Film Reviews by CH

In these times when dependence upon food has become paramount, the opening scenes, set in Ukraine, of Dovzhenko's Earth (1930) resonate across a near-century. This is, right now, perhaps even more startling than looking upon those recent telescope images of the way in which the universe gathered force whenever that was (difficult to get a handle upon the eons of time and space).

Here, though, in this, one of the last silent films, is a reminder that, while, for example, people were bustling around Piccadilly for anything ranging from the latest Aldous Huxley to an Edgar Wallace, others were in those remote plains, some on the point of death, as wheat and fruit were fortified by the sun or beset by the wind - as they had been for centuries.

Harvest was all. Every stage of the future depended upon it. As we now find.

As Graham Greene observed a few years later, Earth had a “magnificent drive... a belief in the importance of a human activity truthfully reported”. These eighty minutes' narrative are not the main thing: their essence is one of life itself while collectivisation entails the loss of individual land as machinery cuts across many more acres than a man with a scythe can do. One might recall those scenes in Hardy, some four decades earlier, when steam engines did likewise – and indeed of those years after the Second World War which saw England's hedgerows torn up to give way to combine harvesters and the loss of bees' habitat which now prove vital for us all.

Thankfully, despite all this, and for us, Earth is not a pamphlet; it is something, literally, much more moving: clouds cross the sky, people traverse the countryside in memory of a man killed for his belief in the land as inherently a greater force than bureaucracy's egotistic craving to submit it to a form-filling régime.

Even those who do not read poetry appreciate that the land provides it. An onion, an apple, these have the shape of a sonnet; a field is an epic which we need to celebrate.

What's more, startlingly, Earth celebrates those who find that the land's magnetic force has pulled off all their clothes to bring them to a state of Paganism.

Here is something whose open faces speak to us more cogently than anything the latest masked Marvel character can ever hope to do.

How many films open with a close up of ducks in a bath? The only one that comes to mind is Imitation of Life (1934). And it lifts off from there. The other occupant of the bath is the infant daughter of widowed Claudette Colbert. As chance has it, there is a knock at the door from Louise Beavers, a black woman who is also a single parent who offers to work in the household. The women strike a bond which combines the cooking skills of one with the marketing prowess of the other (no prizes for guessing this division of labour).

All this was bold for the Thirties. It is based on a novel by Fannie Hurst, who, after a struggle, became a bestselling, often-filmed author much given to social issues which, such is fame, was to have her consigned to relative oblivion after a long life; signs are, she is becoming esteemed again. As for this film, directed by John Stuhl, it is as bright as ever (Preston Sturges had a hand in the script).

There is a schematic shape to it all. As the enterprise grows, so do the daughters, which, as always brings new problems, not least an amatory tangle as bold for the time as the racial one (partly driven by a case of “passing” which had been the subject of Nella Larsen's eponymous novel (1929)). There are moments, including death, when it appears to become maudlin, but the script – as well as the camera – pulls back, and moves on at a pace which makes one surprised to find that it has lasted almost two hours. One can never miss an appearance by Claudette Colbert – and must wish that Louise Beavers had been to the for more often.

When did cigarette cases pass from general view? This had occurred to me while reading again The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), whose plot turns around an inscribed one. Such an item – also engraved – surfaces in An Affair to Remember (1957) which finds almost all the men sporting hats (except for one who declares, “I'm so stupid, I ain't even ignorant!”). Come Kennedy, hats would be gone and perhaps cigarette cases before them.

The plot is familiar, partly because it is a re-make of Love Affair (1939) which was also directed and written by Leo McCarey, a man with an undoubted sentimental side but let us not forget that he made that masterpiece of mayhem Duck Soup; that familiarity is also resonant because it was to inspire that run of Nineties romantic comedies such as Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail. The plot is a variant upon such shipboard romances as the one which made Anything Goes steam ahead. Aboard a liner – the Constitution - both Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, he a playboy painter, she a singer, are engaged to well-heeled others who are busy in America with their business dealings. Between Europe and New York, there is a dalliance (“let's get some air” “I'll show you the rudder” sounds faintly indecent), which is stoked by a halt on the Riviera, where Deborah Kerr accompanies Grant on a visit to his grandmother (Cathleen Nesbitt).

This is a protracted scene which, although elegantly done, goes on a bit (as does the film itself at close on two hours). And, as it is, with Grant then fifty-three, Cathleen Nesbitt should have been at least a hundred. No matter, here is a woman who hugs Grant and, a leap across time, may have recalled while doing so that she once had in her arms another handsome man, Rupert Brooke: she was one of his various girlfriends (her memoir is coy about their involvement).

There are, amidst the furs and cuff-links, enough sharp lines to alleviate the inevitable sentimentality. “My mother told me never to enter a man's room in months ending with an r.” And later there is the eternal wisdom of “never is a frightening word”.

Some notches beneath Ninotchka, that unsurpassable romantic comedy, here – complete with Christmas scenes – is grand entertainment which reminds us that should anybody utter the greeting “top of the morning!”, the correct reply is, “and the rest of the day to you!”

EAR DEFENDERS

“Name?” “Rivett.” Not perhaps cinema's most resounding exchange, but it is a neat joke for, in the space of an hour, Michael Powell's Red Ensign (1934) tells an absorbing tale – inspired by a newspaper story - of an attempt to revive the Scottish shipbuilding industry. For all its air of a quota quickie, it has much in common with the decade's documentary movement.

Here are many shots of moribund yards, and some well-nigh exciting scene of very loud rivetting as Leslie Banks, a designer and shareholder in the firm, plots to build a fleet which will bring renewed prosperity to the area, and to the country. He is not only up against his own Board but there are attempts to sabotage it all by a rival (a pleasingly unsavoury Alfred Drayton). This recalls the arson which gave Powell's film earlier that year the title of The Fire Raisers. It also starred Banks, whom Powell called an actor's actor, and Carol Goodner who reappears here as a trustafarian on the Board and, naturally, provides piano-playing love interest.

Powell called her “my big discovery”. He had seen her in the West End in an American play. “She hadn't got much of a figure, but she had expressive eyes and a quiet intensity that was quite unforgettable. In addition she was highly professional. I decided that what I liked about American actresses was that they were not content with speaking a lot of words: they knew that there was a real woman hidden somewhere amongst all that verbiage and they were trying to find her”.

As he also recalls of the contemporary audience, they did not know what to make of it. “The elaborate staging of the shipyard, the big, sweeping exteriors, the high standard of performance and sincerity of the actors, the overall seriousness of my approach to directing our story, made them run for cover."

No need to do so now but savour it in its own right – and as a prelude to his great run of films with Pressburger.

“Have you brought an adding machine?” It gives nothing away to say that From Here to Eternity (1953) contains a famous beach scene in which, as the waves break on the shore, Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr grasp one another upon their clothes. Less often recalled is this line of dialogue. Why, in the throes of passion with his superior's wife, should a Sergeant feel the need of so mundane a device? Then again, this is a film in which, for all the current events at an Army base in Hawaii in the early part of 1941, all those involved have a backstory (as they say).

Lancaster's been told that Deborah Kerr has been free with her favours while she and her husband were at another posting; meanwhile Montgomery Clift has sought a transfer after killing somebody in one of the service's boxing bouts; first glimpsed with a broom in his hand, Frank Sinatra is as much a bundle of insecurities as his bête noire, Ernest Borgnine who runs a prison with, literally a rod of iron; and the beach scene is intercut with an encounter at the New Congress Club, which is aptly named, for its staff are prostitutes, including Donna Reed who is saving to return to the mainland and the life of respectability which had been hers before being jilted at what she has assumed would be the altar.

All this, and more, two hours of it, was adapted by Daniel Taradash from James Jones's novel, one of those sprawling late-Forties novels which tried to make sense of everything through which the country had been put before the Bomb dropped and all our woe.

As directed by Fred Zinnemann in effective black and white, it is, for all the bawling marching exercises, a big-screen chamber drama. Scene after scene, even a bar-room brawl, takes place in confined space, notably the night-time moment when Sinatra and Clift hug each other, almost passionately, one last time. This is accomplished film-making, of which Manny Farber said at the time, it “happens to be fourteen-carat entertainment. The main trouble is that it is too entertaining for a film in which love affairs flounder, one sweet guy is beaten to death, and a man of high principles is taken for a saboteur and killed on a golf course”.

And yet, Farber, like anybody who sees it, was gripped (as one is by Lumet's equally pounding The Hill a decade later). How one should like to leap From Here to 1953 and listen to talk, in the bar afterwards, and learn from the discussions between those who had elected upon it as something through which to hold hands on a date-night. Did it foster argument or passion? Or both?

What surprised audiences at the time is that the seemingly innocent Deborah Kerr took on a salacious rôle. Of course, we now know, from Michael Powell's memoirs, that in Thirties England he had a similar encounter with her, albeit not upon a beach but on a rug in front of a lodging house's gas-fire. We shall never know whether this went though her mind when asked about the adding machine.

A knife. This is – almost literally – at the heart of The Boys (1962), as it was at an earlier trial drama: Twelve Angry Men (1957). While that was confined to the jury's deliberation room one New York afternoon, Sidney Furie's London film not only takes place in a courtroom over which Felix Aylmer presides but it incorporates flashbacks, sometimes repeated, to scenes as recollected by witnesses of the events which ended with a night watchman killed.

Amidst those recollections are some by the four flashy youths accused of the crime, whose defence lawyer is none other than Robert Morley. This might sound preposterous but he, Groucho eyebrows and all, turns in as engaging a performance as the prosecuting counsel, Richard Todd.

At two hours, this has led some to say that it is a swollen production (although shorter than most trials); in fact, there is so much happening, with an array of character parts, including Steptoe as a lavatory attendant, that one's attention is continually engaged. Whether in the street, pub or atop a 'bus, the London of that era is wonderfully caught in a few moments of screen time. To say any more about the twists of events would be unfair: the title of this review gives an indication of the forensic detail.

Here is a film which should be far better known – and cherished for a Judge who asks, “what do you mean by yobboes?” This is on a level with the Judge who, a year or so later, would ask, “who are these Beatles?”

Another period detail. Nowadays, jurors are not allowed to wear hats. But in 1962, all of those three women upon the jury sported headgear.

Incest. One might even now be startled to find this the underlying theme of Banana Ridge (1941) which had appeared in the West End three years earlier. All the more so as it is a farce with the requisite number of doors - and even a wardrobe.

Ben Travers had a long series of these produced at the Aldwych Theatre in the Twenties and Thirties. Most were filmed, and are often dismissed as stagey when in fact they are more than a record of the era's acting styles. Robertson Hare and Alfred Drayton are part of a company which deals in rubber (with the former on leave from a Malayan plantation). Along comes a charmingly insinuous Isabel Jeans, who reminds them of their lodging at her mother's house as officers during the Great War. It appears that either of them could have sired a son upon her (Jeans) – the very fellow (Patrick Kinsella) who is waiting outside, and even then beginning to romance Drayton's daughter (the great Nova Pilbeam) – and he simultaneously would Drayton's wife, Pilbeam's mother.

Small wonder that Drayton is aghast at his possible son marrying his certain daughter. Hence his being bundled off to the eponymous plantation (by dint of a money and some rain showers, this was filmed in Hertfordshire). All concerned give dashing performances (literally and metaphorically), not playing it for laughs but taking it seriously, which is the necessary requirement of effective comedy.

And it is a repository of vanished phrases. When one wife tells another that she does exercises every morning, she is asked, “don't you find that terribly heating?” And one husband, when told to do something, expostulates, “I'm sugared if I'll do so!”

Travers was to have a revival in the Seventies – and, at the age of ninety, a new play, directed in the West End by Lindsay Anderson. If at the moment, sightings of them are rarer, these film versions are a chance to discover a master of mayhem.

“Give my best to Mrs. Cross.” “Yes, I'm going to meet her at the lodge,” replies Vincent Price in Shock (1946), a line which has one chortling – and horrified.

Why should this be? The dialogue appears unexceptionable. It gives nothing away to cite it because, in the opening scenes, we have witnessed Price club her to death with a candlestick in a San Francisco hotel, where he keeps an apartment, before he returns to the grand, out-of-town asylum over which he presides with elegant authority.

While leaving a flunkey to send the trunk, the late Mrs. Cross therein, to the mountainside lodge which is his bolthole from matters medical.

Not only us, but also Anabel Shaw has witnessed the murder across the way from her hotel suite. She had checked in, anxiously, as she had assumed her serviceman husband (a fresh-complexioned Frank Latimore) dead these past two years only to hear that he has survived and that they will meet here. Her anxiety, heightened by his unexplained delay in fog and the candlestick, leads her to a state of collapse, with a wonderful nightmare sequence which lays her out on the sofa.

As fate has it, Price is summoned to help her – and he finds that her subconscious gives voice to sentences which, in the circumstances, only he is in a position to understand. Under guise of concern, he offers to take her to his sanatorium – something for which the delayed Latimore is grateful.

And all our woe.

Long before Nurse Ratched, there was Lynn Bari – and wow! As the mistress whose sultry presence led Price to clobber his wife, she repeatedly quashes any remaining scruples he is about to summon. Hers is such a bravura performance that anybody should seek out whatever else she appeared in. And, by contrast, has there been a rôle to match Anabel Shaw's? Fiercely sweet-faced, she is mostly in a horizontal position as, wincingly for us, she becomes victim of Price's smoothly-administered needles, part of his process to convince everyone that she is delusional.

In the annals of asylum-set films, can anything match the stormy night when another patient (John Edwards) goes on the loose for several crackling minutes which bring his hands to Anabel Shaw's throat? Director Alfred Werkler is not well known (some of us relish his News is Made at Night, which also features Lynn Bari), but he commands a pace, one of such velocity that, here, it brought to Vincent Price to the fore – and the rest we know.

There is much more than this to see in these seventy minutes. Do so for yourselves.

The middle-European tangle of events which yielded the Great War has brought much commentary. What all can agree is that these had roots which went back centuries, and all grew rapidly around 1910. And yet, even with the shooting in Sarajevo in 1914 many did not anticipate the War and all its consequences.

No historian has mentioned the part played in all this by Marilyn Monroe.

As she puts it, “your Balkan revolutions, you have them all the time!” She is addressing the Regent of Carpathia, which did not exist but sounds as though it should. How does she find a place in territory chronicled by A.J.P. Taylor and Christopher Clark? She is the eponymous hoofer in The Prince and The Showgirl (1957) who has stayed in London in 1911, and is among the cast visited backstage by the Regent who is also there for the Coronation of George V.

He is so struck by her that she receives an invitation to meet him at the Embassy in Belgrave Square. Flattered, she also wises up when she realises that there will be only the two of them (cold food means that flunkeys are not needed to serve it). Marilyn is in well-nigh every scene – and blows the Regent off the screen. An achievement all the more remarkable in that the he is none other than Laurence Olivier who also directed but did not dissuade himself from giving one of those hammy performances to which he was prone. The accent! The hair! One fully expects him to give her (oft-wiggling) bum a cackling slap, a routine which Sid James made all his own.

Written by Terence Rattigan from his own play, it would be far less without Marilyn who understood comedy and is well supported by an array of English actors, among them Sybil Thorndike as something of a comic Dowager while the chorus line includes Vera Day and Jean Kent – and, in another outing as a supercillious official, Richard Wattis gets to wear a costume grander than his usual suit and tie. The plot turns around the succession in Carpathia, the King-to-be played by Jeremy Spenser who a few years earlier had given a tremendous performance as a troubled boy in Edge of Divorce.

Born in 1937, Spenser is the only main player in this film who is still here. He vanished from the scene in the late-Sixties. Would that somebody could prevail upon him to recall his work on this and other films. As it is, The Prince and The Showgirl is now perhaps not as often seen as the charming My Week with Marilyn (2011) which sprang from Colin Clark's memoir of working with her and Olivier on this very film.

At almost two hours, The Prince and The Showgirl is perhaps too long but it makes good use of a limited set, from which it sometimes breaks out for a ballroom and the Abbey, and Rattigan's dialogue includes such sharp lines as a showgirl's assertion, “I wouldn't miss the Coronation for the whole Body of Guards!”

Meanwhile, Marilyn makes another apt political point: “that's the thing about General Elections – you never know who is going win.”

Ha'Penny Breeze (1950) is not as well known as Ealing Studios' films, but this depiction of post-war life beside the River Orwell has much in common with them. Directed by Frank Worth, it is from a story which he wrote with Don Sharp, who also stars in it as an Australian who had been in a prisoner-of-war camp and is invited by Edwin Richfield to his home village of Pin Mill.

The film opens with their walking, kit-bags in hand, up a quiet lane. All of which is very pastoral, but reality intrudes with a turn of the corner and their finding the small shipbuilding yard in disrepair. The place is bleak. Richfield's family come in sight to explain what has happened. The mood is sombre, even despairing but, having got this far, Richfield is not one to be daunted. He proposes they continue to build the yacht on which he had worked before the war and use it as a means to bring purchasers for more of them: a new world beckons. Such a notion runs up against objections from the old guard who look askance at such pleasure-seeking notions.

Into all this comes a familiar cast: a vicar, a genial publican a beautiful young woman – and a bounder intent upon scuppering the race for which the yacht is eventually entered (Darcy Conyers, who also produced the film). Put like this, it might sound whimsical but its strength owes much to the cinematography by Gordon Lang and George Stretton. Buildings and landscape (including the river) are made as much characters as those who act out their destiny in the foreground. There is something almost Expressionist about the way in which a single head fills the screen in profile each time events take dramatic turns.

“She's a real live, livin' doll.” No, it's not the Cliff Richard song. Two years earlier, in San Francisco, one of a group of querulous Italian-Americans had praised Tony Curtis's dancing partner (Marisa Pavan) this way in The Midnight Story (1957).

And she certainly is. As for Tony Curtis, think of him in the Fifties and there inevitably come to mind the same year's Sweet Smell of Success - and Some Like It Hot (1959), where he himself tried to be a livin' doll. The Midnight Story is in the shadow of these, and shadows it contains (along with hills if not cliffs). It opens with a priest caught in an alleyway at night, and killed; the rosary is between his fingers when he is discovered.

This is filmed in cinemascope, alas, for this late noir is very much one of confined spaces; happily, it is in black and white to match the nuns' outfits at the orphanage where Curtis grew up and was helped by that priest, who found him a job in the police.

He is shaken by the killing, and, although in the traffic department, suggests he help the homicide team; his offer declined, he turns in his badge and goes underground in pursuit of the man (Gilbert Roland) whom he saw in a strange state at the priest's funeral. Roland combines fishing with selling his catch is a restaurant while sharing a house with his cousin (Marisa Pavan) and her widowed mother (a strong, ever-aproned turn by Argentina Brunetti). In a manner typical of noir plotting, Curtis coins a story sufficient not only to get him a job with Roland but become so much a part of the household that he falls for Marisa Pavan.

Love and detection are uneasy partners. No need to say more about the course of events, Curtis frequently conferring with his erstwhile, otherwise stumped colleagues. Except one has to pause to credit a key, brief turn by a potential witness: Peggy Maley is here the archetypal flowsy blonde married to a man whose night shifts mean that she does not have to shield her roving eye. One could watch her in anything.

Joseph Pevney is not widely known as a film director. He worked mainly in popular television series whose audiences took scant notice of the figure behind the camera, but he should be esteemed for here bringing a noir turn to the domestic drama which was the work of Edwin Blum, who certainly knew what he was about: he had written Stalag-17.

“I'm not scared of bachelors! Married men are the worst.”

Who, at some time in life, has not been in love with Jessie Matthews? Well, perhaps not Graham Greene. Less than gallantly he referred to her “long tubular form... the curious charm of her ungainly adolescent carriage”. This is to ignore that face, those winsome eyes which look directly into others', a mask of innocence – a probing of the soul - worn to traverse the farcical situations in which life lands her. Could any other woman flutter her eyelids in the way she did? One might even say that Liza Minnelli closely studied that gesture.

The Thirties were her time, and early on came There Goes the Bride (1932). Adapted by W. P. Lipscomb from a German story, it is a farce which, as prose, could have attracted Wodehouse to swathe in in his glorious wordplay. As it is, directed by Albert de Courville, the film is diverting. Aghast at the prospect of being married off (to a briefly-glimpsed Basil Radford) as part of a business deal, Jessie Matthews bolts – and climbs aboard a train for Paris.

These opening scenes, with her expressive face, are in effect a silent movie, and she might even bring Louise Brooks to mind. No need to delay over the circumstances which find her after dark in the City of Light – and prevailing upon a man (Owen Nares) to hide her away until it is too late for that cattle-market marriage to go ahead.

That chic apartment has many doors, through which there come and go several of his top-hatted, drunken cronies, a fierce housekeeper – and, of course, his fiancée (Carol Goodner). By now, some fifteen minutes in, there is almost an hour to go, and it does so entertainingly. Scenes are as varied as a grand house, all ballroom and curving staircase, and a wide bath in which Nares recovers while reading a newspaper: this is L' Intransigeant, a real one but singularly misnamed: by now it had shifted from its left-wing, nineteeth-century origins to a distinctly conservative stance. We are left wondering whether this long night, complete with songs and dance, will change his point of view.

Two women share a bath while others loll upon the floor beside it as their gossip and barbed asides echo around the walls of a high-ceilinged French château. The beverage within their grasp, however, is nothing stronger than tea. This is the early-Forties, and they are holed up in a building requisitioned by the Germans to intern Brtitsh women who had not made it out of the country before the Occupation.

There are moments, with the banter between this mixed bunch, when Twenty Thousand Women (1944) could almost be the stuff of a boarding-school romp or that rooming house of Stage Door. A febrile atmosphere, and what a cast for a film written and directed by Frank Lauder and Sidney Gilliatt.

Here are Phyllis Calvert, Patricia Roc, Flora Robson, an especially sultry Jean Kent, a glimpse of Thora Hird (and her own infant daughter). Their voices are crystal clear, they are well outfitted, and – as with the confines of these writers' The Lady Vanishes – comedy blends well into a thriller which turns around some airmen baling out only to find their parachutes have directed them into these grounds by night.

It would be easy to deride the plot but, as it picks up speed but has to resist doing so but relish such things as the most unusual card game ever filmed – and a stage show, which could have been a West End hit and almost brings to mind The Producers.

“I'm going to play it by the book, I'm not even going to trip over a comma.” So private investigator (Mark Stevens) informs a police detective (Reed Hadley) after relocating from San Francisco to a rundown New York office with the sound and sight of the elevated railroad a few yards away. Oh, and between times, he has been in stir, stitched up by former business partner, a suave Kurt Kreuger.

He is, evidently, used to the rough and tumble of his trade. In adding to this, The Dark Corner (1946) plays by the noir book, with many commas along the way. Here are such noir tropes as shadows, staircases, wet streets, venetian blinds, outstretched nylons – and a jazz band (a chance to see Eddie Heywood).

What one might not expect to be part of these captivating chapters is Lucille Ball. First seen at desk with the word private in reverse on her side of the glazed office door, she is the newly-hired secretary to Stevens with scant knowledge of what his work involves.

She is set to learn far more as the elements of the plot cohere and her fast typing is outpaced by her talking: wisecracks are as much in Manhattan's water supply as its gin joints. Stevens's erstwhile partner has not gone away but is entangled with the wife of a Fifth Avenue art dealer so elegantly sinister that Clifton Webb was best placed to play the rôle. He and Lucy do not get to share a scene; that would be too heady a cocktail, especially one with an ingredient which is William Bendix: outsize, he sports a white suit which makes him an even more obvious tail as Stevens goes about the next job: saving his own life.

All this is accomplished with style, even if the film could have lost some of its running time to regain the spirit of its inspiration: a story by Leo Rosten which had appeared in Good Housekeeping. Goodness knows who plays a briefly-glimpsed taxi driver but he taught me more than any of his cohorts have done: the phrase “to take a brodie”, which, I find, means to endure a fall.

If the lovers in Brief Encounter had spawned a child, it would be Background (1953). Philip Friend is an ambitious barrister married to Valerie Hobson; their well-clipped accents are rather different from that of a long-serving housekeeper (Lily Kann). Talk echoes around their smart suburban house where the children are on holiday from boarding school; it takes nasty turns as the marriage founders and another man (Norman Wooland) appears on the scene to enjoy a round of afternoon cinema and teashops and plans for life on a Dorset farm.

All this is given edge by the three children – Jeremy Spenser, Jeanette Scott and Mandy Miller. They dispute amongst themselves, and even brawl in a way that is rather more convincing than many an adult fight in Fifties films. Such is the venom caused by the parents' news that Jeremy Spenser fixes a photograph to a dartboard and pierces it with a well-aimed shot.

This splendid performance is a harbinger of the startling turn in the film's second half. Sufficiently opened up by screenwriter Warren Chetham Strode (perhaps best known for The Guinea Pig) from his own play, here is a film with more to savour than might at first appear.