Film Reviews by CH

"I don't slap men's faces, I slap the look on them." Not perhaps the sort of line one readily associates with Glynis Johns. In this film, made in

England in 1949, from a novel by Gerald Butler, she finds herself becoming enthralled by a man who goes by the name of Lucky and, as did Lord Lucan, he makes a living at those gaming tables which were then, unlike the Clermont Club, behind the scenes: a wooden flap pulled back before a concealed door swings open to reveal those affecting calm around a large table as the wheel spins and a rake shunts chips to and fro. Needless to say, violence simmers beneath a landscape of cocktail dresses, dinner jackets and bow ties. Much of the film takes place by night, light and shade deployed well, almost up to the standards of those American dark streets. Told in a series of flashbacks, it opens with Glynis being questioned in a hospital about a gun found at the scene - and keeps one guessing throughout. Not a pinnacle of noir, perhaps, but there is plenty to be getting on with here - not least the fruity dialogue between Glynis and the woman with whom she shares modest quarters . What used to be called risqué before the barriers came down.

The title might lead one to expect that the boat is a main player in this engaging spy drama. In fact, there is less of it than scenes in London and thereabouts as the Intelligence service seeks the key to a Nazi spy ring which, with the war just over, is trying to grasp control of atomic-bomb secrets. So much happens in this film that there is scant time to dwell on the plausibility of all the twists. As much as anything, it is all carried along by brilliant character acting: suave Robert Newton gets away with some double entendres in talking with Guy Middleton, whose moustache is a character in its own right, while a brief turn by Wildrid Hyde-White makes a taxi driver even more churlish than the trade's general reputation. Sad to say, the charming Muriel Pavlow died last year and almost comes a cropper here, in a well-depicted lodging house, until a telephone call chances to raise the alarm: indeed, it is surprising how much of the film takes place on the telephone. Great entertainment, intelligently done, with the scenes in the Dublin hotel lobby an object lesson in how to manage extras.

Take Patrick McGoohan, add a jazz club and put him behind drums; for good measure, find room for Charles Mingus, Dave Brubeck and Tubby Hayes (and others), all of this being a variant on Othello: a worthy inter-racial turn by Basil Dearden who was much given to social issues, but this little-known film has flair, owing much to the editing: the pace is terrific, and the camera angles unusual. An example of jazz on film working well (which is often far from the case).

One of the many enjoyable aspects of these 50-minute dramas is that one spots an actor on the cusp of fame or taking the work on offer after earlier starring roles. In the case of disc two of series three, one is startled to find that one of the villains is none other than Michael Caine, and there is also an appearance by Murray Melvin, perhaps best known for A Taste of Honey.

This is very well done in its blending of scenes from Katherine Mansfield's life with dramatic versions of her short stories. Perhaps one needs to know something of her life to appreciate the biographical scenes (which are a shorter part of the eposodes), and it jumps over a visit to Paris - when she diverted to the Front (or, rather, close to it) for an assignation with a lover who was in the Army. This series is perhaps best watched an episode (two stories) at a time.

Lost for many years, this film has resurfaced. Although it cannot be called a hidden gem, it is diverting enough with a suave Donald Houston who has returned from Canada in hopes of picking up the thread of a wartime encounter with a pleasingly malevolent Susan Shaw whose eyes are forever trained upon the main chance.

The twist in all this is that Houston is an adept footballer, the ideal new member for a town's faltering football team - as he proves to be. His place is all the more vital as a will reveals that the team will inherit £25,000 if it gets into the third Division; should it not do so, then the money goes to a chiseller who also runs a night club (that staple scene of Fifties British thrillers).

That remains a secret (which surely goes against wills being public documents). Events move briskly. Even those without a taste for football can enjoy the fast editing of various matches (one of which takes place at Arsenal's old ground) - and marvel at the less-than-thermodynamic shorts with which players contended.

In some ways, it could be an installment in the Edgar Wallace Presents... series. As such, it is enjoyable - and makes one lament that Susan Shaw did not make it to fifty, a career undermined by grim events.

Such dialogue shows that we are in noir territory - in this case, the countryside outside San Francisco with truckloads of apples en route to a wholesale market under the thumb of a chiseller who feels affronted at being asked to pay for the produce he sells on to willing customers.

Trucking - Hell Drivers, Duel - lends itself to the movies (would that the English version of They Drive by Night would re-emerge and which inspired Graham Greene to extol its depiction of "monstrous six-wheeled lorries plunging through the rain" of the Great North Road). Thieves' Highway was adapted by A. I. Bezzarides from his novel, and a love element does not make this fruit soft in any way. On the contrary, Valentine Cortese (who appeared years later to memorable effect in Truffaut's film-about-a-film La Nuit Americaine) is an exemplar of the sultry. Sizzling are her scenes as something of a hooker sent by a vegetable wholesaler to divert an Army veteran (whose father has been handicapped by that wholesaler).

If, as the previous reviewer here suggests, it is a movie of parts that do not quite gel, that does not matter: those parts are so strong and it all moves at such a pace that one is carried along. These are ninety minutes of your life you will not get back - and be glad they were so well spent.

This is perhaps a lesser-known performance by Boris Karloff - an author set upon research - but well worth seeing as he skilfully builds up the horror as a part of fine ensemble playing which takes in such disparate, differently-lit settings as graveyards and a music hall. To say any more would be unfair. Seek it out.

A curious film, this. It opens with an urgent voice-over against shots of a noirish Piccadilly Circus, and cuts to a nightclub - but the real drama is a four-hander, largely filmed inside, with a deep and wide lens which makes something well-nigh Gothic of tale which turns upon lust and revenge - all of it carried by a performance from Dennis Price which deserves to be better known. Some might say that it is stagey (it derives from a play) but it is transformed sufficiently to become a work in its own right. And, in any case, what chance does one have of seeing it on stage?

Such lines occur frequently in this London-set film (1964), much it taking place beside a low-tide Thames. "There's enough junk here for a two-year calendar!" "There are few masterpieces in the world - but there are many millionaires." And these lines are only in the scenes with an extraordinary turn by Richard Attenborough as a gallery owner and himself an anguished painter of calm scenes (with a young Judi Dench as secretary). He has been visited by Stephen Boyd, an American television broadcaster based in London and esteemed by the nation as a rock-steady commentator. In fact, he and Attenborough shared a widowed psychiatrist, who dies, an apparent suicide, in the opening scence with an enigmatic whisper to the housekeeper.

The psychiatrist's fourteen-year-old daughter - a remarkable performance by Pamela Franklin - is certain that there was foul play, and enlists Boyd's help. This sounds preposterous but the acting carries all with it. Elements of the customary procedural tale are there, but this is a film notable less for adroit plot turns (a fine script by Robert Joseph) than its filming: director Charles Crichton owes much to the often deep-focus cinematography of the ever-reliable Douglas Slocombe. Even small rooms assume epic proportions, with faces in half-shadows redolent of the With the Beatles cover (as with that photograph, the film would not have worked in colour).

Dream, nightmare and reality overlap, with an emphasis on chalked messages upon Thameside walls, where also stands, or rather sits, a statue of Hans Christian Andersen, who has a bearing on events.

If all this sounds rich (in both senses of the word), it is but a small part of a film which also, at one fraught moment, brings allegation of Lolita-like situations, one of them upon a four-poster bed.

Say no more.

It is a continually unsettling film, not least with something almost unspoken, if not unspeakable, about the past in the life of a Judge - Jack Hawkins, no less: he unbuttons, literally and metaphorically, after sitting through another day in the life of a detailed industrial-espionage case.

Why is this film not better known? Give it a whirl, and you will be sure to spread the word. And, meanwhile, word is that a strand of the plot, with Patricia Neal, was cut after filming. That would have made it too long, but would be fascinating to see if the footage survives somewhere. All too often Crichton is mentioned for a late-career return to cinema with A Fish Called Wanda. Make no mistake, The Third Secret us far better.

Strangely, the Radio Times Guide persists in grudging this two stars out of five.

Others of us might say that this maritime-based tale is a near-masterpiece of British noir, superbly filmed by Robert Hamer (who adapted it from a novel by Howard Clewes which should also be sought out). The title refers to the long prison sentence endured by John Mills for a crime that nobody committed.

Duly released, he is out for revenge. Things become more complex than such a black-and-white matter - and, indeed, the filming, whether beside the Kent shore or the side of the Thames in London is a marvellous sequence of shades of grey; of the Sun dappling pebbles before moonlight heightens wet cobbles (complete with cat). The tangle of sub-plots never drags under a narrative which finds a place for clanging squad-cars and the long barometers of suburban hallways (where, upstairs, a married couple have a narrow bed apiece, separated by a table upon which a telephone rings at awkward moments).

Psycho is all very well, but has any film turned so much around a shower that it is well nigh a character? That is the case

with Cockles and Muscles. So much is it used - singly or in company - that the continually exasperated father (the least of his problems is being cuckolded) takes out the fuse from it at one point. Billed as a comedy, it certainly has elements of that distinctive French take on farce, but gains from an undertow of sadness, a sense of life passing as a new generation rises. As for the shower, it gets an extra to itself.

With three 50-minute films per disc - nine per series -, these swiftly told stories are naturally variable, but show variety, and are never less than interesting. To single out one, Urge to Kill, this displays a small-town boarding house redolent of Cornell Woolrich. The murderer is apparent from the start; that is no destraction, for everything turns upon the amount of killings before the inevitable end. Eyebrows might now be raised at the performance of one suspect but this is an affecting one (say no more). A great interest of these series is to spot actors early in their careers (or at the end of them): ever suave, Paul Eddington not only pops up as a villain in one of these films but indulges in violence of the chair-on-head variety; as one might put it: the bad life.

In this brisk hour and a quarter, there is adroit use of Hastings and the area along the coast - as well as equally moody interior scenes filmed in Merton Park studios. Anybody who starts this film will be sure to sit until the end - and then grasp the title of this review of a film far closer in time to Mrs. Woolf's novel than now. The film has a larger cast than her novel, with many neat small parts, such as the supercillious landlady of a modest hotel.

The two on the first disc - Present Laughter and Blithe Spirit - are a delight, with Peter Wyngarde notable in the first one and Hattie Jacques in the second. They are well staged, and the television adaptation is fine. The very thing for a civilised winter's night. Each play is introduced by Coward, who is unduly defensive of his work when, at the time, the kitchen sink was to the fore. Time has shown, however, that there is also a place for the drawing room.