Film Reviews by CH

Although the opening scene of Too Many Crooks (1959), very well shot, has all the dark pace of a noir, this is soon revealed to be stuff of comedy when the truck in question crashes directly into a jeweller’s, and there tumble from and under it such hapless stalwarts of farce as Sid James (whose character is once again called Sid as that it what people call him anyway).

He is one of a group of crooks - including George Cole and Bernard Bresslaw - with ideas above their abilities. What’s more, this being late-Fifties England, it is scarcely surprising that along the way suave businessman Terry-Thomas’s eyes stand forth almost as often as moll Vera Day’s breasts.

Crudely put as that might sound, this is all in fact a blow for women’s rights - as befits a script by Michael Pertwee which was in fact built upon a story co-written by Christiane Roochefort, whose left-wing upbringing informs her novels and other writings (and she managed the linguistic feat of translating John Lennon’s books in the Sixties). The plot is readily summarised. The gang hits on the idea of kidnapping the daughter of Terry-Thomas who has made his pile by building nefariously upon his wife’s initial money; less than grateful to her, he proves thankful when the gang kidnaps her - a hearse and chloroform to hand - by mistake.

There is an expression known as a Sam Kydd moment. He frequently pops up effectively for a few seconds in films at this time - and never finer than when he stirs from an early-morning bench only to see a driverless hearse head his way, then crash, with which a shrouded figure rises from the now-vertical coffin and sends him running.

Restored to life, the wife joins forces with the gang to bilk Terry-Thomas of even more than the ransom he had proved far from willing to pay.

Chases, a convenient fire, an outlandish scene in front of a magistrate, impersonated officers from Scotland Yard, not to mention the stock-in-trade of a violin vase and such lines as “what’s in that cigar? Congo rat?”, here is diversion more skilfully managed by director Mario Zampi than anything the gang itself hoped to pull on the Great North Road

Artificial Intelligence. The brain is becoming burdened by the phrase. Little noticed, though, has been the third film, Britannia Hospital (1982) in the series by Lindsay Anderson and David Sherwin about Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) up against the world.

This time, the camera turns to health, in particular a research hospital which is preparing for a Royal visit while staff are on strike and a mob gathers outside to protest about the private wing in which a dictator has fetched up with his retinue (there is a terrific scene with them and an orange in his ante-room).

And what a cast is gathered here. Anderson was able to draw upon his familiar faces, including Alan Bates who was content to be glimpsed as a corpse. Mona Washbourne, Arthur Lowe, Joan Plowright... they are all here. As is Graham Cowdon, familiar from O Lucky Man as a crazed scientist who experiments with animals. Out the back at the Hospital he has now progressed to humans, and his own sampling of”delicious” brain (made into what would later be called a smoothie) is but a starter.

Protestors and Royal alike find themselves in the audience for a lecture about the culmination of all this, a large, mechanical/electronic creature which recites an obvious enough speech from Hamlet - capped by Cowdon’s remark that, come the end of the century, all that will be contained within something the size of a matchbox.

As we know, a quarter of the way into the next next century, this Intelligence occupies even less space.

Could any machine manufacture a script to rival this one? True, it can sometimes feel as if several elements have been yoked together, even a touch of Carry On, but the same could be said of the previous two in the series. The mob - such a crowd of extras - is unleashed, and there is a controlled anarchy to the film itself.

Why is it not more widely known?

As usual with Garson Kanin and Geoge Cukor, here is elegance and style,. It is a mileu into which there enters a mobster who soon realises that his gal Billie Dawn (played by Judy Holliday) needs educating in a way that he himself is incapable of doing. And so, she is entrusted to a bespectacled William Holden and, along the way, has frequent recourse to a large dictionary which has a stand to itself.

For anybody familiar with the Pygmalion myth, the course of events is predictable enough. Feistily done, even if Billie's voice can be hard to take, here is diverting comedy a notch or two below the very best.

With Iris Apsel's recent death at 102, this was a chance to see the documentary about her which Albert Mayles made a year before his own death. At first, it is a welcome sight, this colourfully decorated New York woman who, never opting for grey, sported all manner of clothes - and their accessories, mutiple bangles and all, by which she always set as much store.

Trouble is, it lasts more than ninety minutes. Long before this - shuttling between Florida and Park Avenue - it has become yet another foray to a shop and a rummage for unexpected items, whether in a thift store or more gilded a setting (she gets an exhibition of all this at the Metropolitan Museum when it had a sudden gap to fill). One soon asks, what else is there in the life of her and her husband (he died not long after). What does all this dressing up bring with it? There is no reference to books, plays, music - to anything else in Manhattan. Without wishing to impugn her, one cannot help but say the documentary feels hollow.

Not the film for which Mayles will be best remembered, although one is glad of the chance to see it, even if balking at the extra on the disc which is a fifty-minute interview with her by a fashion editor at the time of the film's release here.

INT. DAY.

Man sits at desk and writes a screenplay by hand.

If the script for In a Lonely Place (1950) fell open at that page, any producer might snap it shut and pass on it with a droll aside or two redolent of Humphrey Bogart. This was an unlikely reaction, for the very man with a pen in hand is a sultry-lit Bogart in this wonderful variant on noir.

Directed by Nicholas Ray with a script by Andrew Solt from Dorothy B. Hughes’s contemporary novel, here is something in which no bullets fly - there would hardly be room for them amidst the one-liners, which do, however, make way now and then for a well-aimed punch or two (even Bogart’s bespectacled agent - Art Smith - does not escape his knuckles).

The origins of all this are simple enough. They always are. Screenwriter Bogart is assailed by somebody at a smart restaurant because he has not given his view about a novel’s screen potential. As chance has it, the cloakroom girl (Martha Stewart) has almost finished doing so in between handing the coats to and fro. Bogart asks if she would come home and tell him the plot. Uneasy, she breaks a date to do so, and afterwards - which was all this side of innocent (“I didn’t say I was a gentleman - I said I was tired”) - she leaves to get a taxi at a nearby junction.

That is the last seen of her, until a front page appears with news of her strangulation soon after, body at the roadside.

What with his hot temper, Bogart is a prime suspect, hauled in at 5 a.m., and soon gains something of an upper hand with the evidence of his neighbour Gloria Grahame who, hungry for him and dextrous with her eyebrows, has a view into his place.

How will it all go? Well, at first Gloria Grahame says of Bogart’s face, “I said I liked it, I didn’t say I wanted to kiss it.” All of which bears out a later observation, “a good love scene should be about something other than love.” There are more references to film-making along the way (“they’re not hot on arithmetic but they know how many minks make a coat” and “you keep making the same film, you’re a popcorn salesman”).

All light and shade (mostly shade, some of it provided by the inevitable venetian blinds), the narrative’s turns do not let up, matched by George Antheil’s score (which gives way to a nightclub scene with then-popular singer Hadda Brooks at the piano, who had a Nineties revival and here gives a wonderful scowl at the possibility of Bogart’s interruption).

As for grapefruit and film, any word-association challenge is likely to bring a reply of James Cagney pushing one into Mae Clarke’s face in The Public Enemy two decades earlier. If there is an allusion to that, it comes here at breakfast after the night before, when Bogart goes into the kitchen and struggles to cut the fruit while Gloria Grahame enters and asks, “what happened to the grapefruit knife?” “It was crooked and so I straightened it.” A shame he does not also offer her coffee: it would make a contrast with Gloria Grahame’s encountering a strong brew in The Big Heat three years later.

“It’s much harder to come back than it is to arrive,” says a rugged Hollywood type at one point. In the case of In a Lonely Place, it was not a public success in its time - but it has come back, something not to be missed. And let us raise a glass to the uncredited Ruth Warren who plays an unfazed cleaner whose hands are as attached to the vacuum as a cigarette is to her lips, even when she retorts after Bogart’s complaint about the machine’s noise, “she can’t hear it, she’s taken those pills.”

As far as the title of this piece goes, it highlights an exclamation in the film - quite possibly the only time the Biblical allusion has been made on screen.

Jeunesse dorée. Gilded youth has been a part of every generation. Over thirty years ago, in Metropolitan (1990) some of those on Manhattan’s Upper East Side were back from college for the Christmas vacation, their haunts various bars and sofa-laden apartments. Here is much talk less profound to anybody listening in than to those sparring with one another to appear informed and languid.

Written and directed by Whit Stillman, it was made on a small budget, and met with success. Audiences divided into those who saw it as a latter-day incarnation of Scott Fitzgerald and those who thought it bluntly indulged those who vapoured on about lives which turned in and around dating.

It is not so much a comedy as a mood, even perhaps a short story which has become unduly elaborated. At its core is somebody (Edward Clements) who has come in their orbit despite living in a small place the other side of the Park. He forms something of a friendship with bespectacled Chris Eigman who elaborates his theories of class distinction while in the room there come and go women talking of Jane Austen - and there are more references to critic Lionel Trilling than is is good for the soul.

For all the panoply of romance, the essence of the film is that disappointment beckons. Men as much as women are shaken when realising that not only putative love but groups of apparent friends are a staging post. The horses are untied and the caravan goes separate ways.

Others will have found the same after coming of age and more in the decades since their infancy at the time of the film’s release - and even made films about it.

Scarcely has the bare-chested strongman struck the Rank gong than it looks as though he has strayed into a leading part in Floods of Fear (1958) itself.

This much-muscled figure, however, is one which has been worked up by Howard Keel, a decade after he had played another gritty rôle in an English film, The Small Voice. This time, the scene is America, where the levee has broken. Water pours on all sides for much of these eighty minutes and brings with it fellow-convict, a creepy, wire-spectacled, knife-crazy Cyril Cusack, and their guard played by, wait for it, Harry H. Corbett.

Keel has made a bolt from sandbagging work along this ad hoc river which is taking houses and people with it. Along the way, he saves Anne Heywood, and, with the others, fetches up at her smart, rapidly disintegrating home where he commandeers fine doors to create a raft.

This becomes another hostage drama, the twist soon being that Keel has been six years inside instead of the waterside business partner who was in fact the one who murdered his wife after finding that she was having an affair with Keel.

Described in these terms, here is the structure of many a noir drama - including Keel doing the decent thing by saving Anne Heywood from the rapacious Cusack, who has the demeanour of a souped-up Steptoe. Well played as all this is, it owes as much to the direction by a man usually associated with comedy, Charles Crichton. He keeps up a brisk pace and continual use of fresh angles to heighten the ever-surprising events - something which is equalled by cinematographer Christopher Challis, whose task was aided and challenged by having to cope with an extraordinary amount of water, its roar matched by Alan Rawsthorne’s score.

Come the end, and that rare thing, a well-staged fight, it is startling to find that all this was filmed not in the Delta but Pinewood. Challis’s work means that one’s eyes take in stock footage, models and tanks as one.

It is brilliantly done - and one might wonder who decreed that, amidst such a storm, Keel should go bare chested at almost every turn, including his carrying Anne Heywood to safety. Naturally enough, this was an image used on the posters for a film which should now be more widely known.

Special effects. The phrase can strike more terror than whatever it might be that these seek to depict. Another hideous yawning jaw can set off a genuine example: one’s own.

No such danger in Village of the Damned (1960), a more lurid title for its inspiration which was John Wyndham’s novel The Midwych Cuckoos. Director Wolf Rilla opens it in a quiet village in a style almost redolent of many a wartime film, except that residents are keeling over not as a result of any gunfire but a mysterious force.

All of which comes to the attention of a military man who was about to visit for a few days. Shortly after his arrival, the afflicted rise again, and that seems to be that - except that it becomes apparent that in this interval several women became pregnant, and all give birth to supernatural children.

Preposterous? Yes. Plausibly done? Yes. And this owes as much to the acting skills of those involved, such as village big shot (George Sanders), his wife (Barbara Shelley) and their purported son (Martin Stephens). The boy is one of that dozen, seemingly alien, very white in hair and skin children whose eyes light up like headlamps as a prelude to seeing off predators (the sole special effect).

The boy is as polite as he is neatly dressed, in keeping with a film which never forces its pace. Malevolence is all the worse for its surface civilization.

Made cheaply (not that it shows) and released on a small scale, almost as a distributor’s afterthought, it quickly found an audience - as it has done ever since. Be sure to see it.

The hills are alive with the sound of... murder.

Perhaps most widely known for an epic account of the von Trapp family, Robert Wise began life as a director with a number of brisk thrillers such as the real-time night of The Set-Up, the masterly Odds against Tomorrow and, most startling, Born to Kill (1947).

From a now-very scarce novel Deadlier than the Male by James Gunn, it opens in Reno where sultry Claire Trevor - to the hilt what was once called a mean broad - is now divorced. New-found equilibrium is disturbed by her chancing to find - and flee from - the bodies of an attractive woman and potential lover freshly killed in a dark kitchen by a hulking, psychotically jealous Lawrence Tierney.

Come the railroad station, they meet on the platform, unaware of this connection. They talk, and, naturally, all this takes such a noir turn as his meeting her again amidst the San Francisco hills and wide staircases of the house where he meets, and marries, her rich sister. Such a man, of course, remains dangerously smitten, and Claire Trevor does not brush him off.

All the while, did he but know it, there is a Fury to match Ida from Brighton Rock. Esther Howard is the redoubtable landlady of the Reno rooming house who has her suspicions and, what’s more, has engaged the services of private detective Walter Slezak, a man born for rôles as sleazy as his surname. The trail hots up, with the strange diversion of Tierney being aided - even to the point of sharing a bed - by that familiar fellow, the slight, ever-nervous Elisha Cook.

Here is no star-driven “vehicle” but ensemble playing which risks treachery at every step (the detective gives a masterclass in the niceties of being bought off). Born to Kill carries its superior hokum aloft. Wise reaches for the familiar haunts and dark streets of noir while keepng up a pace which also allows time for the characters to talk - beguilingly or threateningly, as circumstances require.

It would be difficult to picture Julie Andrews in any remake of this. With all its shades of the creepy, here is a cult item - a status enhanced by David Lynch adopting the name of its first victim Laury Palmer as the Laura of that ilk whose early end caused so much trouble in small-town Twin Peaks.

There is even a reference here to the aroma of coffee.

A damn fine film.

Anything with Herbert Lom commands attention, but even he cannot lift the sluggish Snowbound. It turns around a film writer sent undercover by the Intelligence services to report upon those gathered in a ski hotel. A plot which will do service many times over fown the decades, for the Nazis were not eradicated with the Allies' arrival in Berlin. Variously funded, pockets of them survived in hopes of funding enough to resume the Reich. Trouble is that, a few good moments apart (including an opening on a film set), the sleepy script is not enough to wake a fine cast.

For much of the time, out in the wilds by night and dawn, the fiml is pleasingly slow moving as police and suspect go in quest of a buried murder victim. There is much intermittent talk, with the suggestion that life is more complicated than this quest. One is drawn in, fascinated while naturally wondering exactly what has happened and how it bears upon these lives - and then in the last fifty minutes, with a daylight return to town, and a prolonged autopsy, the mood is broken, attention falters and it becomes more irritatingly than tantalisingly enigmatic.

There is a second disc of extras (I bought the film rather than rent it), which are perhaps something to watch after seeing more fims by a director who certainly commands the attention.

A newspaper editor called Ellington (John Stuart) is so often late at work that his wife (Antionette Cellier) visits a smooth-talking acquaintance (Anthony Hawtrey) one evening. Nothing happens, though it could have done so one might surmise, for there now arrives an earlier friend, who had become more than that, indeed pregnant, a fate which brings her a fatal bullet - and he is on the run.

All of which is of interest to Ellington’s paper, where a star reporter is Brooksie (the ever-suave David Farrar) who never quite gets to spend enough time with somebody else on the paper (Anne Crawford).

Such a set-up does not take long to establish. All of it is done with some style if not exactly the brio of His Girl Friday - although there is some good badinage with a rival’s reporter, Wiilliam Hartnell whose face is so constructed that a vital bone could be called the sardonica.

At less than seventy-five minutes (no newspaper copy editor could sigh, “much more is there?”, things move briskly (the director is capable if unsung John Harlow) Much of it takes place, one way and another, on the telephone, with several moral quandaries and a train ride as evocative of 1943 as a small cinema at Waterloo (in making this film, the producers evidently obeyed the edict: don’t mention the war, and it could be taking place a decade earlier).

A sometimes surprisingly louche scenario, this side of noir, with a key part played by a bespectacled obsessive (Richard Goolden), all capably brought to the screen, Headline is more than a soft feature.

Nobody should turn to this in expectations of its being yet another crime drama. True, It opens with a helicopter descending upon a field in northern France. Nothing unusual in that, even when it proves to be lifting a dead cow from a field.

Except a body had been found in the creature.

A pair of hapless detectives set about solving the case, only to confuse matters as they do so (much careering about in a small car). What with further deaths - and the machinations of a group of children, including the eponymous one whose sour face is something to behold - this is continually unpredictable.

Accept this as a take upon provincial life which lends itself to surreal extrapolation, and here is high entertainment which also includes a view of how people find a place in the society around them.

It is all enough to make one want to see, in a while, the sequel which was made by Dumont four years later.

Astonishing to think that Shiraz (1928) was made almost a hundred years ago. Directed by a German, Frank Osten on location in India (to which he had moved), it has many interior shots of an Expressionist hue alongside those outside which, naturally lit, often find caravans of camels ambling by.

This is the background to a tale of an epic seventeenth-century love tangle. As a child, a princess is lost to the desert after a raid by brigands. She is found and rescued, to be brought up in a village where her new, eponymous brother falls in love with her. Alas, she is sold as a potential sex slave at market some years later. She is taken up by an Emperor who comes to love her but they cannot marry as she is apparently not royalty. Her grief-stricken brother watches from afar for eighteen years, and goes blind while events take a different turn within the Palace.

To summarise the story - and there is much more - is to miss the way in which the viewer become involved: the drama, the passion, the spectacle (there are many elephants). As so often in silent films, eyes are more than expressive, and the same can go for a kiss..

Now restored, partly with funding by George Harrison’s Estate, the film has a remarkable crispness, fittingly accompanied by Anouska Shankar’s new score. This is perfectly judged to savour all the intimate moments while carrying along a narrative which has soon shaken off any suggestion of the preposterous.

And this is not to reveal an ending which might yet take some by surprise.

Pedigree. If any film has this, it is State Secret (1950). And yet how well is it known?

Adapted and directed by Sidney Gilliat, who had worked on Hitchcock’s international spy thriller The Lady Vanishes, its cinematographer was Robert Krasker who had just brought such a spirit to The Third Man’s take on post-war Vienna. Among the cast is a pivotal, ever-sinister Herbert Lom. He is startled along the way by American surgeon Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and showgirl Glynis Johns whom circumstances have flung together in a bid to escape - The Thirty-Nine Steps-style - after Fairbanks’s adroit way with a scalpel means that he is embroiled in political events during a visit to collect a Prize in a mid-European country called Vosnia.

What’s more, all this includes Jack Hawkins, who - echoes of Claude Rains in Casablanca - is not only a suavely brutal factotum who works on behalf of Vosnia’s President but is given, apparently, to speaking in Esperanto for much of his rôle (one gets the gist, which is rarely pleasant).

A narrow partition can divide hokum from the engrossing - and State Secret lands distinctly on the latter side. There is comedy along the way, notably when Fairbanks ducks into a theatre to avoid pursuit (another film-chase trope, one fatally emulated in November 1963 by... Lee Harvey Oswald) and hears a version of “Paper Doll” as cringingly rendered by Glynis Johns (the rest of the music is by Alwyn). All the while, there is a continual awareness of political malignancy, particularly so during the crowd scenes’ close-ups as a wide-eyed populace awaits a glimpse of their elected dictator on a balcony.

There is also something to be written about films which which end on a hill or mountainside, as does State Secret, a hundred minutes after a prelude in the self-same spot. This is brilliantly done - and it gives nothing away to say so here.

Be sure to make this film better known. A worthy aim, and a great treat.