Film Reviews by CH

To get the pitch right for a romantic comedy means that it should have an edge, and, in theory there is plenty of this here - but it is almost impossible to believe that a civil sercant will invite somebody, on a second date, to a high-level global conference in Iceland. It becomes difficult to give much credence to what is being said, on all sides, `

To ctach up with this first series has been a diverting time in mid-winter. This is not simply a matter of its being set in Hawaii but in following an array of characters who are just this side of caricature - and often betond it - as guests and staff overlap in in a pricey, secluded resort. The dialogue, often brief, sometimes the stuff almost of monologue, is a delight - perhaps the best set-up since Six Feet Under a couple of decades ago. It has spurred me to watch more written and directed by Mike White.

Written by associates of Billy Wilder and directed by Howard Haws, who was never one to slacken the pace, this is a return to the screwball trends of the previous two decades. As with those, the premise is slight, even preposterous: Cary Grant, married to Ginger Rogers, is on the track of a rejuvenation liquid at a labatory where a secretary is Marilyn Monroe: another early part to which she beings brio - although there are moments when all the cast is outclassed by a chimp and even by a (human) baby. Do not inger over the illogic of it all, but relish one surreal scene after another - and help Grant look for his spectacles.

Five years before Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960) there was the apartment which is the main setting for his The Seven Year Itch. This film, however, is of course best known for that scene in which Marilyn’s white dress billows when caught by a gust through the sidewalk vent of a subway after she and Tom Ewell have been to a showing of The Creature from the Black Lagoon at a Manhattan cinema.

That had been released the year before, one of many details which locates the film in its time - an era when the Catholic church continued to hold sway over what could be depicted upon the screen, especially when it came to the subject of the footloose husbands taking advantage of their wives and children being absent from the fetid city for the summer.

And so what does do Tom when Marilyn rents the apartment above?

Well, he delivers many a monologue about his honourable intentions while giving way to fantasies which take a different tack - including one which parodies the beach scene in From Here to Eternity and another in which, hospitalised, he finds a nurse flinging herself upon his bed (a spirited turn by Carolyn Jones, who became Morticia in The Addams Family). He occupies more of the screen than his neighbour, but Marilyn brings to proceedings a wit and comedy which lift it almost to the level of Wilder’s most notable films.

Strange to say, censorship also lifts the film. George Axelrod’s Broadway play led to seduction forbidden on film, but the latter has all the more of a frisson for its being an unfulfilled possibility.

As with The Apartment, which was inspired by Brief Encounter, so The Seven Year Itch has a Coward connection. One of the fantasies has Ewell imagining himself wooing her by sitting in a cocktail jacket at a piano while playing Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto.

There are enough bravura moments to keep one happily diverted - a view of a sultry summer which eases a chill winter’s viewing, and leaves one also wondering whether it will be revived on stage in its original form - and, of course, eager to seek out The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

As for the wisdom of keeping one’s underwear in the freezer, that is something for each viewer to decide for herself - or even himself.

Only the mention of the start of a football match and its ending make one realise that the eighty minutes of Locke (2013) have not taken place in real time. That is, and also the reflection that had it done so then concrete-expert Tom Hardy would have been arrested for breaking the speed limit.

The film features only him as, strapped in, he drives along a night-time motorway all those 120 miles from Birmingham to London. As it is, the police could have pilled him to the hard shoulder, for he speaks well-nigh continually on his (admittedly hands-free) cellphone.

Written and directed by Steven Knight, who is well known for more conventional television work, this outing stands up well a decade on. Against a continual background of other vehicles’ lights and blue signs upon the bridges ahead, Hardy confronts the meaning of life. (The film’s title is not a reference to the philosopher but this eponymous Welsh driver, first name Ivan.) His career has been given to calculating the correct consistency of the concrete to be poured into the ground to support towers being built around the country. (Presumably he is a subscriber to the long-running, fascinating magazine Concrete Quarterly, whose archive is now available online.) The latest job, in the Midlands, is of particular interest to the powers-that-be in Chicago.

And what do we find? Locke has done a bunk this night before the dawn when the mixture should begin to pour into those foundations which are also the basis for the firm’s future contracts. Furthermore, he is not on the way back to his wife and sons but to the hospital where a troubled woman is about to give birth to the child whom he sired upon her after a casual encounter at some frightful awayday gathering.

All of this emerges amidst his giving instructions to a deputy about arranging the new day’s concrete pouring (which brings the immortal reply, several times, “I’m in an Indian restaurant!”). The motor-car echoes to all these variously querulous exchanges as Locke fixes his eyes upon the road ahead - physically and metaphorically. Among those seen but not heard are Ruth Wilson and Olivia Colman. One might wonder how it would work as a radio play, or read to oneself. Much, however, is gained by the darkness and fluorescence - and by the many expressions which Locke brings to something which would be a familiar scenario had it been otherwise set (if one can use that verb in this concrete context).

Some twenty minutes into Joanna Hogg’s Unrelated (2008), which felt far longer, it was time for the eject button and no curiosity about the fate of those in a Tuscan holiday home. Its place chanced to be taken by another household, Love Next (1951).

The scene opens in Manhattan, outside a brownstone house, which has been bought by June Haver while her husband William Lundigan has been in the Army abroad. Confusion begins with his entering the flat occupied by her, only to find another man in it - in fact, she has moved into the basement, where she attempts to control the tempestuous events created by the building itself and the residents to whom she has rented parts of it.

From a novel by Scott Corbett, this was written by I. A. L. Diamond who would work notably with Billy Wilder, including some films with Marilyn Monroe. As chance has it, she has a rôle here, a matter of a few scenes and as many minutes but is of course enough to have her lavished upon the film’s cover and a placed in boxed sets of her work.

Nobody should complain, for this has lifted an enjoyable film from the obscurity into which would perhaps have faded. And here one savour not only the badinage between husband and wife but a splendid turn by a suave conman Frank Fay with a line in seducing rich widows.

As with anything set in such an establishment, there is an abundance of plot but all this never becomes clogged - and, of course, leaves one to reflect that nowdays such a building could only be afforded by those who most likely also have a Tuscan retreat.

If the cast is now in Marilyn’s shadow, they provide high entertainment seventy years on - and unlike that of Unrelated, they do not mumble.

Although the fine music score for And Now Tomorrow (1944) is by Victor Young, the film brings to mind Haydn and Mozart. Both of these found themselves smitten with a woman only, in each case, to marry the sister. Its plot, from a novel by Rachel Field - in a screenplay co-written by Raymond Chandler - turns around a small town dominated by the Blair family, one of whom, Emily (Loretta Young) is engaged to Barry (Jeff Stoddard) when she finds herself blighted by deafness brought on after an arrack of meningitis.

She spends much of the family money in seeking a cure around the world, all of which is to no avail; on returning home, she does not realise that her fiancé has fallen for her sister (Susan Hayward); one of the first to know, however, is the bright local doctor (Alan Ladd) who, born the other side of the tracks from the Blairs’ home, is engaged to develop a serum which might just help.

Medical matters are often a driving force in the plots of soap, and there is no denying that there is more than element of it here, but the tension between Ladd and her is well done, augmented by the contrasting settings of dark tenements and a house which opens - as so often in films at this time - upon a wide staircase which curves to an equally ample landing. Directed by Irving Pichel, perhaps best known for The Moon is Down and They Won’t Believe Me, it has a pace which involves one in these betrayals as they come to light in a shadowy world, one which is not as dark as the territory usually associated with Chandler.

Before BACS transfers there were weekly runs by trucks with cases of smackers aboard for allocation to those who toiled in company offices and factories. Human nature being what it is, there were frequent attempts to prevent these from reaching their rightful destination.

Such is the case in Payroll (1961). Based upon a now-vanished novel by Derek Bickerton, it was adapted by George Baxt, who worked on various films at this time, including that cult item Circus of Horrors, before himself turning to crime fiction - notably with a series featuring one Pharoah Love. This script supplied director Sidney Hayers with ample material to fashion his depiction of a gang of crooks whose efforts take place in a wonderfully deliniated Newcastle (that said, they are all readily comprehensible) where light and shadow - within and without - become characters themselves thanks to the work of cinematographer Ernest Srewart whose visual take merges well with the percussive nature of Reg Owen’s jazz-inflected music.

As for the characters themselves, the gang is led by Michael Craig, a man of smoother aspect than the cohorts in whom he has placed what, inevitably, turns out to be undue trust. Things go wrong from the start, during a brilliantly choreographed raid on the van. With a policeman dead, it is now more than a matter of money; for one thing there is a grieving and sassy widow (played by Billie Whitelaw) whose counterpart is Francoise Prévost: in a hapless marriage, to one who is in on the details of the raid, the Frenchwoman hankers after the finer things in life; the embodiment of sultry, she is the driving force of the film.

Scarcely a moment lacks suspense, which is no mean achievement, something which keeps the plot aloft even when it appears to be guying the conventions of a heist scenario. Some two thirds of the way through there is some disintegration of the narrative, as if it has come to bear too much, but it has been sustained so well, with every character distinct, that one watches with near-wonder as events lead to an inevitable ending whose very image brings to mind that of Armored-Car Robbery a decade earlier.

Armored Car Robbery (1950) appears to concern exactly that. As in any heist, what counts is not so much the haul as the aftermath. A small fortune has been taken from a Los Angeles racetrack as part of a meticulously-plotted raid but, for all the work being done amidst gas, something goes wrong. The gang is spotted, chase is given, bullets ring out, two of them hitting flesh through windscreens.

Minutes into this, and time is already catching up with those who thought that money could bring a better life across the border. This was made by Richard Fleischer two years before his masterly Narrow Margin with which it shares pace and an eye for those hours between dusk and dawn when shadows conceal so much more.

Charles McGraw is a policeman out to avenge a colleague killed in the shoot-out and gets hard on the trail of gang leader William Talman who, of course, is smitten with a burlesque dancer (Adele Jergens) whose on-stage scenes are given added heat by her being already married to another member of the gang.

Filled with now-vanished curvaceous automobiles, any number of location scenes, and several moments at the game appears to be up. For all the dextrous performances, the start of this is the camera which, at every moment, brings a sense of the shades between the black and white of order and law - and there is a surprising reference in the dialogue to the young Norman Mailer. Watch a b-movie and you can be so much better rewarded than items first presented at red-carpet showings.

Who is the star of Cleo from 5 to 7 (1961)? On the face of it – and what a face it is -, this is the eponymous singer played by Corrine Marchand who is on screen for most of a film which takes place in something close to real time (there are as many clocks in it as in The Set-Up). While she traverses contemporary Paris, its buildings, cafés, parks, squat automobiles and more form as much a character as she does.

Written and directed by Agnès Varda, it turns around the singer being anxious about going to keep an appointment that afternoon/evening to see whether she has cancer. That might make it sound sombre but there is such a brio to the way in which the film is made – very much nouvelle vague – that one is carried along by it, revelling in the variety of camera angles which capture a city in flux and coming to a halt now and then.

Along the way, she calls in at a songwriter (played by Michel Legrand himself) and visits the studio where a friend (Dominique Davray) who is modelling for a life class; their continuing journey includes the delivery of a film to a cinema whose projectionist invites them to watch it there and then: this is Seine-side pastiche, a few minutes long, of a slapstick silent film which stars, amazingly, Godard in a fine lovelorn rôle.

Unlikely as it might appear, this surreal interlude fits perfectly as the prelude to the onset of evening and the uncertain news which had been heralded by the film's opening section where Tarot cards were turned (mercifully, and fittingly, the only part in colour).

Here, though, is a celebration of all that life can entail (and on disc there is an array of extras well worth watching). All of which leaves one only able to reflect how galling it must be for the Académie française that the French for happy hour is... le happy hour.

How well known is The Paper Chase (1973) these days? The title refers to first-year Law students who are eager to stay the course at Harvard. As such, they are beholden to their professor, a steely, perhaps charismatic John Houseman (the jury is out on that).

One would like to know what the film critic Philip French made of it. He once observed that, with a background in memorising all the FA Cup scores from the beginning and then doing likewise with thirty cases while studying Law at Oxford, one could gain a good degree.

In this film, Houseman takes the opposite tack; he chastises a student who claims to have a photographic memory - and the students are put through it. Among them is Timothy Bottoms; he never displays that part of himself during the recurrent shower scenes to which dorm mates have recourse after fervid discussion of possible exam questions; still less does he do so during close encounters with Lindsay Wagner who, on the point of divorce, turns out to be the professor's daughter.

Skilfully done as all this is, one's verdict has to be that it comes down on the wrong side of hokum. That said, there is a curious interest in seeing how Seventies hairstyles and beards appear in conjunction with the formal dress requested upon an invitation.

More diverting than essential.

It is a great opening – as is all that follows, and went before. This is D.O.A. (1949). In fact, Edmond O'Brien is still alive when he arrives at the San Francisco police headquarters to report a murder: “my own”. In his end is our beginning, for the story cuts back to proceed through the events which brought him to the police. A suburban insurance agent, who has left his secretary (Pamela Britton) behind, he is in the city for a holiday when he finds himself caught up in a neighbouring room's party which decamps to a brilliantly-filmed jazz dive, where he becomes ill.

This is no surprise, for, amidst some furious drumming, the camera has cut to the switching of the drink bought for him at the end of the bar. For a small-time agent, he is to discover that he has become unwittingly caught up in murderous events. Should he be asked, he can testify, with the aid of a document in his possession, that a jump from a balcony was a push. Time is not on his side. In what remains of it, he has to scour the city, and make a détour to Los Angeles, in a quest for his killer. All the while assuring his lovelorn secretary by telephone that he is all right.

The plot might sound preposterous, but there are slow-acting poisons and the fast pacing of this film leaves scant room for doubt. Written by Russell Rouse and Clarence Greene, it is directed by Rudolph Maté in a way which makes full use of the city as seen by cinematographer Ernest Laszlo (some terrific runs through crowded streets) during day and night.

Film noir is a term which occludes its variety, and this one turns many of these upon the familiar retinue of Mr. Bigs and their mercilessly self-seeking, smartly-dressed women with a cigarette between manicured nails which also serve to scratch. Nobody is above suspicion. Malevolence pervades society. Even the viewer feels guilt by association.

There is much talk now of the way in which human labour will be supplanted by robots. As it was ninety years ago, when René Clair made A nous la liberté (1931) which more than inspired Chaplin's Modern Times (to Clair's delight).

The plot is simple. Two men (Raymond Cordy; Henri Marchand) are in gaol, their days spent at the side of a conveyor belt. After hours, in their cell, they are engaged in the more primitive task of breaking out by dint of sawing through the high window's bars (one standing upon the other to do so).

Come the break-out, only Cordy makes it. Ever quick to improvise, he becomes the owner of an impressive gramophone manufacturing company; this time, he is in charges of others who toil at a belt as the components speed by.

For all its dialogue, this straddles the end of the silent era. Much of one's interest is in watching rather than listening – although the ears are of course called upon to relish Auric's music as these visually emoting characters caper and chase in the very spirit of slapstick. Marchand also escapes, only to find himself a humble employee at this factory which is as whistle-driven as the gaol. After the camera has moved to and fro, as light has contended with shade time and again amidst these huge sets with towering doors at every turn, the inevitable comes to pass. Greed is exposed on all sides, top hats caught on the wind as thousand-franc notes elude grasping hands while the pair, escaping re-capture, walk into the sunlit countryside.

To relate so much of the plot is not unfair, for this is all less a story than a fable – something which depends upon its telling, as Clair does so well here. So much of subsequent film technique, around the world, is anticpated here, but it should not be regarded as the stuff of the lecture room: here is great entertainment.

This disc includes a fifteen-minute interview with Clair's widow, made for his centenary in 1998. Even more fascinating is that an extra is his 1924 twenty-minute film Entre'acte

From the beginning, cinema has turned upon chase scenes impossible to capture on stage or in prose. Little mentioned, though, is one of the best, Entr'acte. Not only directed by Clair, it has a scenario by the artist and polemicist Francis Picabia (admired by David Bowie); as if this were not enough, the music – which anticipates John Adams – is by Erik Satie, who appears in the opening scenes as somebody launching a cannon; this shot brings much in its (literal) wake, not least a scene in which Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp are engrossed in a game of chess. Along the way, at varying speeds, are dancers – and flowers which appear to be doing so, in a way that anticipates the unfurling women who recur in Busby Berkeley's films.

What is going on? To ask the question, as the cannonballs fly and bicycles are vigorously pedalled, is to go against the spirit of Dada as it merged into Surrealism. After all, who ever heard, in France, of a hearse being led by a camel, let alone one as bemused as this? Small wonder matters go awry, and, soon pilotless, the coffin speeds away. This downhill pursuit is a miracle of filming.

One might think that it could not be capped – but it is, and prepare to gasp, even when the final credit comes up. A joy.

GLAMOUR AND GRIMMER

“We must love one another or die.” This is, of course, a famous line in a poem written by Auden in a New York dive-bar as Germany invaded Poland. He later observed, “after it had been published I came to the line 'We must love one another or die' and said to myself: ‘That’s a damned lie! We must die anyway.’ So, in the next edition, I altered it to ‘We must love one another and die.’ This didn’t seem to do either, so I cut the stanza. Still no good. The whole poem, I realized, was infected with an incurable dishonesty – and must be scrapped.”

This comes to mind when watching Thorold Dickinson's Secret People (1952). This opens with an exile (Charles Goldner) who lives above a London café where he receives a letter with tidings of a friend's likely death at the hand of fascists – as in Greene's The Confidential Agent, Franco is implied - and that his daughters are waiting downstairs for his help. That letter quotes Auden's original line as something to live by. The only thing is that this scene is set in 1930 – almost a decade before Auden wrote it.

As such, it is an emblem of the way in which this film appears realistic – steam from the coffee machine – and yet is almost an allegorical depiction of that decade's struggle. Dickinson, who is perhaps now best now for the original film of Gaslight (that and the Hollywood version have their different merits), brings his own form of poetry to all this while, with a leap to 1937, those sisters (Valentina Cortese and a young Audrey Hepburn) make their way in London while figures from the past – those secret people – meet clandestinely, intent upon assassination.

As a thriller, it has longueurs – perhaps, paradoxically, because Ealing cut it to about ninety minutes when it could have gained from elaboration of its many close observations (one to survive is the startling moment when Valentina Cortesa gently slaps Audrey Heburn's left buttock to spur her at a successful audition to join a ballet company). Secret People has many such moments – what Christopher Isherwood called Forster's “tea-tabling” of drama; all of which enforces the explosive moments (Forster had a propensity for sudden deaths).

Such were the hopes for this film that Dickinson engaged the young Lindsay Anderson to write a now-scarce book about its making. Perhaps, come the Fifties, the subject had missed its moment; it is, though, a perennial one: how far can the quest for liberty entail the death of innocents?

A film is not a pamphlet. What makes Secret People so rewarding is that it is a continual work of composition; everything has its place, as it does in the work of Henry James. How does he come into this? The latest DVD of the film, wonderfully restored, has a ten-minute talk by a James expert, Philip Horne, who has also edited an absorbing book about all of Dickinson's work, which is one fit to set beside Dickinson's own study of film.

Naturally, many remark upon this being an early appearance by Audrey Hepburn but it is also a chance to see Irene Worth, more usually regarded as a stage performer. What's more, it is yet another film in which a few seconds' screen time has one exclaiming, “that's Sam Kydd!”

Whatever happened to Killer Riders of Wyoming? The question comes to mind while revelling in The Smallest Show on Earth (1957). One scrambles to see whether this existed, for considerable trouble must have been entailed in filming those scenes which surface upon the small screen of a rundown cinema in the town of Southborough whose air is dominated by its glue factory.

But no, this and several other Western scenes were especially made – fast horses, speeding trains, cliff-edge tumbles and all – for a delightful, moving comedy written by William Rose who was responsible for many other films of an Ealing hue; this was made by British Lion, and it should be as well known as his other work.

It opens with a postman on his rounds, who reaches up to hand Virginia McKenna a letter for her novelist husband (Bill Travers). Once he rises from his typewriter, he opens it and finds that he has come into an inheritance, something which could make all the difference to their impecunious state (desirable as their London home appears sixty-five years on).

Full pelt (first class) to Southborough, and, in time, down to earth, for the junior solicitor Leslie Phillips's sad task is to inform the young couple that the long-lost great-uncle's legacy is a cinema – the Bijou -, whose rafters and lighting are regularly shaken by the adjacent railway line. Such is the state of the place, it could do with rapid application of the liquid produced by that glue factory.

All in all, a legacy which would make a 1957's publisher's advance appear the stuff of dreams.

What's more, the Bijou comes complete with three ancient members of staff from its glory days: at the box office and piano is Margaret Rutherford while at the projector and whisky bottle is Peter Sellers (who, in his early thirties, was dressed to look close on eighty) while, equally bewhiskered, there is Miles Malleson who multi-tasks as janitor and commissionaire.

To say anymore about the plot is not necessary. It is the familiar one of modest forces in battle with a conglomerate (such as 1939's Cheer Boys Cheer did so well, its subject rival breweries). All this takes but seventy-five minutes, including those preposterous Westerns, but contains so much that one cannot help but want to sit round for the next showing to savour again the rapid dialogue, the ready humour, the pathos, the skilful plotting: here is everything to fuel a term at film school (including Virginia McKenna's hapless attempt to sell ice cream during the interval).

All of the cast, directed by Basil Dearden, must have had as much fun in making as this anybody will do if at all tempted to watch it.