Film Reviews by CH

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.

If The Long Dark Hall (1951) is by no means a great film, it is very well made. As its jury will do, consider the evidence.

Written by the excellent Nunnally Johnson, it sprang from a novel by Edgar Lustgarten, well known in his time, and co-directed by Anthony Bushell (who also appears as a lawyer).

All are wonderfully supported by cinematographer Wilkie Cooper who, with an effective score by Benjamin Frankel, brings a noir tone to every setting, whether it be a bar, a lodging house or suburban Richmond. Curiously, Manny Farber said that it was a “dillie... shot without electric lights in a dark walnut courtroom”. What a dillie might be in this context is uncertain, but that oppressive courtroom is as well depicted as the rest of the film.

What has led to that scene in which white wigs stand out against dark walnut?

Here are familiar notions. A married man (Rex Harrison) has fallen for a West End showgirl (Patricia Cutts) and so wants to help her that he is more than tetchy at the thought of her “seeing” any other man. And there is his downfall. He lets himself in at her lodging house, to which she has given him a key against the orders of forthright landlady (Brenda de Banzie) who is one in a long line of those who tell the police (including Raymond Huntley), “I keep a respectable house”.

Harrison finds the girlfriend dead – and panics, a moment's mis-judgment which brings all his woe. To relay all this here is not to give anything away, for these few minutes have seen the killing itself, by a brilliantly creepy Anthony Dawson, who will re-appear to taunt Harrison's wife (so well played by Lilli Palmer, calm incarnate) just as he did his first victim, none other than Jill Bennett.

And it all has a tinge of metafiction. Now and then the narrative cuts to a room in which a detective tells a novelist about the case, and teases him to suggest its subsequent turns.

If this makes it sound as though there are several films unreeling beside one another, that is a fair point, M'Lud – but any jury has to bring in a verdict of... quality.

Headlines appear as newspaper pages are turned in Cat and Mouse (1958) - and bring a running commentary.

BISHOP BRAINS BOBBYSOXERS

“Well, I bet he has a bit of fun himself.”

DOPE FIEND SWITCHES SEX

“The things people get up to, Sarge!”

As it turns out, all this makes for a crucial moment but to cite these droll remarks does not give anything away. Here is a film with curious origins. Adapted from one of the many hundreds of novels by John Creasey, it was directed and co-written by none other than Paul Rotha who was, of course, best known for his documentaries praised by Graham Greene with the caveat that they were “seldom free from a certain prettiness and self-consciousness”.

Prettiness is not to the fore in this tough tale, apart from Ann Sears. She arrives at a bedsit house somewhere in London in answer to a summons by a wonderfully creepy Hilton Edwards who had witnessed the crime for which her father was hanged twenty years earlier: the killing of a man during the theft of some diamonds which, Hilton asserts, do survive – and he wants his share.

This is but a prelude, for he takes a tumble – and the noise of their altercation is heard by a man the other side of the door: Lee Patterson. As suave as he is insecure, he hits on her and a plan to collar the sparklers. Far from documentary – apart from its nighttime scenes in the West End -, most of the film is a matter of interiors. Some might question the implausibilities but, then again, one can do so of Hamlet. There is enough happening here – ample mcguffins – to carry one through its seventy-five minutes with a relish aided by a fine musical score, the work of Edwin Astley (he of The Saint and much more), whose daughter was to marry Pete Townshend a decade later.

There is surely much more of John Creasey that could be filmed. He knew how to plot, and others could supply snappy 2022 dialogue.

“They can get courage from a bottle – but we've got lipstick.”

So says one woman to another in one of the many fraught dark moments which comprise the eighty-minute running time of Split Second (1953). That sounds the stuff of film noir dialogue but this was also the decade of hostage drama (so well caught in the Sinatra of Suddenly) and one in which an unfettered Bomb loomed. All these elements are drawn together in a film directed by Dick Powell who had moved from musical comedy to a noir starring rôle – and he is now so effectively behind the camera as events unfurl in a remote spot where a town has been cleared for another mushroom cloud to reach for the sky as dawn breaks.

What is the need for these Bomb testings? The effect had already been shown in practice.

For all that, at the time, Manny Farber said of the film, “an unusually good performance by Stephen McNally”. He has broken out of gaol, a flight which has landed a comrade with a chest wound: that bullet needs retrieval to fend off a festering death.

One way and another, an unlikely crowd – half-a-dozen others - chances to be fenced in. The very spot upon which the Bomb is likely to render all their immediate preoccupations a tawdry concern, these bright open skies a variant upon an old dark house.

And very good it is too.

What's more, McNally's repeated threat that others should not dare to be “cute” - that is smart - prompts one to look up Jonathon Green and find that this usage dates from eighteenth-century low-life.

Here is a masterpiece.

“Boy, before the evening's over, I might poison him.”

“I'll toss you for it!”

Such is the exchange between two Broadway showgirls on the pavement in Twenties Manhattan after they have been introduced to a gag-laden, straw-chewing Danny Kaye who had just arrived from hixville to ply his cornet in a band which plays to audiences in a swanky hotel. He persuades them to head to Harlem and hear a hot player (Louis Armstrong), with which one of them (Barbara Bel Geddes) afterwards falls in love with him during a taxi ride southwards.

All this, some two decades making for the two hours of The Five Pennies (1959), is based upon the life of Red Nichols, who himself supplied the soundtrack for the fingering well mimicked on screen by Kaye. Manny Farber wrote of it at the time, “even a schmaltzy jazz delight like Danny Kaye's hot cornet film The Five Pennies, has a solidity and thoroughness that belongs in an Encyclopedia Britannica discussion of post-Dixieland music”.

As musical bio-pics go, this might not rank as highly as Love Me or Leave Me, Young Man With a Horn and Yankee Doodle Dandy but Kaye's is a bravura performance whose comedy is given heft by his on-the-road, card-playing life being transformed by news that his daughter Dorothy has fallen victim to polio (a growing rôles shared so well by Susan Gordon, who died soon after Nichols's daughter, and Tuesday Weld).

Talking of which, Kaye and Barbara Bel Geddes talk during a dance-hall scene of having “a real corny, old-fashioned family”; with which, she informs him that she is “three months' corny”, which appears to be a one-off term for pregnant.

How well is this film now known? It provides more than enough to make one want to see more of Danny Kaye.

“Simone de Beauvoir is not on trial!” So proclaims the defence lawyer (Charles Vanel) when her name is mentioned during a murder trial, his client Brigitte Bardot in the dock of a crowded courthouse which is partly the setting for La vérité (1960).

The author's name had been mentioned as part of a reflection upon the way in which women are oppressed in society, with catastrophic results. That reference might lead some to recall that Simone de Beauvoir had written a long, philosophical article in 1959 for Esquire about Bardot, soon reprinted as a paperback book.

Bardot, to her own horror, was everywhere as the Fifties became the Sixties, but one might now ask how many watch those films then thought sensational. (John Lennon had a photograph of her on his Liverpool wall and encouraged his future wife to dress like her.) To miss La vérité, though, would be a tremendous shame: it shows how very good she could be. Directed by Henri-George Clouzot (he of half-a-dozen masterpieces such as The Wages of Fear), it was created, from true-life inspiration, by him and several other screenwriters (with sections suggested by Bardot herself). This befits a film which cuts from the court room to the several strands of a narrative which lands Bardot with her hands on the wooden dock as she gives vent and has to be silenced by the Judge.

The magnificent black and white cinematography brings out the shades of grey which make something complex of the gunshots of subsequent events. (One might also think, around that time, of Ruth Ellis in Hampstead and of that great film with Diana Dors, Yield to the Night.) Put simply, Bardot has joined her sister (Marie-José Nat) in a Parisian rooming house where they share a room which one of them has to vacate when matters amatory are in prospect.

Location scenes catch so well this era in Paris: streets with cars as curved as many of those on the pavements; strolls from one night-time café to another (topically, one is called Le Spoutnik); television screens are watched through shop windows; one almost expects a glimpse of Sartre struggling to re-light his pipe - but there isn't. Into the fray comes Sami Frey, a handsome student of conducting. His affections volley between Bardot and her sister; that love triangle has to take second place to the podium of an orchestra whose work includes some forcefully rendered Stravinsky.

Here ensue rows worthy of Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee. The walls of these humble rooms close in, before cutting back to the expanse of the court room where the two lawyers engage in jousting which parallels those rows (Paul Meurisse for the prosecution). All this is as free-flowing as the emergent New Wave, so much so that, afterwards, it is a surprise to find that the film has lasted well over two hours. No scene is superfluous.

Bardot, like Marilyn, could bring tremendous resources to the screen when the likes of Clouzot and Wilder were behind their cameras. A process which, on set, could be as fraught as any of those encounters which make La vérité an enduring reflection upon the way in which passion can dwindle into a power struggle with so many in its wake.

As for John Lennon, it is said that in the late-Sixties he and Bardot briefly met but, one way and another, communication was hopeless: “worse than meeting Elvis.”

“I don't want to hear what you've got to say! You've got a lot of crust!” So declares Jane Randolph to a detective (Hugh Beaumont) as he steps in and tries to turn her when it becomes plain that her beauty salon is the front for the murderous gambling racket which is the mainspring of Railroaded! (1947).

The film's dialogue is as dark as its seventy-minute setting. Jonathon Green's matchless dictionaries of slang reveal that crust, in this sense of nerve, dates from 1900 American colleges. There is much crust to the film's characters as Jane Randolph joins those (including the police) who try to pin murder upon Sheila Ryan's brother, who, when accused of stealing $5000, is asked what he spent it on and replies in exasperation, “the first thousand on bubblegum and the rest on beer.”

Written by John Higgins from a story by Gertrude Walker (both had noir credentials), it was brought to the screen in fine style by director Anthony Mann. Manny Farber referred to Mann's “inhumanity to man, in which cold mortal intentness is the trademark effect... The films of this tin-can de Sade have a Germanic rigor, caterpillar intimacy, and an original dictionary of ways to punish the human body. Mann has done interesting work with scissors, a cigarette lighter, and steam, but his most bizarre effect takes place in a taxidermist's shop. By intricate manipulation of athletes' bodies, Mann tries to ram the eyes of his combatants on the horns of a stuffed deer stuck on the wall”.

None of this takes place in Railroaded! We find here, though, that beauty is certainly no defence against a loaded gun, but all that is capped by a brawl in which two women combatants out-do that celebrated instance of Destry Rides Again. It's small wonder that a smart apartment's sofa does not collapse with the final push.

Terrific stuff, and if it does not find a place among 1001 movies to see before you die, it should certainly be high in the list for that eternal cinema upon a cloud the other side of St. Peter's Gate. Better, though, to sneak it in this side of Paradise.

“Basil Radford.” In any word-association challenge, the name is likely to bring the reply “Naunton Wayne!” They were to reprise that cricket-obsessed pair from The Lady Vanishes quite a few times. There is good reason instead for replying “The Flying Squad!”

Made in 1941, this is just short of an hour in length. Cinematically speaking, it was made as rapidly as the Edgar Wallace novel upon which it is based (he could dictate one in a weekend). As such, it sports the familiar Wallace device of a scam in which the élite conspire with low life (the latter set to take the rap, should things go awry). Boldly, it turns around an import business – an aeroplane by night – which uses face powder as a front for what appears to be cocaine. Even more boldly, the Bond Street ringleader is a suave Jack Hawkins who would become noted for the portrayal of probity itself (except of course for that masterpiece The League of Gentlemen).

Along the way, Hawkins has caused the brother of glamorous Phyllis Brooks to meet a watery end, something which prompts a Scotland Yard Inspector (Sebastian Shaw) to prevail upon her to nail this long-running racket. Her many furs spring up against art-deco settings, but all the while a violin plays, a haunting reminder of the dead.

Hokum, of course, but Basil Radford's appearances – in gaol and without - transform this into something else – and make for one of the best endings to a film (which brings back ever-rebarbative Kathleen Harrison who supplied a good what-for early on). Here is time well spent.

“You can talk until your tongue is dragging on the floor!”

And talk they do, throughout Twelve Angry Men (1957). What can left to be said about this film version of Reginald Rose's play? It continues to hit one straight in the heart and in the forehead, which is what one of the jurors threatens to do to some of the others in that closed room. Even then, it sports a glugging watercooler whose paper conical cups ease their tempers as a humid summer's afternoon tacks towards a storm and an evening's verdict (despite which, many keep their ties in place).

What's more, one of them asks another, topically enough, “don't you ever sweat?”

This is a tale, in resonant black and white, told in retrospect as the diverse Jurors, each known only by their number, listen to architect Henry Fonda who elucidates his doubts about a murder which has happened three months ago in the midnight shadow of an elevated railway. Here is logic contending with prejudice, that social concern which was so often the mark of Sidney Lumet's films.

Mostly sporting ties and with ashtrays to hand upon their shared table, these men often lurch to contradict the others and have to be reminded that “we're talking about somebody's life here” (an ad man doodles and claims it helps him think).

One might wonder how it was filmed, for it does something interesting with time. These ninety-five minutes appear seamless, the stuff of one take, but daylight turns to dusk as the hours go by. A working definition of suspension of disbelief.

Lest it all appear technical, the dialogue includes such lines as the ad man's variant on run it up the flagpole: “let's put it out on the stoup and see if the cat laps it up.” As one of them sneezes, he is told, “your horn works, now try your lights!”

“He don't even speak good English.” “Doesn't speak.”

One could say more, but should not spoil it for those yet to see this masterpiece. Simply ignore Manny Farber's contemporary description which reduces it to Lumet's “bringing a hundred tiny details of schmaltzy and and soft-center 'liberalism' into a clean mosaic”. And Farber also derides it as “the shrill tingle of... couterfeit moviemaking”.

Watch this film and call upon others to bring a verdict upon Farber.

“Altogether elsewhere, vast / Herds of reindeer move across / Miles and miles of golden moss, / Silently and very fast.” The concluding stanza of Auden's 1947 poem “The Fall of Rome” - an allegory about the nature of society – comes to mind when watching The White Reindeer (1952).

It was written by director Eric Blomberg with his wife Mirjami Kuosmanen who also stars in it (and died too young a decade later). She plays a newly-married woman whose husband is so often away that she prevails upon a shaman in their remote, snowy homestead to bring him back. He does so but the catch is that the process brings out this beautiful woman's latent witch: now and again she will turn into the eponymous creature who leaps from the herd which swirls across the landscape. None of the human tribe is safe from her predations.

That is the sum of it, and, put like this, it might sound the stuff of nordic Hammer. This is to reckon without Blomberg's wonderful filming of that land, and, being almost silent, the hypnotic score which evokes the wind and the ever-moving animals of a Lapland briefly visited by the sun. As with the places to which Auden alludes, the film is a meditation upon the fragility of society. What will survive of us is reindeer.

A familiar situation. Disparate people find themselves in a remote spot where danger threatens as the lamps go low and the rain heralds a storm. In the case of The Ghost Train (1941), the Shepherd's Bush studio re-created a Cornwall halt too far from Truro for the passengers to reach it that night.

All this derives from Arnold Ridley's play. Now a century old, it was first filmed in one of the late-Twenties Anglo-German productions (Hitchcock learnt from a stint in Berlin) and then in England by Water Forde in 1931. For many decades that version was thought lost but some of it has resurfaced. Meanwhile, the best-known incarnation is Forde's wartime re-make. This brings ration coupons and blackout curtains to a tale which turns around a couple about to marry, a temperance adherent with a pet parrot (Kathleen Harrison), ever-suave Raymond Huntley, along with Richard Murdoch. Proceedings are dominated by Arthur Askey who is on his way to a seaside season, and does not shy from vexing one and all with his gags, some of which are funny.

High in the credits is the terrific Linden Travers (she of “the buttocks over the billiard table”, as extolled by Graham Greene's 1937 review of Brief Extasy). Her arrival, as here and in The Lady Vanishes, is enough to rival that of any express. If the comedy is too broad for a thriller, it all makes for a diverting time. Most startling is the moment when Kathleen Harrison takes fright and is calmed by some of the whisky which a doctor keeps about his person. Liquor had never touched her lips but now she beams at the effect; to which Arthur Askey says, “wait till it reaches the junction!”

To continue the railway metaphor, how did that line ever get through?

A point rarely made was put well by Manny Farber some eight decades ago: “script writing has been rare that could make the whole equal to its good parts, as were Alice Adams, Wuthering Heights and The Lady Vanishes”.

Some say that the opening section of Hitchcock's 1938 film, which finds a number of people snowbound in a mid-European hotel, is a different film from its famed railway carriage sequence; in fact, it needs this to set in motion the relationship between those involved – just as there is an equally engaging and comic a time at the start of Rear Window before apparent murder takes place. The Lady Vanishes, too, has comic brio throughout which is not simply the cricket-vexed pair Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne but the banter between folksong specialist Michael Redgrave and a woman who is on her way back to marry into grand circles at St. George's, Hanover Square.

The title is a summary of the plot, the railway making the disappearance all the more puzzling while one and all, such as the creepily elegant doctor (Paul Luckas) amd the dining-car attendants assure Margaret Lockwood that she is suffering from delusion, as people were to inform wheelchair-bound James Stewart as he looked across that New York tenement block.

And to think that all this European voyage was filmed at Islington. Hitchcock's use of model sets and miniature engines carries one into a Europe on the brink of war, and, as Farber suggests, much of this is buttressed by the way in which Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder's script has these couples' lives running in parallel (not least the fusty lawyer, Cecil Parker, who is having an affair with the ever-spirited Linden Travers).

Here is high entertainment, as is so much of Hitchcock's English period. If the transatlantic Rear Window and Shadow of a Doubt have a claim to be his best work, The Lady Vanishes is not toiling along a branch line.

“Sally.” So much has this song become associated with Gracie Fields's stage appearances that some might be surprised to find that she first sang it near the beginning of her first film, Sally in our Alley (1931) while working in a tough and steaming café – where she also gives vent to “Lancashire Blues” which has a touch of Bessie Smith about it.

The film is about the aftermath of the Great War. She had agreed to marry a soldier (Ian Hunter) who, after battle (filmed with effective stock footage), fears that he will be in no state to be her husband and asks a comrade to inform her that he has died. A slender plot, especially one to sustain a decade over seventy minutes' screen time but it could have easily been the stuff a Jacobean drama. There is something torrid about the doubts, worries, friendships and rivalries in and around this café and pub.

Not whimsical comedy, this shows Gracie Fields able to broach comedy as well as tragedy – and there is raw power to the scene in which she encourages movie-struck Florence Desmond to demonstrate her acting skills by dashing down treasured ornaments from shelves and the mantlepiece.

Written by Miles Malleson and Alma Reville, this is a strange film which, with some adjustment and transposition to Germany, could have been iremembered widely as an expressionist drama. The print survives in very good condition, and only on reflection does one realise that it has made use of few sets. Small wonder that, as the decade went on, she was to be praised by Graham Greene, with whom she became a neighbour on Capri.

A boxed set to explore with relish.