Faded Video Labels

Nicholas Nickleby (1947)

2012-02-11T09:38:00.022Z

Last Tuesday marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens, probably the greatest writer to ever reach for a feathered quill and embark upon a novel. In honour of this literary Titan, I thought I'd dig out this old Ealing version of his beloved 1839 bildungsroman, The Life & Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby, directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, his final picture for the studio. Often unfavourably compared with David Lean's faultless Great Expectations, released a year earlier, Cavalcanti's film actually stands up remarkably well. Dickens adaptations proved popular with post-war cinema audiences in the forties because they discussed hardship, want and deprivation, themes all too familiar in an austerity climate and perhaps why the author's bicentennial has struck such a chord with readers and viewers in 2012.

Nicholas Nickleby's title character (played here by Derek Bond) is a young man who has recently completed his education and, along with his mother (Mary Merrall) and sister Kate (Sally Ann Howes), been cast into the hands of his cruel and miserly Uncle Ralph (Cedric Hardwicke) following the death of his father. Ralph Nickleby proceeds to ship young Nicholas off to a teaching post at Dotheboys Hall in Yorkshire, a grim little boarding school for boys where nourishment is scarce but violent corporal punishment dished out liberally by its tyrannical proprietor, Wackford Squeers (Alfred Drayton). Nickleby takes exception to a particuarly vicious beating Squeers inflicts upon one haunted student, Smike (Aubrey Woods), and intervenes, after which master and pupil depart together. Abandoned by his uncle, Nicholas tries various lines of work before meeting flamboyant actor Vincent Crummels (Stanley Holloway) and his itinerant theatre troupe. He and Smike join the company and prove a success but Nicholas is soon called away to aid Kate, whom Ralph is surreptitiously seeking to pimp out to two sleazy business associates. Nicholas must finally confront his odious guardian and prevent him from blackmailing the lovely Miss Bray (Jill Balcon, daughter of studio boss Michael) into marriage in exchange for cancelling her pauper father's debts.

John Dighton's screenplay necessarily makes a number of sacrifices in condensing Dickens' weighty doorstop into a feature length costume drama but it's an admirable effort. A story with a great deal more threads and characters to it than Great Expectations (1861), Cavalacanti's film may not succeed in navigating the novel's more soapy plot developments entirely smoothly and Bond is only so-so in the lead but there are some wonderful character turns to relish. Hardwicke, Holloway, Drayton and Bernard Miles (a veteran of Lean's film, in which he made for a heart-breaking Joe Gargery) are clearly enjoying themselves and there are some fabulous bit-parts for the likes of Vida Hope as Squeers' spoiled daughter, Timothy Bateson and Cecil Ramage as Lord Verisopht and Sir Mulberry Hawk respectively, Cyril Fletcher as the winsomely foppish Mantalini and James Hayter, playing twins 63 years before Armie Hammer as Ned and Charles Cheeryble. All look as though they have stepped straight out of a Phiz illustration and more from any or all of them would have been welcome. Not perfect then but a convincing portrayal of a society riddled with hypocrisies, monsters and injustice and all the more of a pleasure for that. Dickens and Ealing were always going to be made for one another like hot chops and sauce.

The Children's Hour (1961)

2012-02-07T09:40:00.015Z

Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine in a publicity still to promote William Wyler's adaptation of Lillian Hellman's controversial 1934 stage tragedy about two teachers, Karen Wright and Martha Dobie, whose lives are torn apart when a resentful pupil at their New England boarding school begins spreading the untrue rumour that they are lesbians and carrying on an affair. Wyler had already shot the play earlier in his career as These Three (1936) with Merle Oberon and Miriam Hopkins at a time when the Motion Picture Production Code prohibited the text's taboo subject matter, forcing him to alter the central accusation and make it into a more palatable straight love triangle between Karen and Martha and the former's fiancé, Dr Joe Cardin (Joel McCrea). By the early sixties, screenwriter John Michael Hayes still wasn't allowed to use the "L" word or refer to the women's alleged homosexuality explicitly but remained otherwise largely faithful to Hellman's source.

Wyler's second crack at The Children's Hour is very much a filmed play with everything spelled out, nothing left unsaid and a number of scenes drawn out for far too long in order to accommodate some weighty speechifying. It certainly has its faults but MacLaine is utterly compelling, as is Miriam Hopkins (returning after taking on the role of Martha in These Three) as the terminally vain and self-absorbed actress Aunt Lilly whose incautious jibes inspire young Mary Tilford's fatal fib in the first place. Fay Bainter is also pitch-perfect as the girl's strident and hysterical grandmother who leads the witch hunt before coming to realise all too late how horribly wrong she's been. The child actors are also strong, notably Karen Balkin as Mary and Veronica Cartwright as Rosalie Wells, the kleptomaniac blackmailed into endorsing her classmate's falsehood. Hepburn makes for a calm, gentle counterpoint to MacLaine's temperamental Martha and has the right sort of ethereal beauty one can imagine someone becoming infatuated with and imposing their romantic ideals and lonely fantasies upon but her performance ultimately comes across as a tad vague and passive, especially when juxtaposed with her fearless co-star, whom your heart just bleeds for. This remains a resonant and emotional bit of melodrama, whose best moment is arguably when the gaggle of leering male farmhands pull up at the gates of the empty school in a flatbed truck to leer at the women like vultures circling a wounded deer, their presence alone enough to convey great menace, hypocritical disapproval and a looming sexual threat, all without a word said.

Revived last year in London's West End in a production starring Keira Knightley and Elisabeth Moss from Mad Men (2007-), Hellman's work deserves to live on for its sensitivity and very modern concerns - sexual identity, homophobia, the destructive power of gossip, slander and insinuation - which, if anything, are more topical today than they were when she first raised them in the mid-thirties.

Room Service (1938)

2012-02-06T11:21:00.013Z

Oh dear. The decline of the Marx Brothers began here with this sagging, sluggish hotel farce made while out on loan to RKO immediately after the death of MGM's Irving Thalberg, their only outing not based on a concept created by the boys themselves. Adapted instead from a 1937 Broadway play by Allen Boretz and John Murray that Zeppo had seen and liked, Room Service finds Groucho's scheming producer in debt and unable to bankroll his latest venture, spending his days fending off the fastidious hotel manager trying to evict him while desperately courting backers for his project. Veteran gag writer Morrie Ryskind does his best with the script but the lines are hit-and-miss, William A. Seiter's direction is utterly anonymous and the one-set approach feels too confined and claustrophobic (in fairness to Ryskind though, his hands were tied by a studio reluctant to alter a hit play and he did later concede that Room Service, "was a cramped, badly paced miscalculation"). Groucho seems particularly uninspired and was clearly only doing it for the money - any Marx caper in which his character is named "Gordon Miller", rather than Dr Hugo Z. Hackenbush, Wolf J. Flywheel, Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff or Otis P. Driftwood, just can't be good. Future noir character actor Donald MacBride plays the increasingly frustrated hotel boss with gusto ("Jumpin' butterballs!") but Lucille Ball, Ann Miller and, most bizarrely, Chico, are left with very little to do, though the latter does have a nice bit of business with a mounted moose head. Harpo comes off better in a part shoe-horned in especially for him, notably producing a wild turkey from his infinite overcoat and chasing it around the suite with an axe and shotgun in a bid to fend off hunger. His costume for the performance, which features a miner's helmet with a flaming gas lamp affixed to the front, is also at least memorable. Hail and farewell boys.

Le Quai Des Brumes (1938)

2012-02-02T21:20:00.021Z

Another very fine moment in French cinema, this erratic but brilliant existential noir from writer-director team Jacques Prévert and Marcel Carné stars Jean Gabin as another doomed but philosophical outsider, this time a deserter haunted by his experiences with the French colonial army who rears out of the mist to hitch his way to the Port of Le Havre in the hope of finding passage to a new life on one of the departing freighters bound for South America. On the way, a stray drunk and a mongrel puppy guide Jean to a ramshackle tavern on the beach where he encounters a number of strange characters, including suicidal artist Michel Krauss (Robert Le Vigan); the proprietor (Edouard Delmont), a kindly fellow fixated on his misspent youth in Panama; and, most importantly, Nelly (Michèle Morgan), a 17 year old local beauty whose boyfriend Maurice has recently disappeared. When a car-full of gangsters rocks up in pursuit of Zabel (Michel Simon), Nelly's guardian, Jean is initially nonplussed but later slaps around their petulant man-child of a pimp Lucien (Pierre Brasseur) for bullying Nelly, with whom he has fallen in love, a piece of chivalry that will ultimately have fatal consequences. Meanwhile, the artist has finally taken the plunge and ended it all, bequeathing his passport, a suit of clothes and 850 francs to Jean so that he can make his escape to Venezuela under an assumed identity. However, our boy is torn about leaving Nelly behind and has found himself framed by circumstance for the murder of Maurice after the latter's body is dredged up from the harbour alongside the army uniform Jean previously discarded. What's more, Lucien's on his tail gunning for revenge and the real killer's still on the loose.

Based on a novel by Pierre Mac Orlan, Le Quai Des Brumes marked the first of four collaborations between Gabin and Morgan, who apparently became involved on set but never pursued an affair because the former happened to be a married man at the time. However, their chemistry together on screen is as clear and undeniable as it is in the picture above, taken during a lunch break on the film's location shoot in Le Havre. Gabin had slowly become a symbol of working class integrity and a fatalistic icon over the course of the thirties by delivering big performances in such films as Pépé Le Moko by Julien Duvivier and Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion (both 1937) and helped get this classic of "poetic realism" off the ground when producers baulked at its downbeat subject matter. His signature character was surely cemented here through his portrayal of a man coming to terms with the idea that destiny is as inescapable as the creeping fog of this "port of shadows", a notion that would have chimed with contemporary French audiences staring the prospect of war with Germany in the face. Gabin's star would only soar higher the following year when he appeared in another trademark outing, Le Jour Se Lève, also scripted and directed by Prévert and Carné, who would go on to make their masterpiece, Les Enfants Du Paradis, seven years later. As well as the romantic leads, Le Quai De Brumes also boasts Michel Simon, France's premier character actor of the day, as the seemingly harmless gift shop owner and church music enthusiast Zabel, really a beast tragically unable to keep a rein on his true monstrousness. In truth, his psychodramatic sub-plot and the development of the burgeoning relationship between Jean and Nelly in the film's second half end up leaving the criminals and eccentrics from the first a tad sidelined, though this somehow doesn't matter over all. Carné's gloomy mood piece is superbly complimented by Maurice Jaubert's theme, emphatically echoing the raging of the sea, and apparently once prompted a spokesman for the Vichy government to publicly blame the film for lowering the morale of the French populace at a pivotal moment: "If we lost the war, it was because of Le Quai Des Brumes". Remarkable.

Madame De... (1953)

2012-01-31T17:11:00.023Z

Time for a little change of pace, I feel. Here's the regal Danielle Darrieux as the titular belle with Vittorio De Sica (an accomplished actor as well as the celebrated director of Bicycle Thieves, 1948) playing her doomed lover, Baron Donati, in Max Ophüls' sumptuous adaptation of Louise Lévêque de Vilmorin's 1951 period novel. The author remains one of the few people ever to see Madame De... and take exception to it. American critic Andrew Sarris regularly campaigns for it as "the most perfect film ever made" and I certainly can't recall seeing a more exquisite piece of cinema, though perhaps Jean Vigo's L'Atalante (1934) runs it close.

Set in the opulent surroundings of fin de siècle Parisian high society, a world of boundless luxury, the film's carefully constructed plot concerns its aristocratic heroine's decision to sell back a pair of diamond earrings gifted to her as a wedding present by her husband, a stern but loving General (Charles Boyer), in order to pay off some personal debts she'd rather keep private. The trinkets are then quietly resold to the General who passes them on to his mistress, who in turn pawns them in Constantinople to fund a gambling habit. There they are finally acquired by Italian diplomat Donati, who happens by chance to run into Madame de... at customs and falls in love with her without ever quite managing to catch her name. They begin an affair in the embassy ball rooms and restaurants of the French capital, which is initially tolerated but resented by the General, before matters come to a head and the two men take to the duelling field to settle the matter on a point of honour.

Coming in the middle of the German director's great purple patch towards the end of his life, which also produced Letter From An Unknown Woman (1948) with Joan Fontaine, La Ronde (1950), La Plaisir (1951), a Guy de Maupassant adaptation starring Jean Gabin, and Lola Montès (1955), this tale of love, lovelessness and loss is exquisitely played by its leads, Boyer and Darrieux reuniting two decades on from their first pairing in Anatole Litvak's historical drama Mayerling (1936) and giving truly affecting performances. Boyer in particular is magnificent as a man forced to accept a role imposed upon him by his wayward wife that isn't necessarily true or fair. The rich emotional complexity in evidence here is as fine as all the silks, satins, furs and gemstones the General bestows upon his bride and Ophüls allows his actors every freedom, letting the action unfold naturally and trusting in the subtlety of his players as Christian Matras's camera glides, drifts and orbits around them like some lingering scullery maid. Stanley Kubrick famously noted that Ophüls' camera could "pass through walls" but this approach to shooting is no mere novelty and comes always at the service of mood, perhaps most clearly when Darrieux and De Sica are seen waltzing together and the camera's swoops and reels echo the intoxication of their movement, rallying against the stifling proprietaries and expectations of society. François Truffaut suggested in The Films In My Life (1978) that, "Ophüls was less interested in real things than in their reflections; he liked to film life indirectly, by ‘ricochet.’ For example the first treatment of Madame De…, rejected by the producers, planned that the story, which we all know, be seen entirely in mirrors and on the walls and ceiling."

Ophüls' heroine journeys from frivolous materialist to passionate woman to tragic victim with the passage of time and similarly the earrings themselves take on new layers of meaning and significance whenever fate intervenes to pass them on from one owner to the next. John Webster discussed the same phenomenon in The Duchess Of Malfi (1613), over three centuries earlier, when he wrote, "Diamonds are of most value, they say, that have past through most jewellers' hands" and perhaps Madame De... itself is acquiring a greater lustre as the world that created it falls away and disappears.

Limelight (1952)

2012-01-26T18:12:00.015Z

Charlie Chaplin had intended Limelight to be his final film, a closing statement on his own career, mortality and the fickle nature of fame. As it happened, he went on to make two more - A King In New York (1957) and A Countess In Hong Kong (1967), the latter a particular curiosity with Marlon Brando, Sophia Loren and Tippi Hedren among the cast - but Limelight is his real swansong and comes with more than a whiff of the vanity project about it. This nostalgic autobiographical melodrama is really classic Chaplin, in all of its maddening charm, humanity and unapologetic syrup.

Chaplin directs and stars as Calvero, "the tramp clown" (hint, hint), a former star of the London music-halls of the late nineteenth century but a penniless alcoholic by the summer of 1914. Returning to his lodging house inebriated one afternoon, Calvero smells a gas leak and breaks into the ground floor flat of Terry (Claire Bloom), a desperate young girl attempting to commit suicide. Calvero rescues her and nurses her back to health, learning that she was once a ballerina but can no longer dance after failing to recover fully from rheumatic fever. However, a doctor suggests that Terry's condition is really psychosomatic and so Calvero puts her back on her feet and teaches her to walk again. Terry falls in love with her saviour but he rebuffs her, feeling she deserves to be with a younger man, and leaves to busk for a living. Terry returns to the ballet and triumphs while Calvero's comeback gig flounders. Later the pair are reunited and she wins him the part of a harlequin at the Empire Ballet under an alias. Once his true identity becomes known, a benefit performance is swiftly arranged in his honour, one last round of applause for a dying god.

Yes it's heavy-handed and leaves nothing unsaid (ironic for a silent comic) but Limelight is a touching and persuasive bit of business too. And while it may not be as searching a look behind the velvet curtains as, say, Tony Richardson's The Entertainer (1960), there are some deeply felt, true and occasionally bitter observations espoused here about the world and its myriad hardships and cruelties. Chaplin was no stranger to scandal after all and had encountered the best and worst in people over the course of his long and extraordinary career. He would soon receive another dose - on returning from a British tour promoting Limelight, Chaplin was told that he was no longer welcome in America because of his supposed communist sympathies, the country then caught up in the grip of paranoid McCarthyism, an occurrence that sparked his long-term estrangement from the US. He returned to pick up his only competitive Oscar 20 years later when Limelight was re-released, winning for best original score, but the rift was never truly healed.

Aside from its subject matter and standing within the Chaplin canon, Limelight is perhaps best known for featuring the only ever on screen pairing of Charlot with his great silent rival Buster Keaton (above). Rather like Keaton's brief cameo in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), the part was written in as a kindness to the Great Stone Face who had fallen on hard times after a messy divorce but he's superb on stage with Chaplin playing an absent-minded pianist struggling with his sheet music. Chaplin's own performance is as expressive and graceful as ever, Bloom is extremely endearing in her first silver screen appearance and Nigel Bruce (Basil Rathbone's Dr Watson for many years) is amusing as stuffy patron Mr Poston. Many Chaplin children also appear in small parts, most notably Charlie's son Sydney as Neville, Terry's lost love, and the film also serves as a useful guide to the sort of material the star was performing much earlier in his career (he first played a flea circus ringmaster in the unfinished 1919 short, The Professor, for instance). If the whole affair weren't quite so damned earnest and self-pitying I'd say it was a masterpiece.

The Ladykillers (1955)

2012-01-15T10:39:00.028Z

Alexander Mackendrick's pitch-black comedy stands as one of the jewels in Ealing's crown and is just possibly the greatest of all British films. Based on a masterly script by William Rose (an American, of all things), The Ladykillers concerns elderly widow Mrs Wilberforce (Katie Johnson), a sweet old biddy who lives alone in a bomb-damaged house in darkest King's Cross, a ramshackle residence cluttered with doilies, fussy floral wallpaper, parrots and pictures hanging askew. When she takes a new lodger in the person of the outwardly charming but in fact really rather sinister Professor Marcus (Alec Guinness), Mrs Wilberforce finds her quiet existence suddenly turned as lopsided as her home. Claiming to be rehearsing with the other members of his string quintet upstairs, the Professor is actually plotting a bullion heist with a criminal gang, a ragtag bunch of riff-raff comprised of Herbert Lom, Peter Sellers, Cecil Parker and the hulking Danny Green. The job goes off without a hitch (sort of...) but when the redoubtable Mrs Wilberforce learns the truth and insists that the Professor and his mob hand themselves over to the police, there seems to be only one solution to their predicament...

Rather than try and analyse this most glorious of capers, I thought I'd quote Mackendrick on the subject at length from his 2004 book On Film-Making, which offers the best reading of The Ladykillers you could possibly wish for, straight from the horse's mouth:

“The fable of The Ladykillers is a comic and ironic joke about the condition of post-war England. After the war, the country was going through a kind of quiet, typically British but nevertheless historically fundamental revolution. Though few people were prepared to face up to it, the great days of the Empire were gone forever. British society was shattered with the same kind of conflicts appearing in many other countries: an impoverished and disillusioned upper class, a brutalised working class, juvenile delinquency among the mods and rockers, an influx of foreign and potentially criminal elements, and a collapse of ‘intellectual’ leadership. All of these threatened the stability of the national character.

Though at no time did Bill Rose or I ever spell this out, look at the characters in the film. The Major (Parker), a conman, is a caricature of the decadent military ruling class. One Round (Green) is the oafish representative of the British masses. Harry (Sellers) is the spiv, the worthless younger generation. Louis (Lom) is the dangerously unassimilated foreigner. They are a composite cartoon of Britain's corruption. The tiny figure of Mrs Wilberforce (Wilberforce was the name of the 19th century idealist who called for the abolition of slavery) is plainly a much diminished Britannia. Her house is in a cul-de-sac. Shabby and cluttered with memories of the days when Britain's navy ruled the world and captains gallantly stayed on the bridge as their ship went down, her house is structurally unsound. Dwarfed by the grim landscape of railway yards and screaming express trains, it is Edwardian England, an anachronism in the contemporary world.

Bill Rose's sentimental hope for the country that he and I saw through fond but sceptical eyes was that it might still, against all logic, survive its enemies. A theme, a message of sorts, one that I felt very attached to. But one that it took quite some time for me to consciously recognise and appreciate".

An acute and thoughtful allegorical state-of-the-nation address then as well as a cracking comedy. As expertly played as the villains here are, it's the remarkable Katie Johnson, then aged 76, who really deserves the plaudits. Mrs Wilberforce violently attacking her clanking plumbing with a mallet in order to squeeze out enough water to fill the kettle is a definite highlight for her sudden and unexpected physicality but it's her dignified bearing, fine diction and unwavering moral compass that make her such an astonishing force of nature. Watch out also for an early appearance from Carry On star Frankie Howerd as an aggrieved barrow boy and, needless to say, give the Coen Brother's ill-advised 2004 remake short shrift - despite Tom Hank's best efforts in the Guinness part, it's entirely unnecessary and their worst film by some way. Irish comedian Graham Linehan recently scripted a stage version of The Ladykillers for London's West End starring Peter Capaldi that might fare better but, really, how could you not plump for the original?

The Big Steal (1949)

2012-01-13T19:36:00.014Z

After the combustible chemistry they demonstrated in Jacques Tourner's ultimate noir Out Of The Past (1947), audiences were hungry for a second pairing of stars Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer. Their wish was only granted, however, when Mitchum's original co-star on The Big Steal, Lizabeth Scott, dropped out following his arrest for marijuana possession, fearing her image might be tarnished by association. Greer was called in, in spite of objections from a besotted Howard Hughes, when no other actress on the RKO lot would take the part and the result was this light-hearted chase caper through rural Mexico, again based on a script by novelist "Geoffrey Homes" (AKA Daniel Mainwaring), this time adapting Richard Wormser's short story 'The Road To Carmichael's' with Gerald Drayson Adams. Mitchum plays US army lieutenant Duke Halliday, on the run from his superior, Captain Vincent Blake (genre regular William Bendix), after being framed for the theft of $300,000 from the payroll. Pursuing Jim Fiske (Patric Knowles), the real stick-up man, all the way to Mexico, Halliday encounters Fiske's angry girlfriend Joan Graham (Greer), who is also after the slippery spiv over some "borrowed" funds of her own. The duo reluctantly join forces to track him down, with Blake not far behind.

Naturally, The Big Steal isn't the unquestionable classic its predecessor was but Mitchum and the tough, capable Greer spark off each other nicely once again and there's an enjoyably relaxed, comic tone to proceedings. Director Don Siegel, who would of course go on to shoot Dirty Harry (1971), demonstrates a sharp eye for the lively sights and sounds of the Mexican countryside (accentuated in the 1991 colourised version I saw), shading the background with herds of goats, outraged gas station attendants and sentimental road menders. Stereotypes perhaps, but there's also a credible, rounded Mexican character here in the person of Inspector-General Ortega, played by former silent heartthrob Ramón Novarro, sadly better known these days for his brutal murder at the hands of two rent boys in 1968, who choked him to death with an Art Deco dildo, than for his earlier career as a Latin lover and the first screen Ben Hur. Ortega makes for a shrewd presence, never for a second convinced by Mitchum's false identity and touchingly proud of his gradually improving English. The plot may not be especially original (it actually echoes This Gun For Hire, 1942, in several respects) but there's a great deal of fun to be had here, not least because of the smoking leads, a wild car chase making full use of some frantic back projection and a trio of strong supporting performs courtesy of the always reliable Bendix, Novarro and John Qualen, the latter an eccentric "fence".

This Gun For Hire (1942)

2012-01-08T11:29:00.011Z

A little more Veronica Lake from the same year in the first of her popular pairings with Alan Ladd, followed by The Glass Key (1942) and The Blue Dahlia (1946), an Americanisation of Graham Greene's thriller A Gun For Sale (1936) from director Frank Tuttle and writers W.R. Burnett and Albert Maltz.

In his breakthrough performance, Ladd stars as Raven, an embittered hitman forced to turn fugitive when he is paid for a job in marked bills, prompting him to seek revenge on his double-crossing contacts while evading the cops. Raven is described by Greene as, "made by hatred; it had constructed him into this thin smoky murderous figure in the rain, hunted and ugly. His mother had borne him when his father was in gaol, and six years later when his father was hanged for another crime, she cut her own throat with a kitchen knife; afterwards there had been no home. He had never felt the least tenderness for anyone". Greene's protagonist served as the prototype for Pinkie Brown in Brighton Rock (1938) and sports a grotesque hair-lip that warps his features (and by extension his moral outlook), presenting him with a serious professional handicap, especially when he spends much of the story on the run from the authorities with coverage of his sensational escape splashed across the front page of every newspaper. Ladd's only problem, however, is a broken wrist and a history of violence at the hands of an abusive aunt and a reform school. He's as handsome as ever and it's hard to accept his total nihilistic withdrawal from society, sympathising only with alley cats as fellow self-imposed outsiders. Surely someone so good looking can't really have done all that badly by other people? This is just one of several problems with giving Greene's grotty little revenge pulp the sanitising treatment. Instead of the pre-war European political assassination that parallels that of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand for significance in A Gun For Sale, Raven's opening assignment here is simply to take out a minor police informant in San Francisco. Similarly, when Lake's Ellen Graham is trussed up and imprisoned by portly villain Willard Gates (Laird Cregar), she is stowed away in an elegant closest rather than shoved unceremoniously up a boarding house chimney like her literary counterpart Anne. While Anne works as a chorus girl in a provincial Christmas pantomime, Ellen is a chanteuse and magician at a flash night club. The source is also hijacked somewhat for the delivery of a clumsy but timely pro-interventionist message: Gates and his employer Alvin Brewster (Tully Marshall), owner of Nitro Chemical, are preparing to sell poisonous gas to the Japanese, prompting Ellen to scold the previously indifferent Raven: "This war is everybody's business. Yours too." If only serial-Greene adapter Carol Reed (The Fallen Idol, 1948, The Third Man, 1949, and Our Man In Havana, 1959) had gotten his hands on it, we might have had something more remorselessly grim, a British noir along the lines of his own Odd Man Out (1947), the Boulting Brothers' Brighton Rock (1947) or Jules Dassin's Night & The City (1950). Greene himself said he didn't care for Tuttle's film and confessed himself mystified by the "strange intrusion" of a "girl conjurer" into the story but personally I found Lake's musical numbers a definite highlight, not least because of the bizarre dominatrix/angler outfit she sports in 'I've Got You'.

Still, for all those gripes, This Gun For Hire remains a supremely entertaining affair with two spanking hot leads, memorable bad guys (Marshall's ancient and dying Brewster especially) and some fine action set-ups, not least the shoot-out at the train yard and the gas mask scene, which is also in Greene's novella and presents a real gift for screenwriters as it's already a perfectly cinematic plot contrivance, designed to confuse.

I Married A Witch (1942)

2012-01-07T09:48:00.009Z

Here's a sweet supernatural screwball comedy starring an adorable Veronica Lake as Jennifer, a 17th century witch burned at the stake and imprisoned within a tree along with her wicked father Daniel (Cecil Kellaway) by Salem Puritans led by Jonathan Wooley (Frederic March). Before she dies, Jennifer places a curse on Wooley damning all of his male heirs to endure unhappy love lives. Centuries later, a bolt of lightning strikes the tree and frees Jennifer and Daniel into the present day, whereupon she seeks out the modern ancestor of her denouncer, the soon-to-be-married gubernatorial candidate Wallace Wooley (March), and tries to make him fall in love with her in order to torment the family further. However, when Jennifer is inadvertently fed her own love potion by mistake, the situation runs out of control, the pair get hitched and she realises she must protect her husband from his new father-in-law, still unrepentantly evil and out for revenge.

Frenchman René Clair made this fun little outing his second Hollywood picture, after The Flame Of New Orleans (1941) with Marlene Dietrich, but fell out with producer Preston Sturges during shooting over creative differences. Sturges' presence is still evident throughout, however, as many of his stock company appear on the cast list, most prominently Lake and Robert Warwick as the scheming pater of Wally's intended, Estelle (Susan Hayward). The idea that Jennifer uses a spell to manipulate the election result in Wally's favour, a plot point that passes unquestioned, also seems to chime nicely with the great director's sense of humour. Sturges regular Joel McCrea declined to be reunited with his notoriously difficult Sullivan's Travels (1941) co-star, however, arguing that, "Life's too short for two films with Veronica Lake". Though no masterpiece, I Married A Witch seems an obvious inspiration for the later Broadway adaptation Bell, Book & Candle (1958) with Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak and the popular Bewitched television sitcom (1964-72) and makes for a cute vehicle for Lake. It also boasts some spirited straight performances from Oscar winners March and Hayward and is rather similar in tone to Frank Capra's kookily sinister Arsenic & Old Lace (1944), all flying taxi cabs and witchy spirits taking the form of wisps of smoke and getting sozzled by hiding out in rum bottles. Speaking of witch hunts, the film's story was taken from Thorne Smith's unfinished novel The Passionate Witch (completed by Norman H. Matson and published in 1941 after Smith's death), with a script worked on by Dalton Trumbo, who would later become one of the Hollywood Ten when he was blacklisted in 1947 for refusing to name names to Senator McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee.

Whisky Galore! (1949)

2012-01-06T19:24:00.014Z

A sight for sore eyes. Basil Radford's fastidious Home Guard commander Captain Waggett contemplates the few legitimate bottles of Scotch still up for sale on the Outer Hebridean Isle of Todday during the chronic wartime shortage that besets the place in Alexander Mackendrick's debut film, an adaptation of Compton MacKenzie's charming 1947 novel of the same name. While Waggett (a clear influence on Arthur Lowe's Captain Mainwaring in the BBC's immortal sitcom Dad's Army, 1968-77) desperately tries to instil some English discipline into the local crofters and fishermen, depressed and inconsolable about being deprived of their "water of life", the poor blighter loses control entirely when the S.S. Cabinet Minister is wrecked off its coast, haemorrhaging a cargo of 50,000 cases of good whisky from its hull, at which point the locals gang together to steal it and make merry. Waggett is appalled, preferring to return contraband state property to the Crown (he being the sort of pompous buffoon who complains about "obstructive attitudes" while building a road block). A battle of wills follows and a "tight little island" gets tighter still as the government reluctantly moves in and the citizenry are forced to seek out ingenious places to stash their loot.

MacKenzie's book was based on the real-life wrecking of the S.S. Politician off Eriskay in 1941 and his screenplay with Angus MacPhail (an Ealing regular who worked with Alfred Hitchcock on Spellbound, 1945, and The Wrong Man, 1956) does much to streamline the novel, condensing the fictional twin isles of Great and Little Todday into one and cutting out much of its Gaelic language and religious conflict sub-plots. The result is a gently amusing caper in which Radford is a definite comic highlight, with many puns to be had on the name of the distilled drop in question, perhaps the best being an early scene in which an elderly man dies of grief for the want of a drink, whereupon a gathering of friends and well-wishers assemble to "mourn a departed spirit". Joan Greenwood is the only other big name on show from south of the border, with the rest of the cast comprised of Scottish character actors such as Gordon Jackson and the formidably bearded James Robertson Justice (below), with native folk serving as extras and advising on verisimilitude.

Rather like the same year's Passport To Pimlico, Mackendrick's comedy is another Ealing wish-fulfilment fantasy fable about deliverance from the hardship and rationing of the post-war years. It also follows producer Michael Balcon's favourite theme that anyone can become a crook when driven to it by the right circumstances, as demonstrated later in The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) and Mackendrick's own The Ladykillers (1955). Balcon was apparently unhappy with the director's original cut, however, and annoyed at the film's location shoot over-running because of turbulent weather and had it re-edited by the admirable Charles Crichton, who, it must be said, did a sterling job but for the oddly downbeat and moralising ending, which states that the islanders soon ran out of the good stuff once more and returned to their misery. Surely the teetotallers can't win in a film that is otherwise a staunch and unabashed celebration of the joys of a nice wee dram?! Mackendrick would return to the Scottish coast for another Ealing adventure in 1954 with The Maggie while Mackenzie would write a Cold War sequel to his novel in 1957 entitled Rockets Galore! in which a missile base is built on Todday to the chagrin of the locals, which itself was filmed to less acclaim by Michael Relph shortly after.

Monkey Business (1931)

2012-01-02T09:46:00.012Z

Here's a splendid Marx Brothers outing for Paramount, their third feature and the first from an original script not derived from one of their stage shows. From the moment these stowaways emerge from barrels of kippered herring aboard an ocean liner harmonising 'Sweet Adeline', Monkey Business proves to be one of their funniest and most nonsensical films. Having been chased around the ship by a furious captain and crew (as they would be again in A Night At The Opera, 1935), hiding out in gangster's closets and Punch and Judy shows, the Brothers find themselves on either side of a gang war - Groucho and Zeppo acting as "muscle" for tough guy Alky Briggs (Harry Woods) and Harpo and Chico for "Big Joe" Helton (Rockcliffe Fellowes), a situation complicated by Groucho's romantic overtures to Briggs' frustrated moll (former schoolteacher and Miss Massachusetts Thelma Todd) and Zeppo's love for Helton's debutante daughter (Ruth Hall). The idea of a "reformed" bootlegger trying to go legit and make a show of entering high society makes for a surprisingly topical plot angle for a Marx vehicle (which could be said to serve as a parody of the Warner Brothers gangster thrillers of the period) but, as always, the primary concern here is with pricking pomposity and all-encompassing, consequence-free anarchy, of which there's no finer example than the four siblings playing merry hell at passport control by throwing papers around and imitating French crooner and studio stable-mate Maurice Chevalier. "If a nightingale could sing like you..."

Groucho was very much at odds with writer S.J. Perelman during the making of Monkey Business, stemming from a disastrous early script reading at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles in which Perelman was asked to do a read-through in front of 27 people and five dogs, none of whom laughed once. However, despite the writer's unhappiness, there are plenty of great lines in tact in spite of the meddling of the Hays Office, not least this excellent Groucho plea to Todd: "Oh, why can't we break away from all this, just you and I, and lodge with my fleas in the hills? I mean, flee to my lodge in the hills." The Brothers also found a more sympathetic director than Victor Heerman from Animal Crackers (1930) in the person of Norman Z. McLeod, a University of Washington light-heavyweight boxing champion and World War One fighter pilot, who put up with and even encouraged their on-set clowning, which frequently included one brother dressing up as another to confuse proceedings. McLeod and Todd would both return for the equally successful Horse Feathers the following year, as would no nonsense producer Herman Mankiewicz (before finding immortality as Orson Welles's co-writer on Citizen Kane, 1941), whom Perelman described as having, "a stormy Teutonic character and [an] immoderate zest for the grape and gambling... if he had any lovable qualities, he did his best to conceal them". However, Mankiewicz knew comedy and hotly resisted efforts to expand the Marx formula: "If Groucho and Chico stand against a wall for an hour and crack funny jokes, that's enough of a plot for me". When asked by Perelman and fellow gag writer Arthur Sheekman about the psychology of the Marx characters, Mankiewicz replied: "One of them is a guinea, another a mute who picks up spit, and the third an old Hebe with a cigar. Is that all clear, Beaumont and Fletcher? Fine. Now get back to your hutch and at teatime I'll send over a lettuce leaf for the two of you to chew on. Beat it!" By all accounts, a brilliant but fearsome individual.

Maurice Chevalier - You Brought A New Kind Of Love To Me

The Fall Of The House Of Usher (1960)

2012-01-01T14:05:00.016Z

"Is there no end to your horrors?!"

-Philip Winthrop To Roderick Usher

Happy new year folks! I thought I'd start 2012 as I mean to go on with a lurid but literary Technicolor Gothic horror from Roger Corman, the first of his eight-film Edgar Allan Poe cycle for American International Pictures. The wholesome but faintly gormless Mike Damon stars as Boston gent Philip Winthrop, who ventures out on horseback in search of his betrothed, Madeline Usher (Myrna Fahey), only to find her bed-ridden and apparently imprisoned within the grounds of her family’s crumbling New England ancestral seat by her brother Roderick (Vincent Price), a tormented aristocrat suffering from a "morbid acuteness of the senses", an affliction that renders the slightest sensation too much for him to bear. Usher, a morose, obsessive individual as fragile as "fine glass" but highly controlling, is hostile to the intruder and explains his belief that he and Madeline are descended from a cursed bloodline, the last of a cruel dynasty of decadent tyrants, rogues, harlots, drug addicts, murderers and smugglers. Determined that the Usher name should die with the current heirs, Roderick strongly opposes Philip's plans to depart with Madeline and a violent argument erupts, during which the waif appears to pass away from a heart attack. After she is buried in the family vault with unseemly haste, Winthrop grieves for his beloved and prepares to take his leave but not before learning by chance that Madeline frequently suffered from cataleptic fits and thus might not really be dead after all...

Corman's Usher proved to be a winning formula and a follow-up, The Pit & The Pendulum, also starring Price and scripted by Richard Matheson, would hurriedly follow its blueprint to the letter a year later. Here, as there, Corman assembled a workmanlike production and a distinctly average supporting cast around his theatrically trained star but it matters not as an ice cream-haired Price carries the film with ease. Just the right side of hammy, the former noir character player and stage thesp makes for a marvellous Roderick Usher, perhaps the greatest of Poe's sickly, morbidly preoccupied protagonists and arguably the actor's best role. The man is simply unforgettable plaintively plucking his lute and daubing grotesque portraits of his deceased relatives as the house tremors and shudders all around him, both he and it buckling under the weight of their own sadness and moral decay. For once, Corman's thrifty sets - all rotten bannisters and excessively dusty fixtures - are entirely justified in their flimsiness, the house of Usher being an unhappy place built on a fog-blasted swamp where nothing can grow, the sort of desolate locale that can only be set free from the nightmarish secrets it holds by the cleansing fire that finally razes it to the ground. Brrr...

The Man In The White Suit (1951)

2011-12-30T14:53:00.012Z

Alec Guinness always said that this inspired manufacturing industry satire from director Alexander Mackendrick was his personal favourite among the Ealing pictures in which he appeared. Reunited with Joan Greenwood (and, briefly, Miles Malleson) from their triumph in Robert Hamer’s Kind Hearts & Coronets (1949), Guinness is endearingly childlike here as mad scientist Sidney Stratton, a niave but brilliant chemist who secretly develops a luminous, indestructible fabric while working as a lab technician at a Lancashire textile mill. When the factory's boss Mr Birnley (Cecil Parker) learns of Stratton's combustible but potentially lucrative invention, he is keen to press on with its mass production, only for his rivals to round on him and point out that such a move would destroy their entire business as consumers would never require more than one suit of clothes in a lifetime. When the plant's trade union members learn of Stratton's miracle material, they too rise up and the poor fellow is unceremoniously imprisoned and then chased through the streets as both capital and labour unite to try and suppress his creation.

Perhaps not the funniest of Ealing's capers but arguably the studio's weightiest and most thought-provoking script (from an unproduced play by Mackendrick's cousin, Roger MacDougall), The Man In The White Suit serves as an allegory for the restriction of scientific progress under a conservative hierarchy. However, Stratton's resilient and dirt-resistant cloth (barring instabilities in its structure) would certainly have put millions out of work had it been embraced - a detail that makes it as destructive a prospect as the A-bomb and which makes the film more relevant today than ever as we find ourselves shufflingly unthinkingly into a digital economy founded on self-service supermarket checkouts, eReaders and mass unemployment. "Why can't you scientists leave things alone? What about my bit of washing, when there's no washing to do?" What indeed.

Greenwood is as sexy as ever as the plucky daughter of Parker's compromised local industrialist, Ernest Thesiger is hilarious as a sickly, ghoulish tycoon (very much a proto-Mr Burns) and there's an early part for Michael Gough (best known to modern audiences for his recurring role as Alfred Pennyworth in the pre-Christopher Nolan Batman films, 1989-1997). Guinness and Parker, meanwhile, would team up with Mackendrick one final time for The Ladykillers (1955) before the Scot packed his bags for America and the mighty Sweet Smell Of Success (1957).

Passport To Pimlico (1949)

2011-12-27T22:11:00.018Z

"We always were English and we always will be English and it's just because we are English that we're sticking up for our right to be Burgundian!"

I just received a nice new Ealing box set for Christmas courtesy of my dear old Dad and the first one we plumped for was this smart satire from prolific studio writer T.E.B. Clarke and first time director Henry Cornelius about the discovery of a treasure trove of jewels and gold coins belonging to the last Duke of Burgundy near the site of an unexploded bomb in darkest Pimlico, London. Amongst this stash is a royal charter from Edward IV of England bequeathing the area to the fleeing ruler after he was presumed dead following the Battle of Nancy in 1477. The authentication of this parchment by Margaret Rutherford’s dotty academic Professor Hatton-Jones leads the locals to declare the Miramont Place estate a free territory independent of the United Kingdom, whereupon the locals run riot with glee (“Blimey! I’m a foreigner!”) and the moustaches of Whitehall begin to twitch and bristle with vexation.

A fine example of producer Michael Balcon’s “mild revolution”, Passport To Pimlico stands as a comic fantasy of liberation from the necessary restrictions imposed on Brits living in tenement rubble and brick dust by the post-war austerity Labour government of the day. There’s a palpable sense of fear detectable here about a return to the horrors of evacuations, conflict and the siege mentality of the war years, still so fresh in the memory, but also a nostalgic yearning for a revival of the famous “Dunkirk spirit” the British people pulled together to demonstrate under those same dark skies. In 1949 the ration book was still king and many were beginning to feel exasperated by the ongoing scarcity and want and dreamed of deliverance from the deprivation they encountered every day, a mood Passport To Pimlico captures perfectly and is typified by the scene in which Stanley Holloway’s Arthur Pemberton proposes a new children’s playground be built nearby and is met with a frosty response from the chair of the local council: “This borough is in no position to finance daydreams”. Clarke’s script is always quick to set idealism crashing against the rocks of practical reality and the story actually unfolds as a logical examination of the likely problems a new microstate such as Burgundy might encounter – the immediate appearance of black marketeers (the rogue fishmonger purporting to be selling “Danish” eels at extortionate rates), the festivals of bureaucracy taking place at its borders and diplomatic wrangling in its corridors of power, a dependence on its neighbours for water and food supplies and the potential collapse of law and order (British manners and respect for rank are abruptly cast aside in the pub in favour of drinking and dancing). The result is an extremely satisfying enterainment and no doubt provided a welcome escape for contemporary audiences.

Clarke’s tale of the south London Burgundians was inspired by a news story he encountered during wartime concerning the pregnant Princess Juliana of the Netherlands, who went into labour with the country’s heir while living in exile in Canada, a turn of events that would have rendered the boy ineligible for the throne because he wasn't born on home soil. To remedy the situation, the maternity wing of the Canadian hospital in question was temporarily handed over to the Netherlands and Dutch law was appeased. Ingenious! Of the many highlights among a cast including Raymond Huntely, Hermione Baddeley, Sydney Tafler, Michael Horndern and a young Charles Hawtrey, it's great to see the return of Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, Charters and Caldicott themselves, as representatives of the British government. The film also includes arguably the best pathetic fallacy joke of all time – the whole picture takes place during an unseasonal heat wave, which only ends when Burgundy is welcomed back into the UK, whereupon it immediately begins to rain.

Scrooge (1951)

2011-12-23T21:11:00.013Z

A very merry Christmas to all of my readers - both of you, that is - and here's an early gift, my favourite of the seemingly infinite number of screen adaptations of Charles Dickens' most beloved tale. Composer Bernard Herrmann once observed, "Audiences are like children; they don't mind hearing the same story over and over again. It's how you tell it", and the endless reworkings of A Christmas Carol (1843) appear to bear this notion out perfectly. Brian Desmond Hurst's spin on the old yarn really is a gem though - authentically spooky thanks to C.M. Pennington's Richard's gloomy cinematography and extremely faithful in tone to its source ("There's more of gravy than of grave about you"), filled with the bitter experience of its author but tempered with a sympathetic pro-welfare state message. As much as I like the Muppets, this is most certainly the version for me.

Alastair Sim makes for a marvellous Ebeneezer Scrooge - fearsome and cynical early on and exuberantly joyful at the close - and there's fine support from Mervyn Johns as a charming Bob Cratchit, Michael Hordern as the ghostly Jacob Marley, Kathleen Harrison as Scrooge's cockney charwoman and Jack Warner as roguish embezzler Mr Jorkin. Look out too for George Cole as young Ebeneezer, Ernest Thesiger as an undertaker, Miles Malleson as the wry pedlar Old Joe, Hattie Jacques as Mrs Fezziwig and Patrick Macnee as young Marley.

As essential a Yuletide movie as It's A Wonderful Life (1946), Miracle On 34th Street (1947), A Christmas Story (1983) or Bad Santa (2003), go for this baby every time (though perhaps not the sickly colourised print from 1989) and, whatever else you do, remember to steer well clear of the Patrick Stewart and Kelsey Grammer TV movie travesties. Those really are frightening.

Christmas In July (1940)

2011-12-14T19:45:00.008Z

A little more Dick Powell for you in Preston Sturges' underrated follow-up to the same year's The Great McGinty, based on a never-produced play the writer-director had drafted in 1931, A Cup Of Coffee. It may not actually have anything to do with Christmas but, hey, so sue me.

A real product of the Great Depression - think My Man Godfrey (1936) - Sturges' satire on consumer-capitalism concerns Jimmy MacDonald (Powell), a poor but earnest young clerk at New York's Baxter Coffee Company who enters a contest to compose the new slogan for rival firm Maxford House Coffee ("If you can't sleep, it isn't the coffee. It's the bunk"). Taking advantage of a delay in the announcement of the winner (William Demarest's Mr Bildocker causes it by anticipating 12 Angry Men (1957) and refusing to side with the majority vote, driving his fellow executives, including Robert Warwick and Jimmy Conlin, to distraction with his stubbornness), three of Jimmy's colleagues decide to play a prank on him by writing a phoney telegram in which he is declared the lucky recipient of the $25,000 first prize. When Jimmy's boss (Ernest Truex) gets wind of this triumph, he decides to hand the lad a promotion to the advertising department, where Jimmy immediately impresses. Having picked up his cheque from an unquestioning Dr Maxford (Raymond Walburn), Jimmy and his loving girlfriend (Ellen Drew) proceed to hit the stores to buy a wedding ring, a high-tech davenport for his mother and gifts for everyone on the block. However, when the truth is discovered, all hell breaks loose and a fish fight erupts between Jimmy's neighbours and the department store creditors trying to retrieve their goods, leaving the naive victim disillusioned and debt-ridden. Until...

There's some real pathos on show here in the desperate dreams of Sturges' protagonist of hitting the jackpot and selflessly delivering those around him from the poverty and desperation that has blighted their lives. Powell and Drew make for an adorable couple and her impassioned speech to save his job is a truly touching moment, as is the scene in which the trio of contrite jokers bring the MacDonalds a replacement couch for their pains. This is a fable as timeless as they come and as relevant now as when it was penned but, as a spoof of modern business culture, the hollow pursuit of material wealth and the illusory nature of success, Christmas In July is perhaps not as biting as it might have been. Still, Mr Baxter's rationale for thinking less of Jimmy when he learns he hasn't really won the competition has an enjoyably crooked logic - without the quantifiable endorsement of others, his ideas have no capital and are thus to all intents and purposes worthless, no matter how fine they may have seemed at first ("I didn't hang on to my father's money by backing my own judgement, you know"). There are also some splendid character turns to enjoy here, from the likes of Truex, an animated Walburn, Franklin Pangborn as a frazzled radio personality and Alan Bridge as an eccentric jewelry salesman. Not Strurges' finest but rather lovely all the same.

Man On The Flying Trapeze (1935)

2011-12-12T21:02:00.020Z

Kathleen Howard struggles to conceal her disgust at husband Ambrose Wolfinger (W.C. Fields) talking with his mouth full in this inspired Paramount comedy from dear old "Charles Bogle's" best period. Like Harold Bissonette in the previous year's It's A Gift (who was also married to a Howard moaner), Wolfinger is another of Fields' stoical family men, a breadwinner who has been forced to survive on cold toast for eight years because of the greed and selfishness of the ungrateful in-laws he's been doing his best to support. The last laugh is most assuredly his, of course.

I've written fairly extensively about The Great Man before so there's no need to dwell on his back story too much here. Instead, let's just stand back and admire the brilliance of one of his very finest films. Man On The Flying Trapeze benefits from the simplicity of its premise, that Fields' unassuming office file clerk and "memory expert" wants to take his first afternoon off work in 25 years to see a wrestling match, a championship bout between Tosoff, the Russian Behemoth (played by Swedish beast Tor Johnson, later a star of Ed Wood's infamous Z-movies) and Hookallockah Meshobbab, the Persian Giant. Ambrose's boss Mr Malloy (Oscar Apfel, returning from 1934's The Old Fashioned Way) isn't too keen on the idea so Wolfinger is forced to volunteer the lie that his hated, shrewish mother-in-law Cordelia (Vera Lewis) has recently passed away from alcohol poisoning. However, with his ticket for the match swiped by work shy brother-in-law Claude Neselrode (Grady Sutton, Ogg Oggilby from The Bank Dick, 1940) and the premature memorial wreaths stacking up at home, the poor devil's going to have to come up with something pretty special to win the day and appease his bossy wife Leona (Howard), the sort of woman who delights in reading aloud "Gertrude Smodden" editorials from the newspaper.

The highlights here are many. Arguably the stand-out is the opening sally in which Fields takes a nip in the bathroom while he's supposed to be brushing his teeth, performs a laborious blowing-and-rolling ritual with his socks (twice) before taking up arms and venturing down to the basement to apprehend two burglars supping on his homebrewed applejack and instead joining them in a sentimental croon, along with the equally sozzled cop they are handcuffed to. Fields caterwauling along with these two hoodlums (played by future cowboy character actor Walter Brennan and Fields regular Tammany Young) to 'On The Banks Of The Wabash' is a real moment of brotherly fellowship and just too funny for words. His manic chase downhill and onto the railroad tracks in pursuit of an escaped spare tire is also splendid as is Wolfinger's surprisingly violent final confrontation with Claude and Cordelia - knocking the former out cold and chasing the latter away with a wild swing that only narrowly misses. However, as always, our man has plenty to say about the human condition as well, depicting a cruel world populated by ghastly relatives, sycophantic superiors (Lucien Littlefield's fastidious Mr Peabody is especially memorable) and patronising traffic cops. It's genuinely affecting to see Ambrose cross the threshold to his own home sporting a black eye and a nosegay of wilting flowers ("Things happened...") and the only source of solace and relief in this man's dreary and unhappy existence is a quiet drink and the love of his doughty daughter (Mary Brian) from an earlier marriage - tellingly christened Hope. It is she who clears his name and wins him back his job with a stellar raise and she who most deserves her place in the front of his new car as the credits role while Claude and Cordelia cower in the rumble seat, drenched by a sudden rain storm to the driver's beaming satisfaction.

Aspects of Man On The Flying Trapeze are thought to be autobiographical - Fields' own estranged son was named Claude, he himself really did have a photographic memory (he read precociously and was able to recall lengthy passages from hefty tomes in detail) while his on-screen secretary is played by Carlotta Monti, the comedian's long-term mistress. These are mere details and dalliances, however. Our man deals in universal truths. "It's hard to lose your mother-in-law. Almost impossible..."

Murder, My Sweet (1944)

2011-12-11T15:49:00.016Z

Dick Powell as Raymond Chandler's celebrated private eye Philip Marlowe, temporarily blinded by gun smoke and under suspicion from the cops, in Edward Dmytryk's excellent adaptation of the author's 1940 novel Farewell, My Lovely. The former Warner Brothers musical star tends to divide opinion in the role but, personally, I love his light comic touch and whimsical, perpetually amused take, perfect for smirking through Chandler's witty dialogue. A scene in which Marlowe strikes a match off the cold marble buttocks of a statue of Cupid to light his cigarette before grinning wryly up into its eyes in anticipation of annoyance sums the character up beautifully. Powell may handle Marlowe pretty differently to Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep (1946) - he's no hard man but then Marlowe's no Mike Hammer - though he did get there first and there's surely plenty of room for both interpretations. Some of Powell's lines are unbeatable, however: "'OK Marlowe,' I said to myself. 'You're a tough guy. You've been sapped twice, choked, beaten silly with a gun, shot in the arm until you're crazy as a couple of waltzing mice. Now let's see you do something really tough - like putting your pants on.'"

Dmytryk's leading man is by no means let down by his supporting players in this superlative tale of missing dames, extortion, phoney stick-ups, trophy wives and jade MacGuffins. Mike Mazurki (above) is unforgettable as hulking simpleton Moose Malloy in his best known role, a character described by Chandler as, "a big man not more than six feet five inches tall and not wider than a beer truck.. He wore a shaggy borsalino hat, a rough grey sports coat with white golf balls on it for buttons, a brown shirt, a yellow tie, pleated grey flannel slacks and alligator shoes with white explosions on the toes... Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula in a slice of angel food." Brilliant stuff and Mazurki gives life to this creature so magnificently that his Malloy ends up as immortal a screen monster as King Kong or Boris Karloff's in Frankenstein (1931), two more big brutes in search of love. Anne Shirley is also sweet as the distrustful Ann Grayle while Claire Trevor makes for a fine femme fatale, seductive, street smart and entirely believable with a pistol in her hands during the climactic beach house scene. It's easy to imagine her clipped delivery and sharp manner providing the inspiration for Julianne Moore's avant-garde artist Maude in The Big Lebowski (1998), just as Ben Gazzara's Jackie Treehorn in the same film seems to echo Otto Kruger's turn as quack blackmailer Jules Amthor here. The surreal dream sequence Marlowe endures after being knocked-out and doped seems to have provided a further cue for the Coen Brothers. Another post-modern spin on Chandler's mystery came in 2009 with the launch of HBO's inspired comedy series Bored To Death, in which Jason Schwartzman's depressed writer Jonathan Ames rediscovers the novel and sets out to become a detective himself (unlicensed) like a latter day Don Quixote, with similarly disastrous results.

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)

2011-12-07T19:54:00.018Z

The magnificence of the Ambersons may have begun in 1873 but it looks like we may never get to see it in all its glory. Orson Welles's follow-up to Citizen Kane (1941), an opulent adaptation of Booth Tarkington's Nobel Prize-winning novel of 1918, was famously butchered by nervous executives at RKO when the director's back was turned - its editor Robert Wise instructed to shave over an hour of footage from Welles's final cut, burn the negatives and shoot a more optimistic ending after a lukewarm preview screening had given the suits the jitters and before Welles could return from the set of his unfinished It's All True in Brazil in time to intervene. Some say a complete reel of Welles' finished cut was sent to him for safe keeping in South America by loyal crew members but, if such a treasure ever existed, it has long since been given up as lost. However, after the amazing rediscovery of a longer cut of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) in an Argentine storeroom in 2008, the possibility of an unadulterated Magnificent Ambersons turning up suddenly feels that little bit less remote.

What we have left of Welles's lost masterpiece remains a spellbinding piece of cinema. This elegaic gem concerns a wealthy Midwestern dynasty living in splendour at the turn of the century before being brought low by the bull-headed arrogance and destructive snobbery of its heir, George Minifer Amberson (Tim Holt), who opposes his widowed mother Isabel's (Dolores Costello) last chance at happiness with the true love of her life, a nouveau riche automobile pioneer named Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten), whose fortune might have saved the Amberson estate from crumbling into nothing. George's oediapl jealousy and misguided preoccupation with protecting the family name from gossip and rumour leads him to sneer at Morgan's "horseless carriage", even though he himself is ostensibly in love with the man's spirited and devoted daughter Lucy (Anne Baxter). Anxiety over their feud eventually drives poor Isabel to an early grave and Eugene away to grieve while the Ambersons fall on hard times and are forced to exchange their gloomy mansion for labouring jobs, a cheap boarding house and a life of toil, destitution and quiet desperation.

Welles was introduced to Tarkington's novel by his father Richard Hodgdon Head Welles, who was a close friend of the author and may even have inspired the character of Eugene, having made his name with the invention of a best-selling range of bicycle headlamps and married a society beauty, one Beatrice Ives, an accomplished concert pianist. Orson was actually the director's middle name, incidentally. His Christian name was George. The young Welles became fascinated by a novel with such close ties to his own childhood and produced a version for his radio series The Campbell Playhouse in 1939, in which he took the role of George himself but in which only Ray Collins appeared from the later cast. By the time the director came to shoot a film of The Magnificent Ambersons in the wake of his critical triumph with Kane, Welles decided that he was too old and had become too portly for the central role so instead cast Tim Holt as George, a performer he considered, "one of the most interesting actors there's ever been in American movies" but whom he felt squandered his talent by taking easy, minor roles in Hollywood Westerns. Welles doesn't appear on screen but his pitying, murmurous narration reverberates around the halls and haunts proceedings superbly, his presence always felt. Cotten, the redoubtable Agnes Moorehead and composer Bernard Herrmann were all Mercury Theater veterans while Anne Baxter was handed a role because she knew something herself of living with a legacy, being the granddaughter of famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The stately Amberson house was built in full on a studio sound-stage - parts of it reused in countless films since - with the idea that its walls could be removed so that Stanley Cortez's camera could roam freely around the place like a character in its own right. This effect is noticeable in the scene in which George confronts his Uncle Jack (Collins) soaking in the bathtub, swapping glances from each man's perspective and catching their reflections in the mirror and also in the scene in which the bullied Aunt Fanny (Moorehead) appears at the top of the third tier of bannisters, eavesdropping on the arguments below.

Like Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons presents a personal empire tearing itself apart with hubris and resentment and demonstrates the powerlessness of humanity and all its impermanent trinkets and monuments to withstand the ravages of time, recalling the "Colossal Wreck" of Ozymandias in Percy Shelley's poem of 1818. The Magnificent Ambersons is arguably a more mature, disciplined work than its celebrated predecessor, however, taking the bold decision to centre itself around a protagonist so sour and unpleasant that he risks alienating the popcorn crowd from the get-go and capsizing the whole venture. No wonder the Philistines were spooked and chose to pair Ambersons in contemporary picture houses with the loopy Lupe Vélez vehicle Mexican Spitfire Sees A Ghost (1942). In a movie full of wonder, my favourite scene has to be the magical moment in which Morgan's shivering jalopy finally breaks down in deep snow, whereupon the merry inventor cranks it up gamely and keeps everybody cheerful by starting a sing-along to 'The Man Who Broke The Bank At Monte Carlo'. Everyone except George, that is. Cotten, Costello, Moorehead and Collins give memorable performances as a quartet of sad and kindly ghosts who have been so terribly wronged by their spoilt offspring.

Night & The City (1950)

2011-12-03T10:36:00.012Z

American hustler, confidence trickster and nightclub tout Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) was a lifelong loser who came to London after the war with dreams of striking it rich and damn near made it. For one fleeting moment, he had it all right there in the palm of his hand. This one wasn't like the football pool's scam or the Birmingham greyhound track. This one was big.

A chance encounter with the Great Gregorious (Stanislaus Zbyszko), an ageing Greco-Roman wrestling champion and a purist disgusted by the fakery and choreography of the modern game, gives Fabian the idea that he could become a big shot promoter. But such a venture would require a solid backer and his bloated boss at the Silver Fox, Phil Nosseross (Francis L. Sullivan), may have one too many ulterior motives to be truly trustworthy, not least his obvious jealousy towards Fabian over his ruthless wife Helen's (Googie Withers) wandering eye. The boy will also need to overcome the objections of another party, Gregorious's son Kristo (Herbert Lom), a shady fellow keen to modernise the sport into a more contrived, spectacular entertainment without losing the old man's love.

Director Jules Dassin was dispatched to a Britain still smouldering in the rubble and ruin of the Blitz to make Night & The City by Fox head Darryl F. Zanuck, who knew that Dassin was about to be blacklisted for his alleged Communist sympathies. Gene Tierney was sent along with him for this adaptation of Gerald Kersch's 1938 novel in order to get over a particularly bad break-up that had led Zanuck to believe her suicidal. It's perhaps this melancholy background that explains the resulting production's relentless pessimism and abiding gloom. Tierney's Mary Bristol, Fabian's doting girlfriend, is one of the few characters we are introduced to who is anything other than a crooked parasite in pursuit of their own interests. Dassin's London is a nightmarish underworld of squalor, poverty and desperation, its winding alleyways cloaked in expressionistic shadows, in which no one decent has a shilling to spare - an atmosphere no doubt reflecting the director's troubled state of mind at the time. Noir always deals in fatalism but rarely has the point been so unromantically made as in this account of the utterly pointless life and death of Harry Fabian. Czech hood Lom flicking his cigarette butt absently into the Thames after watching The Strangler (Mike Mazurki) polish off Fabian and dump his body in the water just says it all.

Widmark is fabulously energetic in the lead, his bony, taut face and staring eyes barely concealing Harry's frantic ambition. He spends much of the film running, darting away from hoodlums and into doorways and new scrapes and seems to be almost perennially out-of-breath, refusing to surrender to the idea that he can't outrun death. Withers and Sullivan also make for a memorably frightful couple, he as beady and wearily knowing here as he was playing Jaggers in David Lean's remarkable Great Expectations (1946). Full-time henchman Mazurki is also well cast as a boorish rival wrestler (a nod to his earlier career) and his bout with the older Zbyszko (the Pole had also been a professional Greco-Roman brawler, see below) is one of the most memorable cinematic sporting contests I can recall.

Dassin may have been discarded by Hollywood because of his political affiliations but he continued to work and followed Night & The City by relocating to France and making Rififi (1955), possibly the greatest of all bank heist capers. As sweet a kiss off as they come.

Follow The Boys (1944)

2011-11-26T10:40:00.010Z

George Raft, Orson Welles, Marlene Dietrich, W.C. Fields, Arthur Rubenstein and The Andrews Sisters all in the same film? It happened.

Raft stars as vaudeville clown turned Hollywood musical star Tony West who takes it upon himself to organise entertainment for serving US troops following the bombing of Pearl Harbour by the Japanese. Alienating his pregnant wife and co-star (Vera Zorvina) in the process, West tours the country's army camps with such luminaries as Welles, Dietrich, Fields, Rubinstein, Joan Blondell, Dinah Shore, Sophie Tucker, Carmen Amaya, Andy Devine, Nigel Bruce, Donald O'Connor and Peggy Ryan plus band leaders Louis Jordan, Freddie Slack and Charlie Spivak and a good time is had by all.

The above magic turn from the two biggest names on the bill is a definite highlight of this back-slapping Universal variety ensemble but so is Fields' boozy pool routine (an echo from 1934's Six Of A Kind) and Jordan's lovely rendition of 'Is You Is Or Is You Ain't My Baby?' for an audience of black servicemen from the back of a flatbed truck in the rain. The cruel-looking Raft can certainly bust a move when he wants to and makes for a determined lead in this worthiest of patriotic tribute films but the narrative about his neglected home life, which is used to tie everything together, seems oddly overdone. The decision to kill him off at the end when a Japanese sub torpedoes a navy carrier with the Andrews Sisters on board in mid-song is a particularly heavy-handed touch. We get it. The guy's a hero. All the stars who gave up their time acted commendably (though in publicity terms, it has to be said, they had little choice) but somehow you can't help feeling that the soldiers themselves are being forgotten here amidst all the self-congratulation. There are no real characters among the men and women in uniform and no alternative voice. As such, Follow The Boys from director Eddie Sutherland and producer Charles K. Feldman stands as an uncomplicated record of this peculiar footnote to showbiz history. It's unabashed propaganda but none the less interesting for that.

The Lady Eve (1941)

2011-11-19T10:06:00.011Z

Henry Fonda's clumsy snake-spotter and brewery heir Charles "Hopsie" Pike falls for Barbara Stanwyck's manipulative card sharp Jean Harrington (taking out a waiter in the process) aboard an ocean liner from South America in Preston Sturges' excellent screwball comedy. Rather like Cary Grant's Dr Huxley in Bringing Up Baby (1938), Pike is a bookish, retiring academic type caught up in the affairs of a female whirlwind, this time the manipulative Harrington, in league with her professional gambler father (Charles Coburn) to swindle the rich and stupid at the card table, who accidentally finds herself in love with Charles for real. However, when he uncovers the truth about her choice of career, the befuddled ophiologist storms home to his family's country retreat in Connecticut, heart-broken. She follows him, angered by the snub, posing as a member of the English aristocracy named Lady Eve Sidwich and eventually marries poor, confused Charlie after convincing him that she is in fact Jean's twin. And the fun doesn't stop there...

Here's a very fine moment early on in which the seduction truly begins. Stanwyck is sensational throughout and again uses her shapely ankles to entrap a man, just as she did in Double Indemnity (1944). Fonda's naive Adam is here rendered entirely helpless and would almost certainly say yes to any suggestion she'd care to make, forbidden apples or otherwise.

Paramount's The Lady Eve was based on a short story by Monckton Hoffe entitled 'Two Bad Hats', which was very nearly its title and Joel McCrea, Fred MacMurray, Madeleine Carroll and Paulette Goddard were all slated to star at various stages of pre-production. As delightful as those performers are, Fonda and Stanwyck make for a strong pairing and, as is so often the case with Sturges, the supporting cast are the real highlight. The director had an extraordinary gift for finding the right people and giving them funny things to do, like having the oinking Eugene Palette sing and clang steel cloches together as he becomes increasingly impatient for his overdue breakfast. Or having William Demarest as Pike's suspicious minder Ambrose "Muggsy" Murgatroyd creep past the dining room windows spying on Lady Eve in silhouette before tumbling head first into a flowerbed. Or having Fred and Ginger regular Eric Blore dressed up like The Penguin, complete with monocle and top hat, roaming the country club set posing as a knight of the realm in deliciously villainous style. You can see why the Coen Brothers admire Sturges so much. His slogan for Pike's Ale ("The Ale That Won For Yale") could have come from the same marketing department that cooked up Dapper Dan's hair pomade.

Private's Progress (1956)

2011-11-12T15:37:00.035Z

Taking its title and loose gist from William Hogarth's satirical series of paintings A Rake's Progress (1732-35)*, which chronicle a young novice's rise and fall from worldly innocence to corrupt experience, this was the first of the Boulting Brothers' own string of questioning comedies, a lampoon of the British military based on a novel by Alan Hackney. Private's Progress proved hugely popular upon its release, revealing an enduring taste for wartime capers among UK audiences a full decade after hostilities had ceased.

As with its follow-up Brothers In Law (1957), the period's favourite everyman Ian Carmichael stars as a bumbling naif called into an unfamiliar environment and caught out by its peculiar rules and disciplines, making a right old hash of things until he is taken under the wing of a waggish Richard Attenborough. Here, Carmichael's Stanley Windrush is a conscripted undergraduate from an eccentric but well-to-do background appalled by the poor food and hard physical routines of barracks life and demoted to private after failing an officer's exam. Posted to a holding unit, Windrush is suddenly called up to serve under his uncle as part of a top secret assignment known only as "Hat Rack", a job for which he seems suspiciously under-qualified.

Carmichael is good value as ever and does particularly well playing roaring drunk (as he would in the Boultings' later Lucky Jim, 1957), memorably cheeking a sentry after a night out on the town and giving his name as "Picklepuss" before falling over, laughing hysterically and stealing the latter's whistle. There's also a priceless look on the lad's face when he realises that he's lost his shorts wriggling under a tarpaulin sheet during a training exercise. However, in an all-star cast featuring such stalwarts as Peter Jones, Miles Malleson, Jill Adams, John Le Mesurier, Ian Bannen, Kenneth Griffith and even a young Christopher Lee playing a Nazi officer, two performances stand out. Dennis Price, for one, is a delight as scheming Brigadier Bertram Tracepurcel, hoping to profit from the war by leading an outrageous undercover mission to Germany to recover stolen art treasures before faking his own death and fleeing to South America with a healthy stash of loot and the delectable Adams on his arm. For me, this probably stands as Price's best role after Kinds Hearts & Coronets (1949), which is high praise indeed. The second real corker is, of course, Terry-Thomas in his breakthrough part as the really rather sympathetic Major Hitchcock, a scream in the scene in which he bunks off to the local cinema to watch Noël Coward's stirring naval drama In Which We Serve (1942) only to find that the entire audience is comprised of his own men who are supposed to be out on manoeuvres: "You're all absolute showers!"

The Boultings would reunite many of the key players here to reprise their characters for a sort-of sequel three years later, the trade union satire I'm All Right Jack, which would also give Peter Sellers one of his best-known roles. On the downside, the success of Private's Progress may also have inspired Carry On Sergeant (1958), both of which featured William Hartnell as a no-nonsense CO, and thus unleashed a truly lamentable series of craptacular comedies on an unsuspecting public. You can't win 'em all.

*Another key British comedy of the period, 1960's School For Scoundrels, which again featured Carmichael and Thomas, would also rework the title of an eighteenth century cultural landmark, Richard Brinsely Sheridan's comic play The School For Scandal (1777).

Left Right & Centre (1959)

2011-11-11T17:33:00.018Z

With George Clooney's The Ides Of March (2011) currently whipping up Oscar buzz, here's another film from the campaign trail with which it almost certainly has nothing in common. This rather sweet-natured comedy from prolific British Lion director-producer team Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat again stars the redoubtable Ian Carmichael as TV panel show personality Robert Wilcot, star of teatime quiz 'What On Earth Was That?', who agrees to stand as Conservative candidate for the fictional constituency of Earndale in a parliamentary by-election. Wilcot soon becomes disillusioned with the contest when he realises he was only put forward for the nomination by his gleefully avaricious uncle Lord Wilcot (Alastair Sim) in order to ensure publicity for the family's stately home, which the latter has recently opened to the public and converted into a tourist attraction, filling the grounds with funfair rides, a nudist camp and peep show slot machines promising to reveal 'What Ye Jester Saw' and 'Sex in 3D' (which, brilliantly, is out of order, presumably from overuse). Robert's electioneering is further complicated when he finds himself falling helplessly in love with rival Labour candidate Stella Stoker (Patricia Bredin), the Socialist daughter of a Billingsgate fishmonger, much to the annoyance and disbelief of the pair's respective campaign managers (Richard Wattis and Eric Barker), who subsequently join forces to try to fend off the inevitable.

"You'll howl when sex and politics collide head on!" insisted the film's original tagline but actually Left Right & Centre rather abandons the pointed political satire it punts for early on in favour of standard romantic comedy plot contrivances - misunderstandings engineered by self-interested outsiders, confrontations with jealous partners etc. Launder and Gilliat's film opens with a pleasingly ironic narration stating that "every nation, they say, gets the government it deserves" and outlining the key ideological difference between the British right and left accordingly: "Whereas the Conservative philosophy is the exploitation of man by man, with the Socialists it is exactly the other way round". This is followed by a rousing ode to the British electorate in praise of our keen awareness of the important social issues of the day and proud sense of fair play, deftly undermined by images of crowds betting on horse races, jeering at referees and chasing after girls. Left Right & Centre is good on media manipulation - two local rags take entirely opposing angles on a photograph of Wilcot chivalrously carrying Stoker's luggage at Earndale station - and Sim's Lord Wilcot does get to hand his young nephew this astonishing piece of wisdom: "We are all governed by dead ideas but, when it comes to political programmes, an idea has not merely to be dead but to have lost all meaning before it has any chance of being adopted with real enthusiasm." Bold stuff but instead of more in this vein, which could have led to a post-war, pre-Wilson answer to The Thick Of It (2005-), we end up with a harmless and somewhat messy trifle though the result remains a pleasant confection.

Carmichael and Bredin make for a charming item and prove themselves more than game when it comes to fighting it out at the hustings but the premise is pretty unlikely in the first place and, as always when his name appears on the cast list, it's Sim who steals the show here as the delightfully cynical, mercenary and meddling aristocrat, an opportunist far more interested in flogging homemade parsnip wine ("It puts the 'nip' in parsnip!") and counting his day's takings than the competition's outcome. Our man never looks happier than when he's spotted riding around town on the roof of a campaign truck smoking a fat cigar and promoting the paid-entry after-party he's hosting at Wilcot Priory on election night, regardless of the result. His oddly matter-of-fact death at the film's close - killed falling from a step ladder - at least provides one final piece of mischief: despite winning the election, Robert has inherited a peerage by dint of his relative's sudden demise and is thus ineligible to sit in the House of Commons anyway, meaning that the whole business is void and must begin again from scratch. Professional campaigners Wattis and Barker, of different class but otherwise cut from very similar cloth indeed (tellingly, both men share a taste for champagne), are left flabbergasted and squabbling on the pavement as the credits roll but you can't help but sense their exhilaration. This is, after all, what these creatures live for.

12 Angry Men (1957)

2011-10-31T21:23:00.012Z

Sidney Lumet’s enduring legal drama 12 Angry Men is an undeniably worthy piece of work – it almost feels like a public information film at times – and perhaps not as cool as Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder (1959) but it's also a perfectly argued and optimistic defence of democratic values and the American criminal justice system. The film is all the more astonishing for the formal constraints Reginald Rose’s script imposes upon itself, making use of just one set – the stifling jury room of the Supreme Court Building in New York’s Foley Square – and taking place in real-time with no action to speak of, just the titular dozen sweating out their deliberations and picking over the evidence in minute detail. It’s a truly amazing feat of writing, acting and directing from all concerned that still manages to keep audiences hooked over half a century later.

If you’ve never seen 12 Angry Men, the film concerns the trial of an impoverished Hispanic youth charged with murdering his own father in New York City. When the jury retires to consider its verdict, eleven members instinctively vote guilty in an initial straw poll. The only dissenter is Henry Fonda’s unnamed bleeding heart liberal who happens to feel that a man’s life is at least worth a conversation and has no time for complacent assumptions. Fonda’s architect assesses the all white, male (and politically representative) faces before him and seeks to persuade and debate his way to an alliance between those among his fellow jurors who are naturally sympathetic to his moderate, left-leaning point of view and those self-made conservative reactionaries in opposition, typified by hateful, perspiring Lee J. Cobb and a racist Ed Begley. Fonda asks his fellow jurymen to reconsider key passages of testimony and aspects of the circumstantial evidence before them and realises in the process that convincing Wall Street stockbroker E.G. Marshall - an enlightened corporate capitalist and early neo-con but, crucially, a man of reason - is the key to ensuring an acquittal for a boy whose guilt no one can honestly be sure of.

Ultimately Lumet’s film champions universal humanitarianism, reasoned argument and dispassionate group decision-making in pursuit of consensus rather than the deeply ambiguous notions of common sense justice and black-and-white moral certainty. 12 Angry Men also asks whether any criminal case is ever truly free from reasonable doubt and invites us to revisit the very concepts of “truth” and “fact”, arguing that all perceived reality is subjective and a matter of interpretation, susceptible to influence by prejudice, bias and narcissism. At one point a frustrated Begley shouts, “I’m sick of the facts – you can twist ‘em any way you like!” and in so doing a profound philosophical point is made in an accessible, box office-friendly manner. A real public service of a film.

Although Fonda, civilising the land just as he did in My Darling Clementine (1946), is undoubtedly the star here (he also served as producer), there are no weak links in the cast, with some strong turns on show from Cobb, Begley, Marshall, foreman Martin Balsam and a meek John Fieldler (the voice of Piglet in Disney's Winnie the Pooh franchise). Jack Warden is especially memorable as intellectually lazy, wisecracking baseball fan, as is Robert Webber as a crass Madison Avenue advertising man. Balsam and Warden would, incidentally, be reunited in the editorial offices of The Washington Post for another American cinematic monument, All The President's Men, in 1976. You can watch 12 Angry Men in full here and, frankly, it would be a crime not to.

P.S. Fans of period British comedy should check out the following episode of BBC sitcom Hancock's Half Hour from 1959, in which comedian Tony Hancock and sidekick Sid James find themselves re-enacting Lumet's film when they are called up to serve as jurors on a robbery trial at the Old Bailey. A neat and affectionate skewering of the source.

Cape Fear (1962)

2011-10-30T15:06:00.012Z

Gregory Peck raises a formidable eyebrow at a meddlesome Robert Mitchum in J. Lee Thompson's classic thriller about a Georgia attorney stalked and terrorised by an ex-con he helped put away eight years previously. Thompson's film was based on John D. MacDonald’s 1957 novel The Executioners and the director brought together some natural casting choices for the job. Peck, Mr Integrity, would play his signature role, Atticus Finch (another lawyer), that same year in To Kill A Mocking Bird while ageing tough guy Mitchum had already played a psychotic pursuer in Charles Laughton’s brilliant, expressionistic Night Of The Hunter (1955). Similarly, Martin Balsam was fresh off Psycho (1960), where he met a grizzly end as Detective Arbogast, so was a shoe-in for Cape Fear’s voice of law and order, Sergeant Dutton. All are great – as are Polly Bergen, Lori Martin and Telly Salvalas in support - but it’s Mitchum’s performance as vicious rapist Max Cady that keeps us fascinated. Squinting out at Peck’s Sam Bowden from beneath his Panama hat, a cigar jutting contemptuously from his alligator grin, the man oozes menacing insouciance, an American Nightmare invading a cosy middle-class idyll in a similar vein to Joseph Cotten’s Uncle Charlie in Shadow Of A Doubt (1943). Cady clearly enjoys watching his prey squirm on the hook. So much so, in fact, that you start to wonder whether his actually going through with the killing of Bowden and his family wouldn’t rob him of his sole raison d’être. His disturbed sexual interest in Bowden’s young daughter (Martin) remains shocking to this day and Thompson’s film – often parodied, most notably in The Simpsons – still looks beautiful, its cool black-and-white cinematography accentuated in recent high definition releases. Perhaps its biggest selling point, however, is composer Bernard Herrmann’s unforgettable score, as tense and tied to the action in its way as John Williams’ for Jaws (1975).

Mitchum, Balsam and Peck (above) all returned for cameos in Martin Scorsese’s really rather unnecessary remake of this three little pigs tale in 1991, starring Robert De Niro and Nick Nolte in the leads with Jessica Lange and Juliette Lewis providing support. Herrmann’s theme was also recycled from the original, albeit rearranged by Elmer Bernstein, though screenwriter Wesley Strick did beef up Cady's motive for pursuing Sam Bowden, the latter having suppressed evidence that might have seen the defendant receive a reduced sentence in this version – a fatal act of moral judgement on Bowden’s part stemming from his certainty over Cady’s guilt. This certainly helps muddy the waters but you should stick with the original anyway - De Niro's tattooed religious nut soons becomes a hysterical caricature and operatic silliness ensues, particularly in Scorsese's overblown houseboat dénouement.

Bernard Herrmann - Theme From Cape Fear

Brothers In Law (1957)

2011-10-23T12:43:00.013+01:00

A befuddled Ian Carmichael takes the lead in another all-star British Lion comedy from the late fifties, this time a broad-brushed satire of the legal industry from John and Roy Boulting. The film was intended as a follow-up to the brothers' military spoof Private's Progress from the year previously, taking a swipe at another great British institution in all its bewildering briefs, flying paperwork, convolutions, circumlocutions and archaic quirks. "The law is an ass", Charles Dickens once observed, and that's very much the standpoint taken here in a screenplay adapted from Henry Cecil's popular 1955 novel.

Carmichael stars as naive junior barrister Roger Thursby, who enters the Inns of Court off Fleet Street as a trainee in Miles Malleson's busy chambers, guided along the way by his more worldly flatmate Henry Marshall (Richard Attenborough). Essentially a comedy of embarrassment, Brothers In Law sees Thursby fluff his lines, forced to take guidance on points of law from clearly guilty career-criminal defendants and exasperate any number of judges (especially John Le Mesurier on the golf course) with his inexperience. It's all rather slight and gentle in truth but the film packs bags of charm and an excellent supporting cast including the beautiful Jill Adams as the object of Roger and Henry's affections, Terry-Thomas in a proper character part as cockney geezer and serial swindler Alfred Green as well as minor though amusing turns from such stalwarts as Irene Handl, playing a maddeningly inarticulate witness, Leslie Philips as a smooth tailor and radio panel show personality Nicholas Parsons as a car-obsessed stock broker. Future Billy Liar (1963), Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Marathon Man (1976) director John Schlesinger also makes a brief blink-and-you'll-miss-him appearance. Brothers In Law is available in full here, m'learned friends.

Shane (1953)

2011-10-12T18:12:00.009+01:00

Alan Ladd and young Brandon De Wilde in George Stevens' unusual and enduring pacifist Western Shane, about a jaded former gunslinger who drifts into the middle of a conflict between greedy Wyoming cattle baron Rufus Ryker (Emile Meyer) and a gaggle of homesteaders who just want to live peacefully on land Ryker considers "his". Shane (Ladd) eventually takes up with the Starrett family after intervening in a skirmish between pater familias Joe (Van Heflin) and Ryker's posse and tries domesticity for a while, exchanging his trail duds for work denims and firmly buttoning his holster, much to the disappointment of Starrett's impressionable son Joey (De Wilde). Eventually Shane's non-violent stand is challenged by Ryker's crew who bully, humiliate and beat on him until he is finally forced to take arms against this sea of troubles and by opposing end it. But personal vengeance is not Shane's motive. He enters the final shoot-out as an act of self-sacrifice in the stead of a proud but better man, knowing that he will never be able to live in the second Eden he's helped create as, like Ryker or Victor Mature's Doc Holliday in My Darling Clementine (1946), he's a relic from a savage past that must die before the West can truly be won. Sure enough, Shane rides off into the sunset at the film's close like many a cowboy star before him. But unlike them, he's bleeding from a bullet wound to the guts that will presumably prove fatal. Shane leaves us a self-imposed exile on the dirt road to Cemetery Hill, a legend in the territory and, perhaps more importantly, a hero in the eyes of Joey, its future. There'll be peace in the valley. But not for Shane.

Shane's story, taken from a 1949 novel by Jack Schaefer, is a simple one but packed with hard-felt emotion and mood. Like the brooding purple mountains looming over this disputed stretch of boggy grazing country, there's an overpowering melancholy about the film that stem's from the grim inevitability of its subject's end, something the man himself appears to recognise and understand implicitly all along, accepting it with a stoicism and dignity that underscores the character and is subtly evoked by Ladd. Ok, so De Wilde's idolising youngster is a tad cloying and a heavy-handedly allegorical role to begin with, but most of the performances here are first-rate with Jack Palance fascinating as Ryker's enigmatic, man-in-black hired gun and Jean Arthur as lovely as ever in her final screen appearance. For me, the stand-out scene is probably Ladd's brutal punch-up with Ben Johnson's cocksure barfly Chris Calloway, who has earlier splashed whisky on Shane and insulted him as a "sod buster" - as physical and adrenaline-fuelled an action scene as you're likely to see. Apparently Paramount nearly canned Shane in pre-production because Montgomery Clift, William Holden and Katharine Hepburn were not available to play the leads, which would have been a crying shame indeed.

Devil Girl From Mars (1954)

2011-10-09T17:05:00.011+01:00

This charming British B sci-fi concerns the crash landing of a Martian spaceship in the Scottish highlands. The UFO's pilot, a leather-clad dominatrix named Nyah (Patricia Laffan), turns up at the nearest pub, the Bonnie Charlie, in which a gaggle of representative types have gathered for the evening, and explains that she is on a mission to capture earth men to take back to the red planet in order to breed with its womenfolk, who have just eviscerated the last of their male counterparts following a civil war between the genders and are thus without a means of propagating their species. A quite literal battle of the sexes, you might say. Surprisingly, the normally red-blooded Scots are quite against the idea of becoming interplanetary sex slaves and plot to blow-up Nyah's spacecraft instead.

Despite its horny schoolboy's fantasy of a premise and splendid title, there are long stretches of Devil Girl From Mars that are dreadfully dull while the acting on show is of a decidedly mixed bag. Perhaps only the mesmeric and winningly serious Laffan and the wild-eyed, future Dad's Army star John Laurie stand out, although there's some credible, grounded support from Sophie Stewart and Hazel Court as no-nonsense hostess Mrs Jamieson and her incongruous fashion model guest, respectively. Director David MacDonald's special effects are above average for a film with such an obviously small budget but it has to be said that Nyah's tree-zapping robot subordinate Chani does resemble a waddling fridge-freezer. A very poor relation to Gort from The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951). What is arguably most surprising about Devil Girl From Mars, however, is that it was reportedly based on a play. Written by James Eastwood and John C. Maher, who adapted it for the screen, this little opus is extremely hard to find anything out about and it's hard to believe it was ever staged. If anyone out there has the skinny I'd dearly love to know more. In the meantime, here's the feature in full for your consideration.

The Brain From Planet Arous (1957)

2011-09-18T17:28:00.011+01:00

Er, yep. That's the titular brain all right and pretty impressive it is too. Or at least it is until the climax of Nathan Juran's splendid Atomic Age B picture, when the hero whose body the offending cerebrum has previously taken possession of hacks away at its "Fissure of Rolando" with an axe and you realise that it's just a helium balloon bobbing around with lights attached. Still, a fine effort for such a low-budget production.

Juran's film concerns the visit to earth of the eponymous brain, an evil, echoey-voiced fugitive named Gor hiding out in California and hell bent on world domination. A bit like Mel Gibson. Attracted by the high levels of radiation being picked up on his Geiger counter, nuclear scientist Steve March (John Agar) visits the desert caves of "Mystery Mountain" - where else? - with his flippant partner Dan (Robert Fuller), who is promptly eviscerated by the floating alien intellect. Steve survives but Gor elects to use his body as a vessel while he goes about his plan of enslaving all humanity. Returning to Steve's devoted little fiancée Sally (Joyce Meadows), Gor-as-Steve paws her hungrily until the family dog George is forced to intervene to keep things decent. Sally is shocked by her man's uncharacteristic display of heated sexual aggression and becomes concerned about Dan's disappearance. Meanwhile Gor is busy using Steve's professional influence to score a meeting with the government's Atomic Energy Commission, wherein he demonstrates his awesome ability to blow up aeroplanes and buildings with nothing more than a frantic wiggle of his eyebrows. Things are beginning to look pretty black for planet earth, until a second remarkably similar-looking brain named Vol arrives in pursuit of Gor and agrees to possess George, the aforementioned canine, so that he can observe his prey at close quarters and ultimately thwart Gor's fiendish apocalyptic masterplan. Vol turns out to be oddly ineffectual, as it happens, and a great deal of nonsense ensues. Check it out for yourself below.

Juran was a Romanian immigrant who began working in Hollywood in 1937 when he joined RKO's art department, going on to win an Oscar for Best Art Direction in 1941 for his work on John Ford's How Green Was My Valley. He directed a number of cheapo genre pictures between 1952 and 1973, reaching his creative peak - well, sort of - in the late fifties with Attack Of The 50 Foot Woman and The Seventh Voyage Of Sinbad (both 1958). Juran's direction here is appropriately unspectacular for a man who considered himself a "technician" rather than an artist but does show occasional flashes of brilliance, as when he shoots Agar's tormented, contorted expression through a glass water cooler, distorting his face and making him all the more monstrous. Genre stalwart Agar is also excellent though it has to be said that he's not especially menacing at the best of times and looks damn foolish in a pith helmet and sweat patches. However, Agar does deserve bonus points for soldiering on manfully in tinfoil contact lenses. Those babies really must have chafed something awful.

As with many B-movies of the period, it's hard to ignore the unintentionally hilarious, matter-of-fact period sexism on show. Meadows is lovely as Steve's concerned other half and plays her role with more conviction than The Brain From Planet Arous deserves. However, her Sally is nevertheless primarily concerned with feeding the men around her - charred hamburgers are a speciality - and washing dishes and is routinely patronised by the menfolk, even her doting dad. For me though, it's Gor's insatiable lust for her that represents the film's stand-out detail, hands down. This peculiarly earthy and sinister pronouncement from the supposed intergalactic polymath in conversation with Steve really had me in stitches: "I chose your body very carefully. Even before I knew about Sally. A very exciting female!... She appeals to me. There are some aspects of the life of an earth savage that are exciting and rewarding. Things that are missed by the brains on my planet Arous... Even I must have some interest to stir me up. She'll do very nicely". This kind of extraterrestrial lusting recalls the romantic travails of Phil Tucker's Robot Monster (1953), with which Juran's film's shares its Bronson Canyon shooting location. Both are, needless to say, highly recommended if you like this sort of amiable faff.

Way Out West (1937)

2011-09-02T19:42:00.010+01:00

As a feature, it has to be said that Laurel and Hardy's Way Out West has a pretty thin plot. The boys are on the road again and heading for the town of Brushwood Gulch where they have been instructed to deliver the deed to a gold mine bequested by a dead prospector to his impoverished daughter, Mary Roberts (Rosina Lawrence). Duped instead into handing it over to a crooked saloon owner and his showgirl wife (James Finlayson and Sharon Lynne), Stan and Ollie plot to get it back, knocking each other over and getting tickled a good deal in the process. Er, that's it. The only clues we have that this is even the Old West - before the boys are eventually overtaken by a stagecoach - are that their coats are slightly longer than usual and their familiar clanking jalopy has been replaced by a pack mule named Dinah. What follows would just be business as usual but for a handful of musical interludes that elevate the piece to immortality and are surely among some of the most inspired moments ever committed to film, all the funnier for coming from such an unlikely source. Elegantly choreographed dancing and sweet syncopation are the last things you'd expect to see from these two self-proclaimed saps.

First up is their irresistible impluse to bust a move to Marvin Hatley's song 'At The Ball, That's All', being performed on the tavern steps by period vocal group The Avalon Boys (who also appeared briefly in Pardon Us, 1931, and the W.C. Fields comedy It's A Gift, 1934), which is simply one of life's great joys and the mother of all funny dance scenes. I've posted the original below rather than one of the myriad anachronistic remixes uploaded to YouTube by various wags, although this Soulja Boy mash-up is admittedly oddly pleasing.

The second such gem is, of course, 'The Trail Of The Lonesome Pine', a lovely little ditty in its own right written by Ballard MacDonald and Harry Carroll in 1913 that was released as a single in the UK in 1975, long after Stan and Ollie had passed on, reaching a respectable number two in the charts. The b-side was 'Honolulu Baby' from Sons Of The Desert (1933), incidentally.

Alas, the film's equally cute closing number, 'We're Going To See My Sweet Home In Dixie', is no longer available online, but it's a peach and brought on by Ollie and the heroine getting nostalgic for the Old South and the promise of home-cooked "possom and yam". Yuck.

Carrie (1952)

2011-08-28T15:48:00.014+01:00

No, not that one. Several billion light years away from Brian De Palma's 1976 Stephen King adaptation of the same name and all its menstrual angst, oppressive Christian fundamentalism, pig's blood and telekinesis is this truly heartbreaking period romance by William Wyler starring Laurence Olivier and Jennifer Jones.

Taken from Theodore Dreiser's novel Sister Carrie (1900), Wyler's film follows the fortunes of its eponymous heroine (Jones) as she leaves Hicksville, Missouri, for the big bad city of Chicago, first working in a Dickensian shoe factory before reluctantly shacking up with uncouth, manipulative salesman Charlie Drouet (Eddie Albert), a predatory oaf who repulses her but whose overtures she can't ignore because of her dire financial straits. Enter onto this unhappy scene one George Hurstwood (Olivier), manager of the exclusive local eaterie Fitzgerald's, who is kind to Carrie and falls in love with her over a game of cards. George is unhappily married to an equally shrewd and controlling spouse (Miriam Hopkins) and is desperate to intervene and rescue Carrie from her deeply compromised and socially frowned-upon domestic arrangements. However, Mrs Hurstwood soon uncovers their tryst and confronts her husband, who in turn is abandoned by Carrie when she learns of the marriage. Charlie meanwhile, sensing defeat, seizes the opportunity to propose to the distraught Carrie, who accepts against her better judgement. George is spurred into action. Accidentally-on-purpose lifting some money from his employer, he lies to Carrie to get her to board a train with him wherein he explains everything. Reconciled but penniless after George is relieved of the last of his illicit dough, the pair get hitched and set up home together in a cheap New York flophouse. George finds it increasingly difficult to find restaurant work because of his age and the circumstances of his departure from Fitzgerald's and Carrie soon suffers a miscarriage. Reasoning that they are better off apart and leaving George to his fate, she auditions for the stage and becomes a successful actress while her former husband sinks into a slough of despondency and poverty, roaming the streets in search of scraps, sustained only by her fading memory, his fall from grace complete.

Olivier - pictured above on set with his wife, Vivien Leigh - was reunited with director Wyler after their popular Wuthering Heights 13 years earlier and is utterly devastating in this saddest of doomed romances. George Hurstwood's tragic decline from gentleman maitre d' to shambling destitute is almost physically hard to watch, so earnest and decent is this character in the face of such a cruel and savage world. Hurstwood is entirely undeserving of his end - sneered at as "Rockefeller" by his colleagues and overlooked by employment agents because of his obvious breeding and smart attire - his motivation being entirely without vanity and stemming only from sympathy and love for a poor, ill-treated woman he wants to rescue from a life imposed upon her by a louse who shamelessly took advantage of her inexperience and naivety. George is emasculated and robbed by his hateful wife and finally damned for eternity for daring to take a stand and make one last bid for happiness after squandering away his best years in servitude. Jones is excellent too and very touching - the piece wouldn't work if she wasn't on top form - but it's very much the thespian's show and Olivier dominates from his first appearance. David Raksin's score is occasionally a little on the melodramatic side but that's really the only criticism I can offer of this tender and nakedly emotional film, pretty much as satisfying an experience as cinema has to offer. What's that? No, no I'm not crying. It's just... it's just a piece of grit in my eye, that's all... (sniff)...

Bigger Than Life (1956)

2011-08-27T14:32:00.011+01:00

Englishman James Mason co-wrote, produced and starred in this terrifying fifties issue drama from Nicholas Ray - fresh off Rebel Without a Cause (1955) - about a suburban American primary school teacher whose life disintegrates when he becomes addicted to prescription cortisone. Mason is electric as Ed Avery, a mild-mannered educator and caring pater familias transformed into a monstrous domestic tyrant by the supposed wonder drug - erratic, arrogant, aggressive, twitchy and paranoid. Often films built around their star's central performance can topple over into egomania and self-indulgence but Mason is simply towering here and was quite possibly never better. He's ably supported by Barbara Rush and young Christopher Olsen, however, as his increasingly frightened wife and son, effectively experiencing a home invasion at the hands of a man who bears little resemblance to the one they love. There's also a nice early role for Walter Matthau as a concerned PE teacher turned gallant woodsman, rushing to their aid when Avery finally succumbs to a megalomaniacal psychotic episode, believing himself to be the Biblical Abraham sent to smite his own flesh and blood, a scene played out as the family TV set blares a sickly funfair theme. If there's a more ominous line in film than "God was wrong", I haven't heard it.

Here's a great moment in which Mason's Avery - well on the way to a very dark place by this point - lays waste to liberal teaching theories based around the importance of self-expression in front of a shocked audience at parents' evening. His view that childhood is a "disease" to be cured through education is as original as it is horrific.

Ray's film was based on a 1955 New Yorker article by the magazine's medical correspondent Berton Roueché entitled 'Ten Feet Tall', written for the screen by Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum with help from Mason plus additional uncredited contributions from Ray, Gavin Lambert and playwright Clifford Odets. The tension is cranked up throughout courtesy of a nervy score from Otto Preminger's composer David Raksin and it's exquisitely shot in CinemaScope by Joseph MacDonald, whose darkened primary hues give the film a brooding, haunted look not a million miles away from the landscape paintings of Edward Hopper. The Cahier du Cinéma crowd certainly adored Bigger Than Life and it's recommended viewing for fans of TV's Mad Men (2007-) for its troubling insights into the real goings on behind the lace curtains of the period's imagined Rockwellian small-town world of nuclear families, fishing trips and bridge games. It may take the intervention of cortisone to turn Ed Avery into a cracked mirror but the infants in his school are already painting pictures of trains running late and men angry at their mothers. Paging Dr Freud...

The Great McGinty (1940)

2011-08-24T20:21:00.007+01:00

Would you vote for this guy? Me neither. Obama he ain't. But that won't stop him. No sir. He's already voted for himself 37 times and has half the drifters in town running around doing the same thing for $2 and a bowl of soup. How can anyone even begin to fight a machine with that kind of class behind it?

Preston Sturges sold the script for this whip-smart political satire, then called The Biography of a Bum, to Paramount for just $10 in exchange for a shot at the director's chair and the rest is history. However, aside from launching its helmsman into the big time, the film itself deserves much more acclaim than it usually receives for daring to present political corruption, graft and extortion as an everyday reality of American civic life, something Sturges does in a jaw-droppingly cheery, nonchalant and matter-of-fact manner. Less well known than Mr Smith Goes To Washington (1939), McGinty deserves as much attention for lines like this, in which William Demarest's proto-spin doctor/fairground barker character actually defends kickbacks as a means of ensuring good governance: "If it wasn't for graft, you'd get a very low type of people in politics, men without ambition, jellyfish!"

Allegedly loosely based on the career of New York governor William Sulzer, impeached in 1913, The Great McGinty begins with its fallen protagonist tending bar in a tropical banana republic. One night he finds himself forced to intervene to stop a disgraced banker blowing his brains out in the men's room. Pouring the depressive a stiff one, McGinty goes on to regale him with the rags-to-riches story of how he became state governor, starting out as a starving hobo and working his way up as a heavy collecting protection money for "The Boss" (Akim Tamiroff) before being made the latter's poster boy for "reform" in the local mayoral elections. As part of his campaign strategy, The Boss explains to McGinty that he'll have to get married because "women don't like bachelors" and so the boy reluctantly agrees to do right by his secretary Catherine (Muriel Angelus). Sure enough, he takes City Hall with ease before moving on to the governor's mansion soon after. However, this latter day Delilah soon wins our man over for real and her profound sympathy for the less fortunate turns his crooked little head. Maybe he could tackle the real issues of the day, like child labour and squalid tenements, rather than simply idling away his power and influence commissioning unnecessary municipal infrastructure projects and picking up healthy bribes from unscrupulous contractors. Of course The Boss hotly disagrees with this new approach and McGinty's past soon catches up with him, all because of that "one crazy minute" in which he tried to do the right thing for the first time in his rotten existence.

Donlevy is splendidly energetic in the lead (a sort of comic version of his later Paul Madvig from The Glass Key, 1942) while Tamiroff provides marvellous support as the philosophical immigrant fixer and self-proclaimed "robber baron" prone to punch-ups with his stooge candidate. Admittedly the ending, in which this pair break out of jail and flee the country, is somewhat anti-climactic but you can still see the Sturges genius at work throughout, with many of his established character players already in place to flesh out the background. Recommended.

Quatermass & The Pit (1967)

2011-08-14T09:48:00.022+01:00

Following the ressurection of the Hammer horror brand in 2007, the creaking old British production house has at last begun churning out new films again, the best of which so far is undoubtedly Irish supernatural chiller Wake Wood (2011) starring Aiden Gillen. However, Hammer is also in the process of revisiting its back catalogue, restoring and re-launching some of its biggest titles on Blu-ray via Optimum Releasing. First out of the traps, ahead even of The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958), is this eerie and profound sci-fi oddity from director Roy Ward Baker and television genre pioneer Nigel Kneale, about the discovery of a series of ape skulls and a Martian spacecraft buried in the clay beneath a London tube station. Amazing what you find lying under our nation's capital (see also Passport To Pimlico, 1949, in which the unearthing of some forgotten treasure belonging to the last Duke of Burgundy leads to a startling revelation).

Hammer had already made two Quatermass films prior to this one, both of which, like Quatermass & The Pit, were remakes of earlier BBC television series. This time, however, Baker took over the reins from Val Guest and stern Scot Andrew Keir inherited the title role from American actor Brian Donlevy, delivering a committed, emotional and admirably serious performance that serves to anchor the film and rescues proceedings from camp tongue-in-cheekery. James Donald, Julian Glover and studio regular Barbara Shelley all deliver solid support and the film's pay-off, in which an industrial crane is toppled into the pit to smash the subterranean homesick aliens like a giant mallet, is distinctive and memorable. However, it is surely Kneale's ideas and daring that make Quatermass & The Pit so enduring.

The film's plot revolves around the shocking extraterrestrial findings and their implications for humanity. Government scientist Professor Quatermass refuses to believe the military's official theory that the bones, rocket and locust-like insectoids within represent a forgotten Nazi propaganda stunt and soon works out the truth. The bugs have actually lain there for five million years, having abandoned their dying home planet and visited earth in search of a species with whom they could communicate. Finding only an underdeveloped primate populous, the creatures made a Promethean intervention to create their own intelligent race of earthlings - man - and killed off the failed mutant prototypes in a savage purge. If that wasn't enough to horrify the creationists, Kneale's script goes on to suggest that the horned arachnids at Hobbs End are also the secret inspiration for every Christian or folk conception of the devil man has ever devised - their evil faces carved into every gargoyle and superstitious etching produced by human hand. Bold and provocative stuff - and an idea that leads to rioting and panic in the streets, a plot turn that gives the film an astonishingly topical spin, given the sudden outbreak of looting, arson and anarchy we've seen around London and several of the UK's other major cities this week. Perhaps that's what it was all about... a revelatory tweet from a latter-day Quatermass about alien evolutionary meddling rather than just mobs of opportunistic cretins deciding en masse to abandon the rule of law because they'd quite like some free trainers and a nice new widescreen TV.

The Glass Key (1942)

2011-08-09T20:58:00.009+01:00

This was Paramount's second crack at an adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's 1930 political thriller - after Frank Tuttle's 1935 version with George Raft, Edward Arnold and Ray Milland - and it turned out to be a winner. Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd were teamed for the second time and continued to spark nicely off one another in a story about complex relationships and loyalties under strain.

Ladd stars as Ed Beaumont (dropping the initial "N" and fine moustache of his literary counterpart), a "hanger-on" and adviser to San Francisco politician Paul Madvig (Brian Donlevy), an influential but decidedly dubious local fixer. With an election looming, Madvig is backing reform candidate Ralph Henry (Moroni Olson) for governor and is in love with the man's spunky daughter Janet (Lake) but soon finds himself in a whole heap of mess when Henry's no-good gambler of a son Taylor is found slain in the street after a heated confrontation with Paul. It's up to Beaumont to investigate the circumstances of Taylor Henry's demise but even he has his misgivings about his boss, doubts that are only compounded when a series of mysterious poison pen letters begin to appear around town accusing Paul of murder.

Director Stuart Heisler's film is a pretty faithful recreation of Hammett's source novel that isn't afraid to take liberties with the material. The whodunnit plot is simplified to eliminate some complicated clues involving missing hats and canes and Joseph Calleia's urbane gangster Nick Varna comes in as a replacement for the book's Shad O'Rory (perhaps because contemporary audiences would have been sceptical about Maltese actor Calleia attempting a lilting Irish brogue). However, Jonathan Latimer's script wisely retains many of the book's best scenes, including Beaumont's graphic, sustained torture in the "dog house" at the fists of Varna's henchmen Rusty and Jeff (Eddie Marr and William Bendix). The latter of these two goons is repeatedly described by Hammett as an "apish" evolutionary retrogression, a Prohibition Mr Hyde, who takes an immediate shine to Beaumont, whom he labels, admiringly, "a God-damned massacrist". Jeff's relationship with his victim certainly takes on a viciously sadomasochistic edge (“I never seen a guy that liked being hit so much or that I liked hitting so much”), which is beautifully played out by Bendix. This uncomfortable theme - that sex and violence are two sides of the same coin - is neatly expanded upon in the opening scene of Heisler's film when Janet slaps Madvig for bad-mouthing her brother, whereupon he instantly falls for her. One slight deviation from the text is that Beaumont's relationship with Paul has something decidedly homoerotic about it in the book, which is thoroughly scrubbed out on screen. Both men are careful and "sheepish" around one another in Hammett's Glass Key, old friends whose parting at the end feels more like a heartbroken divorce than a simple betrayal. None of that college boy mush here.

Ladd is actually perfectly cast as Beaumont in spite of the fact that this remake was primarily commissioned as a further vehicle for the Ladd-Lake brand. He is as cool, calculating, opaque and inscrutable as the character is written (arguably a thinly disguised, if idealised self-portrait by the author). Perhaps the most interesting thing about this protagonist though is just how extraordinarily ambiguous he is, far more so than the same writer's Continental Op, Sam Spade or Nick Charles. As critic Peter Wolfe put it in his book Falling Beams: The Art of Dashiell Hammett (1985): “His neglect of the poor, the sick and the jobless make him, along with his free spending, an unlikely Depression hero”. In a time of bold strokes, of G-men and rum runners, hobos and bankers, Hammett presents us with a deeply worldly, matter-of-factly amoral man unafraid to make unsentimental choices to suit his own ends. However, his commitment to Madvig is recognisably human and his personal motto is one for his age and ours: "I can stand anything I've got to stand."

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)

2011-08-07T12:38:00.008+01:00

Marilyn Monroe's sweet natured gold-digger Lorelei Lee can't hide her surprise when she finally gets to meet eligible heir Henry Spofford III (George "Foghorn" Winslow) aboard a transatlantic liner in Howard Hawks's smashing MGM comedy from the 1949 stage musical by Anita Loos. It was here that Marilyn perfected her innocent, sensual brand of sex appeal and she is a delight to witness throughout - it's astonishing to think this creature really walked upon the earth - but the late Jane Russell also deserves enormous credit as the film's wry, knowing straightwoman. Russell is especially game impersonating her co-star in a Paris courtroom and in her ludicrously camp solo number 'Ain't There Anyone Here For Love?', which takes place in a cruise ship's gymnasium against a backdrop of male Olympic athletes working out in ill-advised skin coloured shorts.

Perhaps too readily dismissed these days as a fifties museum piece remembered only for the excellent but endlessly parodied 'Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend', Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is an ironic and funny treatment of the showgirls and sugar daddies theme. Lorelei chases after harmless old lecher and diamond magnate Sir Francis "Piggy" Beekman (Charles Coburn) while Russell gently disapproves but the film has little to say about the matter other than who really loses in this deal? Arguably Lorelei's wet blanket millionaire fiancé Gus (Tommy Noonan) or Lady Beekman (Norma Varden), though she in particular is snooty, self-satisfied and complacent in her wealth - more interested in the return of her tiara than her brandy-mottled husband. Piggy gets one last squeeze before the grave and Lorelei wins some nice new bling and a little security - where's the harm? Preston Sturges' The Palm Beach Story (1942) also pondered this subversive spin on conventional morality, as would 1953's How To Marry A Millionaire and Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959), both of which, of course, also starred dear old Marilyn, the period's reassuringly non-threatening face of breathy sexuality. It's impossible to resist such relaxed, pragmatic and thoroughly adult logic.

Packed with bags of charm and a delirious sense of fun, Gentlemen Prefers Blondes has plenty of fine scenes but Monroe getting stuck in a port hole and requiring the aid of young Spofford (above) is a definite highlight. Animal magnetism indeed.

Johnny Guitar (1954)

2011-08-05T16:04:00.017+01:00

Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge star as deadly rivals in this camp, bold and really rather mad feminist role-reversal Western from Nicholas Ray for Republic Pictures. Crawford's Vienna, a cornered cat, finds herself playing surrogate matriarch to the male croupiers and bartenders at her empty saloon in an underpopulated, gusty Arizona boomtown just waiting for a new railroad to come through. Her local rival is Emma Small (McCambridge), a hateful rancher and banker's sister, intent on seeing Vienna run out of town. The menfolk, including land baron John McIvers (Ward Bond), suspected bandit The Dancin' Kid (Scott Brady) and drifter minstrel Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden), look on passively as these two alpha females play out an increasingly personal and vicious Freudian psychodrama to its inevitable bloody endgame.

In Johnny Guitar, Crawford's character is aggressively masculinised - appearing first in black trousers, a string tie and boots and spoken of admiringly by her employees, one of whom states that he has, "Never seen a woman who was more of a man. She thinks like one, acts like one and sometimes makes me feel like I'm not one." Vienna is a bullish, headstrong and independent business woman (recalling Crawford's famous role in Mildred Pierce, 1945), the antithesis of the subservient church-going ranchers' wives and prostitutes the Western genre usually insists upon. As her revived romance with Johnny progresses, however, she learns to relax, allows herself to be supported and even fries his breakfast (see clip below). Her nemesis meanwhile is an embittered, sexually repressed shrew whose long-running feud with Vienna and desire to see her framed and hung without trial seems to stem from a deep-rooted sexual jealousy. There are certainly some heavy hints that Emma is in love with The Dancin' Kid (who, like Johnny, is after Vienna) but is decidedly less than comfortable when he tries to waltz with her and is certainly keen to hunt him down and string him up once his gang robs her late brother's bank. Vienna explains their tangled relations thus: "He makes her feel like a woman and that frightens her." Emma only really looks happy, orgasmically so, when she's burning down Vienna's saloon and some critics have called her a "proto lesbian", an interesting label that further muddies this already conflicted character. Whatever her motivations, this nutty chick certainly has sex and death all mixed up and it's a relief when she finally gets what's coming to her courtesy of Vienna's six shooter.

Ray's film is a strange one visually as well as thematically. Vienna's gambling hall seems to have been built into the side of a rockface while The Dancin' Kid's surprisingly needy Mild Bunch (consisting of Ben Cooper, Ernest Borgnine and Royal Dano) hide out in a secret lair beyond a waterfall. Shot in Trucolor, Emma and the mob-happy townspeople all wear funeral black while Vienna, Johnny and the outlaws don a series of loud and increasingly outlandish coloured outfits. Crawford looks particularly silly in some of these - starting out as a cowgirl dominatrix, she goes on to appear variously in a floor-length white gown for the hanging scene, a mid-80s Michael Jackson costume complete with socks for the subsequent escape and a yellow shirt and red neckerchief in the final shoot-out, which just makes her look like a mid-level McDonald's manageress. This all adds to the eccentric tone but ultimately one's patience starts to run thin. Hayden is excellent as the pastel-favouring Johnny but we only get to hear him play his titular instrument once and ultimately this enigmatic, "gun crazy" figure ends up lost in the ho-hum gender experimentation and pop psychology of the foreground, which just feels like a waste of a great name and conceit. François Truffaut loved Johnny Guitar and called it "the Beauty and the Beast of Westerns" and it's certainly a fascinating failure.

Peggy Lee - Johnny Guitar.mp3

The Lady Vanishes (1938)

2011-08-03T17:14:00.014+01:00

Alfred Hitchcock's penultimate British film was this splendid pre-war caper in which a young English socialite (Margaret Lockwood) encounters a charming elderly governess (Dame May Whitty) aboard a transcontinental train heading west through the Balkans who then proceeds to mysteriously disappear without trace. Increasingly perplexed, the girl enlists a roguish folk historian (Michael Redgrave) in her quest to find the missing senior while the remaining passengers repeatedly deny the woman's very existence. Could this delightful English rose really be mad, did Miss Froy simply get lost on the way back from the lavatory or is it all an elaborate ruse on the part of Johnny Foreigner and his nefarious cohorts to waylay the efforts of our green and sceptred isle's least likely spy?

Written by future production team Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder and based on Ethel Lina White's novel The Wheel Spins (1936), Hitch only took on the project after an earlier attempt by American Roy William Neill was scrapped over script controversies. Although this might suggest that The Lady Vanishes was something of a journeyman assignment for Hitchcock, it contains many of his familiar themes and motifs, not least strangulation (Strangers On A Train, 1951), an innocent and their companion embroiled in intrigue aboard a train (North By Northwest, 1959) and foreign authorities under suspicion over a missing person lost overseas (The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1934 and 1956). The film is also arguably one of the most critically neglected in the Hitch canon, perhaps overlooked because of how conventionally entertaining it is. As writer Matthew Sweet explained in an excellent piece for The Guardian following the film's 2007 restoration, The Lady Vanishes is really about Britain's awakening from "self-absorbed triviality to uncompromising engagement with the enemy" in the run up to World War II, typified by the film's very own Rosencratz and Guildenstern, the cricket obsessed clubmen Charters and Caldicott.

I can't think of another film in which the supporting players so routinely upstage such excellent leads. Lockwood and Redgrave are delightful together throughout and we cheer their romantic clinch at the end but it's Charters and Caldicott (Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne) that consistently make us laugh, turning the whole espionage mystery into a bristling comedy of manners. This bumptious, perpetually unenthused Walrus and Carpenter apparently expect the rest of Europe to be ordered according to the cosy standards they are used to at home and are regularly put-out when confronted by the contrary. They are ticked off to have to share a hotel room with a saucy native maid when an avalanche blocks the train's progress, they are affronted to find there's no steak on the menu when the same venue is unexpectedly overrun with guests and quite bilious when a voice in London is unable to tell them the latest test score over the telephone. As for a lady requesting the sugar bowl when Charters is in the middle of illustrating a key passage of play with its cubes... iciness is the response and Miss Froy's imprisonment carries on needlessly as a result. I have rarely seen the English character more effectively skewered in fiction than in the portrayal of these fusty, be-tweeded oafs abroad, who are only prepared to shoot at the enemy once they've been assured it's really necessary and even then ask politely for a handkerchief to bandage a bullet wound.

So beloved were this pair that they were written into several more films thereafter including Night Train To Munich (1941) and Millions Like Us (1943), both of which were also penned by Gilliat and Launder, as well as Crook's Tour (1941) and Secret Mission 609 (1942). They were even revived for their very own BBC TV series in 1985. Radford and Wayne meanwhile made careers playing variations on these genteel buffoons in such fare as Passport To Pimlico and It's Not Cricket (both 1949) before the former died over dinner in a Mayfair restaurant in 1952. A fitting end - it must surely have been teatime.

The Lady Vanishes also lives on and has recently appeared in the public domain. You can revisit this ludicrously underestimated and immensely enjoyable Hitchcock masterpiece in its entirety above.

Rope (1948)

2011-07-20T18:45:00.020+01:00

Jimmy Stewart's acerbic prep school housemaster Rupert Cadell confronts conspirators Brandon Shaw (John Dall) and Phillip Morgan (the late Farley Granger) during their decidedly macabre dinner party in Rope, Alfred Hitchcock's first venture into colour and the first of his two Transatlantic films - set up to escape the control freakery of superproducer David O. Selznik.

Rope opens with an apparently quiet New York street scene before Joseph Valentine's camera peers in through the closed curtains of a Manhattan penthouse as a scream rings out from within. Inside we spy gay lovers Brandon and Phillip, two aesthete Raskolnikovs, stringing up a mutual acquaintance by the throat for sport. They hide his body in a chest in the centre of their living room and begin preparations for a party to which they have invited a gaggle of the deceased's friends and relatives. Brandon is by far the more impish and relaxed of the pair while Phillip, a fraught, uptight concert pianist, is constantly threatening to give the game away by drinking too much to calm his nerves. The guests begin to arrive and the festivities get under way. All goes swimmingly until the arrival of Caddell, the boys' former schoolmaster, who soon smells a rat and begins to ask difficult questions of his former charges.

The film's story was taken from a 1929 play by English novelist Patrick Hamilton (author of the superb Hangover Square, 1941), which was adapted for the screen by actor Hume Cronyn with a script by an uncredited Ben Hecht and Arthur Laurents, a writer who would go on to such Hollywood heights as West Side Story (1957) and enter a long-term relationship with Rope's bisexual star Granger (a matter of some fascination for Hitchcock). Hamilton's drama was itself based on the sensational real-life case of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two homosexual University of Chicago students who captured and killed 14-year old schoolboy Richard "Bobby" Franks in 1924 as part of an intellectual game, to prove that they were among Friedrich's Nietzche's chosen supermen, the "superior few" privileged to commit murder. The "Trial of the Century" followed, in which famed capital punishment opponent Clarence Darrow successfully defended the undergraduates from death row by criticising their influences in higher education: "Is any blame attached because somebody took Nietzsche's philosophy seriously and fashioned his life upon it?... It is hardly fair to hang a 19-year-old boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university."

This theme was topical again in post-war 1948 after a certain Adolf Hitler had also misinterpreted Nietzche's thoughts on man's potential to atrocious effect. While Rope is a serious and pointed meditation on human nature and the delusions of those in positions of power, Hitch saw a perfect vehicle for his peculiar brand of black comedy and the chance for a major experiment with cinematic form. The Master of Suspense always enjoyed playing with audience expectations and toying with the boundaries of his craft, setting himself such challenges as using the smallest set possible (Lifeboat, 1944) to having his protagonist fixed in a stationary position with only one viewpoint (Rear Window, 1954) to killing off his nominal star midway through (Psycho, 1960). Here, Hitch tried to shoot the entire movie in one long real-time take and, although he didn't quite succeed in spite of extensive pre-planning and rehearsals (the camera occasionally has to drop into the small of Dall's back or the lid of the chest to sneakily conceal a cut), it's a fascinating endeavour. Aleksandr Sokurov achieved something similar with Russian Ark in 2002 but Hitch got there first over half a century earlier, albeit not without cheating.

The premise and execution of Rope provided Hitch with endless opportunities for subversion. The film is full of in-jokes, from breaking the fourth wall in post-modern fashion by having his female characters gossip about a recent film they've seen starring Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant (the latter having turned down the Stewart part in Rope, which was written so that Cadell's own homosexuality was hinted at more explicitly, for fear of what it might do to his image) to making endless puns about the stranglers' method of murder ("These hands will bring you fame", guest Mrs Atwater tells a suddenly very pale Phillip as he sits at the piano). The classically farcical body-in-the-trunk motif, which recurs in The Trouble With Harry (1955), constantly undermines everything the characters do or say - whenever it appears in shot we are reminded that this is no ordinary high society mixer we're witnessing. The ghoulish tone throughout has the big man's signature all over it, typified by the publicity shot below in which the director has exchanged places with the film's central cadaver.

Two aspects of Rope that are perhaps most worthy of mention are its Technicolor New York skyline set and Stewart's unsettling performance as Caddell. The former, known as the "cyclorama", was the largest such backdrop ever created on a studio sound stage, an exact miniature of nearly 35 miles of buildings powered by 8,000 bulbs and 200 neon signs sucking up 126,000 watts of juice. The clouds were made of spun glass and the whole enterprise serves to simultaneously represent the passing of time from 7.30 to 9.15pm as evening descends, signify the elite social setting and make the production feel less stagebound (something the likes of 1954's Dial M For Murder would suffer from), confined as it is to a single location. I think the device also serves to puncture the illusion of reality somewhat because, as convincing a background as it is, we are never entirely distanced from the fact that it's just a prop, a special effect, something that would not occur to us as viewers if Rope had been shot on location. Thus, like the obviously staged Baltimore harbour in Marnie (1964), we know we are complicit in a fantasy, someone else's sick dream of murder and intrigue.

James Stewart, meanwhile, was already well on the path to having his wholesome screen persona dissected and corrupted by his director, a process that would reach its creepy conclusion in Vertigo (1958). He arrives at the party and immediately dominates, assuming control of the situation from his hosts and former pupils, offering prickly barbs to everyone he's introduced to before launching into his edgy, whimsical thoughts on homicide as a means of entertaining the company. However, he soon finds himself playing detective and ends up horrified and ashamed when he learns the truth of Brandon and Phillip's actions. A returning war hero by this point, Stewart had been tormented by his experiences in the US air force and briefly considered retiring from acting altogether. His roles thereafter reflected the burden of a generation, a million miles away from the screwball comedies he so excelled in during the thirties. As Amy Lawrence observed in an essay for Hitchcock's America (1999), “nearly all of Stewart's post-war roles are haunted by an undercurrent of confusion, guilt and shame." George Bailey from It's A Wonderful Life (1946) was perhaps the first of Stewart's darker characterisations but Hitch and Rope gleefully continued the all-American boy's moral decline. Interestingly, Stewart was hugely unhappy on the set of Rope because he felt his director was only really concerned with camera positions and other technical aspects of the production and cared little for his actors' performances. So much so, in fact, that he vowed never to work with Hitchcock again. Until he saw the script for Rear Window, that is, when the allure of Grace Kelly proved too big an enticement.

Crossfire (1947)

2011-07-16T11:02:00.011+01:00

Director Edward Dmytryk made this neat little social issue B noir for RKO from a novel by Richard Brooks entitled The Brick Foxhole (1945) about the murder of a recently discharged gay WWII veteran. John Paxton's screenplay adapted the work to make the protagonist Jewish rather than homosexual in order to sidestep the Hays Code and tackle the topical theme of racial prejudice and the result is a strong if preachy plea for tolerance and unity in a suddenly directionless post-war America.

The film opens on the spectre of two men shadow boxing, quite literally, in a Washington D.C. flophouse. When one of the combatants, Joseph Samuels (Sam Levene), hits the carpet and breathes his last, the police are called in. First on the scene is Captain Finlay (Robert Young), a jaded, professorial brand of detective ("Everybody's the type") who struggles to work out why three army buddies who had been drinking with the deceased, a man they had never previously met, would be wrapped up in this seemingly random act of manslaughter. Enlisting the help of their NCO, Sergeant Keeley (Robert Mitchum), Finlay sets to work probing his suspects in search of a likely motive.

Rather like George Marshall's Raymond Chandler-scripted The Blue Dahlia (1946), Dmytryk's film deals overtly with the psychological troubles of servicemen returning to the US after battling Nazi's in Europe. The likes of chief suspect Mitchell (George Cooper) and hateful bigot Montgomery (Robert Ryan) are damaged men struggling to slip back into the old routine of work and marriage after being trained to kill and tackle the black-and-white moral certainties of conflict. As victim Samuels puts it: “We’re too used to fighting. But we just don’t know what to fight. You can feel the tension in the air. A whole lot of fight and hate that doesn’t know where to go.” Hence Montgomery's poisonous anti-Semitism. The man is seeking a new enemy, someone else to take the fight to and settles on the Jewish citizens he tells himself stayed at home to profiteer out of greed and cowardice ("You know the kind. Played it safe during the war, keeping themselves in civvies, nice apartments, swell dames... you know the kind"). Released the same year as the similarly themed Gentleman's Agreement starring Gregory Peck, Crossfire's moral is clear and spelled out loudly by Finlay in the film's most grandstanding scene: “Ignorant men always laugh at things that are different - things that they don’t understand. They’re afraid of things they don’t understand - they end up hating them.”

Ultimately, Crossfire is a little slow and talky for my taste but it's good intentions are undeniable. The three Roberts are all excellent and Gloria Grahame does her brazen thing as a cynical working girl unwilling to be Mitchell's alibi. Their scene, dancing together slowly in the moonlit, disused garden of an old spaghetti restaurant, must surely be one of the movies' loveliest moments.

For Dmytryk (who also made another noir classic, 1944's seminal Chandler adaptation Murder, My Sweet starring Dick Powell), the film's subject matter and particularly Montgomery's crude allusion to people with "funny names" would prove horribly prophetic. The director, US born but of Ukrainian stock, soon found himself under investigation by Joseph McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and was jailed for refusing to name names. In 1951, he was again called before HUAC and this time conceded, listing those Communist sympathisers - including Crossfire's producer Adrian Scott - who had encouraged him to include left-wing propaganda in his films. Dmytryk was then blacklisted and effectively exiled and his career never truly recovered. America had succumbed to that "tension in the air" after all.

P.S. As a bonus, here's my old favourite Vincent Price doing a public service broadcast on the same theme to accompany his contemporaneous radio detective series, The Saint. Enjoy.

Vincent Price On Racism and Religious Prejudice.mp3

The Killers (1946)

2011-07-15T20:31:00.024+01:00

Now why would these two low-lifes want to knock off a nice small-town gas jockey like Pete Lund? The Swede wasn't doing anybody any harm. Sure, his prices could've been lower and he was a little slow with a dipstick and his windscreen wiping wasn't all that hot but that's hardly enough to justify putting a pair of bullet holes through the big man's heart. "I did something wrong, once," was all Pete himself would say from his grotty deathbed. An enigma to the last, old Pete. So much so, in fact, that Pete wasn't his real name at all, as claims investigator Jim Reardon is about to find out.

Produced for Universal by Mark Hellinger and expanding upon a short story by Ernest Hemingway with a script by Anthony Veiller, Richard Brooks and an uncredited John Huston, this is the sort of noir you think about whenever anyone mentions the subject. In fact it's a kind of amalgam of all the genre's greatest hits and key touchstones. It's got a tough guy hero doomed from the start (former acrobat Burt Lancaster in his first starring role), a double-crossing dame in the vampish form of Ava Gardner, moody, desperate lighting from Elwood Bredell and surly thugs up the wazoo. Like Out Of The Past (1947), The Killers begins with a gas station attendant being confronted by old acquaintances from a period in his life he'd rather forget. Like Double Indemnity (1944), it's main character is an insurance investigator embroiled in a mystery. And like Citizen Kane (1941), it's an episodic recreation of a dead man's life told mainly in flashbacks through anecdotes recited to an audience cypher by the last people who knew the late lamented.

Lancaster is splendid as the Swede (A.K.A. Ole Andreson), a dopey, lovestruck ex-boxer prepared to do anything it takes for the wrong woman - even go to jail or stick-up a hat factory. The character is almost a matinee idol version of Moose Malloy from Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely (1940) and a million miles away from Lancaster's fiercely intellectual J.J. Hunsecker in Sweet Smell Of Success (1957). Gardner too is just the right mix of sweetheart and she-devil, manipulating the Swede on behalf of her crime boss husband - a memorably oily Albert Dekker. Although this sultry pair cornered all the marketing, it's the ever-underrated Edmond O'Brien who truly carries the film as Reardon, as principled, patient and unshowy a hero as you're ever likely to meet.

German expressionist Robert Siodmak's direction is good, the screenplay is good, the performances are good but, arguably, only the early scene in the Brentwood diner leading up to the Swede's murder is truly great. The fact that these opening moments are the only part of the whole yarn based on its source is telling (Hemingway apparently enjoyed The Killers so much he didn't drink a drop of the medicinal gin he'd taken into a preview screening, fearing the worst). The boxing scenes are strong, however, and seem an obvious inspiration for Raging Bull (1980), all flash bulbs and steam rising from lank, sweating muscle. In truth though, The Killers is a little too workmanlike for all its many qualities and style. It's not really about anything substantial and there's just something missing, some essential, undefinable something that's not there and ought to be. The stuff that dreams are made of, perhaps. A shame to admit it but, hey, it's a crowded field. There's a lot of bodies out there waiting to be turned over and the Swede's won't be the last.

Miklós Rózsa - The Killers.mp3

In A Lonely Place (1950)

2011-06-16T20:53:00.013+01:00

"I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me."

- Dix Steele

One of my favourite films of all time, no question. Humphrey Bogart stars as Dixon Steele, an embittered and highly volatile Beverley Hills scriptwriter who "hasn't written a hit since before the war". Tasked with adapting a voguish novel for the screen that he can't bear to read, Steele takes home an enthusiastic hatcheck girl, Mildred Atkinson (Martha Stewart), to recite the plot to him. When she turns up dead the next day, Dix is the obvious suspect. Questioned by police, he meets his striking new neighbour for the first time, Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), who provides him with an alibi. The pair soon find themselves falling in love and, inspired and assisted by his new muse, Steele writes his best work in years. However, with the murder still unsolved and the ongoing investigation hanging over the couple, can Laurel really love a man whose violent temper frightens her so?

Like the earlier Nicholas Ray-Bogart collaboration Knock On Any Door (1949), this baby was produced for Columbia Pictures by Bogie's own Santana Productions (named after his favourite boat). The star's old friend Edmund H. North was assigned to adapt the source, a 1947 thriller by Dorothy B. Hughes, with screenwriter Andrew Solt and the resulting film, originally titled Behind This Mask, is a beautifully fraught, deeply emotional little noir full of pain, resentment, doubt and distrust. Unusually for this blackest of genres, the crime itself takes a back seat to the explosive, intense and sad romance between Dix and Laurel, two damaged people prepared to allow hope to triumph over experience and let love in one last time. He is a fundamentally good man - loyal to his friends like washed up brandy soak Charlie Waterman (Robert Warwick, another old chum who had mentored Bogie in his early theatre days) and beloved by his agent (Art Smith) - but one tragically unable to control himself in the heat of the moment. She is a failed actress - scared of commitment and on the run from a real estate dealer who tried to tie her down with a proposal. Both are as doomed as anyone else in American noir and know it but, for a few weeks, dare to believe otherwise and it breaks your heart to watch them self-destruct. Their redemption can only ever be temporary because of their respective compulsions towards brutality and suspicion.

Ray deserves enormous credit for having the courage to jettison his own original ending, which would have seen Dix strangle Laurel in a fit of rage and find himself cuffed at his typewriter just as he puts the finishing touches to his magnum opus. The director realised this was cornball stuff and had his leads improvise a far more plausible, adult conclusion in which Steele simply walks out on the last good thing that's ever likely to happen to him. The leads are on top form here, with former silent starlet Louise Brooks famously hailing her pal's performance as the closest he ever came to committing his real persona to celluloid. The ever-luminous Gloria Grahame is as lovely as always, having beaten Lauren Bacall and Ginger Rogers to the part (though Mrs B was contractually bound to Warner Brothers at the time), and managed to turn in one of her best ever performances in spite of the fact that her marriage to the director was disintegrating all around her during shooting after she was discovered in bed with Ray's teenage son.

The Bridge On The River Kwai (1957)

2011-06-04T12:02:00.016+01:00

David Lean, Alec Guinness and Sessue Hayakawa enjoy a joke on location during the shooting of this sumptuous, Oscar-gathering World War II epic from the British director of Brief Encounter (1945) and Lawrence Of Arabia (1962). The film's location shoot in Colombo, Sri Lanka, was not always this cosy, however. The climate proved unbearably humid and riddled with poisonous pests, the film's assistant director John Kerrison was killed in an auto smash and its director and star feuded constantly over how best to interpret the character of their protagonist but the results more than justified everyone's efforts.

I've recently signed on to write some reviews and short features for Blockbuster (which will appear here soon) and am already finding it difficult to get in through my own front door because of all the free Blu-rays they keep sending me to write about. Sigh. It's a hard life. Anyway, The Bridge On The River Kwai represents part of one of my first assignments and I'm glad as it's one of those films I've never quite found time for in the past. However, it turns out to be a gorgeous piece of work and one that has now been so beautifully restored from the original negative that you can almost feel the lush jungle foliage closing in all around you and the sweltering sun blistering your skin through sweat-soiled khaki.

Lean's film is a fictionalised account of the building of the Burmese Railway by Japan's prisoners of war in 1943, based on a 1952 novel by Frenchman Pierre Boulle, author of Planet Of The Apes (1963), adapted for the screen by the then blacklisted Carl Foreman of High Noon (1952) fame. The script had passed from Alexander Korda's London Films to Sam Spiegel's Horizon Films after the Hungarian director decided the subject matter had little mass appeal and would prove problematic. Over the years Lean's work has certainly accumulated criticism for its failure to accurately convey the squalid conditions of the territory's bamboo labour camps or the brutal treatment meted out to Allied soldiers by their captors but it remains a stunning human drama nevertheless. Guinness, returning to Lean's side after a brace of brilliant Charles Dickens adaptations in the forties, Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948), is absolutely unforgettable as Lieutenant Colonel Nicholson, a man who's stiff upper lip is so immovable that he is quite prepared to starve to death "as a matter of principle" over the treatment of his officers by his nemesis, the utterly compromised, impotent and ultimately doomed Colonel Saito (Hayakawa). Nicholson refuses to surrender his faith in military discipline, order and "civilisation", even as his copy of the Geneva Convention is slapped from his hand and he finds himself dragged off to face days upon days of dehydration and solitary confinement. "Do not speak to me of rules. This is war! This is not a game of cricket!" cries the uncomprehending Saito but he is soon forced to accept the Englishman's terms in order to ensure his hopeless project is completed. For Nicholson, the titular bridge soon becomes an obsession - a monument to the redoubtable spirit of his battalion and Great British engineering as well as a means of keeping up his men's proud sense of identity as soldiers rather than broken-down slaves in the face of oppression. So monomaniacal is his fixation with the construction that he finally loses self-control and attacks William Holden's US Naval Commander Shears as he attempts to blow it up but Nicholson's death, in which he falls lifelessly onto the detonator, destroying his masterpiece, must be one of the greatest in cinema and is as revelatory in its way as Captain Ahab's.

Orson Welles, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Fred Zinneman and William Wyler were all attached to direct at various stages during pre-production and David Lean was ultimately only selected because of an "absence of anybody else", according to gruff producer Spiegel. Similarly, Charles Laughton, Noël Coward, Ray Milland, Anthony Quayle, James Mason, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Ronald Colman and Ralph Richardson were all considered for the part of Nicholson ahead of the Oscar-winning Guinness. The production's real winner, however, proved to be Holden, who took home 10% of the box office takings on top of his appearance fee, a move that made the actor very rich indeed.

While it might be tempting to compare The Bridge On The River Kwai with other wartime jungle epics such as John Huston's The African Queen (1951) or Apocalypse Now (1979), it perhaps most closely resembles Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo (1982) as a portrait of one man's descent into madness as a result of a deranged determination to build a major piece of infrastructure in impossible terrain. The scene in which the bridge finally does explode in a shower of fire and splinters also recalls the extraordinary Civil War train wreck in Buster Keaton's The General (1926). Finally, Lean's film is highly recommended to fans of HBO's recent hit miniseries The Pacific (2010), which dealt with the broader context of Second World War combat in south east Asia.

My Man Godfrey (1936)

2011-05-30T08:02:00.005+01:00

The magnificently arch Jean Dixon and William Powell sprucing up a hangover cure with a "counter-irritant" for batty lady of the house Angelica Bullock (Alice Brady) in Gregory La Cava's hysterical My Man Godfrey for Universal. Powell had been brought in on loan from MGM for the part and, after reading Morrie Ryskind's script, insisted that he be joined by Carol Lombard. The actor knew Lombard was right for the material and was prepared to overlook the fact that they'd gotten divorced three years earlier for the good of the film. A great call as both prove to be pitch-perfect.

The Depression-set story is a simple one. When "Park Avenue brats" Angelica (Lombard) and Cornelia Bullock (Gail Patrick) set out on a drunken society scavenger hunt they are asked to bring back a "forgotten man" to win top prize. They find just such a down-and-out at the city dump in the person of the mysterious Godfrey Park (Powell). He takes exception to the game's poor taste and to being patronised by Cornelia and promptly shoves her into an ash pile. Immediately endeared to this bewhiskered bum, the ditzier and younger Angelica apologies and Godfrey agrees to accompany her to the finishing line so that she can trump her snide sister. Angelica wins out and realises she's falling in love with Godfrey so spontaneously offers him a job as the family butler, an offer he's in no position to refuse. But who is this dapper, Harvard-educated fellow serving cocktails to the kooky, irresponsible, free-spending Bullock clan and what's he really up to?

The leads are impeccable, the script top notch, the direction inventive and the character performances out of this world. Mad matriarch Brady is lovely, Eugene Pallette as her put-upon husband is a scream and Mischa Auer's gorilla impression just has to be seen to be believed. The actor often played comic Russians in comedies of this period (see also Frank Capra's You Can't Take It With You, 1938) but was rarely better than here as Brady's "protégé", a kept man who spends more time eating than composing. Englishman Alan Mowbray also makes an appearance as an old college friend of the suave Godfrey and plays it surprisingly straight, especially when you recall his barn-storming turn as boozy actor Granville Thorndyke in John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946). Also keep your eyes peeled for Jane Wyman, Franklin Pangborn and Grady Sutton in minor supporting roles but it's Powell and Lombard's comic romance that gives the film such heart. Thank goodness their separation proved amicable!

You Can't Take It With You (1938)

2011-05-29T18:16:00.014+01:00

This slightly preachy, stage-bound, overlong screwball comedy may not quite be up there with Frank Capra's best work but it still has plenty to recommend it. Rather in the spirit of George Cukor's Holiday, released the same year, Capra's adaptation of the Pulitzer-winning George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart play tells the story of class cross'd lovers Anthony Kirby Jr (Jimmy Stewart) and Alice Sycamore (Jean Arthur). He's the son of a stuffed shirt Wall Street munitions tycoon (Edward Arnold) who's hoping to buy up the neighbourhood where her madcap family reside in order to knock it down and build a timely factory. She's Jr's secretary and the object of his snooty mother's disdain. Things get worse for the pair when her free-spirited grandfather (Lionel Barrymore) refuses to sell up at any price and the Kirby's arrive a night early for dinner with the Sycamores, their prospective in-laws. The snobs find themselves in a world of ballerinas, xylophones, harmonicas, Russian dancing masters, ditzy novelists, ape masks, experimental firecrackers and amateur wrestling and begin to have grave doubts about their son's choice of bride.

Not quite as anarchic or zany as might have been intended at the time, You Can't Take It With You wades through Capra's usual themes of anti-capitalism, community and the pursuit of happiness in predictably syrupy fashion. The scene below in which Barrymore ticks off Arnold while the pair are locked up in the drunk tank is a pretty classic example of the sort of tub-thumping the director handled with much greater panache in other Stewart vehicles such as Mr Smith Goes To Washington (1939) or It's A Wonderful Life (1946). This sort of rhetoric from Barrymore's Grandpa Vanderhof would all be easier to swallow if the script addressed just how it is that this man has been able to survive in retirement for 30 years, supporting an entire extended family and assorted hangers-on in their various artistic endeavours, without any obvious source of income whatsoever. He can't have saved all that much just from dodging his income taxes. As British novelist Graham Greene wrote of the character in a contemporary review of the film for The Spectator, "Like the British Empire, he has retired from competition with a full purse." Greene was otherwise exasperated by the film and said, "The director emerges as a rather muddled and sentimental idealist who feels - vaguely - that something is wrong with the social system... it is useless to trying to analyse the idea behind Capra films: there is no idea that you'd notice only a sense of dissatisfaction, an urge to escape... one prefers Wall Street". Ouch!

However, I would argue that it's pretty disingenuous to pick holes in a film with this much native charm. Stewart and Arthur are as lovely a team here as they would be in Mr Smith and are a particular delight learning to dance the "Big Apple" with a gaggle of precocious street kids before causing havoc in a posh eatery with complaints about non-existent rats. Also of interest is their surprisingly prophetic conversation below in which Stewart's Tony Kirby appears to anticipate the discovery of solar power.

A final aspect of the film worth keeping an eye out for is the screen debut of a key Capra stock player - Jimmy the raven. This is the same avian actor that appeared in the likes of It's A Wonderful Life and Arsenic & Old Lace (1944) and, allegedly, 600 other movies, if his trainer Curly Twiford is to be believed.

The Palm Beach Story (1942)

2011-05-15T19:03:00.021+01:00

Here's another finely scripted comedy from Preston Sturges' early Forties purple patch - a screwball caper about good wife Gerry Jeffers (Claudette Colbert) who decides to run away from her unsuccessful architect spouse Thomas (Joel McCrea) to get a divorce so that she can marry a millionaire and thus help her estranged ex fund a pioneering urban airport project he has so far failed to get off the ground. Tom, however, is understandably not too keen on this scheme as he happens to still be in love with her in spite of his financial woes. He gives chase, following Gerry down from New York to Florida in time to find her in the arms of one of the richest men in America, the meek, generous but terminally serious John D. "Snoodles" Hackensacker III (crooner Rudy Vallee). Gerry is all set to carry out her gold-digging exercise while Tom soon finds himself the object of Hackensacker's sister's affections, the serial wedder and maneater Princess Centimillia (Mary Astor). But will Gerry go through with her Indecent Proposal-esque plot or will the quarrelling lovers find a way to live happily ever after after all?

"Sex always has something to do with it, dear", smiles Colbert to jealous husband McCrea early on, a shockingly frank attitude for a film of this vintage to be striking and further proof of the ahead-of-his-time genius of Sturges. Indeed, an early draft of what was then titled Is Marriage Necessary? was nixed by the Hays Office because of its irreverent and salacious content. 17 years before Billy Wilder's Some Like it Hot, Sturges was sending his heroine out to the Sunshine State on the trail of an ageing tycoon to manipulate into marriage in order to secure herself a comfortable future. Like Marilyn Monroe's Sugar Kowalcyzk in that film, Gerry's behaviour is not treated as cruelly cynical but rather as an endearingly pragmatic and self-sacrificing solution to a problem from which everyone concerned benefits. Everyone, that is, except Thomas, whose pursuit of his wife shades The Palm Beach Story with real pathos. His emasculated frustrations as a creative professional unable to realise his designs or provide for his wife are all too believable and the thought of his losing her for the sake of the rent is a genuinely devastating one.

Sexual politics aside, there are some splendid comedy turns to enjoy here, my favourite being Robert Dudley's stone deaf Texas Wienie King, Gerry's unlikely fairy godmother who tells her that the secret to success in the sausage industry is having a secret source of cheap meat and warns her against the product that made his fortune: "Stay off 'em, you'll live longer". The meddlesome Ale and Quail Club are also a hoot, a collection of Sturges stock players who board a train south from Penn Station and proceed to get roaring drunk, shoot out the windows, serenade Colbert with a glee club rendition of 'Sweet Adeline' and send out a hunting posse roaming through the aisles complete with shotguns and beagles, all before their carriage is quietly disconnected and abandoned on the line so that the boys can sleep it off. The Palm Beach Story's twist ending is also as laugh-out-loud funny as it is unexpected and how about this as an example of Sturges' white hot poison pen: "Don't you know that the greatest men in the world have told lies and let things be misunderstood if it was useful to them? Didn't you ever hear of a campaign promise?"

Among the leads, McCrea is as reliable as ever, Colbert is just too gorgeous to be real and Mary Astor of The Maltese Falcon (1941) fame is delightful as the motormouth sister ("Nothing is permanent in this world except Roosevelt, dear") whose every step is dogged by her absurd but persistent foreign suitor Toto (Sig Arno). Vallee is also suprisingly good as the shy playboy - adept at physical comedy in a scene with Colbert involving bunk berths and broken glasses - and otherwise charming and in control, delivering such lines as the following with pananche: "That's one of the tragedies of this life - that the men who are most in need of a beating up are always enormous." It's just a shame that his inevitable musical numbers feel too much like a contrivance and intrude upon the whip smart story.

P.S. To those who criticise Preston Sturges' films for their treatment of black characters - both here and in Sullivan's Travels (1943), bug-eyed black servant stereotypes are subjected to indignities in transit involving flying objects for comic relief - I would point to the case of Fred Toones, who plays George the club car bartender in The Palm Beach Story. Any black actor happy to be credited simply as "Snowflake" must have been well aware of the realities of the game he was in at that time.

Sullivan's Travels (1941)

2011-05-07T14:24:00.018+01:00

"To the memory of those who made us laugh: the motley mountebanks, the clowns, the buffoons, in all times and in all nations, whose efforts have lightened our burden a little, this picture is affectionately dedicated."
- Preston Sturges, Dedication To Sullivan's Travels

The Coen Brothers took the title for their Depression-set Homeric picaresque O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) from this splendid Preston Sturges satire for Paramount about an idealistic Hollywood director who sets out to experience life in the raw so that he can make a "socially significant" film about poverty in America instead of his usual studio musicals and comedy showcases. Sick of churning out crowd-pleasing guff like Ants In Your Pants Of 1939, John L. Sullivan (former stuntman Joel McCrea) promises that his forthcoming opus O Brother, Where Art Thou? (apparently an adaptation of a serious novel by one "Sinclair Beckstein") will be "a commentary on modern conditions", full of "stark realism" and the "problems that confront the average man", "a true canvas of the suffering of humanity... With a little sex in it".

Against the advice of his cigar-puffing superiors (Robert Warwick, William Demarest and Franklin Pangborn) and starchy butlers (specialists Robert Grieg and Eric Blore), the wealthy Sullivan picks up his hobo bindle and hits the road, hopping freight trains and sleeping rough with the delectable Veronica Lake in tow, a failed actress he befriends over ham and eggs in a diner. The pair bond further over coffee and "sinkers", push each other into swimming pools and end up in jail before realising they could get used to one another if only Sullivan was able to ditch his gold-digging wife, whom he doesn't love and only married as a tax dodge on the recommendation of a crooked business manager. At the close, Sullivan's sentimental journey of self-discovery has taught him an important lesson about the human condition and the true value of comedy as a unifying source of strength and consolation in a hard and unforgiving world.

Sturges' film is an absolute joy from start to finish. This baby really has it all - dialogue so cynical and sharp it'll give you a papercut, a treasure trove of hysterical character performances, athletic physical pratfalls from the leads and a killer car chase involving a studio support truck and a 13 year-old boy racer. Sullivan's Travels is also an invaluable document of the sights and sounds of down-and-out 1940's America, the scene below in which a chain gang visits a black Southern church to watch a Pluto cartoon being a particularly beautiful record of a lost time and place.

Stagecoach (1939)

2011-05-02T18:08:00.024+01:00

Here's a nice still of the cast of Stagecoach lining up in full costume for a United Artists publicity shot around the time of the film's release. Claire Trevor, John Wayne and Andy Devine on the left look relaxed enough but some of their co-stars seem oddly reluctant to break character.

There's really not a great deal left to say about John Ford's first sound Western other than that it's now available in the public domain and can thus be seen in its entirety below. It is of course famous for finally making Wayne a star despite the fact that it was actually his 83rd screen outing, the actor having toiled away and honed his craft in bit-parts and B-movies since 1926.

What is perhaps most interesting to modern audiences about this microcosmic fable though, in which allegorical types battle Injuns and the "foul disease of social prejudice" during a perilous journey from Tonto, Arizona, to Lordsburg, New Mexico, is not so much its class-bound themes (though the Lady's League of Law and Order is memorably horrible). Rather, it is the all-too topical pronouncements of Berton Churchill's pompous and ultimately corrupt, hypocritical and cowardly banker, Henry Gatehouse. This crooked embezzler, only taking the Overland Stage in the first place in order to flee town with a $50,000 stash of stolen savings, insists that "What's good for the banks is good for the country!" and later foams forth a rant that is worth repeating in full:

"I don't know what the government is coming to. Instead of protecting businessmen, it pokes its nose into business! Why, they're even talking now about having bank examiners. As if we bankers don't know how to run our own banks! Why, at home I have a letter from a popinjay official saying they were going to inspect my books. I have a slogan that should be emblazoned on every newspaper in this country: America for the Americans! The government must not interfere with business! Reduce taxes! Our national debt is something shocking. Over one billion dollars a year! What this country needs is a businessman for president!"

One can't help feeling that there are as many Gatehouse's alive and well in America today as there were in 1880 or in the Depression-haunted thirties when this speech was written. This sort of detail makes Stagecoach feels like an oddly left-wing film for John Ford to have made: news of the Republican Convention even gets dropped entirely from the Lordsburg newspaper's front page in favour of a splash on the Ringo Kid's Main Street stand-off with Luke Plummer.

Scripted by Dudley Nichols and Ben Hecht from a 1937 Collier's story by Ernest Haycox, Stagecoach is packed with brilliant character performances throughout from the likes of genre stalwarts Wayne, Thomas Mitchell and Devine but special mention should really go to several others. Trevor is tremendously moving as Dallas, the film's tart-with-a-heart and the object of Ringo's affections, John Carradine does well in expanding upon an otherwise one-dimensional goateed Southern gambler part and Donald Meek is on hysterical form as the quivering whisky salesman Samuel Peacock/Hancock. Meek's double act with the perpetually sozzled Mitchell as philosopher and sometime medic Doc Josiah Boone is a joy, especially when the latter is tucking his friend carefully into his seat in order to silence objection as he sets about draining the man's entire sample case. Meek is also funny donning a deerstalker hat in terror as soon as the possibility of Apache scalpings is mentioned. The stunts are astonishingly impressive too and all the better for being real rather than CGI concoctions, most notably the river crossing and climactic chase across the plains under attack from Geronimo's braves.

As for the Winchester-wielding Wayne, well, as soon as Ford's camera zooms in on his youthful face you know you're looking at a legend in the making.

The Haunting (1963)

2011-04-03T11:54:00.022+01:00

Oh come on ladies, it's really not as frightening as all that. Robert Wise's psychological horror is one of those films I just don't get. Serious critics, including such heavyweights as Pauline Kael and Martin Scorsese, have always raved about how terrifying it is with apparent sincerity, but how anyone could regard it as anything other than tame, clichéd and downright boring is entirely beyond me.

I think what really grinds my gears about The Haunting is that it remains the first title most people think of when asked to name a strangers-in-a-haunted-house ghost story and Wise's film is simply too oafish to deserve the honour. The idea that it is somehow more sophisticated than other films in its genre because it depends upon sound effects for shocks rather than ghoulish rubber costumes simply doesn't hold up. To my mind it offers one genuine scare - a standard face-at-the-window moment when the lost Grace Markway (Lois Maxwell) appears suddenly through a trapdoor at the top of the library's rickety spiral staircase - which is, frankly, old hat, reliant entirely on visual impact and occurs after nearly 90 minutes of very little indeed. Meanwhile Nelson Gidding's script (based on Shirley Jackson's 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House) repeatedly punctures any hard-won tension the film has managed to drum up with unfunny comic bits, as when Richard Johnson's Dr Markway accidentally walks into a broom closet. The film is occasionally unintentionally amusing, however, usually because of some unconvincing bit of acting - the ludicrous accent adopted by Valentine Dyall as surly groundskeeper Mr Dudley being a fine example. Aside from these faults, the director spends way too much of the film's running time having his actors wandering about saying ominous things or making obvious, melodramatic pronouncements to help the hard of thinking interpret their characters. Perhaps the worst offender on this score is Rosalie Crutchley as Dyall's housekeeper wife, who immediately pounces upon poor Eleanor (Julie Harris) with this deliciously overblown warning:

"I don't stay after I set out the dinner. Not after it begins to get dark. I leave before the dark comes... We live over in town, miles away. So there won't be anyone around if you need help. We couldn't hear you... in the night. No one could..."

Dun-dun-derrr! The stagy delivery of such lines actually mirrors Humphrey Searle's score, which makes just such a flourish whenever Wise treats us to an exterior shot of the film's sub-Addams Family Gothic pile, all turrets and towers. Yawn.

Harris is asked to carry much of the dramatic burden and actually gets better as the film goes on, the actress clearly happier playing spooked-out than she is doing a repressed shrew turn. The house "wants" her, Claire Bloom's sensual medium tries to reinvent her with a makeover while the girl herself is clearly attracted to the ultimately rather selfish (and married) Dr Markway. OK, ok, but do we really, really care about the spiritual awakening of this tedious neurotic? As for Bloom, who is considerably more interesting as a polo-necked vamp, there's plenty of heavy hinting about her character's sexuality and possible attraction to the timid Eleanor but it all comes across as rather prurient in a naff, sensationalist sort of way. When Bloom's Theo rejects the advances of Russ Tamblyn - as the gauche playboy only interested in Hill House as prime real estate - Dr Markway intervenes and asks, "What's going on here?" "More than meets the eye..." Tamblyn answers with a knowing nudge-nudge, wink-wink. Oo-er missus!

It's all a bit of a shame as there's the ghost of a decent film here stalking the halls, rattling the door knobs and casting an eerie shadow. Wise is often unfairly maligned as a journeyman director (his CV featuring everything from The Body Snatcher, 1945, to West Side Story, 1961, and The Sound Of Music, 1965) but he shows real flair and invention at times, making inspired use of mirrors, finding unusual angles to shoot from and sending the camera tumbling down the stairs to represent the point-of-view of the second Mrs Crane falling to her death. The director clearly learned something from Orson Welles when he served as editor on Citizen Kane (1941). The lush monochrome cinematography by Davis Boulton is also lovely and worthy of note. In the end though, The Haunting is just too long, too talky and, when it finally does reach a conclusion, at long last, too rushed. Maddening.

If you want a decent haunted house movie, for god's sake give this wildly overrated film a wide berth and don't even think about Jan De Bont's utterly unnecessary 1999 remake starring Liam Neeson, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Owen Wilson. Why settle for this when you could read The Turn Of The Screw (1898) or see the unashamedly silly B-movie House On Haunted Hill (1959), Stanley Kubrick's masterful take on The Shining (1980), Beetlejuice (1988) or Spanish director J.P. Bayona's unbelievably creepy allegory The Orphanage (2007)? Like an unquiet spirit, The Haunting has outstayed its welcome and is badly in need of exorcising. A surprisingly versatile genre has suffered under its malign influence for far too long.

Anatomy Of A Murder (1959)

2011-03-26T16:08:00.027Z

Jimmy Stewart and Duke Ellington rocking out in a scene from Otto Preminger's ace courtroom slanging match Anatomy Of A Murder, for which Ellington supplied the snappy jazz score.

Notorious for the controversy it stirred up on release over the use of such shocking words as "rape", "panties" and "spermatogenesis", Preminger's film tells of former district attorney Paul Biegler (Stewart), a small-town lawyer happily spending his twilight years in Michigan's scenic Upper Peninsula fly-fishing, playing bebop records and drinking away the long summer evenings with his alcoholic partner Parnell McCarthy (Arthur Connell) and wry secretary Maida (Eve Arden). Biegler's sleepy, Rockwellian idyll is interrupted, however, when he is contacted by trailer park femme fatale Laura Mannion (Lee Remick, perhaps best known for her performance as Katherine Thorn in The Omen, 1976), who asks him to defend her soldier husband, Lieutenant Frederick Mannion (Ben Gazzara), accused of murdering the local bartender who raped her, Barney Quill. Biegler is tempted by the high-profile nature of the case and the chance to run up against the man who succeeded him in office, Mitch Lodwick (Brooks West, Arden's real husband), but has doubts about both Mannions: the overtly promiscuous Laura and her shifty, aggressive spouse, clearly prone to outbursts of rage. Eventually Biegler agrees to take the case on the understanding that Mannion will enter a temporary insanity plea. Matters soon heat up at the trial when Lodwick brings in a ringer, Claude Dancer (George C. Scott), an assistant to the state's attorney general and a formidable opponent with more than a few tricks nestling up his immaculately-tailored sleeve.

A class act all the way, from its Saul Bass opening credits onwards, Preminger's Anatomy Of A Murder is as good a legal drama as you'll see and gives 1957's earnest 12 Angry Men a run for its money. There's not a bad performance in its entire 160 minute running time - from Stewart, Scott and Gazzara to Murray Hamilton as unfriendly witness Alphonse Paquette - but special mention has to go to Joseph N. Welch as the infinitely patient and delightfully droll Judge Weaver. Welch really was a judge, rather than an actor, and had come to the world's attention following his heroic performance representing the US army against Senator Joseph McCarthy in a series of 1954 hearings conducted by the US Senate's Subcommittee on Investigations, in which Welch famously asked McCarthy, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" a fruitful line of inquiry that was greeted with wild applause from the gallery. As a thespian, Welch beat Burl Ives and Spencer Tracy to the role of Judge Weaver and makes it his own. Lee Remick is also wonderfully slutty in a part she only won after Lana Turner refused to appear in tight slacks and slapped Preminger for the suggestion. Laura's first meeting with Biegler is underscored by a knowing alto sax riff from Ellington's main man Johnny Hodges while the film's closing shot, of her abandoned shoe hanging out of a garbage can, says it all.

Wendell Mayes's screenplay was based on a best-selling 1958 novel of the same name by Robert Traver, the pen name of Michigan Supreme Court Justice John D. Voelker, who in turn had taken inspiration from a real-life homicide that took place at the Lumberjack Tavern in Big Bay, Michigan, in 1952 and the subsequent legal fallout in which Voelker became professionally embroiled.

The script and source are both sharp and coolly cynical about the realities of major court cases, arguing that they rely too heavily on subjective human judgement and interpretation and can easily descend into personality contests. Biegler and Dancer both understand that the whole shooting match is vulnerable to manipulation, that attorneys can sway jurors with showbiz pizazz, wisecracks and rhetoric and that a well constructed argument is only one aspect of the game. The former is deliberately provocative throughout the film's lengthy trial scenes, making inflammatory statements, histrionic gestures and asking questions he knows will be objected to by the prosecution because he understands that winning Mannion's case is really a matter of performance, of battling for the hearts and minds of an audience, much like an actor. "How can a jury disregard what it's already heard?" asks the defendant of his counsel. "They can't", Biegler replies with a smile. Similarly, he wryly paints himself as, "just a humble country lawyer doing the best I can against the brilliant prosecutor from the big city of Lansing", much to the chagrin of his city slicker opponent, who is equally not above physically standing between a witness and their counsel in order to stifle communication. As Biegler's boozy colleague Parnell puts it:

"Twelve people go off into a room: twelve different minds, twelve different hearts, from twelve different walks of life; twelve sets of eyes, ears, shapes, and sizes. And these twelve people are asked to judge another human being as different from them as they are from each other. And in their judgment, they must become of one mind - unanimous. It's one of the miracles of Man's disorganised soul that they can do it, and in most instances, do it right well. God bless juries."

Ultimately, we are left unsure of whether Barney Quill's rape of Laura was really just that, a non-consensual violation, the circumstances surrounding his violent death having occurred some time before the events of Preminger's film. At its close, Biegler has argued the facts available to him logically and to the best of his ability and won the case but since the Mannions have skipped town without paying their bill it looks like they had something to hide after all. Maybe some people are just trash.

Duke Ellington - Theme From Anatomy Of A Murder

The Abominable Dr Phibes (1971)

2011-03-19T12:59:00.020Z

I don't know if the term "Swingin' Gothic" has been coined yet but that's about the best I can come up with to describe this self-consciously ridiculous, pre-slasher Seventies horror comedy starring Vincent Price. Set in mid-1920's London, the eponymous evil genius (Price) is out to avenge the death of his wife on the poor surgeons who were unable to save her life following a bad car wreck. Seizing upon a second auto accident (yep) to fake his own death, Phibes, a famous organist and theological scholar now badly scarred beneath a rubber mask and unable to talk, holes himself away in a bizarre art deco mansion and contrives to murder the doctors involved one by one in the style of the Old Testament's ten plagues of Egypt - bees, bats, rats, locusts, darkness etc. Comic relief Detective Inspector Trout (Peter Jeffrey) of Scotland Yard is on the case but can he stop the madman before he slays a good portion of England's jobbing character actors?

The opening credits of this enjoyably silly Phantom of the Opera variation from director Robert Fuest (who went on to shoot episodes of TV's The New Avengers, 1976-77) and shlock producers Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson tell you all you need to know. The scene opens on a hooded Price hammering and flailing away at some Mendelssohn on a levitating, neon red grand organ in suitably tormented fashion while an aviary of stuffed birds and a mechanical orchestra ('Dr Phibes' Clockwork Wizards') look on blankly. The more we see of Phibes' lair the more alarming things get - decked out in lavender and rose drapes with gold trimmings, all ugly statuary and floor-lit faux-marble staircases, the place seems to have been designed not so much by Phibes but someone even more ghastly and demented: Laurence Llewellyn Bowen. It later transpires that Phibes' idiosyncratic tastes extend to being chauffeured around in a jalopy that has his face sketched onto its blacked-out windows by a mute chick in knee high boots and furs who insists on playing a mournful violin whenever anyone gets murdered. Okaaay... By the time you see this kooky pair carting around golden wheelbarrows full of sprouts and cabbages with which to concoct their latest ludicrously convoluted homicide, you've probably just about given up on questioning the logic of this daftest of films entirely.

However, the forced eccentricity and plodding surrealism of the execution aside, The Abominable Dr Phibes actually has plenty to recommend it. There are good turns from Jeffrey and Hugh Griffith as a suspiciously Welsh rabbi in a cobwebbed synagogue, plus an all-too-brief cameo from Terry-Thomas as a leching physician who can't wait for his housekeeper to take the night off so that he can get back to swilling brandy and cranking his projector (ahem) over some saucy belly-dancing films before Phibes breaks in and drains his body entirely of blood. The great Joseph Cotten looks more than a little tired in a supporting role but its nice to see him all the same. There's also some well observed British class satire on show, as when an elderly aristocrat in a gentleman's club complains irritably about the noise, before bristling his moustache and returning to his newspaper, as two policeman try to quietly aid a man impaled through the chest by a brass unicorn bust.

As a horror film, Phibes acts as a homage to some of the krazier excesses of the genre from its 1930s heyday (when films like Karl Freund's Mad Love were doing the rounds) but it also anticipates the Biblically-inspired ritual killing of David Fincher's Se7en (1995) and the ingeniously gory death traps of the more recent Saw franchise (2003-10), mostly obviously in the scene where Cotten must perform emergency heart surgery on his son to retrieve a key but also in the head-crushing frog mask donned by an unsuspecting psychiatrist at Phibes's gala ball. A cruel joke on a self-proclaimed "head shrinker". Meanwhile Phibes's grand unveiling at the film's conclusion, where we are finally treated to the full extent of his horrific deformity, also reveals an obvious inspiration for Wes Craven's Freddie Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984).

Price is clearly having fun with a character that almost serves as an amalgam of his many great horror roles - think of his Prince Prospero in Roger Corman's The Masque of the Red Death (1964) and Matthew Hopkins in Michael Reeves's Witchfinder General (1968) - though the premise squanders the actor's usual expressive style and plummy voice, which is only ever heard via a tinny gramophone recording. Price would return to the role a year later in a sequel, Dr Phibes Rises Again!, and also appeared in another rather similar British production in 1973, Theatre of Blood, in which he played a stage actor who assassinates his critics in increasingly elaborate ways borrowed from Shakespeare plays. Phibes meanwhile lives on through various punk tributes by bands such as the Misfits and the Damned and indirectly via recent interpretations of the Batman villain Victor Freeze, whose tragic wife-on-ice backstory can be traced back to poor old Anton Phibes and his embalmed other half.

The Outlaw (1943)

2011-03-12T15:19:00.014Z

The late Jane Russell, who passed away last month aged 89, got her big break in this weird RKO Western produced and directed by mad aviation tycoon Howard Hughes, with a little help from an uncredited Howard Hawks. The famously buxom Russell was featured prominently on the film's poster artwork (above) and in its publicity campaign but, in truth, her role as a feisty Mexican love interest is fairly minor and doesn't stand up well in comparison with Linda Darnell's similar Chihuahua in the John Ford classic My Darling Clementine (1946). However, Russell's bountiful rack is showcased at every possible opportunity by Hughes and was the cause of a two-year delay in The Outlaw's release, as censors objected to the sheer amount of screen time devoted to the Russell assets, leading to much wrangling and re-cutting. The controversy was in turn put to good use by the studio PR department, however, and, eventually, a star was born.

The film itself is really a bizarro, oddly gay, male relationship melodrama about the burgeoning friendship between ageing bandit Doc Holliday (Walter Huston) and hip young gunslinger Billy the Kid (Jack Buetel, a dead ringer for narcissistic Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo), the cause of no little frustration to Doc's oldest pal, the jealous lawman of Lincoln, New Mexico, Pat Garrett (professional Irishman and fan favourite Thomas Mitchell). The story itself is pretty slight - Doc and Billy bond over a stolen horse, bicker with a local deputy, hide out when the Kid takes a bullet from Garrett and then feud good and proper over Russell with the sheriff on their tail. Er, that's it.

Gregg Toland's cinematography is attractive and the direction by Hughes is accomplished enough, even if there is the occasional strange moment - as when we are presented with an empty shot of a door frame while Victor Young's score swells bombastically or shown a slow-motion close-up of Russell's chin for no apparent reason - but quite what screenwriters Jules Furthman and Ben Hecht (again, uncredited) were getting at is anyone's guess. The less-than-subtle Freudian subtexts are too half-arsed to have much bearing. Nevertheless, Walter Huston, father of legendary director John, is fun as an older, wiser Doc Holliday than Victor Mature played in Clementine, Mitchell gets to be a little more menacing than usual and Buetel is surprisingly good in the lead, portraying the legendary outlaw as a preternaturally self-possessed young man all too used to relying on his own wits and trigger finger.

The Outlaw is ultimately an interesting failure (even the date on Doc's grave is wrong) but worth a punt anyway to see what all the fuss was about back in 1943. I'd rate it narrowly ahead of the disappointing Sam Peckinpah take on the same characters, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), starring James Coburn, Kris Kristofferson and Bob Dylan, but perhaps that's not saying much. The Outlaw also now happens to find itself in the public domain, so you can watch it in full below. Do so.

Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

2011-02-26T12:16:00.024Z

"Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann'd:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad".

- Christina Rossetti, 'Remember' (1862)

Pulp crime novelist Mickey Spillane is said to have hated this brutal, paranoid, atomic age adaptation of his 1952 mystery novella as a left-wing sabotaging of his work but Robert Aldrich's thriller remains a rollicking good ride well worth seeking out for its great lead and apocalyptic ending, in which noir meets science fiction for the first time. Ralph Meeker - somewhere between Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando and Charlton Heston - plays Mike Hammer, Spillane's ultimate conservative male fantasy of a tough guy hero, as a violent sadist and pimp, a deceptive "bedroom dick" anti-hero for the nuclear generation several million light years away from the easy insubordination of Bogart's Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. Scriptwriter A.L. Bezzerides, a poet by day fresh off the woeful Robert Mitchum Western Track Of The Cat (1954), actually does a great job with the fairly one-dimensional source material and was in part responsible for the introduction of the eerie, radioactive Pandora's Box conceit, a plot device that has since become a cult staple through films such as Alex Cox's criminally underrated Repo Man (1984) and Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994). Aldrich took just 21 days to shoot this little honey and his economical, slapdash approach is perfect for the material. As critic Alain Silver described it, Kiss Me Deadly is full of rich texture, "speed and violence" and "records the degenerative half-life of an unstable universe as it moves towards critical mass." He's right. The white light of the final explosion at the Malibu beach house almost has a cleansing quality to it, as though the bomb can wipe away all the problems of humanity that has gone before it.

There's a wealth of strong characters actors on show here, many of whom you might recognise from elsewhere, notably Paul Stewart (Citizen Kane, 1941, The Bad & The Beautiful, 1952), Strother Martin (Cool Hand Luke, 1967), Albert Dekker (The Killers, 1946, The Wild Bunch, 1969) and Cloris Leachman (The Last Picture Show, 1971). Also worthy of praise is cinematographer Ernest Laszlo, who cooks up an L.A. underworld of shining traffic, black alleyways and lonely beaches from Wilshire Boulevard to Bunker Hill. Spillane's novel was set in New York but the transition to the West Coast finds the City of Angeles looking desperate and dingy like never before.

Above you'll see two very fine scenes from Kiss Me Deadly and below you can get Nat King Cole's splendid theme. Gee baby, ain't I good to you?

Nat King Cole - Rather Have The Blues

The Blue Dahlia (1946)

2011-01-30T15:58:00.022Z

Sticking with Raymond Chandler, his only original script as a screenwriter was this angry noir about a US navy pilot who experiences one of the worst homecomings in all of fiction. Instead of being greeted by a loving spouse, Lieutenant Commander Johnny Morrisson (Alan Ladd) returns from bombing the South Pacific to find his boozy, resentful wife Helen (Doris Dowling) making out with another man at a wild party. Not only that, but she's killed their only son in a drunken car wreck and hasn't told him. Understandably a little perturbed when he hears the news, Johnny explodes and threatens her with his service revolver, only to storm out and leave the monogrammed gun at the scene. So when Helen is found murdered the next morning, Johnny winds up chief suspect and heads out on the run, determined to find the real killer.

George Marshall's film, produced by John Houseman, is solid enough genre fair but a little lacking in surprises, truth be told. Ladd and the exceptionally beautiful Veronica Lake, appearing together for the third time after 1942's Graham Greene makeover This Gun For Hire and Dashiell Hammett adaptation The Glass Key, are good value and there's splendid support from the likes of William Bendix (best know for playing the title role in The Babe Ruth Story, 1948), a spivy Howard Da Silva and Will Wright as a blackmailing hotel detective. The Blue Dahlia's main point of interest though is how topical and insightful it is on the subject of returning veterans and their difficulties readjusting to civilian life after the psychological traumas of combat. The swing from the gangster capers of the thirties to the brooding urban nightmares of the forties was always about the haunted generation returning from the horrors of the trenches but rarely is the subject addressed as directly as in The Blue Dahlia, where the character of Buzz Wancheck (Bendix) personifies the issue. An army buddy of Johnny's discharged with shrapnel embedded in his brain, Buzz is fiercely loyal but also prone to violent migraines and bouts of amnesia. As one of the last people to see Helen Morrison alive, things are looking as bad for Buzz as they are for Johnny (and he would actually have turned out to be the guilty party had the US military not objected to that particular passage of Chandler's script). The film remains sympathetic to the disturbed Buzz, however, and deserves points both for its intelligent handling of his condition and Bendix's nicely judged performance (although his hatred of jazz, which the character repeatedly refers to as "monkey music", may not endear him to all modern audiences). Here's a nice introduction to Johnny and his pals from the beginning of the film:

Ultimately, perhaps the problem with The Blue Dahlia is that, without Chandler's original conclusion, it lacks any real social comment or narrative bite. The villains remain blackhatted mobsters and corrupt authority figures in a rather ho-hum, matter-of-fact sort of way. It's just business as usual, an efficient but too predictable off-the-peg studio thriller. However, even with the ending it does have, this need not necessarily have been the case. In a film like John Huston's Key Largo (1948), for instance, much more is made out of similar circumstances. There, the theme is very much that Bogie's returning soldier must accept the need to pick up his gun one more time, to right wrongs on the home front as well as overseas, by ridding his country of sneering hoods like Edward G. Robinson's Johnny Rocco, who dreams of dragging the promised land back to the bad old days. In The Blue Dahlia, they're just bad guys and racketeers. There's really not much more to it than that and Buzz's plight remains a sad side issue.

Double Indemnity (1944)

2011-01-29T12:29:00.018Z

Walter Neff is bleeding. Concealing a bullet wound beneath his overcoat, Neff drives recklessly through Los Angeles, swerving to miss an oncoming truck by inches. He pulls up at the Pacific All Risk Insurance building on Olive Street and staggers inside, shrugging off small talk from a suspicious elevator operator. Alone behind his desk, Neff picks up a dictaphone and begins recording a confession for his boss, paternal claims investigator Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), and so begins the sordid tale of how an easy-going insurance salesman found himself driven to murder for the love of a crooked dame in a cheap anklet and wig.

Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity is right up there with The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Big Sleep (1946) in the noir canon, a key blueprint for the genre in terms of style, iconography, plotting and characters and remains utterly, utterly seminal. Leads Fred MacMurray (only cast after the illiterate George Raft had again rejected a peach of a part), Barbara Stanwyck (then the highest paid woman in America) and Robinson are pitch-perfect and the dialogue from Wilder and legendary crime novelist Raymond Chandler positively burns. Check out the opening encounter between Neff and hell-bound housewife Phyllis Dietrichson (Stanwyck) below for a taste of that sickly sweet honeysuckle scent that drives men to murder.

Also worthy of note is Jean Heather’s very affecting performance as Phyllis’ neglected stepdaughter Lola, the magnificent expressionistic lighting and the sheer ingenuity of the conspirator’s plot. Edward G’s profound heartache in the final scene, when he lights the dying Neff’s cigarette for the first and last time, is as cute a moment as you're likely to see. In their book Hollywood In The Forties (1968), critics Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg put their fingers on one key reason the film is so effective and it's worth quoting at length: "As in Mildred Pierce, the Californian ambience is all important: winding roads through the hills leading to tall stuccoed villas in a Spanish style 30 years out of date, cold tea drunk out of tall glasses on hot afternoons, dusty downtown streets, a huge and echoing insurance office, Chinese Checkers played on long pre-television evenings by people who hate each other's guts. The film reverberates with the forlorn poetry of late sunny afternoons."

Double Indemnity was based on a 1935 novella of the same name by hard-boiled author James M. Cain, who in turn took inspiration from the real-life case of Ruth Snyder, a New Yorker who was executed at Sing Sing in 1928 for persuading her boyfriend Judd Gray to kill her husband days after the latter had taken out a hefty life insurance policy. Cain had reported on her trial in 1927 while working as a journalist and serialised his story in Liberty magazine eight years later. Cain declared himself delighted with the film adaptation and even applauded Wilder and Chandler for changing his ending, Phyllis going to the chair in Cain's version. A great compliment from a great writer and all the more impressive given that the always-ornery Chandler, then undergoing treatment for alcohol addiction, did not get on at all well with the little Austrian director. Wilder had called him in to replace his usual writing partner Charles Brackett at the last minute after Brackett took exception to the sleazy source material and the pair’s collaboration was, by all accounts, fraught. Chandler did, however, provide Wilder with the inspiration for another masterpiece - 1945’s The Lost Weekend, made to "show Chandler himself" - and appears in a brief cameo in the film, sitting on a bench outside Neff's office.

N.B. Fans of Double Indemnity are advised to check out Steve Martin’s inspired use of Wilder’s film, particularly the Jerry’s Market scenes, in Carl Reiner’s 1982 noir pastiche, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.

Scarlet Street (1945)

2010-10-10T15:34:00.009+01:00

On a rainy night in New York City, lonely, hen-pecked cashier Chris Cross (Edward G. Robinson) wanders home from a party thrown in his honour by smug boss J.J. Hogarth (Russell Hicks), a gold watch all he has to show for 25 years of loyal service. When Cross stumbles upon a man assaulting a woman beneath a street lamp, he comes to her aid, fending off the attacker with his umbrella. The girl, one Kitty March (Joan Bennett), is not entirely grateful but agrees to have a drink with Chris anyway and he soon finds himself falling helplessly in love with her. When Kitty learns that he enjoys painting and lives in Greenwich Village, she gladly consents to see him again, assuming Chris to be a famous bohemian artist. This could hardly be further from the truth. At home, Cross is emasculated and scorned by his hateful harpy of a wife Adele (Rosalind Ivan), who still dotes on her “deceased” first husband and sneers maliciously at Chris's hobby, forcing him to set up his easel in the bathroom to escape her viperish philistinism. Kitty's misunderstanding prompts her and abusive pimp boyfriend Johnny Prince (Dan Duryea) to lead the naïve, lovestruck Cross down that well-worn road to perdition, the parasitical pair encouraging him to steal money from the vault at work to fix her up with a swish studio apartment. Worse, Johnny then succeeds in selling Chris's canvases to a noted critic and credits Kitty as the artist. Matters come to a head when Cross finally realises the full extent of Kitty's treachery and manipulation and her masochistic love for Johnny. In an explosive fit of rage, he murders her with an icepick and then allows Johnny to go to the gas chamber in his stead. However, Chris's guilty conscience begins to dog his every step and the poor fellow ultimately finds himself suicidally depressed, destitute and utterly alone.

A year on from The Woman in the Window, Fritz Lang (above with his leading lady) reunited stars Robinson, Bennett and Duryea for Scarlet Street, a devastating noir about a harmless drudge who is destroyed by an ill-advised infatuation. The emotional liebestod of Chris Cross was adapted by Dudley Nichols from Georges De La Fouchardière's novel La Chienne, which had previously been filmed by Jean Renoir in 1931. Bennett makes for a wonderfully earthy, uncouth femme fatale as “Lazy Legs”, Duryea is suitably sleazy and this may well be Edward G. Robinson's finest hour, his performance deeply sad and affecting. As bold and bleak a vision of urban hell as you could wish to find - with some exquisitely stark, gloomy cinematography from Milton Krasner - do yourselves a favour and watch Scarlet Street in its entirety below.

Shadow Of A Doubt (1943)

2010-09-15T15:07:00.013+01:00

Alfred Hitchock's daughter Patricia always insisted that Shadow of a Doubt was her father's favourite amongst his own films but the man himself denied this in conversation with François Truffaut, telling the Frenchman that it was merely the film he found easiest to defend with pedantic critics, “our friends, the plausibles and logicians.” Whatever the truth, it's certainly one of my favourite Hitchcock's (right up there with Notorious, 1946, and Strangers on a Train, 1951) and unquestionably a masterpiece. 17 years before Psycho, Hitch made a serial killer his protagonist and over four decades before David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986), he ghosted in behind the manicured lawns of leafy suburbia to subject a “typical, representative” all-American family to a cruel experiment in evil.

Shadow of a Doubt opens in derelict wasteland beneath the Pulaski Skyway in Newark, New Jersey, where bums stare out across the water at nothing and skeletons of old cars dot the landscape. Next we cut to a quiet neighbourhood street where the local kids are playing baseball. Joseph Valentine's camera wanders over to a front door and then up, up to the upstairs window of what turns out to be a rooming house, cloaked in shade. Inside Charlie Oakley (Joseph Cotten) lies on his bed fully dressed, listening to the noise below and toying with a cigar. Handfuls of scrunched-up bank notes are scattered across the bedside table and rug. This guy is bad medicine. Charlie's landlady Mrs Martin (Constance Purdy) enters and tells him that two men have been looking for him. He fobs her off, waits for her to leave and then tosses a drinking glass angrily against the basin. Striding out into the street, Charlie walks right passed his two pursuers and proceeds up the pavement without batting an eye. They follow Charlie but he manages to escape into the industrial zone. After this temporary reprieve, the fugitive sends a wire to sunny Santa Rosa, California - the sort of place where even the traffic cops go to work with a smile on their faces - to inform his beloved elder sister Emma Newton (Patricia Collinge) that he's coming to stay. This is joyous news to Emma and her daughter Charlotte, also known as “Charlie” (Teresa Wright), who can't wait to be reunited with their favourite relative. But they're about to find out, just as we have, that there's a great deal more to the handsome, urbane “Uncle Charlie” than meets the eye. Arriving by train, the old devil comes to town in a thick plume of smoke and everyone is delighted - aside from the precocious Ann (Edna May Wonacott) who would rather be reading and bank clerk patriarch Joe (Henry Travers) who is more interested in speculating about the best way to kill a man with his ghoulish neighbour Herb (Hume Cronyn). After the initial greetings, Charlie's act soon begins to unravel, prone as he is to making misanthropic outbursts (some of them conveying Hitch's own dark attitudes towards “horrible, faded, fat, greedy women”). He makes a major mistake in presenting Young Charlie with a second-hand emerald ring engraved inside with a dead women's initials, something she is instinctively suspicious of and which prompts her to launch an investigation of her own.

In Vertigo (1958), Hitchcock made the spiral a recurring visual motif. Here it's sharp straight lines - horizontal, vertical and diagonal - that prove his obsession. In Charlie's room at the boarding house, shadows are cast by the window blinds so that they criss-cross his body like prison bars. He wears a pinstripe suit that begins to take on the look of a convict's duds. When he outruns the cops, hiding on a rooftop, the road below noticeably dissects the land at an angle. Then in Santa Rosa it's the white picket fences, telegraph wires, train tracks, wooden floors, stairs and bannisters that cut up and layer the screen. Uncle Charlie's hated world is one of oppressive grids. He feels stifled and bored by conformity, convention and bourgeois concerns and is hungry for transgression ("The whole world's a joke to me"). He wants to break out beyond these suffocating lines and out-pace his past but somehow they just keep on pinning him back. Even when he does get lucky and the cops chase the wrong man into an aeroplane propellor on a runway in Maine, Charlie finds himself hitting the tracks soon after, his own waltz with death finally ceased.

The two Charlies are almost twins – both introduced lying contemplatively on beds, she believing telepathy has brought him to Santa Rosa to relieve her teenage ennui - so it's ironic that it turns out to be Young Charlie who has to bring her namesake down. The experience provides her with a hard lesson and she is less innocent and all the more worldly for her run-in with the Merry Widow Murderer (the camera panning back like a gasp when she discovers the truth from a news clipping in the library is marvellous). Her romance with Jack Graham (Macdonald Carey), one of the detectives on the case, provides her with the consolation that at least one other person knew the real Charles Oakley, the man who tried to execute her, after he has so undeservedly been buried a saint by the townsfolk. Otherwise she wouldn't have been able to share the burden with another living soul for the sake of her poor mother.

The story for Shadow of a Doubt came from the real-life case of serial strangler Earle Leonard Nelson (1897-1928), who, like Uncle Charlie, was known to have suffered a childhood accident in which he crashed his bicycle into a streetcar, after which he began to behave extremely erratically and went on to kill at least 20 women during the mid-twenties. Gordon McDonell, a novelist married to the head of David O. Selznick's story department, thought Nelson's case would make a good subject for a film and met Hitchcock for lunch at the Brown Derby one day to discuss the idea. The director saw great potential in it and hired playwrights Thornton Wilder (Our Town, 1938) and Sally Benson (Junior Miss, 1941) to work on the screenplay, with later revisions made by his own wife Alma. Wilder was eventually called up for military service and Hitch had to accompany him on the train all the way to a training base in Florida just to get his chubby digits on the last few pages of script. Hitch originally wanted to cast William Powell in the lead but MGM refused to loan him out. However, Powell did get to play the part on Cecil B. DeMille's Lux Radio Theater in January 1944, as did Cary Grant in 1950 for the Screen Directors Playhouse. The magnificent Joe Cotten reprised his Uncle Charlie for the Screen Guild Theater in 1943 and 1948.

My Little Chickadee (1940)

2010-09-10T14:59:00.020+01:00

W.C. Fields has a crack at the Old West. In more ways than one.

When Flower Belle Lee (Mae West) is exiled in disgrace from the town of Little Bend for fraternising with the infamous Masked Bandit, she takes a train to Greasewood City on which she meets that sauntering conniver Cuthbert J. Twillie (Fields), whom she marries on the spot with the help of a crooked gambler posing as a reverend (Donald Meek from Stagecoach, 1939) after spying his carpet bag filled with bank notes. However, Flower Belle soon learns that the aforesaid greenbacks are mere facsimiles, vouchers for bottles of Twillie's “Famous Lizard Oil Hair Tonic and Corn Cure” and that her ersatz husband is really a small-time huckster and purveyor of “Novelties and Notions.” Prowling the gambling tables of the town's Last Gasp saloon, Twillie is soon evicted for cheating. However, when local bigwig Jeff Badger (Joseph Calleia) gets a look at his voluptuous lady wife, he hurriedly appoints him sheriff – a job with an unusually high casualty rate in Greasewood.

West and Fields, who had had adjacent dressing rooms at Paramount during the glory days of the early thirties, were finally teamed up at Universal in 1940 when both were arguably somewhat past their prime. Nevertheless, the duo, previously considered incompatible comedically, collaborated on a screenplay with West claiming to have written the bulk of it, leaving gaps for Fields to fill in his own comic bits, something he is said to have worked out on the back of a torn envelope (as he did with The Bank Dick, 1940). Producer Lester Cowan, who had overseen Fields' last team-up, with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy in the circus-set You Can't Cheat an Honest Man (1939), was brought in to supervise while the director was Edward F. Cline, another (uncredited) veteran of that film and a former Keystone man who claimed to have invented the Bathing Beauty. Fields had worked with Cline twice previously and would do so twice more but there was still some animosity between them, according to Fields' biographer Robert Lewis Taylor, who claimed the comedian was unable to resist mocking a director whom he regarded as ludicrously old-fashioned and out-of-step. Fields would apparently treat “every suggestion [Cline] made as a pure distillate of obsolescent corn,” capering around the set, billowing an invisible cape and raising his eyebrows in overblown theatrical fashion to satirise him. Fields would also prove a nuisance to Mae West, who soon grew tired of his incessant, Martini-induced attempts to woo her off-camera: “Bill's a good guy but it's a shame he has to be so god-damned cute.”

Upon the finished film's release, Newsweek worried that the two stars were “diametrically opposed” because West dealt primarily in innuendo and deft wordplay while Fields regarded a script as “a necessary evil, to be ignored at the spur of any moment in favour of the hair-trigger ad-libbing that is the essence of his humour.” Although the periodical conceded that the predicted “war of temperaments” never materialised, it ultimately concluded that My Little Chickadee “isn't the comedy riot it promised to be,” a fair assessment that still rings true today. It is a highly flawed outing rather in the spirit of Laurel and Hardy's Way Out West (1937) but one that's impressively staged and shot and there are plenty of nice moments. Mae's shoot-out with the Injuns for one, her mathematics lesson at the schoolhouse for another. Fields meanwhile goes to bed with a goat by accident, battles a feather boa with a fork and gets to make wildly inventive use of his preposterous vocabulary. In search of Flower Belle he asks for “yon damsel with the hothouse cognomen”. When she shuts him out of the bridal suite, he exclaims, “Egad! The child's afraid of me – she's all 'atwit!” Another fine example is the lengthy bar-room anecdote below about the time he knocked down Chicago Molly, “a tough paloma” who threw a “melange of hot lunch” in his face one day on New York's Lower East Side.

There are recurring Fieldsian themes evident in My Little Chickadee – not least his frustration with women – but the price of West's appearance is that it forces him to play the lecher, a demand that sits uneasily with his familiar blowhard persona (though he did repeat this bit of business in the following year's madcap Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, prowling around a mountaintop after Margaret Dumont's naive daughter). He's clearly much happier glugging “sheep dip” and "firewater" under the disapproving eye of town busybody Mrs Gideon (Margaret Hamilton, the Wicked Witch of the West) than trying to seduce Mae in an ill-fitting nightie. However, the fact that he keeps his sheriff's badge pinned on to this ridiculous garb is a neat summation of his attitude towards a position of authority he has obtained by fraud. As a Western, My Little Chickadee features lawless towns, gushing steam trains, a gun battle, an attempted hanging, racism towards Indians (Fields repeatedly referring to his stoical, blanket-wearing Man Friday as a “red rascal”) and a pioneering newspaperman (Dick Foran) determined to bring civilised values to Greasewood some years before Dutton Peabody picked up a pen in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). As for the ending, in which West and Fields part company by swapping catchphrases, it's as nicely judged and respectful a moment as you could wish to see.

Fallen Angel (1945)

2010-09-08T11:19:00.013+01:00

After Laura (1944), Otto Preminger returned with this underrated but less successful noir, again with Dana Andrews, cinematographer Joseph LaShelle and composer David Raksin on board. While all are on good form (check out LaShelle's use of Venetian blinds in the lighting of Andrews and Linda Darnell below), the end result is something of a poor man's Postman Always Rings Twice (1946).

Andrews plays Eric Stanton, an out-of-work press agent and world class bastard who is kicked off a bus in small-town Walton, California, with nothing but a lonely dollar and a handful of moths in his trouser pocket. There he meets Stella (Darnell), a slutty waitress at a beach-side diner called Pop's Eats, whom half the men in town appear to have a stake in. Stanton fancies a piece of the action himself and decides to stick around. Stella is a born tramp who steals from the cash register and is on the look-out for a man who can give her security, stability and a nice home, far away from the hamburger grill and coffee pots. Stanton can't offer that. Not yet. In order to rustle up the dough, this utterly shameless professional huckster hatches a plan to sweep wealthy, bookish local spinster June Mills (Alice Faye) off her feet, then hustle her into a shotgun marriage and ditch her in time to set up shop with Stella on the Mills nest egg. However, when the latter is suddenly murdered on Eric's wedding night, he finds himself the prime suspect and is forced to take his angelic new bride on the run. They hole up in a shabby hotel in Frisco and only then does Stanton realise where his loyalties and affections really ought to lie.

The repeated use of a Raksin song, 'Slowly' (seemingly the only record available on the jukebox at Pop's diner), is a fairly clear indication that Preminger was aspiring here to repeat Laura's formula for success – that film spawning the hugely popular 'Theme from Laura'. Sadly, although Fallen Angel shares its predecessor's focus on the sudden death of a desirable woman and a subsequent investigation into her many suitors, it lacks Laura's delicate characterisation – preferring much broader strokes. The juxtaposition of raunchy, smouldering Darnell with the wholesome musical actress and radio personality Alice Faye, for instance, is heavily hammered home. Nominal star Faye was so disgusted with the final cut – which Fox head Darryl F. Zanuck had meddled with to ensure Darnell was given a more prominent role – that she sped off the studio lot, tossed her dressing room key to a security guard and didn't return to the screen for another 16 years. Andrews though has plenty to get his teeth into. Eric Stanton is a marvellously unscrupulous cad, desperate and devious, just as happy pushing tickets for "Psychic Extraordinary" Professor Madley (John Carradine) and his spurious “spook act” as marrying a virginal church organist for her money. Stanton's eventual antagonist, meanwhile, grizzled ex-New York City cop Mark Judd (Charles Bickford), is a clear forerunner of Andrews' Mark Dixon in Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), a sadist who dons kid gloves to beat a confession out of his suspects. Also worth mentioning are Percy Kilbride as the kindly Pop, in love with Darnell and always willing to think the best of her, even when all evidence points to the contrary, and Anne Revere as June's elder sister Clara, who sees through Stanton but can't bring herself to stand in the way of June's chance at happiness.

Fallen Angel is better than its reputation might suggest although the whodunnit ending is somehow not as satisfying as it might have been. Harry Kleiner's screenplay was derived from a novel of the same name by the mysterious Marty Holland, of whom little is known beyond the fact that "he" was a woman named Mary and that another of her books, The File on Thelma Jordon (1949), was turned into a film by Robert Siodmak in 1950 starring Barbara Stanwyck.

Out Of The Past (1947)

2010-09-06T13:11:00.014+01:00

“You're no good and neither am I. That's why we deserve each other.”
- Kathie Moffat

A stranger (Paul Valentine) pulls in at Jeff Bailey's gas station in sleepy Bridgeport, California. He asks Jimmy, the deaf-mute kid (Dickie Moore) on the forecourt, where the owner is. Jimmy plays dumb. The man crosses the street to Marny's Café, pulls up a stool and orders coffee with cream, listening to the hostess's gossipy chatter. He claims to be an old friend of Jeff's just passing through town but somehow we're not so sure. Returning to his car, he finds a wary Jeff (Robert Mitchum) returned from the river bank, lugging his rod and tackle box. “Hello Joe.”

So begins a journey that will take the secretive Jeff Bailey back into a past he thought he could leave behind, back into the clutches of the vicious racketeer he once betrayed who never forgets. On the long night drive up to Whit Sterling's (Kirk Douglas) mansion at Lake Tahoe, Jeff spills the beans to his wholesome, loving girlfriend Ann Miller (Virginia Huston) and we cut to a flashback. Before Bridgeport, Jeff was a low-rent private eye named Markham, not Bailey, who had been called in by Sterling to find Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer), the moll who shot him and left him for dead minus $40,000. Jeff traced her to Acapulco, Mexico, where, one fine day, she walked into his life, straight out of a sunbeam. Instead of turning her over to Sterling, Jeff drinks bourbon with her at Pablo's, takes her for midnight walks along the beach and falls in love, the pair eventually escaping together back to San Francisco. All goes well until the lovers happen to run into Jeff's jilted ex-partner, “a stupid, oily gent” named Jack Fisher (Steve Brodie), at a racetrack by chance. He tries to blackmail them. After a fist fight with Jeff, Kathie shoots Fisher and that's where they parted. Now Whit has the tax man investigating his past and he wants Jeff to undertake one final job to clear the outstanding debt. But are things really that straightforward? Kathie is back with Whit now, so the odds are against it.

Horror specialist Jacques Tourneur directed this archetypal noir for RKO from a novel by one “Geoffrey Homes” called Build My Gallows High (1946). The author's real name was Daniel Mainwaring and it's he who was responsible for the adaptation, with uncredited revisions made by Frank Fenton and pulp maestro James M. Cain. There's some truly great hard-boiled narration and dialogue on show (“Let's go down to the bar. You can cool off while we try and impress each other”) and the plot construction is amazingly intricate. You really have to pay attention here, especially during the San Francisco sequence in which Whit tries to entrap Jeff in the murder of two-bit accountant Leonard Eels (Ken Niles). On top of that you get Mitchum in a grubby trenchcoat at his laconic, fatalistic best, baby-faced Jane Greer as a .45-toting femme fatale to rival Brigid O'Shaughnessy (“You're like a leaf that the wind blows from one gutter to another,” sneers Mitchum), a magnificently reptilian Kirk Douglas and a bevy of beautiful, long, hanging shadows from cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca. There are also two memorable deaths to speak of: Joe reeled in off the top of a waterfall after finding himself snagged with Jimmy's hook, pulled crashing down to infinity on the rocks below, and Kathie's, taken out by a spray of machine-gun bullets as she returns fire from the passenger seat of a moving car with a dead man slumped behind the wheel. The end is also very moving, in which Ann is comforted by Jimmy's assurance that Jeff had intended to run away with Kathie after all, hoping to recreate those idyllic days in Acapulco – a half-truth that, without any further explanation of its extenuating circumstances, becomes a betrayal to set her free from mourning, from becoming ensnared by the past herself. Mitchum and Greer would be reunited for The Big Steal in 1949 but, trust me, it doesn't get much better than this.

Gilda (1946)

2010-09-03T13:51:00.015+01:00

“I hated her so I couldn't get her out of my mind for a minute.”
- Johnny Farrell

American drifter and gambler Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford) is saved from a waterfront mugging in Buenos Aires by a mysterious German gentleman with a spring-loaded cane. The stranger turns out to be Ballin Mundsun (George Macready), owner of a local casino, who offers Johnny a job as his right hand man. The pair become inseparable until Ballin disappears on a trip and returns with a “surprise”, a new bride on his arm in the shape of walking powder keg Gilda (Rita Hayworth), who just so happens to be an old flame of Johnny's. What follows is one of the most twisted psycho-sexual melodramas ever put before the public as the trio become embroiled in a decidedly unhealthy and abusive ménage à trois, stuffed with sado-masochism, emotional torture and bitter jealousy from all angles. With sexual tension descending on the gambling hall like a thick ocean fog, it's a small wonder that anyone can make out the roulette wheels clearly enough to place their bets.

The phlegmatic Mundsun appears to take pleasure in Gilda's lies about where she goes at night and obvious dalliances with other men, savouring the heartache of being made a cuckold by this most destructive of femme fatales, a girl he has put on a pedestal and made a goddess for that very purpose. This icy masochist almost certainly relishes the thought of having Johnny, the virile surrogate he has appointed to be Gilda's guardian, take her “swimming,” having after all “bought” the pair of them for his personal amusement. Johnny is equally sexually ambiguous - clearly happiest in the days before Gilda's arrival when he first entered Ballin's world with an agreement that “women and gambling don't mix.” “You must lead a gay life,” he says to his employer early on, after Ballin refers to the concealed blade inside his phallic walking stick as his idea of a “friend,” an item Johnny is instinctively attracted to for the violence and decadence it promises and represents. He can be misogynistic (“Statistics show that there are more women in the world than anything else. Except insects”) and his hatred of Gilda soon becomes an all-consuming passion – sparked either by her past rejection of him, her barbed taunts now or her disruption of his comfortable partnership with Ballin. The feeling is mutual. “I hate you so much that I would destroy myself to take you down with me,” breathes Gilda. Ballin soon notices their animosity and observes, “Hate can be a very exciting emotion. Very exciting... There is a heat in it, that one can feel.” He sympathises: “Hate is the only thing that has ever warmed me.” Gilda feels that warmth too, enjoying the intrigue and anger she creates all around her more than the material wealth and pretty decorations she has acquired in marrying Ballin for his money. Gilda knows and accepts that the men in her life treat her like an expensive object and exploits the appreciative roar of the crowd. But it's Johnny's burning, lustful hatred that really excites her and such dangerous games can't go on for ever.

Two of Gilda's minor characters prove the most acute observers of this most corrosive of love triangles. Uncle Pio (Steven Geray), the dryly philosophical washroom attendant with a “worm's-eye view” on proceedings, senses the deep loneliness behind Gilda's carnival mask and tells her: “You smoke too much. I notice only frustrated people smoke too much and only lonely people are frustrated.” Johnny Farrell also chain-smokes throughout the film. He too is in dire need of a hug and it's Uncle Pio who finally breaks up the trio for good when he stabs the vengeful, resurrected Ballin so that Johnny and Gilda can go straight. Joseph Calleia's ever-watchful Detective Obregon makes the pithiest summary of their tortuous relationship: “You two kids love each other pretty terribly, don't you? It's the most curious love-hate pattern I've ever had the pleasure of witnessing.” Amen brother. There never was a woman like Gilda.

Rita Hayworth never forgave producer Virginia Van Upp for forever dooming her to be typecast as Gilda, a fantasy role no mortal woman could ever hope to live up to. “Every man I knew went to bed with Gilda and woke up with me,” she famously lamented. However, Gilda ensured her place among the true gods of the screen and proved a box office smash with returning servicemen who longed to see more of the pin-up girl that got them through the war. Hayworth didn't disappoint, tossing her hair and vamping it up with the best of them. “Decent? Me?” The script was written by Jo Eisinger and Marion Parsonnet from an original story by E.A. Ellington with contributions from an uncredited Ben Hecht.

Arsenic & Old Lace (1944)

2010-09-02T11:58:00.010+01:00

Halloween night, Brooklyn. Newly-married drama critic Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant) dashes home to tell his beloved maiden aunts (Josephine Hull and Jean Adair) the good news before zipping off to Niagara Falls on his honeymoon with bride Elaine (Priscilla Lane), daughter to the stuffy reverend next door. However, when Mortimer happens to idly open up the window seat in his aunts' living room, he finds a corpse there staring glassily back at him. Horrified, he learns that this is in fact the twelfth or possibly thirteenth lonely old man the spinsters have done away with (“A very bad habit”), poisoning them with elderberry wine as an act of “mercy” and burying them in the cellar with the aid of Teddy (John Alexander), Mortimer's insane, bugle-blowing brother who believes himself to be 26th President of the United States Theodore Roosevelt, digging graves for yellow fever victims at the Panama Canal. Frantically trying to work out what to do, Mortimer is then confronted by two more serial killers - his other brother, the violently unstable Jonathan (Raymond Massey) and his accomplice, Dr Einstein (Peter Lorre), a schnapps-slugging renegade plastic surgeon who has inadvertently made Jonathan over to look like Boris Karloff after seeing a certain movie. Total madness descends as the lights go out, involving the Brewsters, Elaine, several misplaced bodies, a gaggle of Irish cops with literary ambitions and the arrival of Mr Witherspoon (Edward Everett Horton), director of the Happydale asylum, a “rest home” where just about everyone involved would clearly be better off. And, on top of all that, the cab driver outside still hasn't been paid.

Frank Capra completed this macabre screwball farce in 1941 but it wasn't released until three years later when Joseph Kesselring's hit play had finished its Broadway run. Hull, Adair and Alexander all reprised their stage roles but Massey was called in as a replacement for the real Boris Karloff, whose casting on stage had made a self-referential joke out of Jonathan Brewster's sinister, scarred appearance. Sadly this may be Cary Grant's least successful comic performance, a hysterical, hyperactive turn full of wild mugging and cartoonish double-takes. Naturally he looks as sharp as ever and is certainly game for the material but ultimately his incessant whackiness comes across as a little too much. The rest of the cast are all nicely suited to their wide-eyed character parts and there's plenty of pleasing black humour on show. Here's director Capra having some fun on set with a bound and gagged Grant, just after a narrow escape from one of Lorre's “operations.”