Film Reviews by CH

For those who have a relish of post-war English cinema, it is no surprise to find that the man behind the bar of a low-life establishment is none other than Sid James. As did Sam Kydd, he popped up in many such a part. More startling, in No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1948) is that he uses an American accent. With an eye on the transatlantic market, the English makers of this version of James Hadley Chase’s once-shocking novel filmed it in Teddington but set it in New York.

All of the cast had to do their best in sounding American (the sole native was Jack La Rue). The film has been ridiculed for this in some quarters but one soon gets used even to the beautiful Linden Travers speaking from the side of her mouth. She is the eponymous heriress who, about to be unsuitably married, finds herself robbed of diamonds at the roadside while that fiancé is killed in the process. She is kidnapped by a gang over which a bulky mother, Ma Grisson, holds sway and, in the process, falls for one of them - the dangerously smooth, sharp-suited La Rue - with whom she appears to have been previously acquainted, or at least receiving flowers from him.

Stylishly filmed, with several musical scenes in a night club more lavish than those which usually figured in such English films, here is something which was a violent sensation in its time and again deserves to step from the shadows - much as this unsavoury crowd are in the habit of doing - and bring a scream or two along the way.

Place was always as much a character in Ealing films as those who people them. Less well known than Passport to Pimlico is It Always Rains on Sunday (1947). It certainly does in an East End whose roofs and cobbles gleam as much as those in any of the noirs with which it was a contemporary.

True to such form, it opens with the front page of a newspaper - and the headline about a prison escape. On the run from Dartmoor is Tommy Swann, played by John McCullum who has got back to the city and into the surviving air-raid shelter in the crowded house in which Googie Withers who, in the absence of that lover, is married to the stolid, even portly darts-playing Edward Chapman with whom she’s had a son and taken on his two rather older daughters who are embroiled in matters amatory of their own (Sydney Tafler is excellent as a smoothly philandering bandleader).

Startlingly, Googie Withers suggests Swann hides in the marital bed for a while. Many are the turns, some rather bold, taken as day turns to night; in moving from scene to scene - whether pub, kitchen (tin-tub bath and all) or railway track - the pace is tremendous; that route is lined with many a small part cast to perfection and often with more than a dash of humour. None other than Jack Warner provides another of what would be many outings as a police inspector on the trail.

Anybody familiar with Robert Hamer’s next film Kind Hearts and Coronets should be sure not to overlook this one which, in its different way, is as accomplished, owing much to the cinematographer who worked on both: Douglas Slocombe.

A train pulls into a seaside railway station. A man strolls to a cliff-edge house by night. Somebody falls from a cliff., and the man finds that his wife has also died. One would have thought that here is the opening of an engrossing thriller which highlights early-Fifties Hastings and Bexhill. Rare, though, is anybody who can follow the plot which gives the film its title. That said, why award it as many as three stars? For all the tangles of what is going on, the filming of the place, with a notable cast, means that scene by scene there is plenty to absorb the interest against a background - amusement arcade, beach - which brings with it other, smaler-scale dramas.

Another dawn becomes another morning when a prospective knock on the door of another boarding house yields another landlady with that trademark steely gaze which heralds a refusal. So it might seem as Women of Twilight (1952) first rises upon the screen a decade before The L-Shaped Room.

There is, on this occasion, another dimension to so familiar a setting. Before there were the Angry Young Men there was an angry young woman: Sylvia Rayman. While eking out life as a waitress, she had worked on an all-women play first staged in small theatres the previous year. Its appearance on the screen overlapped with continuing stagings in the West End and on Broadway - and was something of a contrast with Coronation year.

With a tremendous set of performances, the film is mostly set in a basement - and plumbs depths a world away from those waving flags at the side of the Mall. Some miles away and far from regal, a uniquely sour landlady Freda Jackson is a veritable Borgia. Under the guise of A charitable disposition, she offers unmarried mothers lodgings which are, did the tenants but realise it, her first step in baby-farming their offspring for adoption. Thankful to find at last somewhere to ease her feet and growing womb, Rene Ray has not only a birth to face but a death. Each day she attends the trial for a murder committed by the father-to-be. The film adds the man himself, one of Laurence Harvey’s early appearances - which here finds him singing, at any rate painfully dubbed, on a night club’s small stage. Rather more resonant is their meeting again either side of a prison visiting room’s glass partition.

Rather more dialogue takes place between those well-nigh imprisoned in the boarding house as it to becomes clear to Rene Ray what lies beyond all this. Allegiances are formed as events and births - and untoward deaths - occur while cash changes hands for infants as soon as practicable after their nine-month tenancy of the womb is up.

That such a play was being staged at a time when legend has it that all was drawing-room comedies waiting to swept aside by Osborne and others is evidence that one should not set undue store by the demarcation lines of history. More is always going on, and here is a version of a boarding-house play that one should like to see on the boards.

Some have acclaimed this tale of mistaken twins and time travel to supply Hitler with the Bomb has a comic masterpiece. Trouble is that the plot is so tangled as to defy summary, let alone to follow events as they progress. the result is that it appears more as though an extended Monty Python sketch - with no foot coming down to squelch it ot somebody to enter and proclaim "too silly!"

This said, others might disagree. At least it is avaialable after being elusive for many years.

How many can remember their birth? The question comes to mind with the ripely symbolic opening of Blast of Silence (1961) as a voiceover accompanies a black screen which, little by little, reveals a glow of light: a train is moving through a long tunnel and brings into view New York’s Penn Station.

This makes quite a souvenir of that splendid, soon-to-be-destroyed edifice - an emblem of the death which lurks in the film’s every moment. There disembarks a man as alone as he was on the day he emerged into the world - a figure at odds with the Christmas celebrations, all lights and jostling jollity, throughout a brilliantly filmed city. He, Frank Bono, is played by Allen Baron who also wrote and directed this, his first film, which takes as its starting point the familiar figure of the solitary gunman. He is in town on a mission to take out a gang leader who leads a life of suburban respectability while, on his nefarious proceeds, keeps a lover in a small apartment in one of the city’s brownstones whose common parts are tended by a memorably vocal and grovelling cleaner, Ruth Kaner.

It hardly gives anything away to suggest that, in its seventy-seven minutes’ running time, things will not end well. The very presence of a frequent voice-over which, uniquely uses the second person (“you”), indicates that a moral can be drawn at every turn.

Bono, attentive as he remains to the essentials of his trade, is wearying - and is disconcerted when visiting a more-than-corpulent fixer who lives in one-room squalour with cages of pet rats. This unlikely figure, wonderfully played by Larry Tucker, provides Bono’s link to somebody who can supply the necessary revolver and silencer.

Bono’s pivotal weakness is to succumb when somebody from their shared orphanage resurfaces in a restaurant. Bono accepts that invitation to a party (dig, man, that carpetbound pea race), whose main attraction is an alluring gal who had earlier got away: Molly McCarthy, another of those who, alas, got away when, like Ruth Kaner, they should have appeared in much more.

Rarely has New York - from Fifth Avenue to Harlem, with quite a view from the Staten Island ferry - been so well caught as it is here. This was the work of cinematographer Merrill Brody who was also the film’s producer and brought on board as composer Mayer Kupferman whose jazz score, including a bass and bongo-driven vocal item in the Village Barn club, adds to a relentless narrative.

Released at the end of 1961, it was ambiguously reviewed by Eugene Archer in the New York Times as “a curious little film... simultaneously awkward and pretentious... this do-it-yourself team obviously wanted to be offbeat and ‘arty’ while still conforming to Hollywood’s tested formulas”. A second-on-the-bill item for Universal, it vanished soon after, but enough people, including Martin Scorsese, saw it for this sleeper’s reputation to wake again decades later and find true appreciation of, in Archer’s phrase, its “minimum of technicana”. Apparently, it was made because - a film subject in itself - Baron was instrumental in smuggling back from Cuba the filming equipment used there for Errol Flynn’s last film. Part of the deal, including a close-run thing with one of Cuba’s cuckolded gangsters, was that Baron got to use those cameras for his Blast of Silence. To add to this picaresque history, the New York authorities had not given permission for filming in the city,. Much of it was, perforce, done from the seclusion of a moving van while Baron paced those sidewalks after, at short notice, he gave himself the part which Peter Falk had to decline after being offered one that actually paid.

For all his cavils, Archer (who identified the voiceover as being in “gutteral Brooklynese”) praised the “spontaneous vigor that augurs well for the director’s future”. As it happened, Baron was to make only two more films and instead directed some episodes of many television series. If they are no longer

Spencer Tracy. Katherine Hepburn. George Cukor. Donald Ogden Stewart. As one comes to Keeper of the Flame (1942), such a quartet might make one expect the mixture as to come. This film, as it opens with a car crash, a montage of newspaper headlines and gathering crowds might, though, put one more in the mind of Citizen Kane than those sparring comedies. That effect is compounded by the return from Europe of reporter Tracy who is on a quest for the dead man, Robert Forrest. What’s more, Forrest lived with a now-elusive wife (Hepburn) in a gothic house on the edge of a town which adored him and his good works.

Come Tracy’s bold arrival there, many an interior has the sumptuous deep focus of Kane - and hints grow, as the weather worsens, that the dead man had an ulterior life. This impression is heightened by the distractory efforts by the man’s over-sedulous sidekick (a wonderfully creepy Richard Whorf who sports tight suit, Crippen spectacles and all). Such a sight contrasts with Hepburn’s emergence from the shadows, long hair trailing as much as her gown which would not have looked out of place on Garbo by such candlelight.

To add to the gothic creep there is another building with sinister staff, home of Forrest’s mother, played with all the terrifying allure she bought to Cagney’s Ma at the end of the decade in White Heat.

It does not give much away to say that, before long, it is not so much the Hearst behind Citizen Kane who comes to mind as Charles Lindberg. Here was a time, Pearl Harbor recently attacked, when there were still forces at play not only to keep America out of the European war but were admiring of those dictators.

Naturally, even in a situation removed from those usually favoured by Cukor, he does not use a broad brush. This is no tract but is taken by screenwriter Stewart from the 1942 novel by the fascinating, much-travelled Ida Wylie who, a keen Suffragette, has slipped from the sight she deserves (the eponymous man in her memoir My Life with George - 1940 - is in fact her subconscious). She had a Hollywood presence from its early days, and to find her name associated with Keeper of the Flame must lead one to a tale filmed a decade later as Phone Call from a Stranger with as storied a cast as this one.

Much of what happens in Twentieth Century (1934) takes place aboard the eponymous train between Chicago and New York. Apart from providing a timescale in which pell-mell events take place this does not make it exactly a train movie. Despite a few exterior shots against a fast landscape, and the presence of some other passengers including a fraudster, the carriages are so lavish that it might almost be taking place in a series of rooms.

The time spent aboard the train contrasts with the three years traversed by the opening of a film which has seen John Barrymore lift Carole Lombard from advertising-model obscurity to a sensation upon the Broadway stage - something which has also led to their becoming lovers. Such is his overbearing manner that she has fled both bed and stage for Hollywood success, and he has gone into a decline.

Her chancing to be aboard the train brings him the chance to woo her back. From the play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, it is sometimes called the first screwball. If not as freewheeling as later films, including those also directed by Howard Hawks, it has the requisite madcap quality to carry it across quieter moments - and indeed the raucous ones to which both stars are given.

Dirk Bogarde was among those who divided his films into those made for Rank during the Fifties and those with Losey, Visconti and others in subsequent decades. This was to simplify matters. His earlier work is more varied, and complex, than such a reductionist approach suggests.

Take Cast a Dark Shadow (1955). From a play - Murder Mistaken - by Janet Green a few years earlier, it opens with Bogarde and Mona Washbourne upon a ghost train at the end of Brighton’s Palace Pier with some seafront scenes afterwards. All looks to be the stuff of light comedy until the scene moves inland, to a large house with a gravel path on which their impressive car comes to a halt.

For all the smooth talk, it is clear that he is a wide boy who has married this older women with any eye on inheritance, a process which he, shall we say, accelerates, and escapes prosecution but does not ease her lawyer’s suspicions. Such apparently practised ease soon finds him back in Brighton and making the acquaintance of sharp-talking former barmaid Margaret Lockwood who herself has come into money.

They join nuptial forces, their life together still under the innocent gaze of his housekeeper Kathleen Harrison. All this could spring from the novels of Patrick Hamilton, and Bogarde delivers a terrific performance as an increasingly troubled chancer. No need to say more about the way in which events turn out. Director Lewis Gilbert handles it all with eighty minutes’ aplomb. There are some who automatically reach for the word stagey when a film is based upon a play. Much of this one does take place inside but Jack Asher’s cinematography makes these dark spaces feel as infinite as the mind itself can become.

Badinage, and brusquer, finds its place in this but the real fascination is in the way the ground is crumbling beneath them all. Asher is adept at catching facial expressions as they change from moment to moment - it can almost appear Expressionist as darkness takes over on the final day.

It was far safer on the ghost train.

The four episodes on the first disc are from the mid-Sixties, about a small-time private eye called Marker, and they get better (not many survived). Well worth watching. Avaiable for renting are only this two-disc set and those from 1975, when it was coming to an end.

The third of these epsodes is particularly good, about an apparently missing husband. Small casts, fifty-minutes' running time and mostly interiors. All well done, unpredictable.

The second disc contains only one episode - about an exhibition of paintings in a public library which is linked with a blackmail case. Another ingenious episode. The disc also includes on an-location interview with Marks at the time, and it is a surprise to find that his own voice is very different from the one he brings to the character Marker.

Earlier reviews here, as elsewhere, show that this is a film which divides opinion.

And so, I come to this from a different angle (and it is a film which use a fish-eye lens many times). From scene to scene it is engaging, fascinating, outlandish and all the other adjectives which can be applied to this magic-realist take on late-nineteetn-century scientific experiment run riot. And yet, do these cohere into as satisfying a film as it could be?

For all this, it is opulently staged in its various cities and abroard ship, so much so that one might be distracted from the narrative into applauding the scenery - and wondering whether there has been a spraying from the cgi device behind those involved (and the acting is often remarkable). It turns out that these real sets were created for it. As such, the film deserves to be seen on a large screen.

And one should celebrate its success at a time when the multiplexes have been swamped by endless sequences of the Marvel crowd and their ilk.

Small wonder that a first edition of Gray's novel - published three decades ago - commands a fair sum now.

The geekish among us might know that Classe tous risques and Au bout de souffle appeared in the same year - 1960 - and even that both feature prolific newcomer Jean-Paul Belmondo; extreme geekdom vocalises their having appeared within a month of each other that late winter. The result was that Classe tous risques fell under the long, continuing shadow of its accomplice which was to be influential part of the New Wave.

Directed by Claude Sautet, Classe tous risques is also a tale of life on the run with many an urban scene, all bright sky, and troubled nights - both with voitures as curving as the women invited aboard them. Despite a speedboat and a motorcycle hoving into the lens as bullets splay, its pace becomes different, redolent of an earlier French style.

True, it has begun in Milan with a long-wanted criminal (Lino Ventura) on the run with an accomplice played by Stan Krol (who himself had met the author of the original novel, José Giovanni while in gaol). They make bold - rashly - to return to France where lurks Ventura’s former gangster milieu, some of them behind respectable façades.

So much for a familiar set-up. Also here, however, are Ventura’s two young children and their mother.

To fund this misbegotten journey, another heist is necessary. It can only go wrong, as it does, and have them sought out again. A matter of chases and roadblocks, death looms.

The children are spared, and the odyssey continues as the sirens fall ominously quiet while the film moves into a different, quasi-domestic gear. Ventura’s hopes of a safe passage are thwarted despite the Parisian mobsters’ despatch of Belmondo to help. In parallel with this, a romantic element is provided, not all together plausibly, by giving a lift to a hitchhiking stage aspirant (Sandra Milo).

Here is tremendous stuff. Even if so many wonderful scenes do not cohere, the film keeps one, shall we say, engagé as its Godard’s continues to do.

Too little known, Innocent Sinners depicts a London more than ten years after the war - when its effects are still visible.

Amidst a bomb site, a young girl June Archer is moved to alleviate both that and her fraught home life by creating a flower garden. This is vandalised but one of the gang is moved to help her restore it in the shadow of the ruined building's inevitable demolition. A counterpoint to her home life and the threat of being despatched to a communal , religious one, here is drama of high order excellently played by all - the young and such stalwarts as Flora Robson.

A sultry presence in The Day the Earth Caught Fire, Janet Munro had appeared a little earlier in The Trollenberg Terror. She is a mind-reader able to detect the presence of one-eyed alien spirits who are descending in the clouds upon a Swiss mountain pass visible from the observatory headed by one of the country's seemingly mad professors - none other than a Warren Mitchell whose wire spectacles appear to have crept from within his face.

Put like this, the film sounds preposterous. Of course it is, but this is done with such panache, and a relish of backdrops and model sets, that one soon becomes absorbed in the yarn even if it is not a match for Janet Munro's other tale of the planet under pressure. And if there are regrets at the vanishing of the television series from which it sprang, these are perhaps eased by the thought it is better at eighty minutes than drawn out further.

With the world in ferment, it is an urgent matter to watch this film made four decades ago, around the time of Protest and Survive.

It depicts an England, in particular Sheffield, in which one thing and another has led to a nuclear bomb being dropped.

Events are shown in all its terror as bodies moulder, buildings fall, rats roam and food is so scarce that those in search of it are shot on sight. A situation made none the easier by the local Council's Chief Executive trying to organise the place with such staff as he has been able to cajole into a bunker - not the best place for team-building, for rancour is top of the agenda.

Grainily filmed, rapidly moving from scene to scene, with some focus upon two families, including a woman about the give birth, here is a kaleidescope which goes by quickly while making one marvel ay the managing of a cast which, per force, includes many crowd scenes.

Written by Barry Hines, who is best known for Kes, it is something which draws upon, and stands out from, the tropes of dysptopian fiction, a form which aspires to truth - and one can only hope - nervously enough - that the world does not unravel as it does here.