverse eras, as Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs, A Clockwork Orange. Before them all, by quite a way, was Lady in a Cage, and the wonder is that it is not better known.

At a time, in Suspect, when there is a plague affecting many thousands of off-screen people around the world, there is conflict between research scientists (led by Professor Peter Cushing in a rare daylight rôle) and Government bureaucrats (a minister, Raymond Huntley gives several pompous speeches even when in private conversation).

All of which, with a vaccine if the offing after many years' research, makes this Boulting film timely, sixty years on, in 2020.

That said, one might have initial doubts, for, scarcely has it begun than there bursts through the Professor's door none other than a disorderly orderly Spike Milligan, whose, er, comings and goings in a white lab coat are driven by complaints avout a miscreant chimp who continually tries to get the upper paw. This is a far cry from the novel, by Nigel Balchin, upon which it is based, and was added to his screenplay by others. With that out of the way, it settles into something closer to, if not a match for, another Balchin film, Powell and Pressburger's The Small Back Room.

Among those in the lab is Virginia Maskell, a splendid actress who could not be brought round from a suicide attempt in her early-thirties in 1968; which brings piquancy to her broken engagement in the film to a man - Ian Bannen - for whom she still cares after he has lost both arms in Korea, which halts his pianist's career. Chopin and Scriabin fill the speakers at moments of drama, which turn around the possibility of leaking the breakthrough upon which the Government has slapped the Official Secrets Act.

And so develops an observed-of-all-observers plot which draws in an array of familiar faces such as ever-seedy Donald Pleasence, a spivish Sam Kydd and, bizarrely, Thorley Walters whose Secret Service office makes many a Dickens scene appear a pioneer of minimalism.

It would be easy to dismiss Suspect, made in just over a fortnight, as preposterous; perhaps there is a better film lurking with in it, yet there is enough here to carry one through its eighty minutes (time which includes loading the disc).

"First you beat me? And then we kiss and make up?"

Between those two sentences, Marlene Dietrich (as a scarf-sporting Gypsy, Lydia) opens eyes even more widely, gleamingly so - which answers the question, "how good was Marlene Dietrich?"

Most likely, with anybody else aloft a caravan at the reins of a white horse, Golden Earrings would be dismissed as preposterous - all the more so as fortune-reading Lydia has prevailed upon British agent Ray Milland to sport earrings to pass himself off as a fellow-Gypsy as they trot through the pre-war Black Forest while he and a separated accomplice are on a mission to obtain a poison-gas formula so that it is not used in battle.

The earrings give Milland a strange, even camp aspect - and camp is doubly the word, for they meet other Gyspsies and there is rowdiness beside the evening's bonfire, with the title song (very much a Hollywood product) making an appearance now and then. For something which might seem a thriller, much of it takes place aboard that caravan, and one's interest is maintained by director Mitchell Leisen, who made a series of terrific movies during the Thirties and Forties (notably Midnight) before slackening into work on television series.

Do not fall into the trap of ridiculing Golden Earrings. Celebrate a Hollywood that laid money across the palms of all concerned.

Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's "Alabama Song" comes to mind while watching The Counterfeiters (2007), for this is the often-voiced fear of those in a concentration camp, and the lyrics are all the more apt when one thinks of the previous line: " if we don't find the next little dollar..."

Written and directed by Stefan Ruzowitky, the film has a plot which might sound fantastic but, as we have seen down the years forgery can take many convincing turns. The Nazis had, during the Thirties, rounded up a number of adept counterfeiters, who, being Jewish, duly found themselves in concentration camps. Among them are two played by Karl Markovics and August Diehl. The former is pragmatic when offered relief from camp horrors; the latter increasingly equivocal. And why? Their task, with others, is to create and print English currency which, when dropped by air, would not only bankrupt the country but also bolster a failing Germany when banked in Zurich.

All of which is true.

This brings a new angle to - if one can say so - the familar settings, the familar horrors of a camp, which is here filmed in a form of colour which lays an emphasis upon grey. And so, here is a plot which does not turn upon breaking out but the danger of breaking down as they work in suits with a piece of striped pyjamas on the back to remind them whence they came and that they could yet rejoin those from whom they are separated in the camp.

All of which can, does, make the viewer feel awkward. Here are we, perhaps with a glass of beer in hand, watching something which, to succeed, as it does, has an element of entertainment - what will happen next? - about it. And, at the same time, one asks: on which flank of our side would one have been? Pragmatic or principled?

In fact, it is all the more grey than that. Among other things, the film is a reminder that English notes were once far larger than now, so much so that, rather than squeeze them into a wallet, those lucky enough to have a few of them would pin them together and fold them into a pocket. A convincing forgery needed those pin-holes.

There is a further twist to that tale, not apparent from the film itself, but revealed in an extra on the DVD: a fascinating interview with one of the troubled forgers - Adolf Burger - upon whose memoirs (The Devil's Workshop) it is based. Say no more here, but he had a hunch the notes could not be used.

Time and again, the film turns on trust (can they rely upon the reassurance of the genial, happily-married German officer?), and indeed currency requires trust (as do the art works which command millions). It can all so easily go wrong, as Germans had found when pushing pramloads of dosch to buy a few groceries. What indeed, in recent years, was quantative easing but something similar? And now, in England, we find a Government which has realised it can no longer deny people money but has to accord them - by digital means - a measure of it if the country is not to collapse.

And so, of course, we are in times when hackers are the new gelignite gangs.

"Shall we put a tail on him?"

"No, I think he looks pretty cute as he is."

With a fast-paced nighttime opening somewhere in Manhattan, and some snappy dialogue, No Questions Asked (1951) is certainly not in the ruck of noir offerings. Written by Sidney Sheldon and directed by Harold Kress (perhaps better known as an editor), its events spring from an insurance agent (Barry Sullivan) being dumped by his fiancée (a splendidly self-seeking Arlene Dahl). To increase his financial standing, he becomes a middleman between the mob and insurance companies who are willing to pay less for the return of goods - no questions asked - than they would in payouts to aggrieved clients.

Such a set-up, did any of them but realise, can only have a limited life, and the death throes kick in swiftly enough during these eighty minutes, the killer being an audacious raid the likes of which has never been seen before or since. Say no more other than that there is no opening night on Broadway to match it.

To the usual bars, smart drawing tooms and down-at-heels offices is added a swimming pool with a malevolent aspect all its own.

The film offers a final moral. It was made by MGM, which had the funds for glossy production. Although it does not go overboard here, a squeeze on the budget could have made it that much punchier.

A point often overlooked: here is a film in which most of the words are spoken by Debbie Harry.

Or, rather, sung. "Heart of Glass" plays for a considerable time in a Strasbourg bar which has previously mentioned several times, and duly visited by Xavier Lafitte, who plays El, a young artist who has returned - after six years - in quest of a girl with whom he had then talked before the moment passed.

And now, during three days punctuated by brief nights, in a film largely silent but for the clicking of shoes on cobbles and snatches of overheard conversation, he sits outside a café, sketchbook in hand, pencil scribbling, his eyes upon those in groups around him.

José Luis Guérin's film - just 84 minutes long - is very much peopled by jeunesse dorée rather than politicians and bureaucrats. Clumsy, distracted, El is preoccupied, so much so that he sees an elegantly-dressed woman (Pilar López de Ayala) whom he takes for the one who slipped away.

And so, to adapt Klee's phrase, this artist takes a line out for a walk, a very long one: he follows her through street after street while a varied population traverses the scenes - a paunchy man in a vest, a woman with a pram. Does she know that he is doing so? Will they meet?

Scarcely anything is said. It is all the very opposite of the Before Sunrise series. And yet it never fails to let one's interest drop away. One could call it a short-haul Rivette. As such, it has divided opinion in the thirteen years since it appeared (there is a solitary Nokia rather than pervasive smartphones). Do not expect everything to be wrapped up; an enigma remains that - and one might wonder about the brief shot of a newspaper headline about a New Crime.

Nothing can be discounted. This is a tale of obsession lightly borne.

One never knows what, indeed who might turn up in episodes of the Edgar Wallace Presents... series.

In the final series there is an item, Game for Three Losers which largely turns around a very-Sixties office from which a tea merchant runs his business while also making appearances as an MP in the Commons (and its nearby restauants). He is none other than Michael Gough, complete with umbrella and hat, and given to a gait which at times resembles that of Kenneth Williams.

With one secretary leaving to get married, he takes on a temporary one, Toby Robins, a beguiling woman who accepts invitations to dinner but all the while a blackmailer has his claws into her.

A familiar scene, one might say, and so it is, but this is very well played. Unlike many an episode, there is no gunfire, chair-wielding fights and large black cars hurtling along London streets or country lanes. A small-scale drama, complete with a country-house lawn and labradors - and a sad saloon bar.

Insects were harmed in the making of this film. The credits do not say so, but one might infer it.

A year after playing the upright Major in The Third Man, Trevor Howard found himself taking a different turn, an MI6 officer who, for some reason, is obliged to return to London, there handing in his resignation and gun. He maintains similar rectitude, however, and, after a visit to an employment office, decides to take a job for which there have been no takers. He goes down to Hampshire to spend some time in cataloguing a butterfly collector's examples: boxes of these once-fluttering creatures are upon shelves in an elegant house. As chance has it, the collector is played by Barry Jones, who bears an extraordinary resemblance to another such collector, Vladimir Nabokov. The novelist was not widely known in 1950. There were to be several years until Lolita emerged (to use a butterfly metaphor).

Not something that one might mention, except that The Clouded Yellow (a type of butterfly) turns around a remarkable plot, created by Janet Green, and directed by Ralph Thomas who is perhaps best known for the series of Doctor... films but also later made one of the best political-scandal thrillers, No Love for Johnnie, with Peter Finch. Thomas brings a sure touch to all this, with an early appearance by a gamekeeper upon whom Jones's wife - Sonia Dresdel - has a fixation less frequently satisfied than she would like. Meanwhile, said crass gamekeeper also has the hots for her fraught adolescent niece, Jean Simmons, then twenty but appearing rather younger.

Jean Simmons is an orphan, her musician father and mother dead in strange, indeed suspicious circumstances (music for the film was provided by Benjamin Frankel). Why is the aunt gaslighting her, making her doubt her memory of the death scene and forbidding her to play her father's music on the piano?

To say all this does not give away too much, nor to say that amidst these lives of quiet Hamsphire desperation, Trevor Howard falls for Jean Simmons - hence the earlier reference to Lolita. She is in her teens, and he appears at least twenty years older (of course , Howard always gave the appearance of springing forth in the maternity ward with a moustache and custom-made tweed jacket while the midwife slapped him into life).

Events have the pair fleeing, Howard's secret-service past taking them to convenient boarding houses rather than motels, with several English cities filmed in a noir style to rival Vienna's, albeit without any cats to hand but a posse of cyclists causes equal trouble.

Why isn't The Clouded Yellow better known? What's more, why is the current DVD reduced by some ten minutes from the original running time of 95 minutes? The well-filmed ending might appear on the hasty side, but one suspects the loss of some scenes from Hampshire, a hint of which is supplied by the one in which Trevor Howard and Jean Simmons, with a shared net, give chase to a butterfly, fall to the sunny ground, find their captive to be a common one - and let it go.

The erotic charge, the release to the scene makes one wonder if Nabokov saw this extraordinary film.

"What's the matter? Don't you like mortuaries?"

Quoted like that, one might easily think that the line has sprung from one of Raymond Chandler's works. In fact, it is said - behind the wheel of a Rolls-Royce convertible - by well-spoken aircraft manufacturer John Mills to his seemingly respectable wife (Phyillis Calvert). Having become erratic, he has confessed to her that a little while ago he had visited their daughter's spiv boyfriend (Herbert Lom) to pay him off with sufficent money for him to depart the scene. And so it appears to be, until Lom rashly sneers that - in a bold turn for 1951 - he has "already had" the daughter. Outraged, Mills hits out, and Lom does depart the scene, by falling fatally against the fireplace of his rented bachelor pad.

Such is Alec Coppel's script, from his own novel, that events take a turn, and another turn, before another, all spinning from the terror which besets Mills after he has disposed of the body during a black night in a ditch somewhere off a road to the North. Here, in the hands of director Anthony Kimmins, is something which moves between the near-noir (with recourse to many a bottle) and the almost comic, with quite a cast drawn upon to add their bit to a plot which never ceases to surprise. Step forward, Bernard Lee, Raymond Huntley and, best of all, Wilfrid Hyde Whyte whose pride in his mortuary is maintained with a cynical edge as he points towards an array of organs in glass bottles.

A transatlantic edge is brought by the daughter's subsequent boyfriend, Sam Wanamaker, a lawyer whose interest in the unfolding case looks set to scupper things, all the way up to a startlingly amoral, even immoral ending which has left far behind an opening whose brisk credits are delivered as a voice-ove (perhaps the only other film to do so is Aunt Julia and the Script Writer).

How should a film end? All too often, everything is tidied up with a clinch or a shoot-out (or both). Of course, there was doubt during the ad hoc filming of Casablanca about the way things would go at the aerodrome, and Graham Greene was at first reluctant for Carol Reed to have his way in the last minutes of The Third Man - and duly conceded that the director was emphatically right.

The thought comes to mind when Reed completed The Key, a decade after The Third Man. Its ending, steam and all, is of a piece with the better sections of a film which takes place within the confines of a tug boat at sea and a small, converted flat within a once-splendid house - with a staircase to behold - near the harbour.

It is 1941, with Christmas in the offing while U-boats and aeroplanes target those vessels that comprised the Atlantic Convoys. The tugs are waiting to aid any ship that comes a cropper, whether by rescuing the crews or dragging the holed vessel back to shore. As chance has it, William Holden, pre-Pearl Harbor, arrives to join the crew of one tug and re-encounters Trevor Howard, who invites him to the flat whose big brass bed he shares with sultry Stella (an early appearance by Sophia Loren) after being given a spare key to it by somebody who had told him to use it should he himself come a cropper. And now Howard does the same, urging it upon Holden.

There is a convincing claustrophobia - redolent of later kitchen-sink dramas - to these interior scenes, both Holden and Stella beset by differing insecurities as the camera ranges across the oddly cinemascope set-up. This widescreen is better suited to the scenes upon the ocean, which are done well enough but now appear of a piece with many a war film from those years rather than being anything imbued with the distinctive Reed touch.

For all the waves crashing upon decks and down tight, metal stairwells, it is often the small details that linger, such as a shop window which proclaims that it can removes hearts and names from those who have previously been tattoed there. Long before Meatfree Monday, the same was then urged on a Tuesday and Friday.

What endures is the passion and amorality combined in Stella (has Sophia Loren ever been as good, that is bad?). One is eager to seek out the original novel, named after her, by Jan de Hartog.