Film Reviews by CH

The credits take some while to roll at the end of the new version of West Side Story, and one learns that many digital artists had been involved in its creation. This, though, has been not at all akin to dinosaurs who purport to traverse craggy mountains which, for all the technology, so often seems more risible than suspension of disbelief.

First filmed sixty years ago, that version remains in the mind as rather too clean-looking for a gritty tale of gang warfare. Steven Spielberg, with screenwriter Tony Kushner, has brought a darker hue to this tale of young love traversing racial boundaries, creating an almost-Shakespearean power for its ending. While, rest assured, never losing the brio of the music, lyrics and dance which made this a feat of collaboration by Bernstein, Sondheim and Robbins.

The time goes by swiftly (two hours and forty minutes, with the closing credits, which, happily, have orchestral variations upon the score). Nothing is out of step. The undubbed singing is excellent, and a great move was to have a cast unknown to most of us – except, of course, for Rita Moreno, who, at almost ninety, brings a subtly bravura turn to a rôle which, this time around, finds her running a bar where she dispenses beer and advice. It is not for me to reveal the surprise she springs.

Hoodlums and police alike are all brilliant turns, from Tony (Ansel Elgort) to Officer Krupke (Brian d'Arcy James), and a continually wistful Maria (Rachel Zegler): one could highlight everybody, but the the real point is that here is ensemble playing: nobody steals a march on the others.

It is exhilarating – and resonates over here, in a Britain riven by the street warfare that is Remain and Leave.

Meanwhile, do browse Sondheim's first huge volume of lyrics and commentary, Finishing the Hat. Here are lyrics dropped on the road, and a reminder that some of the unused music resurfaced at the beginning an equally engrossing work, the Chichester Psalms.

Directed by Tim Whelan, who was noted for Q Planes, Farewell Again (1937) is a variant upon that familiar form, the portmanteau film. In this case, with a screenplay by Clemence Dane and Ian Hay, there are gathered upon a ship a number of military men who are returning to England after service in India. Naturally, they look forward to shoreside reunions; equally so, there are problems along the way, such as new, intervening romances, severe illness, lax discipline.

All of this, with additional direction by Pen Tennyson, who was to die in the war, moves at a clip, sped by an adroit cast which includes Robert Newton and ever-distinctive Flora Robson. Much of it takes place inside, with the cinematography of James Wong Howe who always brought such artistry to his use of lamps and lenses that place becomes as much a character as any human within it.

It is also notable for its depiction of crowd scenes, all those gathered to greet a ship which in fact will only be in the quay for six hours before, on sudden Foreign Office orders, all have to return to duty somewhere abroad.

Made under the shadow of war, it is suffused with a need to do the right thing but never succumbs to tub-thumping ; here is something of the spirit which Noel Coward brought to his depictions of life at all levels of society.

Popular in its era, the film appears to be little known now but is well worth eighty minutes of one's time.

Ecology concerns apart, is there any more disagreeable a form of travel than by airplane? The thought comes to mind when when watching again Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972). This takes place upon the ground, in the large bedroom of a Bremen flat, one of its walls adorned by a huge, bare-fleshed classical mural. Fassbinder, perhaps inspired by the claustrophobia of an aircraft cabin, wrote this play between one side of the Atlantic and the other, and soon turned it into a film.

This makes Coward's writing Private Lives one weekend in a Far-East hotel appear tardy. Both men were prolific, and some of their work can be easily overlooked. How well is this film known five decades on? The two-hour traffic of its stage can bring to mind the threesome which Coward depicted in Design for Living.

The eponymous rôle is taken by Margit Cartensen. Much given to lolling upon her big brass bed, this fashion designer continually issues instructions to her forever-silent assistant Marlene (Irm Hermann), which makes one speculate about everything which underlies their relationship in these curiously-appointed premises (Fassbinder and his time make such tremendous use of colour and camera angles that it never stales into a filmed play).

Before long, a puzzling situation is complicated. There appears on the scene Hanna Schygulla as Karin, who - as is Petra - proves to be separated from a man. They fall for each other, or so it seems. One of the film's well-nigh invisible act-breaks shows that they have remained together some while, presumably watched all that time by the mute Marlene.

It is another taunting relationship, one which provokes Karin to say that – true or not - her overnight absence was owing to the arrival elsewhere of a well-hung black man. Talk, throughout, is not so much dialogue as the declamations of a power struggle, all of which is inflamed by the arrival of Petra's equally vociferous daughter and mother.

Everybody is wary of one another, trust is elusive as the room appears to darken, while The Walker Brothers and The Platters rise on the soundtrack. One can well imagine that Scott Walker would have relished the angst of all this if he saw it (and perhaps he did so). What remains of us is hate.

To watch this on a cinema screen is to experience that Bremen room as a life-size reflection of the auditorium; oddly enough, at home that effect is lost upon a flatscreen, but the drama is more than sufficient to make one crave to fill one's gaps in viewings of Fassbinder's other work (Hitchcock-fashion, he appears here in a newspaper photograph passed between this otherwise all-female cast).

For those who have not seen it, make time for the dozen hours of his version of Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz.

With such a title as French Dressing, being made in 1963 and set in, er, Gormleigh-on-Sea, one might reasonably assume that this would be a low-grade British farce.

It has, thankfully, elements of that, but these are transformed by its being the first feature film directed by Ken Russell, its script tweeted by Johnny Speight (as that verb used to mean) and sporting an array of character actors.

Here, for one, is James Bolam who works as a deckchair attendant smitten with local reporter Alita Naughton (who should have appeared on screen more often). He hits on the idea of bringing new vim to bathchair-ridden (as it were) Gormleigh by staging a film festival in which place of honour will be given to a Bardot lookalike (Marissa Mell).

All of which meets with the opposition of the Mayor (Bryan Pringle) who continually sports a top hat while his civic dignity crumbles as he duly welcomes the bombshell to his shores (Herne Bay does sterling service throughout, not least its seemingly endless pier), where the rain machine must have added considerably to the budget.

To this Russell brings a relish not only of whimsical Tati but all manner of New Wave tropes, such as speeded-up sections, an array of bicycle rides – and even a score provided by the composer favoured by Truffaut: Georges Delarue. And there is even a touch of Bunuel when, at the eventual festival: in front of the screen outraged, rampaging viewers are sucked into Miss Mill's close-up lips. And at the very moment when, backstage, Hitchcock-fashion, a champagne bottle explodes as she asks the Mayor what is on his mind.

And if this is not surreal enough, the turbulent festival is chronicled by a television reporter: a wonderfully droll cameo by eternal quizmaster Robert Robinson.

This being Ken Russell, there is even nudity - at the opening of a beach, a decade before Brighton did so, Miss Naughton's bottom proves as sporting as those of Mayor's office staff.

A final twist. Ken Russell turned down the offer of Cliff's Summer Holiday to make this – and the credits show that, none the less, one of the Shadows, Brian Bennett, was prevailed upon to add a foot-tappin' instrumental to it.

Here is something which anticipates A Hard Day's Night and Monty Python.

The higher frippery rarely reaches such levels. One to watch again.

How does one judge the success of a film? Mention Hester Street (1975) now and, chances are, it will not bring widespread recognition. In fact, it was made – by Joan Micklin Silver from Abraham Cahan's novella - for a modest cost which was recouped many times over. Many others' work should be so lucky. Filmed in black and white, it almost appears to have been made at the very time it depicts: the 1890s Lower East Side, a haunt of those immigrants from Eastern Europe, many Jewish, who had put pogroms behind them to seek a new life.

This was no simple matter. Steven Keats, as an immigrant a few years earlier, has adapted to American life under a new name, found work in the sewing district, and, as such, sent for his wife (Carol Kane) and young son (Paul Freedman) to join him in a modest boarding house.

He has been for dancing lessons, and, one infers, enjoyed dalliances, all of which is a shock to his wife who is an adherent of Jewish traditions, such as a need for wigs to obscure hair, and, failing that, a hat at all times. Here is a film of fraught interiors (along with some well-realised street scenes), many of which take place upon staircases between these modest apartments (which, in the twenty-first century, command a fortune).

For all that, there is a comedy to these dilemmas, not least in the surreal sequence which depicts in some detail the long-bearded deliberations which comprise a Jewish divorce (after which the husband is free to re-marry immediately while his ex-wife has to wait ninety-two days).

Awards ceremonies are not usually something to be mentioned in film reviews, but Carol Kane was up against Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. No need to remind you who won, and all praise to her – but it could have been shared with Carol Kane, who brought as wonderfully a stoney face to her rôle.

A week is ninety minutes in politics. The thought comes to mind when thinking of Wilfred Fienburgh MP. What course would his life have taken? On the left of the Labour Party, he rose through adversity and world war but died in 1958 when his motor-car hit a lamp-post in London. He left behind a novel, No Love for Johnnie. That posthumous publication was soon followed by a swift-moving film (1960) - and one can reasonably speculate that these inspired all the incarnations of Michael Dobbs's House of Cards.

Not to give away too much (writing and politics share something with the bridge or, better, the chess table). Although, in reality, that was the era of Macmillan's “you've never had it so good”, the film (directed by Ralph Thomas and co-written by Mordecai Richler) finds an alternative reality in which Labour is in charge between that end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP. The focus is upon an MP from the North (Peter Finch, on screen almost all of the time). He has to temper what one might call his New Labour ambitions with his constituents' (or, at any rate, the local Party's) views - which are, shall we say, of a Corbynite persuasion.

Nothing changes, all that much. Even as I write this, there are doubtless voices which hush on the Terrace as somebody goes by who is not part of an intra-Party plot being hatched beside that eternal river.

And, of course, there is always the human factor to undermine the design of politics by numbers. In this case, Finch's marriage has staled, if it ever had brio; he is bruised, vulnerable to passing fancy (played both by the wonderfully-named Mary Peach, still with us, and Billie Whitelaw who, alas, is not). All of which appears to anticipate those events which, a couple of years later, brought down a Conservative government (“well, he would say that, wouldn't he?”).

As for this film itself, it moves at a pace, with a cast which comprises so many of those whom politicians would call “a dream team” - from Mervyn Johns to Mona

Washbourne by way of Dennis Price as an acerbic, low-camp photographer who, wise to model Miss Peach's ad hoc political involvement, tells her to pretend that the saucepan handle in her grasp “is the whole Front Bench”. How did that get past the Censor?

Here is a film whose ensemble playing is something of which politicians themselves can only dream. Although Peter Finch is to the fore with a bravura performance – which makes something charming of the charmless -, this is a film in which everybody, from a stationmaster to a Commons clerk, has a well-deployed line or two. Democracy in action.

Not to mention a party in a basement flat, that disc-driven staple of early-Sixties films. In this case, a few seconds find Oliver Reed contending with a cardboard box over his head. Quite why is not clear. Could he have inspired Lord Buckethead?

Another puzzle is that it was filmed in cinemascope, for the bulk of it – from bed to bar and back again – is a matter of smoke-filled interiors. Still, the eyes adjust to the shehanigans.

High time the novel were re-issued.

And would that there had been seat-belts and air-bags in 1958.

How well is René Clair's mid-Thirties film The Ghost Goes West now known?

In order to make it, Clair himself went northwards, as well as westwards, from France to direct this Anglo-American production. It opens in eighteenth-century Scotland where a feud between two Clans duly reverberates in a (then) present day which finds the descendant (Robert Donat) hard pressed to maintain a castle which survived a family honour lost upon the battlefield all those decades ago.

This might sound a working definition of hokum. Far from it. Of course, it is preposterous, and all the more so when an American millionaire is prevailed upon by his charming daughter to buy the castle (and attendant ghost) in order to pay off the chorus of debts which Donat has entailed upon it.

Little do those Scotsmen realise that their paying off will necessitate the transporting of the castle brick by brick across the Atlantic – and, as for what happens after, it is not the place of this piece to say any more.

Except that the enjoyment to be had from all this was highlighted at the time by Graham Greene (a film reviewer who was not easily pleased).

Did he but know it, Greene's review (with its cogent echoes of Elsinore) anticipated Ealing. “I have never believed more firmly in Clair's genius than I did during this film. The silly story, the gross misuse of Clair's peculiar qualities, were forgotten in my admiration for his camera sense. In no other film this year has there been the same feeling of mobility, of visual freedom. And the actors responded with unforced lightheartedness.”

In our digital age, the flickerings which are the stuff of the ghost's arrival and departure might seem small beer (perhaps one should say whisky, a commodity which finds a natural place in the narrative); and yet these draw one into – yes – what amounts to a transatlantic take upon that endlessly re-weavable plot which is Romeo and Juliet, here given a tartan hue.

It is 1937, and while strolling along the cliffs of the English coast brother and sister Ray Milland (he a composer) Ruth Hussey become enchanted by a large empty house into which their dog has chased a squirrel.

From such a small event (momentous if you are the squirrel) springs a tale which transcends time and space as a ghost brings tidings from two decades earlier.

All of which is a far cry from Milland's bravura spirit when first moving in. He thinks twice about sliding down the curving banister - “I don't want to damage the landing gear.” A new phrase on me. And, indeed, the film suggests a Lesbian relationship between a teacher and the dead woman whose portrait hangs on her wall.

When reviewing the film on its 1944 release, James Agee said that it transformed a mediocre story (the screenplay from an obscure novel was co-written by Dodie Smith, whose way with dogs is of course well known). “Ot seems to me harder to get a fright than a laugh, and I experienced thirty-five first-class jolts, not to mention a well-calculated texture of minor frissons.”

That electrical rate might not be as high eighty years on but – more mystery than Gothic – it has an atmosphere of civilised malevolence, not least the performances by Donald Crisp who forbids his grand-daughter Stella (the tragic Gail Russell) to visit the house, and Cornelis Otis Skinner as that teacher, her facial movements a masterclass in seething contempt.

And if this were not enough, there is Victor Young's theme music for the grand-daughter, which, a few years later, would have Ned Washington's words added to create “Stella by Starlight” - and, simultaneously, staying with the music alone for numerous versions by such jazz artists as Charlie Parker and Miles Davis.

How does one depict writing on the screen. At several points in Francois Ozon's Swimming Pool (2003) a crime novelist (Charlotte Rampling) reaches for her laptop to add to the word count of the latest case for her Inspector. This can hardly be something to engross the viewer; in fact, it provides a space in which to ponder everything that we have seen happen around her.

On the face of it, this is not much. Weary of her series, she has been persuaded by her publisher (Charles Dance) to retreat to his poolside villa in the Luberon and let inspiration flow. As is the way of sunny idylls, there is an incursion.

Crashing through the door one day is Ludivine Sangier, the wild and beautiful daughter of Dance by a dead lover, neither of whom was known to Charlotte Rampling (something which upsets her notion that in life one should have a novelist's omniscience). Ludivine lives for drink and men; there seems to be as many of the later as there are bottles; flesh and glass alike are thrown out when used up.

All this disturbs a writer's peace – and provides a variant upon the Inspector's increasingly routine investigations.

Beautifully made, in and out of the water, the film does not shy from lingering, and takes on a dreamlike quality. As the minutes go by, one wonders what is really happening to all these people. Are they a part of life itself or the imagination? And, for all of us, do these overlap?

See it on one's own with pleasure; and with others, it brings debate that could see off another bottle or more. And express surprise that Charlotte Rampling writes directly upon the screen.

Exactly what makes a film a screwball cannot be precisely defined. Certainly these are rooted in misunderstanding and mayhem, but, then, nobody calls the Marx Brothers' work screwball. At two hours, You Can't Take It With You is longer than most, and it starts slowly. Put simply, there are two households, one presided over by financier Edward Arnold and the other a bunch of madcap inventors indulged by Lionel Barrymore who has long since thrown in capitalism and taken his winnings so that he can enjoy life itself – in a prime piece of real estate upon which Arnold has his eye as a crucial part of a complex deal. As in the board game Monopoly, one can only build hotels when one has all of that colour group of properties.

To all this there is a Romeo and Juliet element, for Barrymore's daughter (the ever-delightful Jean Arthur) works in the Barrymore building and has fallen in love with his son (James Stewart). All this sprang from one of the Broadway successes by Moss Hart and George Kaufman, augmented in some ways for the film by Robert Riskin – and seen through the eyes of director Frank Capra. He has often been deemed sentimental. Among those to do so was Graham Greene, who began his contemporary article about it with “as for the reviewer, he can only raise his hands in a kind of despair” and appears to deem it a variant upon A Christmas Carol. Two paragraphs on, Greene takes an about-turn. “It sounds awful, but it isn't as awful as all that, for Capra has a touch of genius with a camera: his screen always seems twice as big as other people's, and he cuts as brilliantly as Eisenstein (the climax when the big bad magnate takes up his harmonica is so exhilarating in its movement that you forget its absurdity). Humour and not wit is his line, a humour which shades off into whimsicality. We may groan and blush as he cuts his way remorselessly through all finer values to the fallible human heart, but infallibly he makes his appeal – to that great soft organ with its unreliable goodness and easy melancholy and baseless optimism. The cinema, a popular craft, can hardly be expected to do more.”

In many ways, the film is a series of vignettes, such as the night-time walk through a park by James Stewart and Jean Arthur who are treated to an ad hoc musical dance routine by a group of children who leave a mark upon her which becomes evident when Stewart takes her, in the very next scene, to meet his parents in a smart restaurant. If the film turns upon such contrary encounters, it does not stale, one feels for all those involved as much as one is entertained be their continual mishaps, not the least of which is a huge explosion and its concomitant, a crowded police-station cell. Capra was of course a master of the crowd scene in all its forms (already seen, for example, in Lost Horizon, as it would be in It's a Wonderful Life).

Here, eighty years on, is a very good time – and it brings to mind that Punch cartoon in which a solicitor at a desk reads from the will to the assembled company: “he says that he has taken it with him.”

Such was late-Forties Soho when greengrocers favoured as elaborate a sign as that. It is glimpsed towards the end of Dancing with Crime (1947). Set by night throughout, here is opportunity for many a neon-light commentary upon events as they unfurl

in spiv-laden territory. One can never forget the moment, when, chased by bullets, the associate of a Mr. Big collapses in an alley at the end of which, across the road, flashes the title of a musical: SPREAD A LITTLE HAPPINESS.

Directed by John Paddy Carstairs from a Brock Williams screenplay, the story is a broad-brush one but sports many such details. Former soldier Richard Attenborough is now a taxi driver and engaged to Shelia Sim (off screen, they had recently married) who hankers for a stage career but, like so many, has to settle for what she can get in these austerity years. As chance has it, such is the taxi life, he encounters an Army friend who seems to be living well on nothing a year (as that memorable Thackeray chapter title once had it). Of course the Army man is mixed up with the black market whose front, naturally, is a night club with rather a good jazz orchestra

whose work is the background to many “ladies, excuse me” dance.

These ladies know what is good, if potentially dangerous, for them. As one of them remarks, “Men! They all want to take you to Brighton. What's so special about Brighton?” Unlike his subsequent appearance in Brighton Rock, Attenborough is here on the right side of the Law, if maverick in the way that he and Shelia Sim set about enacting revenge upon a Mr. Big given to such lines as “don't get too close – I'm fastidious.” What's more, he tells those he does not trust that they deserve a rest on his farm; needless to say, they meet a sorry end before reaching any such pastoral tranquility.

Here, again, we see how much a film gains by ensemble playing. Nobody is expected to “carry” it. A bartender can be as crucial in a few seconds as anybody else. And space must be found to mention Judy Kelly, who plays a nightclub singer on the slide (the lyrics were written by somebody with the unlikely-but-true surname of Purcell). A shame that she made only one more film after this.

With so much in these eighty minutes, one has to watch it again before long – and keep an eye out for more of those signs.

In a review of the Marx Brothers' glossy production A Day at the Races, Graham Greene looked back in preference at their earlier work: “these revellers of the higher idiocy should not mingle with real people nor play before lavish scenery and an arty camera. Like the Elizabethans, they need only a chair, a painted tree”.

Paradoxically enough, Greene's remark came to mind while watching Allied (2016) which is set in the Europe of World War Two with Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard to the fore – against many an impressive background.

In the opening moments a parachute opens, and Pitt lands upon the desert somewhere in the vicinity of Casablanca, to which he is spirited in an automobile rather cleaner than one would expect amidst those swirling sands. Come the arrival in that fabled city, he – a Canadian agent – is embroiled in drama and romance akin to that for which the place supplied the title of a film eighty years ago.

No more than Bogart's joint was filmed in situ, Pitt did not descend from the clouds in this one. To say that this, and much of Allied, is a digital re-creation can miss the point (whether the scenes be there or Hampstead). One only needs to think of the many scenes in films across the decades in which people drive an automobile while it is clear that the twists and turns of the road are a back-projection. Good acting, and lighting, can carry aloft such a simulacrum: suspension of disbelief.

Directed by Robert Zemeckis (who began his career with Spielberg) from a script by Steven Knight, Allied draws upon many a wartime trope: eternal suspicions of a double-cross amidst a sexual free-for-all (at a party, as an air-raid siren goes off, a door opens beneath the stairs, whence naked breasts tumble forth, swiftly followed by a soldier on leave).

If the story sometimes appears about to clunk, Zemeckis's sense of pace carries it along, scant time to question its international logistics. The two-hour traffic of the screen is swift – and equally absorbing are the DVD's extras which a cinema audience would not have seen. As is often the case with such mini-documentaries, we are told that all concerned are geniuses to whom Leonardo would pay homage if he had anticipated cinema.

What becomes more interesting, in these brisk depictions of collaboration, is the way in which digital techniques can become the contemporary equivalent of the Elizabethan methods to which Greene alluded. A replica Lysander aeroplane was built when it became apparent that the necessity for rain would wreck the one surviving example – and the rest of that airfield's squadron was replicated upon a keyboard. Time and again, Brad Pitt and the others acted their scenes before a sheer-blue background: this would become the place in which Casablanca or Hampstead would be projected before our eyes.

Strange to think that Hollywood actors now find themselves working upon the equivalent of a bare-bones village-hall stage.

The ultimate judge is the retina - upon which Allied leaves a good impression. Even so the brain might question whether those agonies should become entertainment here and now. Perhaps that was the reaction to Casablanca.

How can one of Humphrey Bogart's best performances be in the shadow of others that are more widely known? Such is the fate of the prolific. He appeared in many a routine work for Warner Brothers during the Thirties, but Black Legion (1937) is in a class apart. Bogart, who works in an engineering factory, hankers for promotion so that, in the suburbs, he can treat wife and son to more (even a vacuum cleaner) – and himself to a smart automobile whose salesman, typically, tells him that this is the only one in that colour at the moment.

What Bogart – that voice! - takes for a natural progression falters when the foreman's job is given to a Pole who has made much of studying, on the job and a night school. Sour, Bogart becomes so embittered, the voice heard through booze, that he is a prey, via a weasely chemist, for a hooded Klan-like bunch whose campaigning method is, in effect, Put America First: it signs up adherents beside an open-air fire upon which they will be roasted if they do not fork out for cut-price revolvers.

All this has transatlantic, indeed worldwide resonances now. What one should stress is that its effect not only derives from those night-time scenes (so well caught by director Archie Mayo with the help of Michael Curtiz, himself an immigrant), but the many domestic ones. The kitchen sink is as prominent, with radio broadcasts providing some relief, as do excursions to the movies (the posters seem, at a glimpse, to be parodies of Warner titles). What's more, after one film, another couple go for a drink nearby. This is, in effect, Nick's Bar. The eponymous Nick Strumpas is played by Pat C. Flick, who wields the most extraordinary eyebrows this side of Groucho (he wrote screenplays as well as making such appearances).

Graham Greene reviewed this film, prominently, in the second issue of Night and Day magazine. Unlike me, he could not then have punned upon the Rick's Bar of a few year hence, but Greene knew where “the real horror lies: the real horror is not in the black robes and skull emblems, but in the knowledge that these hide the weak and commonplace faces you have met over the counter and minding the next machine”.

He was then at work upon Brighton Rock. One cannot help but feel that films such as this had an effect upon his Pinkie. He also remarks upon its ending, which remains an equal point of discussion about his novel, in print and on screen.

Jonathon Green's huge three-volume Dictionary of Slang dates the term “spiv” to 1929, with possible origins in the Romany for sparrow, a creature whom they deem to live on others' leavings. One certainly recognises the puffed-chest type, and they are abundant in Ken Hughes's first film, Wide Boy (1952): the title is a synonym, the geezer in question a lodging-house denizen played – jaunty hat, and all – by Sydney Tafler who, to continue the avian theme, hawks dodgy goods from a pavement suitcase while forever being moved on by the Law.

From a story by Rex Rienits, all this runs at just over an hour – and is better packed than any such suitcase. In an instant we learn that Tafler's girlfriend (the glamorous and tragic Susan Shaw) has tastes way beyond the proceeds of what one might call his day-job. A sequence of events in this brilliant encapsulation of post-war London – high and low – leads to a series of night-time encounters in a bombed-out Paddington house.

It does not give away too much to say that this is the classic case of a blackmailer who cannot take his winnings and walk away. After all, having been given a bottle of champagne in a smart joint, Susan Shaw naturally expects many more where that came from.

Tafler's performance captures exactly the bluff of the vulnerable at heart; those who, lacking the graft to fulfil their dreams, snarl when put on the spot. That is his tragedy, so well caught is this terrible descent (as it would also be in Rienits's screenplay Noose for a Lady). Ken Hughes had a fine sense of English noir: light and shade of course, train whistles and all, but also funds kept in a shoe and concealed by a sock in a wardrobe which also houses the whisky reserved for celebrations and commiserations.

Never over-doing it, Hughes puts the dram into dramatic.

To call something a small triumph is unfair. To adapt Gertrude Stein: a triumph is a triumph is a triumph.

This 1957 film's title denotes the V-shaped flight by a flock of birds on their way to another life. It could equally apply to the very filming of this by Mikhail Kalatozov who animates a simple tale by much use of overhead cameras. Here, in the brief political spring after Stalin's death, he was able to fashion something poetic – from Viktor Rozov's play – about Moscow in the war rather than merely trumpeting the glories of the Fatherland.

The young Tatyana Samoylova is to be married to Aleksey Batalova. Theirs is a joyful romance which finds him rushing up a curving staircase to be with her. The camera is forever moving in these ninety minutes. Indeed, the cameras. Events are seen from many angles, sometimes with scenes superimposed upon each other in the reverie of memory.

And memory is the dominating force. All too soon, before any nuptials, the Pact has broken down, Russia and Germany are at war, and he is called away to serve at the Front. Typical of Kalatozov's blending of the crowd and the personal is her rushing to be there to see him off at the railway station. Heartache, on all sides, is palpable.

The way in which events turn out is typical of life for many – around the world – in wartime. Loneliness, anxiety, treachery. To say any more of the plot would reduce it to the nuts and bolts of tank; is is far more smoothly done than that. An air raid or a woodland death with a last glimpse of trees, is caught in an ever-swirling manner, in quest of a still centre amidst tumult: in effect, a drowning scene above ground.

Acclaimed at the time, a prize-winner in Cannes, sixty-four years on the film is as fresh as ever. How well is it known now? Nobody should miss this, as if Chekhov had lived decades longer into a very different world and caught it as exactly as he always did.