Film Reviews by CH

With its first scene well-nigh a clone of Went the Day Well? - a narrator recollects events against shots of a village, a pub, a manor house - Four-Sided Triangle (1953) bodes well. An early Hammer production, its centrepiece, The Reproducer, makes a 3-D printer appear tame. Two young men have created a device which can makes copies of anything, even the woman for whom they share affections, Barbara Payton. She brings this film such brio as it has; tragically, it marked a bright spot in a life which became ever dimmer, until her early death in 1967. At only seventy-five minutes, it drags, sunk by explication - and, unlike those in charge of The Reproducer, one has no reluctance to press the stop button.

So why allot the disc four stars? There is a bonus feature, The Right Person (1954). Curiosity is well rewarded. For one thing, it is the first script by Philip Mackie, an ever-dependable television writer. It springs a surprise early on. The opening scene is in garish colour and takes in some of Copenhagen. What's more, it is filmed in Cinemascope. It feels as though the ground is being set for an epic chase. But no, everything cuts to the hotel room in which the newly-married Mrs. Jorgensen (Margo Lorenz, who also died young) puts down her bags after a hard day's shopping and awaits her husband, who should have been back by then, ready for dinner after a drink or two. Instead there arrives a man, insistent on waiting for him. Douglas Wilmer is brilliant at depicting an enigma who is, naturally enough, unwilling to give away too much about wartime bonds and fractures.

Tensions and doubts grow, so much that Mrs Jorgensen knocks back the national drink in one - several times..

To say anymore would be unfair, except that, amazingly, all this fills only twenty-five minutes: neither too little nor too much.

The Right Person had first been shown, with a different cast and in black and white, the year before on the BBC. We need more films which make good use of a neat idea rather than "opening it out", a phrase redolent of skin being pulled apart for an operation. The Right Person does not need surgery: it is now sixty-five years old and in perfect health.

"I am a sucker for lighthouses. The lonelier and more inaccessible, the better. And I love comedy-thrillers," recalled director Michael Powell, and so he said yes immediately to working on The Phantom Light (1935) which, in its time, was regarded as another quota-quickie or poverty-row production derived from a now-vanished play. This, though, was a task of which Powell said, "I enjoyed every minute. The less said about the plot the better."

Put simply, in the opening minutes Gordon Harker arrives by train to take up his new job in charge of a Welsh lighthouse where the previous incumbents have come a cropper. Also among the newcomers are Binne Hale (better known for her stage career than a few films) and the now-obscure Ian Hunter who played dashing - in all senses of the word - young men in the Thirties.

Something shifty is happening, and there is a strong suggestion that some of the Welsh are up to no good. However that might be, Powell lavishes superb cinematography upon them, whether in a pub, upon a dodgy automobile, and more. What's more he studied many a lighthouse before setting to work (and combined several in the eventual fim).

For all that, a fair proportion of the film comprises interior shots of a confined lighthouse, with, naturally , many a scene upon tightly-curving stairs. Tightly curving could also be a phrase for Binnie Hale's thighs. Having come a cropper in the water, she is kitted out with Gordon Harker's Sunday trousers, which she promptly reduces - so that they fit - to something which anticipates hot-pants. Whatever the chill of the night air, she scurries about in these, and proves a great foil for Gordon Harker's barbed remarks.

Gordon Harker? Let Powell explain. He "was one of those naturals that every country has - a face to remember: in France Fernandel, in Mexico Cantinflas, in Italy Alberto Sordi, in America Humphrey Bogart, in Ireland Victor McLagen, in Germany Conrad Veidt... He was one of Hitch's favourite faces, and Hitch had helped to make him a star. He had one of those flat, disillusioned Cockney faces, half-fish, half-Simian, with an eye like a dead mackerel. In one of Hitch's first successes, The Ring, a boxing picture, Gordon Harker had played one of the hero's seconds and nearly stole the picture. He was wonderful in silent films, but even better in talkies. He got his effects with all sorts of strange sounds, and to my delight he could hold a pause as long as any actor I had known. Close-ups were made for him, and we both took full advantage of it."

And Graham Greene concurred, remarking in one of his first film reviews that Harker "gives one of his sure-fire Cockney performances". Ever sharp-eyed, Greene also remarked , "that fine actor , Mr. Donald Calthrop, is fobbed off in a small part. Mr. Calthrop has seldom been lucky in his parts. There is a concentrated venom in his acting, a soured malicious spirituality, a pitiful damned dog air which put him in the same rank as Mr. Laughton". Calthrop scarcely appears, but he is brilliant.

All of which suggests there is so much to enjoy here. And, as waves break on the rocks, one thinks of all that Powell would create as more than a backdrop to The Small Back Room and I Know Where I'm Going.

Although this film opens after the war as a villager stands in a churchyard and recalls something of events a few years earlier, in fact the film was made and released in 1942.

Based on a story by Graham Greene which he collected only towards the end of his life (though it had appeared, strangely enough, in a children's anthology), it was directed by Brazilian-born Cavalcanti whom he much admired. Set during the Whitsun weekend of 1942, it tells of a sleepy village (named Bromley End, and filmed in Turville) where its array of inhabitants found themselves at the vanguard of a world turned upside down. Here we have characters ranging from a gentle, strong-minded vicar to a bedraggled poacher who is passing on the tricks of his trade to a very young Harry Fowler. Scenes range from a village store, and telephone exchange to a Manor House lined with pictures along its twisting staircase.

Among the cast are many canny women (among them Elizabeth Allan and Thora Hird), who, as events unfold, come increasingly to the fore, even the fire: there is some startling violence here, all the more effective as it is not drenched in blood but of a piece with a film in which there is continual use of light and shadow, whether by night or day, inside or out. The cinematography is wonderful. As James Agee wrote in his review when the film was duly released in America some while later (mid-1944), he thought the best of it was "in its relating of the people and their action to their homes, their town, their tender, lucid countryside. As the audience watches from a hill, with the eyes at once of a helpless outsider, a masked invader, and a still innocent defender, a mere crossroads imparts qualities of pity and terror which, to be sure, it always has, but which it seldoms shows us except under tilted circimstances. And at moments, when the invaders prowlingly approach through the placid gardens of the barricaded manor in the neat morning light, the film has the sinister, freezing beauty of an Auden prophecy come true".

For some years, even decades, the film fell from sight, even though there is much in it of a piece with eternal Ealing delights. It is now well established as a classic of English film making, one which time and again takes by surprise even those who have already seen it.

"I'm going to spend the evening curled up with a bookmaker." "I've seen better things wash up on Barry Island." "Wake up, it's Saturday - there's fish cakes for breakfast!"

How can so enjoyable a film as The Crowded Day (1954) be little known? It opens, as it ends, with Sid James muttering to himself as the night watchman at an Oxford Street department store. Many of the scenes were filmed at the now-vanished Bourne and Hollingsworth, which was sporting of its owners, for much of the action turns around chicanery, illicit passion, backstabbing - with the milk of human kindness distinctly semi-skimmed.

One can imagine that, in 1954, audiences were startled to be greeted, within a few minutes, by so many bathroom scenes. Not, one hastens to add, with Sid James, though he would doubtless have relished being there, for many of the store's female employees are housed in its own hostel and queue impatiently for an early-morning's bath, their knees duly kickiing upwards during discussion of the day ahead which is due to be capped by the store's smart Christmas bash for its staff.

Notable among the staff is Vera Day, whom one might easily mistake for Barbara Windsor. Never abashed by a man's approach, she is set on a film career, hopes pinned on the following week's screen test. One should not reveal any more about that. And the same goes for the parallel plot lines which defy physics by briefly overlapping before sundown - and beyond.

Scripted by the great Talbot Rothwell, this was an early work - with splendid cinematopgraphy inside and out - by director John Guillerman, whose later films took a different and longer turn, far from this portmanteau creation which, surprisingly, runs just over an hour and a quarter. In this space he manages to combine what must surely be the most unusual take on a bedroom scene (say no more) and some noir scenes replete with railway trains, a mewing cat and a rapist. Meanwhile, the staff surely deserved a bonus for dealing with such bolshie customers as Dora Bryan, Thora Hird and Prunella Scales.

If any film school needs an example of tightly-paced ensemble playing, this is it.

As for Vera Day swifly losing her much-craved earings, she might perhaps look in the bathroom-fittings department: one could push towels through them.

"Avanti!" That cry, of inviting somebody to enter a room, provided the title for one of Billy Wilder's last films and was uttered throughout it by Jack Lemmon. It is uttered but once in Five Graves to Cairo (1943). Neither film is among Wilder's most widely known - but they deserve to be.

In both cases, his scripts developed, even transformed others' original work. In the case of Graves, this was a story by Lajos Biro twice filmed previously as Hotel Imperial. (Biro's script for Knight Without Armour is wonderful.) In all cases, the plot turns around a small hotel caught up in events where a border town finds itself between opposing armies.

The script by Wilder and Charles Brackett transplants this to somewhere in the Sahara, with an opening scene which suggests that a torrid drama is about to ensue. A tank rumbles (do tanks ever so anything else?) across the hilly desert sands, its throttle jammed on forward by a dead man's foot as somebody, apparently dead, falls from the back and turns out to be the dashing Franchot Tone. His accent is distinctly American, but, no matter, for he acquits himself well as a member of the British Forces, one who, moreover, worked in the Bank of England and sported a bowler hat before signing up.

All this he explains to a French maid, played with a mixture of the romantic and sinister by Anne Baxter, who has her own reasons for remaining with the hotel's owner after the German aircraft forced everybody else out the previous night. For all this opening drame, Graves is a film of interiors - brilliantly and darkly shot by John Seitz - and, this being Wilder, much banter which does not slow down the drama.

Although there are many who appear briefly and uncredited in the film, it is essentially a chamber work, turning around a few characters - something which, along with its humour, it has in common with Casablanca. That might make it small scale, but larger than life was Field-Marshall Rommel, played magnificently by Erich von Stroheim. Never has there been such a lunch as the one to which he invites some captured British officers and invites them to put twenty questions to him, which he partly answers by dint of salt and pepper pots. The performance is no caricature but, even in the midst of war, depicting the events of 1942, shows why he commanded a certain respect from both sides (and figured in the title of one of Spike Milligan's war memoirs).

What might be forgotten is that Rommel was one of those implicated in the plot to kill Hitler in 1944. What with the Field-Marshall's popularity among the Germans, Hitler realised that it was expedient to allow him to swallow a cyanide pill rather than be shot, and it all passed off as heart failure.

What one would like to know, however, is whether - one way or another - Rommel got to see this depiction of himself by brilliant émigrés on the West Coast. He would not have been displeased, and perhaps could have explained the assertion that he did not like a woman to bring him breakfast in bed.

Has there been a better jump-cut than the one from Marie Windsor vigorously filing her nails to a railway engine's going full pelt along the track?

This is but one of the many delights of the seventy minutes which find her - a gangster's widowed moll - aboard a train in the company of policeman Charles McGraw who is there to protect her from mobsters hellbent on preventing her from testifying before a Grand Jury and producing a list of top-notch firms implicated in widespread slayings and corruption.

A train always heightens drama, and there is no higher one than this masterpiece, directed by Richard Fleisher (whose memoirs are a fascinating read).

One could quote some of the fast and salty dialogue but it is better springing from the lips of the cast than this keyboard. A treat in store - however many times you watch it.

Fifty years before Air BandB, there was something to give any viewer pause before signing the Agreement.

With the penultimate series of Edgar Wallace Presents..., it had looked as if things might be going off a bit - and then along comes this hour-long drama Act of Murder, which is a corker.

Put simply, a couple in an inherited, antiques-laden Surrey cottage exchange it for a house in central London in order to be immersed in a dozen plays while the other couple (one of whom is Dandy Nichols) can savour the rural air - not that Dandy ever looks likely to doff her heavweight togs any time soon.

Along with the antiques, the cottage is also home to a charming dog, a budgie and some hens (the latter have their own premises).

Naturally, matters take a different turn from that which any of them expected.

You might have your suspicions; I had mine; and we could all keep guessing.

This being series six, the Sixties have moved on a few years, and there is even a nude scene. Well, Justine Lord is filmed from behind, upon a bed as, after a few lines of dialogue, she wriggles into a new nightie. A scence which is as well lit as the rest, much of which takes place in a cottage so laden that it also takes some manoevering (which makes one fear the worst during a party scene).

Three tense days fill these seventy-seven minutes. A model of psychological tension, this film - taken from a play which has fallen from sight -

is a marvel of small-town life turned upside down when a seventeen-year-old pupil disappears one dark night after meeting the Latin teacher upon whom she has a crush. An example of the way in which characters drive plot, this turns many variations upon lives of quiet desperation. Or, in the case of the girl's aunt (Pamela Brown) not so quiet: unable to shake of the end of an affair twenty years ago, she never loses an opportunity to remind people of it. A splendid study in malignancy. No shoestring incarnation of Peyton Place, this depiction of the Home Counties in turmoil has lavish, almost noir attention to detail, from close-ups of a sinister hand pushing coins in a telephone box to the dredging of the river. Seek this out.

The J. B. Priestley revival has continued apace, what with the National Theatre's continually touring production of An Inspector Calls. This film, however, is less well known, despite a dapper performance by Alec Guiness as Mr. Bird who draws together an ensemble cast. Sid James and Ernest Thesiger together is the most unlikely pairing until Sid appeared with Sean Connery in Hell Drivers. In fact, it has something in common with An Inspector Calls, for this is a tale about a small-time salesman who learns that he is going to die - and decides to go on a bit of a spree (at any rate, to somewhere resembling Bournemouth, spiv Sid laments being thwarted in a desire to sojourn in Brighton. For all the realism of this interestingly and diversely populated hotel, Guinness is as much an allegorical figure as the Inspector, one whose presence calls upon the others to study the course of their lives (as he himself has done, after being galvanised by a canny tailor to splash out on some fine jackets). With many an angle - and a neat camera angle - upon post-War Britain, this film resonates as much seventy years on.

Softly lit, her hair shining on the gallows while drums beat and white birds wait upon the Tower roof, Nova Pilbeam is as striking as ever she was during that all-too-brief run of films during the Thirties, one which ended with her husband's wartime death - and a retreat which lasted until her death a few years ago. Tudor Rose is not her best showing, lumbered as it is by the need to explain machinating characters as one follows another through this chunk of history, when Kings and Queens did not get to sit long upon the Throne, and a cannon marked the sound of the executioner's axe for those out of its earshot. A series of sometimes neat scenes (Henry VIII's deathbed is a corker), it lacks dramatic sweep. As indeed could be said of the mid-Eighties incarnation of this sad story: Lady Jane, with Helena Bonham-Carter.

Thirtysomething paperback writer Charles Bronson takes up with sixteen-year-old schoolgirl Susan George in the South Kensington of 1969, and they nip to Scotland to marry, but Lolita this isn't. With many a cartoonish moment, such as Robert Morley's appearing as a Judge, and a propensity - very Sixties - for freeze-frames, this never convinces, despite a few comic moments. Goodness knows what would be said if it were made now, what with the opening scene of a these mini-skirted teenage girls cycling to school and the camera forever closing in upon their pedalling thighs while Jim Dale sings a ditty on the soundtrack. As a glimpse of London and New York at the time, it is a curiosity. One cannot help but think, however, that Bronson was better suited to the shoot-'em-up side of cinema (though one must draw a veil over Breakheart Pass, which is perhaps even worse than this).

Opening with a scream in the darkness, Danger Tomorrow lights upon a young doctor and his wife who, as often in films from this time, keep to separate beds. The subsequent hour finds them them entangled by time present and time future very much at odds with what appears to be a quiet life as part of a practice in a small village. This job, as junior to Rupert Davies, comes with an extraordinarily large rent-free house (three floors) where pride of place is given to a new food mixer at which the wife conjures up a victoria sponge while the doctor works in the attic upon an antibiotic, a test-tube-and-retort task in which he is assisted by a sultry woman about whom one might have one's doubts. Add to this the wife's sister who is never slow to accept the offer of a drink, all the more so while her own husband, an Oxford don, is busy at the typewriter with his latest detective story. The first half is perhaps on the slow side, a necessary prelude to high drama. If unlikely to be acclaimed as a lost masterpiece, this small film has much going for it - including gl;impses of an era when doctors smoked pipes in the surgery and went out on their "rounds" rather than expecting patients to ring first thing in the morning in hopes of being given a slot to toil into the surgery.

That phrase could sound like an order given by one of the Marx Brothers or Basil Fawlty - but in fact it marks a pivotal moment in this drama set in 1969 Bolton, adapted by Bill Naughton from his stage play. Much of this takes place around a dinner table over which presides the strict, God-fearing James Mason, whose wife (Diana Coupland) is caught between him and the looser spirits of their four children. Among these is Susan George, whose short skirt and long legs are redolent of a changing world outside a small terraced house which, a few years earlier, would have been filmed in shadowy black and white but comes across equally well in bleached colour.

Throughout, with salty remarks along the way (we learn of a fine coat "that'll keep your knees and other bits warm"), one is kept in suspense: will all this take a tragic turn (there is a moment when one even fears for the cat). Watch it and keep guessing. Of course it is now a period piece in some ways - mini-skirts and Mini vans, as well as, of all things, a bright-yellow Land Rover involved in a notably passionate smash - but the film also turns upon eternal insecurities (and reveals that bowls games can conceal some gambling).

"I'm a doctor - and I want my sausages!" So says an impatient Geoffrey Palmer during a small but immortal role which found him take control at the cooker in the Fawlty Towers kitchen while chaos ensues elsewhere on the premises. Less know is his playing another doctor who knocks on the door with key information (heard on an early incarnation of an answering machine) while turbulent events take place during "Incident at Midnight" (1962), one of the many episodes of the Edgar Wallace Presents... series (complete with that insinutaing theme tune which was also recorded by The Shadows).

In an inspired setting, most of the action, and the sitting around, takes place in an all-night chemist's in the West End, where the white-coated dispenser on duty is none other than Warren Mitchell.

At the time, neither of these roles may have seemed worth going to the bother of getting the CV re-typed but time has vindicated them as astute character studies, vital to these 55-minute narratives. Bluff detectives in thick overcoats make their usual appearance, as do sultry women who feel no need of such garments (furs at most, shoulders soon prominent).

To say any more is unncessary except that money is involved - and a good mark of these series is that it is always to be found in an unexpected location.

This episode is a high point.

The opening scene focuses upon a staircase, down which silently treads a man, gun in hand. For all we can tell, this is a seedy lodging house whose worn carpet is about to be decorated by blood.

In fact, a door opens upon a Sunday-afternoon suburban sitting room where a Red Indian - some ten years old - gives a whoop of surprise at being caught out by his father (Patrick Holt) who, no cowboy, is in fact a features editor whose wife (Honor Blackman) is so engaged upon some sewing that she asks him to make the tea.

A task which coincides with the telephone ringing in the hallway (its then customary location): the fashion writer with whom he has had an affair the past three years, of which he now wishes the peaceful end he appears unlikely to find. In hopes of doing so, he arranges to meet her the following evening under cover of a visit to a former Army friend with whom he has racked up gambling debts.

Nothing goes to plan, not least because a key role is played by a nosey parker who delights in her party line: the telephone deserves a credit of its own, alongside all those small players, such as a bluff porter at a block of flats, who help to propel the twists of the plot. Their names mean even less now, and at the time were perhaps otherwise engaged upon repertory theatre, but without them such films would not exist.

Needless to say, events take a turn which brings in the Yard, personified by an Inspector, Valentine Dyall, an actor who could switch between good and evil with ease. How pleasing it is for those of with a taste for such films to find him in this one - along with night scenes, telephone boxes, black cars with scant regard for KEEP LEFT signs, trains whose pelting smoke is oblivious to climate change, not to mention well-stocked shelves where spirits overshadow sherry.

All this occupies but 65 minutes, no detail of which can be overlooked, and one can imagine that, within a few years, writer and director would have been obliged to stretch it out, to less effect.

This is adroit film-making which recognises that nobody - on the screen or behind it - should predominate.