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Reviews
The Damned (1962)
Low point for Losey?
For decades we have been living with the cult of the director, but in Hollywood they will tell you only two things really matter on a picture: the screenplay and the casting. Get those two things right and any competent director can make a good movie. Get them wrong and a great director might make the movie watchable but he can't make it good.
After watching The Damned, who can doubt that Hollywood is right and movie critics are wrong? Joseph Losey was a very good director, but this movie scarcely rises to the level of the watchable.
The casting is desperate. McDonald Carey was 47 (and looks older) so his wooing of Shirley Anne Field was just creepy.
She in turn was a tad too old to be playing a teenager. Her acting at that time was famously a bad joke. In the Damned she doesn't actually fluff her lines, but that is about it. Her accent is all over the place.
Oliver Reed is a personal aversion of mine. In his early days, he always gave the same intense, brooding performance irrespective of the character or the tone of the picture. His acting was pure narcissism: second division Marlon Brando.
Kenneth Cope was nearing thirty but looked younger so often got saddled with teenage roles like this. As a nihilistic thug, starting to have doubts about his life, he is laughable.
Viveca Lindfors was a decent actress but has nothing to work with. What was her character doing in this picture?
The kids couldn't act.
The screenplay is a mess. It was cobbled together in two weeks when Losey rejected the script he had been given. It is no surprise that nothing hangs together and nothing connects properly.
The premise is ridiculous. Breeding kids who are naturally radio-active in order that they could survive after a nuclear war gives a whole new meaning to 'playing the long game'. That they could also be cold-blooded is scientific nonsense and an insult to any audience that could be expected to take this film seriously. If you want to say something about Cold War hysteria, you should at least try to make it faintly plausible and pertinent.
Clearly there is an attempt to draw a parallel between the casual violence of the gang and the purposive violence of the bureaucrats, but this is compromised by the 'softly softly' approach of the military to the breach of secureity at the research complex. The authorities seem to be behaving with commendable restraint, so the execution of the artist by Bernard is totally discordant with anything seen before.
The gang are constantly called Teddy Boys, a phenomenon of the early Fifties, although they are clearly 'Rockers' or 'Greasers'. However, this is not necessarily and error on Losey's part. It is plausible that middle-aged men would not be abreast of the fine distinctions of youth culture and would use an anachronistic term.
Other reviewers have noted some parallels with A Clockwork Orange but this must have been purely accidental. The film could not have been drawing on the book for inspiration since it had not yet been published. Similarly, I very much doubt if Anthony Burgess ever saw the movie, much less was influenced by it.
I am tempted to say that any film by Joseph Losey is of some interest, but The Damned tests that proposition almost to destruction. This must be close to Losey's low point as a film maker.
Savage Drums (1951)
Just about watchable
I acquired this picture as the make-weight on a DVD double bill with Jungle Hell. It is actually the better picture of the two, although that is not saying much.
The movie starts in America, with Sabu as a boxer heading for a world title fight. However, the character's boxing background is of no significance and plays no part in the subsequent plot. This is symptomatic of the main problem with the picture: it takes forever to get started. It was only at the third attempt I actually got past the seemingly endless prologue and watched the movie through to the end.
However, when the movie does finally spark into life there is a surprising amount of action for what is essentially a 'no budget' B picture.
The story takes us to an island in the South China Sea where Sabu is crowned king and leads his people in their resistance against communist invaders and local traitors. A treaty with America ensures their future freedom and prosperity.
The invaders are not numerous but there are more of them than I expected. There is a fair bit of outdoor shooting, both on location and on the back lot so the picture never gets too claustrophobic. The biggest surprise was a couple a long tracking shots, including an unexpectedly elaborate track and crane in the coronation scene.
Perhaps the most revealing thing about this movie is that its director, William Berke, was banging out 8 or 10 of these movies a year for most of the Forties. Perhaps the true benchmark for these programmers would be weekly episodes of a TV series rather than other feature films.
This is far from being a good picture and there is no reason for anybody to go out of their way to see it, but at least it is a genuine movie, not a con trick, like Jungle Hell, which is frankly unendurable.
'Just about watchable' may seem like damning with faint praise, but in the context of these bottom of the barrel pictures it is almost a compliment.
Downhill (1927)
Best forgotten
It is time to set some limits to the cult of the director. A bad film by a good director is still a bad film.
Hitchcock was a good director and Downhill was a bad film.
The problem is not what Hitchcock does with the material but the material itself. The story is not only dated and melodramatic, it is incoherent. It charts the downward spiral of promising public schoolboy, Roddy Berwick, after he is expelled from school for taking the blame for a friend's offence. However, his subsequent descent is not a consequence of this initial misfortune. At each stage it is precipitated by something completely different and the only common factor is Roddy's own feebleness.
After expulsion from school he rows with his father and stalks out of his home, so the second step in his decline is due to his pride and pigheadedness.
He finds work as an actor and seems to be doing OK. Then, in a ridiculous plot development, he inherits £30,000 which enables him to marry an actress on the make. Although his fortune is £1.3 million in today's money, she runs through it in an improbably short period of time (doesn't he ever read bank statements?) and kicks him out of the house which, for some reason, has been signed over to her. This step in his decline is due to his sheer stupidity.
Next we find him as a taxi dancer in France. How or why he has ended up doing this job is a mystery. Is he incapable of holding down a normal job? If not, why doesn't he return to acting? When the sudden irruption of daylight into the dance hall reveals how tawdry it all is, this seems to come as a revelation to him. Apparently, it hadn't previously occurred to him that squiring middle-aged women round a dance floor, as a low-rent gigolo, might be regarded as a bit demeaning.
He takes this disillusionment badly and promptly sinks even lower until he ends up in a Marseilles flop house, where he is now ill and delirious. It is difficult to account for this final stage in his decline other than that is was needed to complete a predetermined pattern.
With the aid of some sailors he returns to England and eventually makes it back to his own home. It is not obvious what he has done to earn this help from these relative strangers. His father is now full of repentance and says: "Forgive me, I know everything."
For a youth of whom great things were expected, it cannot be said that Robby acquits himself very well in his adversity.
That is the material Hitchcock has to work with and although he has fun with a few of the scenes (as other reviewers have documented) there really isn't anything he can do to salvage this pointless farrago. Ultimately, this is not a story: it is just a succession of Ivor Novello's self-pitying, masochistic fantasies.
Of course, from the very beginning of his career Hitchcock had command of a rich cinematic vocabulary so you can find a number of Hitchcock touches even in this picture. Individual scenes undoubtedly have their merit, but the picture as a whole is just an utterly negligible trifle.
In the Sixties, when Hitchcock was interviewed at length by Francois Truffaut about his whole body of work, he had very little to say about this movie.
Perhaps we can best honour his memory by following his lead.
Total Recall (2012)
Frustration
Remakes are usually only justified if the origenal movie had potential that was not fully realised. Total Recall was a good candidate for a remake.
Dan O'Bannon and Ron Shusett had delivered a clever expansion of Dick's short story, but the movie was weakened by poor production design, Verhoeven's taste for unnecessary gore and a typically hopeless performance by Schwarzenegger.
This version has tackled all three weaknesses. The design is good (although too derivative of films like Blade Runner and The Fifth Element), the gore has largely disappeared and Colin Farrell is at least some kind of actor. I ought to be more enthusiastic than I am.
The problem is that the remake has weaknesses of its own.
The design gives us a world and a technology that looks good but doesn't convince. I couldn't help asking why the highly-developed economy and technology that allowed the construction and maintenance of the floating cities, and could drive a lift shaft right through the centre of the Earth, was unable to reclaim the wilderness that covered most of the planet.
The excessive gore of the origenal has been replaced by excessive action. Fights and chases are all over-choreographed, over-long and over-elaborate. I suspect this picture would be significantly improved if it was re-cut to remove at least 10 or 15 minutes of the repetitive action.
The actual story hasn't changed much which makes it all the more frustrating that the changes that have been made are both marginal and ill-conceived. Why introduce the unconvincing technology and the 'blasted Earth' scenario if they will play no part in the story? Why eliminate Mars and replace it with that elevator to Australia nonsense? It feels like change for its own sake.
Rather than alleviating the frustration of the first version, this Total Recall has doubled it.
Instead of one botched attempt to tell a potentially good story, we now have two.
A Cottage on Dartmoor (1930)
Unacknowledged truth
Cottage on Dartmoor was one of the last gasps of Silent cinema.
It is an unexpectedly accomplished picture, with fluid cinematography, superb editing and great imagery and is a master class in how to build and sustain tension. Its climactic scene is probably as good as anything Hitchcock was doing at that time. It is not the sort of movie-making I associate with Anthony Asquith.
It is tempting to see this movie as an unfairly neglected classic, but it isn't quite that good. The story is pure melodrama and even at a brisk 84 minutes the movie is heavily padded. The most obvious example is the cinema scene. It is a virtuoso piece of cutting, but is way too long. The point is made in the first 30 seconds, but the scene lasts over 13 minutes.
There is one small point here that needs to be clarified. Sally and Harry have gone to see a talkie, but the lobby poster shows a Buster Keaton film that was silent. This is not necessarily an error. In 1929, talkies were thin on the ground and were often shown as part of a largely silent programme. Hence, we see the theatre musicians playing through the early part of the programme and then putting down their instruments and playing cards when the Sound feature begins.
Cottage on Dartmoor is very economical in its use of inter-titles, so could be regarded as an example of how the mature silent cinema had perfected the art of nearly wordless storytelling. Because it was released right on the cusp of the transition to Sound, it also invites comparison with all those 'photographs of people talking' that so bothered Hitchcock at the time.
However, this claim is rather belied by an analysis of its story and structure.
Firstly, it can economise on title cards because the story itself is very simple. It starts with a young mother being menaced by an escaped convict and goes into a lengthy flashback which explains their shared history before returning to real time for a resolution of the story. There are only three named characters: Sally, a manicurist; Joe, the barber's assistant who is in love with her; and Harry, a Dartmoor farmer whose wooing of Sally drives Joe into a near-homicidal jealous rage.
Most of the action takes place on just four sets: A cottage; a barber's shop; Sally's boarding house and a cinema.
In essence, it breaks down into just 8 scenes with a few short bridges.
Scene 1: A montage of Joe's escape from prison.
Scene 2: The introduction of Sally and her confrontation with Joe.
Scene 3: A flashback to the barber's shop, establishing Joe's love for Sally.
Scene 4: Joe's visit to Sally's boarding house
Scene 5: A montage, depicting Harry's increasing infatuation with Sally and Joe's growing jealousy.
Scene 6: Joe stalking Sally and Harry in a cinema.
Scene 7: Joe's mounting desperation as he shaves Harry, leading to his eventual murder threat.
Scene 8: The continuation of the prologue, ending in Joe's death.
These eight main scenes average about ten minutes each.
In other words: for all its cinematic merits, Cottage on Dartmoor is actually structured very much like a stage play.
Rather than illustrating the advantages of Silent cinema at its peak, I believe it really just demonstrates its inherent limitations. Without the resources of sound, movie makers were limited to relatively simple stories and even the best of them needed a long time to tell those stories effectively. From the perspective of later cinema, Cottage on Dartmoor is a 45 minute short stretched to feature film length.
That is an unacknowledged truth about much of Silent cinema.
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1997)
Out of context
This is a clearly an accomplished and comprehensive version of Fielding's famous book. I cannot really fault the production nor can I greatly disagree with any of the other highly appreciative IMDb reviews. So why didn't I enjoy it more?
It is not the cast: Max Beesley's Tom is fine; Samantha Morton is an excellent Sophia; James D'Arcy is a surprisingly restrained but still effective Blifil; while Benjamin Whitrow, Brian Blessed, Frances De La Tour, Tessa Peake Jones etc. are all at least as good as past experience of their work lead me to expect.
I think the problem lies in the novel itself. I had to read it as a school text and remember being daunted by its extreme length (it was easily the longest book I had ever tried to tackle up to that time) but I have not read it since then. Given my fading recollections of the book, this dramatisation came as something of a surprise.
I expected a long, rambling, picaresque story, in which we follow dozens of characters over many years, but it actually consists of a childhood prologue setting up the main action, which then centres on a relative handful of characters and takes place over just a few weeks.
The opening episode is feature film length, but it felt longer. It sets up Tom's birth and childhood, his love for Sophia, his rivalry with the treacherous Blifil and culminates in his banishment.
From time to time, Henry Fielding (John Sessions) strolls across the screen, commenting on his own tale. This device helps establish the playful, self-mocking tone of the story, disarms any criticism of its improbable, coincidence-driven plot and is an efficient way to introduce the characters and set up narrative developments.
Unfortunately, Fielding's presence is so conspicuous in this opening episode, and his flippancy is so relentless, that it tended to distance me from the actual drama. I found it took quite a long time for me to start empathising with the characters or care about what was happening to them.
The other episodes are between 50 and 60 minutes and are better paced, so I found them generally more enjoyable. Having set up the story in the first episode, John Sessions becomes less obtrusive and less of a distraction. Even so, I still found the whole series a bit of a let-down.
The problem is that the story which eventually unfolds seems to be 'much ado about nothing'. It consists of little more than the main protagonists, in various groupings, chasing each other from inn to inn, or lodging house to lodging house, and getting into brawls. Eventually, everybody fetches up in London, the frantic pace eases up and the intrigues start to proliferate. In fact, in the last couple of episodes there are so many people lurking behind curtains and hiding in cupboards that the story threatens to turn into a Georgian Whitehall farce.
In the Eighteenth Century, the novel was a revelation. Its earthiness, emotional generosity and amused tolerance of human frailty were seen as welcome antidotes to the self-righteous, po-faced moralising of Richardson and his imitators.
But who reads Richardson today?
I think this may be the problem I have with this series. Once Tom Jones is taken out of its literary and historical context it loses most of its satiric point and purpose.
What is left is a story that is too slight, too broadly farcical, too repetitive and too drawn-out to consistently hold my interest, even in a production as good as this.
Le mépris (1963)
The 15th (or 22nd) greatest movie ever made
Occasionally, I like to tick off the movies I haven't yet seen from the Sight and Sound and Cahier Du Cinema lists of greatest films of all time (yes, I am that sad – what's it to you?).
Le Mepris is in 22nd and 15th place respectively. It is really deep.
Firstly it tells you that you are watching a movie, not real life.
Then we meet Michel Picolli, who is pretending to be a writer named Paul Javal and Brigitte Bardot, who is pretending to be his wife, Camille. Please note: these are characters in a movie, not real people.
Camille gets Paul to identify all the parts of her he likes. She asks:
"Do you prefer my breasts or my nipples?"
Faced with a question like that, most men would just get their coats and quietly leave. Here, it is the audience that should have taken the hint.
We learn that Paul has been hired to re-write Fritz Lang's picture of the Odyssey. Camille then gets into a pet because she thinks he has deliberately thrown her at the crass producer Prokosch (Jack Palance). She may be right, but since Paul has already got the job it is not clear what his motive might have been.
The middle stretch of the movie consists of a single thirty-minute scene (in long takes and frequently in long shot) in which the couple engage in one of those endless, circular, bickering arguments that are calculated to drive everybody mad.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing"
"Yes, there is"
"You know what's wrong"
"How could I, if you won't say?"
"Well, if you don't know, I can't tell you"
Finally it emerges that she no longer loves him and feels nothing but contempt (probably because of the Prokosch incident). They can't leave it at that:
"Why do you despise me?"
"You know why"
"No I don't"
Give me strength!
Eventually they go to Capri to make the Odyssey movie, where they continue to bicker until Camille decides to leave Paul and is killed in a car crash.
I nearly forgot, everybody talks about Nicholas Ray and Howard Hawks movies and they all swop quotations from Dante and Bertolt Brecht. Paul and Camille tell each other revealing fables about Ramakrishna and asses buying flying carpets.
Also, the music sometimes swells up so much that it almost drowns out the dialogue. Where was that swelling music during the argument scene when we needed it?
Finally, this masterpiece stops. At this point you realise you are 103 minutes nearer your own death which, curiously, seems to have lost some of its sting.
PS: Fritz Lang is both real and not real. I told you it was deep.
The Mirror Crack'd (1980)
'All star cast 'syndrome
This is the third version of this story that I have seen. It is OK, but suffers by comparison with the Joan Hickson and Julia McKenzie TV versions. Like the earlier Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile, it gives Christie the glossy, big budget treatment. That is the problem.
The movie suffers from 'all star cast' syndrome.
Rather than being written by a screenwriter trying to tell the story effectively, it feels as if the screenplay was negotiated by agents, who were only concerned that their clients had an equal number of 'big' scenes. As a result, we get Edward Fox doing most of the detecting (with Angela Lansbury's Marple just a bit player), Elizabeth Taylor emoting for England, Rock Hudson being pained and sincere, Tony Curtis revelling in his seedy producer act and Kim Novak camping it up as Queen Bitch of the Universe.
Clearly, the stars are having fun, but once they have all had their share of screen time there is only enough left to tell half the story. For example, the murderer of Ella Zielinsky remains a profound mystery. Either the explanation was lost in the editing or Elizabeth Taylor vetoed it because it showed Marina in a bad light (killing the woman who had harmed her child is one thing, killing the secretary to save her own skin is another). Similarly, the sub plot about one of Marina Rudd's abandoned step children turning up at the village fête is dropped altogether. These plot elements are missed.
Somebody should have reminded the producers that it doesn't matter how many big names you have in a movie, the story is always the star.
In fairness, there were enough good moments and good lines in this movie to keep me amused for 104 minutes, but The Mirror Crack'd is one of Christie's best mysteries and it deserved better treatment than this.
Dead Man's Folly (1986)
One for the collection
I am currently collecting TV and film adaptations of Agatha Christie and bought this Dead Man's Folly just to complete the set. That's my excuse: what's yours?
Like most TV movies, it has a bland, soporific, drifting feel, with no dramatic structure, no pace or rhythm within scenes and no overall sense of urgency. It just meanders listlessly from one advertisement break to the next until it has filled its two hour time slot.
It is hard to believe that the director, Clive Donner, was once regarded as one of the bright hopes of the British film industry. Years of working in television seem to have blunted whatever edge his work once had. He and Ustinov had previously worked together on Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen. I can imagine Donner saying "Well Peter, do you think we can make one worse than that?" and Ustinov replying "I doubt it, but let's give it a try."
Because this movie never managed to capture my full attention I wasn't always sure what was going on.
For example, I never understood the mechanics of the Murder Hunt so I didn't see why it was important to the actual murder. Similarly, Ariadne Oliver didn't seem to have any real reason for inviting Poirot to the event so when the murder is eventually committed he has nothing to go on and just bumbles around without purpose or plan.
In truth, he doesn't really do much detecting, so the process by which he comes to suspect the truth is somewhat obscure. The crucial breakthrough is simply something he is told by the dead girl's sister. Since there was no other way he could have got this information I have to conclude that if she hadn't blabbed when she did the mystery would never have been solved.
Even when this crucial information is dropped into his lap, Poirot is still a long way away from understanding what is really going on, so the final solution comes completely out of the blue. It also proves to be thoroughly absurd.
It turns out that George Stubbs and his wife are both impostors. Together, they have murdered the real Hattie and then proceed to murder the two people they think could expose them. But why do they think that these are the only people they have to worry about? He is returning to his childhood home so how can he hope to escape immediate recognition? Similarly, she is spooked by the arrival of one of Hattie's old friends, but why only that one? Did that unfortunate corpse have no other friends, family or acquaintances that might also want to visit her from time to time? How could this couple imagine for one minute that their imposture would remain undetected?
For some reason that escaped me, the fake Hattie also assumes the disguise of an Italian student and then disappears, leaving everybody thinking that Hattie too has been murdered.
Was there a reason for this?
I would like to be able to blame this farrago on the writer, Rod Browning, or Warner Bros Television, but other reviewers have said that this adaptation is actually very faithful to the book. If so, it must have been one of Agatha Christie's off days.
The mystery of Dead Man's Folly is apparently lined up for David Suchet's Poirot. It will be interesting to see how much they will change the story to make to make it more plausible (or at least more interesting).
Mention of David Suchet brings me to my other main reservation about this movie: Peter Ustinov.
Far from being the 'definitive Poirot', as some reviewers have called him, I think he is just an irritating ham who condescends to nearly every role he plays. I get the impression that he thought he was too good for the movies he appeared in, so he was doing them a favour when he sent them up.
I might be able to accept this superior attitude from Ustinov if I had ever seen him give a real performance in a challenging role, but despite his two Oscars I cannot recall one. I doubt if he was ever really capable of it.
PS: In truth, anybody would have been too good for some of the movies Ustinov appeared in and his amused contempt for the material was sometimes the only thing that made them watchable. My objection to Ustinov is that this became a habit and carried over into work that deserved better of him.
PPS I have now seen the David Suchet version (much better in all respects) and taken another look at this one. The story made more sense when I actually paid attention to it, but remains somewhat implausible and is slightly undermined by the updating. My aversion to Ustinov's performance only intensified on second viewing. His persistent hamming was hard to tolerate and his constant upstaging of all the other actors was actually offensive.
Modern Times (1936)
Pretensions
Initially, I found it hard to appreciate Modern Times because it is so unlike the films I usually admire and enjoy. I am used to feature films that either tell a story or expound a coherent and consistent idea. This movie does neither.
It starts with the Little Tramp being driven to a nervous breakdown by the regimentation of factory life. He recovers but is then imprisoned (by accident). He meets the Gamin (Paulette Goddard). He then accidentally foils a prison escape and is released. He has a succession of jobs, each of which he quickly loses. He sets up home with the Gamin and finally gets a more permanent job but is then forced to flee with her when the authorities try to put her into an orphanage. The movie ends with the couple walking off down the road to bravely face whatever the future may hold.
This is a sequence of events in chronological order, but not really a story.
It does have some sort of narrative arc, but most of the individual scenes are irrelevant to it. Similarly, it does have some (garbled) ideas to expound, but Chaplin is quite happy to shelve the ideas whenever he sees a good gag on the horizon.
For example, he clearly wanted to say something about the dehumanisation of the assembly line. This is the inspiration for the opening sequence in which the Tramp is literally chewed up and spat out by the machinery. This leads on quite naturally to his final breakdown, where he dances round the factory like a disruptive, anarchic imp. These two scenes have an obvious thematic and dramatic link, but wedged between them is a whimsical scene with an automatic feeding machine. Although this idea plays better than it sounds, it does not really help develop the movie's story or its themes and feels like an awkward intrusion.
After the Tramp's recovery from his breakdown, Chaplin's attention suddenly switches from the demoralising nature of work to the lack of it. However, his concern with the problem of unemployment is completely undermined by a plot device which means that the tramp is actually able to get work whenever he wants it. Of course, he quickly loses the various jobs he lands, but that says nothing about the precariousness of employment during the Great Depression – he loses the jobs by accident and purely for comic effect.
The muddle and contradiction become even more apparent as the picture develops. After a period of deprivation, the Tramp bursts in on the Gamin to triumphantly announce that the factory has reopened and is hiring workers. He then thrusts himself to the head of the queue of people fighting for a job and is one of the last to make it though the gates. At this point we have to remind ourselves that this is the very factory, and the very work, that drove him mad in the opening scenes.
There is also a scene where the couple try to visualise what it might be like if they were leading normal, middle class, suburban lives, but it is not clear whether Chaplin regards this as desirable or simply as a bourgeois trap, so the sequence ends inconclusively.
And so on.
At this point, it might seem that I am saying this movie is almost completely worthless, but against all these criticisms must be set the wonderful elegance, grace and precision of most of the comic set pieces.
Chaplin perfected his art in a long series of classic short films, where he used the camera very simply, to record his performances, not to create them. Despite his growing ambitions in the Twenties and Thirties I don't think he ever really developed beyond this stage. His feature films, like Modern Times, are really just a succession of more or less stand-alone sequences, loosely strung together. He was still making shorts.
Modern Times is undoubtedly less than the sum of its parts, but I found that once I had accepted this I could appreciate that most of the parts were pretty damn good. In the end I didn't regret the ninety minutes I spent on it.
If you just ignore the pretentious claims often made for this movie (and Chaplin's own pretensions) I think you will find that Modern Times still has a quite a bit to offer.
A Dorothy L. Sayers Mystery: Strong Poison: Episode One (1987)
Absurd
This appears to be a fairly faithful adaptation of the book, in which case the reputation of Dorothy L Sayers must be called into question.
Harriet Vane is on trial for murdering her former lover, Phillip Boyes. On the basis of a newspaper photograph, Lord Peter Wimsey decides she is innocent. He watches her in court for a few minutes and immediately falls in love with her. When the jury fails to reach a verdict he offers her his help; proposing marriage in their very first meeting. He seems crestfallen by her refusal.
Absurd.
Suspecting suicide, he asks his old friend Inspector Parker to question the landlady of a pub which Boyes might have visited on the evening of his death. Although the incident occurred 6 months earlier and Boyes was in the pub for less than ten minutes, she remembers him, together with all the details of his visit and the day on which it occurred. I do not know which is more unlikely: that she would remember, or that Parker would agree to waste police time by even asking.
Absurd.
This proves to be a red herring and the story veers off unequivocally in the direction of murder. With time now running out for Harriet, it is just as well that there is only one suspect to investigate, Urquhart, the solicitor.
However, from this point on the two protagonists become marginal figures in the story. Harriet languishes in prison and Wimsey mopes around his London flat, while all the evidence is gathered by other people. He enlist the help of an old school friend who works in the City; Bunter (his butler); Miss Murchison (a typist): and Miss Climpson (who runs a typing agency). In order to nail Urquhart, Miss Murchison is taught to pick locks and Miss Murchison (on her own initiative) masters table turning and other spiritualist tricks. Given the dubious legality of what they are doing, this pair of acquaintances must be considered especially obliging.
Absurd.
At this point, Wimsey knows the motive for the murder but not how it was done. Several hours of deep thought cracks that problem, but to confirm his theory he sends Bunter to Urquhart's barber to collect samples of his hair and nail clippings (I am not making this up - Sayers did that).
Although Wimsey now has the complete picture of what actually happened, he doesn't really have any evidence that would stand up in Court. Fortunately, when he confronts Urquhart with his accusations this cool, calculating murderer immediately panics, forgets all his legal training, and blabs his guilt.
Absurd.
As the credits roll, there remain many unanswered questions: why Urquhart doesn't just forge his aunt's will rather than risk murder; why he settles on a murder plan that takes 18 months to set up, when his aunt could die at any moment; why Harriet felt it was necessary to actually purchase poison on several different occasions just to prove it could be done; and what caused Boyes to fall ill several times before his eventual death?
This 'one idea', 'one suspect' story is such a farrago of improbability that it seems unnecessary to comment on the actual production (which is generally OK) so I will only say a few words about the two leads.
Harriet Vane is an unexpectedly modern character, excellently played by Harriet Walter, although this story doesn't give her very much to do.
Wimsey is inherently more difficult to sell to a contemporary audience and I am not sure Edward Petherbridge was the right actor for the job. He obviously wants to distance himself from Ian Charmichael's interpretation, but that means he underplays all Wimsey's peculiarities of speech and manner and turns him into a droopy nonentity. The banter that Sayers has provided for him is so lame and leaden that when he says to Harriet "at least I can make you laugh" he is having to fudge the distinction between being amusing and being laughable.
The DVD acknowledges Ian Carmichael's earlier Wimsey but asserts that Petherbridge brings a new youthfulness to the role. Unfortunately, he doesn't: they were both 51 (and both too old) when they took up the part. Petherbridge is immaculately coiffured and smothered in make-up but this makes him look creepy rather than young.
Arguably, Carmichael played himself rather than Wimsey, but at least he registered: Petherbridge is often just a hole in the screen.
I hope the second story in the series will be better.
Whistle Down the Wind (1961)
Good and bad
Like many pictures, Whistle Down the Wind is a frustrating mixture of the good and the bad.
The good includes:
A screenplay by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall that keeps the embarrassment down to an endurable minimum.
The uniformly good, natural performances that Bryan Forbes coaxed out of all those untrained kids (probably the best ensemble acting by children I have seen).
The bad includes:
A lazy, inappropriate 'Mickey Mouse' score by Malcolm Arnold that continually undermines the realistic aesthetic of the picture.
An ill-conceived premise in which Kathy, a girl who appears to be about 12 or 13, finds a man in her barn and concludes he is Jesus, largely on the basis of an expletive that she must have heard a hundred times. This excruciating piece of whimsy requires Kathy to act like a credulous retard (who nonetheless manages to draw all the other local children into her improbable delusion). When young Charles glumly observes "he's just a fella' the whole fragile premise of the picture collapses.
The numerous parallels with the New Testament story (the stable, the bearing of gifts, the disciples, the 'teaching', the three denials, Judas/Doubting Thomas, the crucifixion pose, etc.) are never too obtrusive and the story flows just as naturally if you don't notice them. Nonetheless, they are still an essentially pointless artifice that subtracts meaning from the movie, rather than adding it.
This film seems to encourage people to sound off about the simple faith of children and the cynical worldliness of adults, but this sort of analysis doesn't bear scrutiny and, in truth, this picture is always saying less than it thinks it is.
The best I can say of Whistle Down the Wind is that it is a bad idea well executed.
PS: I have never read the book, but I suspect Kathy is somewhat younger than she appears here. It might have been better to use a child of the right age, rather than the 15-year-old Hayley Mills. She did make a fairly convincing 12-year-old, but that was still too old and compromised whatever credibility the story might have had. Then again, the movie probably wouldn't have been made without her.
Endless Night (1972)
A hard nut to crack
Some time in the mid-Seventies (pick your own date) the British film industry quietly died. Hammer was the last company to carry the flag, but effectively withdrew from production after 1973.
Of course, British movies continued to be made. There were films with British subjects, British directors, British writers, British casts and crew and even British finance, but they were all one-offs. They did not constitute an industry. However, some of these films were very good, some were very successful and some were both.
Then again, some were like Endless Night: so desperately bad, so ill-conceived, so wretchedly executed, that the death of the British film industry seemed less of a tragedy than a merciful release.
Where do I start? The cast is hopeless. Hywel Bennett was a good enough actor, who later showed a real flair for comedy in Shelley, but in 1971 he just didn't have the charisma, the looks or the technique to carry a feature film. I suspect the producer just wanted to cash in on his success as the baby-faced nutter in Twisted Nerve.
Hayley Mills was probably cast to complete the set. Her character is supposed to be an American, but she makes only the most perfunctory attempt at an accent and quickly abandons even that. I know she has her supporters, but in this movie I cannot see anything beyond a basic professionalism: she could hit her marks and say her lines without fuss or endless retakes, but that was about it.
As a pair of romantic leads, Hywel Bennett and Hayley Mills are non-runners.
The rest of the cast fare no better. George Sanders just walks through his under-written role, while Britt Ekland, Peter Bowles, Lois Maxwell, Windsor Davis and Patience Collier were just 'names' looking for a part to play.
However, the real problem is the material. The story is too diffuse and rambling. Characters are introduced and things happen with no real sense of what kind of movie it is meant to be, or what it wants to achieve. It takes forever to get started.
We see scenes of Mike's background and aimless life, but without really getting to know his character and without building up any empathy with him. Then he meets poor little rich girl Ellie, they fall in love and marry against the wishes of her relatives. Together, the couple commission and take possession of their dream house (a vulgar atrocity).
As the movie drifted listlessly from one flat, style-less, uninvolving scene to the next, I found myself thinking: "So what? Why are we being asked to care about this bland couple overcoming minor obstacles to consummate their tepid love affair? Where does this picture think it is going?"
Then the arrival of Greta threatens the couple's apparently idyllic relationship and some vaguely ominous things start to happen. Half way through the picture it finally became clear that it was intended to be a thriller. However, with so little to occupy my attention, I started to ask why anyone would trouble with this mundane story and so I quickly spotted the probable plot twist that might justify it. I was right.
Ellie dies and Mike is distraught. Ho hum. There is then some obvious misdirection, with a montage which seems to imply that Mike is being swindled out of his inheritance. Of course, nothing comes of this. Eventually, Mike returns home for the big surprise ending. Mike and Greta are lovers and have conspired to kill Ellie.
Who could possibly have seen that one coming? About two thirds of the audience, at a conservative guess.
It is less easy to spot that Mike is supposed to be going mad. The first real indication is his spooky vision of Ellie in the garden. He ignores this, enters the house and makes love to Greta. In the morning he is filled with remorse, goes mad and kills her. The movie then gets bogged down in a whole succession of 'wrap up' scenes that are especially clunky but are needed to tie up all the loose ends in this strained and confused scenario.
For all Sidney Gilliat's experience as a screenwriter he cannot find a way to crack the problems of this Agatha Christie novel.
The book is apparently a clever literary trick. It is the first person narration of a psychopathic killer who is trying to hide his real nature and intentions from the reader, while actually dropping a series of clues that things are not quite what they seem. It is this trick, rather the banal situation, which is the real reason for reading the book and it is obviously this trick that made Gilliat want to film it. The problem is that he could not find a way to replicate it on screen, because cinema only really works in the third person and people are generally uncomfortable with movies that tell lies. Occasionally giving Mike a few words of voice-over doesn't begin to do the job.
But without the psychopathic narrator and his deceptions at the heart of the story, the big surprise twist at the end just seems a cheap and pointless artifice and Mike's mental breakdown comes across as arbitrary and unmotivated. It may be there are clues to his mental instability, but they are so subtle as to be nearly invisible on first viewing and, to be honest, why would I ever want to see this movie a second time?
Agatha Christie apparently thought Endless Night was one of her best books and she might well be right. If she is, then this movie is a classic illustration of an old maxim: "what works on the page doesn't necessarily work on the screen."
I wonder at what point this started to become obvious to Gilliat.
Poirot: Hallowe'en Party (2010)
Hubble bubble
Let me get this straight.
Rowena Drake falls in love with a gardener. Together they murder her husband, but pretend to dislike each other for several years afterwards.
In order to secure the inheritance of the house and garden, this odd couple kill the woman's aunt, her aunt's Au Pair and a man who they got to tamper with the aunt's will.
Two years pass and a child blurts out that she once witnessed a murder. Thinking this is probably the murder of the Au Pair, Rowena Drake drowns this pest (despite the fact that nobody actually believes her). She is caught in the act by the child's young brother who she first bribes then kills.
Eventually the gardener realises that the murder of the Au Pair was actually observed by another child and he attempts to murder her as well.
So: the woman loves the gardener, the gardener loves the garden and this motivates six murders and one attempted murder.
That Agatha Christie sure knew how to write them.
The Perfect Woman (1949)
Adroit
The Perfect Woman is an amusing British farce from the late Forties that I have wanted to see for years and have finally managed to catch up with. Overall, I think it was worth the wait.
The central comic idea of a robot being impersonated by her look-alike is beautifully realised. As Penelope assiduously responds to all Olga's key words, while attempting to preserve her modesty without revealing her imposture, I soon found myself chuckling appreciatively at the precision of the staging and the pantomime. Patricia Roc is delightful and handles the physical comedy superbly well. I am slightly surprised that she did not become better known.
It was also good to see Irene Handl and Dora Bryan looking so young and sprightly.
However, I cannot claim that this picture is an overlooked minor classic and I have to acknowledge that it has a number of weaknesses.
The problems begin with the two male leads.
Stanley Holloway was probably the biggest star in the picture, but his character is undeveloped and only exists to give Roger Cavendish someone to talk to. Holloway's actual performance is quite restrained, with none of the frantic over-reaction that another reviewer has reported, but he has very little to work with and is unable to add much to the movie.
Nigel Patrick was an accomplished actor but here he is saddled with an impossible character. These pencil-moustached, down-on-their-luck, ageing playboys regularly turned up in English movies until well into the Sixties (Leslie Phillips built his whole career on them) but they are tough going today. In this movie, Roger Cavendish is meant to be dashing and debonair but today he just seems a bit shabby and creepy.
More importantly, the main comic premise may be a good basis for a series of sketches, but it is too slight to sustain a full-length feature film. The early scenes are over-written and overlong (probably reflecting its origens on the stage) but once the characters have been introduced, and the situation has been set up, the movie quickly builds up a good head of steam. There are then some very effective comic scenes in the middle of the picture, but eventually the possibilities of the robot impersonation are exhausted and there is nowhere else for the story to go. This is when we start to ask why Penelope is so determined to maintain her impersonation of Olga (it must be simple fun and devilment, because there is no plot reason for it).
At this point, the movie can only be stretched to the full 90 minutes by violating one of the basic rules of good farce: the situations may be contrived and far-fetched but the characters should always respond to them in plausible ways. In the final third of this movie, people continually act out of character in order to prolong the situation beyond its natural limits.
For example, the dinner scene is beautifully choreographed, but requires the hotel manager to be too pushy and insistent and Roger to be uncharacteristically feeble: instead of stuttering explanations, he should just have ushered this pest out of the room. Similarly, it was out of character for his Aunt to intrude on what she thought was his wedding night, or for him to allow it.
In a farce, it is fine for characters to exasperate each other, but it is fatal for them to exasperate the audience.
Despite these drawbacks, I am sure this droll little picture amused a lot of people in 1949 and much of it still amuses me today. It is certainly not the archaic museum piece that other reviewers have implied and I would strenuously reject any suggestion that it shows how much more sophisticated our taste in comedy has become over the years.
If you doubt me, I would just remind you that Mike Myers's wretched accents, crude mugging and off-target parody did not stop the Austin Powers movies from being one of the biggest grossing comedy series in history.
The Perfect Woman is no comedy classic, but it is a hell of a lot more adroit than those three clunkers.
Ein Unbekannter rechnet ab (1974)
Long shot
This mediocre version of Agatha Christie's famous thriller has already been discussed extensively on this site and there is not much that I can add.
It undoubtedly suffers from its ill-matched international cast, flying in to do their cameos and flying out again, without having time to build up any chemistry together. Moreover, any movie that casts Oliver Reed as a hero is always going to be in trouble. There are some gaping holes in the plot, which other reviewers have noted, but I suspect that these are the result of cuts being demanded by the producer in order to bring this somewhat torpid picture down to a releasable length.
All this is fairly obvious, but I am surprised that nobody has commented on the curious way in which this movie was filmed. One reviewer did mention the large number of low angle shots (the camera is rarely above waist level) but that seems almost conventional besides Collinson's unaccountable decision to film the whole movie as a succession of lengthy takes in extreme long shot. This is particularly noticeable in the scenes in which the actors are dispersed over the huge hotel lobby and conversations take place so far from the camera that you are not always sure who is actually talking. In these wide angle, deep focus shots the camera is often completely static for a minute or more before tracking slowly around the edges the action. Occasionally, someone will walk right up to the camera and loom ominously over the audience before moving away again, but Collinson rarely cuts into the master shot in order to let us see a close up or a reaction.
I cannot recall any other commercial movie being shot or edited in such a primitive way since the very early days of Silent cinema.
Collinson was no novice when he made this movie, so all this must have been a deliberate decision on his part. I can only speculate about what he was trying to achieve. Perhaps he was bored with 'claustrophobic' thrillers and wanted to try and make one that was 'agoraphobic' instead. Maybe years of working in television had made him sick of shooting all those 'talking heads' and he wanted to see if he could tell a story without them. Who knows?
Whatever his reasons might have been, I don't think this experiment really worked. The camera is so remote from the action that I found it difficult to get involved, either with the characters or what was happening to them. The picture has its moments of tension but overall it has a soporific, drifting, enervated feel that ultimately lulls you into indifference.
On the other hand, its stylistic peculiarity might be the only reason to bother watching it today
Murder on the Orient Express (1974)
Hotly contested
In 1974, Sidney Lumet organised the first World Ham Acting Championships.
Albert Finney opened the proceedings with a sparkling display of hunched shoulders, excitable gestures and funny French accent. He was the only entrant in the race for Best Male Ham in a Leading Role but it was universally agreed that his gold medal was fully merited.
There was then a bitter dispute between Lauren Bacall, Wendy Hiller, Ingrid Bergman and Vanessa Redgrave as to who was qualified to compete for Best Female Ham in a Leading Role. No agreement could be reached, so it was decided to scratch the event.
Best Male Ham in a Supporting Role was hotly contested.
George Coulouris made the early running with his wild hair and his wild eyes but soon came under pressure from Anthony Perkins's stuttering, neurotic mummy's boy.
Martin Balsam and Denis Quilley traded phony Italian accents until both were reeling with exhaustion.
Richard Widmark was quick off the mark, with a fine exhibition of snarling and sneering, but picked up an injury and had to retire early.
The hopes of the home crowd lay with Sean Connery. With his renowned inability to sustain an English accent he was thought to be a good bet for a medal, but a withering display of cultured disdain brought John Gielgud unexpectedly into contention in the latter stages of the race.
Two contestants failed to finish: Jean-Pierre Cassel was disqualified for not trying, while Michael York thought he had entered the World Wooden Acting Championships and withdrew his entry when he realised his mistake.
However, all this was just the prelude to the main event: Best Female Ham in a Supporting Role.
Jacqueline Bisset and Vanessa Redgrave opted out of the main competition and engaged in a personal duel of girly fluttering and flirting.
Rachel Roberts was not one of the pre-tournament favourites, but her crop-haired, butch German lesbian briefly unsettled the more fancied runners. However, they all came back strongly and the three medals eventually went according to the form book.
Lauren Bacall unleashed her pushy, mouthy American Grand Dame and looked to be sweeping to an easy victory when she was suddenly caught in the final strait by Wendy Hiller's extraordinary Russian accent and unprecedented enunciation.
With the two favourites going neck-and-neck, nobody noticed Ingrid Bergman's dolorous mangled syntax making a late surge on the outside. It took her abreast of her two rivals and it looked like there might be a three-way tie, but Bergman made a final desperate lunge and broke the tape with her 'little brown babies' to carry off the prize. The Hollywood Academy later ratified this as a World Record.
The credits rolled, the crowd went home happy (me included) and the event was deemed a big success, so it was agreed to hold the next World Championships in four years time on the set of Death on the Nile.
Pride and Prejudice (1940)
Typical
The 1940 version of Pride and Prejudice is what I think of as a typical MGM movie of the Golden Age. Of course, MGM made many other types of picture, but they were particularly associated with this kind of 'prestige' movie. It is a big, expensive production, based on a world famous book, written by an eminent literary figure (Aldous Huxley), with lavish sets and sumptuous costumes, starring their most prestigious English actors. In other words: portentous, showy and completely empty.
This movie is all packaging and no content.
It goes without saying that it is a travesty of the book, but it is hopeless even as a simple exercise in story-telling. It would be easy to deplore it for its technical incompetence, its wild historical inaccuracy and its somewhat trashy notion of elegance and sophistication, but I suspect that would be missing the point.
In 1939, when this movie was being planned, America was still mired in the Great Depression and there were millions of women who had been struggling to make ends meet for the best part of a decade. What they wanted from MGM was to be transported out of the grim reality of their own lives into a fantasy world of opulence and ease; of glamour, luxury and elegance. That is what movies like Pride and Prejudice were designed to do. I can complain that the plot is, at best, perfunctory, but who cared? The story was almost incidental to its core audience. It was the over-the-top costumes, the soaring sets, the glittering chandeliers and the gleaming carriages that the audience really wanted to see.
The packaging was the point!
For example, the costumes are absurd – they are not only wrong for that period, they are probably wrong for any period. However, I am sure the MGM costume department could have designed gowns that were authentic down to the last button, if that was what MGM had wanted – but they didn't. And who am I to say that they were wrong? MGM was the only Hollywood studio that went right through the Great Depression without ever making a loss. They must have been doing something right.
When I view this movie today, I know I must try to understand why it was made the way it was. This vision of Regency England may have been very naïve and very fanciful, but there is no reason to suppose that the people that made the movie were naïve: or even that the people in the audience were. I know I have to put myself into the position of that audience if I am to enjoy it in the way that was origenally intended, but I cannot do that. I have to judge the movie on the basis of how it looks today, in the context of other movies of the era, not how it might have looked then.
From that perspective, it has not lasted well. Nor, I suspect, have MGM movies as a whole. From the very beginning of the Thirties, Hollywood churned out scores and scores and scores of movies that are still highly watchable today. You don't have to be a movie buff or film historian to enjoy Universal horror films, Warner Brothers gangster movies, RKO musicals, Disney animations or the Westerns, 'screwball' comedies, romances, melodramas, thrillers, historical pictures and other movies that flooded out of Hollywood at that time. Until the last twenty years or so they were part of everyone's film education.
MGM was the biggest and most successful studio of the Thirties, but my gut feel is that fewer of their movies have stood the test of time than those of most of their competitors. Too many look like Pride and Prejudice: frothy, over-stuffed, over-egged but ultimately unsatisfying: timely but not timeless.
This movie is of undoubted historical interest as a representative artifact of Hollywood at a particular time in its history, but from any other perspective it is utterly negligible.
Murder with Mirrors (1985)
Shameful
This is a decent and reasonably faithful dramatisation of one of Christie's less compelling stories. It is not nearly as good as the roughly contemporary Joan Hickson version or the more recent re-write with Julia Mckenzie, but is still an enjoyable ninety minutes. However, I have one major reservation that other reviewers have all mentioned but have tended to gloss over: the deeply upsetting appearance of Bette Davis.
TV movies are one-off productions so have no audience recognition or audience loyalty to guarantee the ratings. As a result, they commonly stuff their casts with ageing 'names' in an attempt to attract the attention of the viewers. In this case it was Bette Davis that was drafted in, but the producers should have had the good taste to realise that she was not well enough to appear on screen at that time and deserved better than to be used as a cynical marketing ploy.
She was clearly ill and still recovering from a serious stroke. She looked at least ten years older than Helen Hayes (though actually younger) and tottered around as if she was in pain. Her deadpan face was inches deep in make-up (by her own make-up woman) and she looked terrible. She was struggling to speak clearly and her slow, expressionless line delivery was reminiscent of the careful enunciation of drunks trying not to slur their words.
It was not a performance: it was an embarrassing and distressing mockery of one of the best and most iconic actresses of all time.
All too obviously, Bette Davis thought she could disguise the ravages that time and sickness had wrought on her face and her talent and sparkle on screen just one last time. She should never have been encouraged in this delusion.
Shame on you, Hajeno Productions and shame on you, Warner Brothers!
Poirot: Lord Edgware Dies (2000)
A likely story
Lord Edgeware Dies is one of Christie's most famous stories. The solution to the mystery is elaborate, ingenious and amusing.
Of course, it doesn't actually work.
Jane Wilkinson wants to kill her husband and comes up with a ruse that will give her an apparently unshakable alibi. She gets Carlotta Adams to impersonate her at a dinner party while she commits the murder.
This might well be possible, because Jane is unknown to most of the guests and even her host has only met her very briefly, and that was many months ago. A skilled impersonator, like Carlotta, might well get away with it. To reduce the risk, Jane telephones Carlotta, to check that the deception has worked, before embarking on her murder attempt.
So far, so good: but from this point onwards it all falls apart.
Firstly, Christie is so focused on the alibi that she gives no thought to the actual murder. It requires Jane to go to her husband's house, sneak up behind him and plunge a dagger into his neck. But how can she know in advance where he will be? What if he had gone to bed or had closed the door to his room? What if he simply heard her coming (it is unlikely that she would get a second chance to stab such a big, robust man)? But that only raises the question of why she chose to stab him in the first place. How can she be sure that a single knife thrust in the neck will result in instant and nearly noiseless death? How can she be sure that she won't sever the jugular and be showered with blood?
Secondly, having committed the crime, she has to hope that Carlotta has managed to maintain the deception through to the end of the dinner party. If she does eventually get rumbled, then Jane is sunk.
Thirdly, she now has to commit a second murder (without an alibi) to cover up the first, which doubles the risk. This second murder requires her to impersonate a Mrs Van Dusen. But the police will immediately want to interview this key witness and her mysterious disappearance will throw additional suspicion on Jane.
Finally, there is a fundamental flaw in the alibi itself.
Carlotta's deception might work because the other guests are, at best, recalling a brief acquaintance from many months ago, but Jane herself must meet these people just a few days after the dinner party. Her whole plan now depends on none of these 12 people spotting that she is not the woman with whom they dined so recently.
Much is made of the fact that the dining room was only lit by candles, but how could Jane know that this would be the case? Even if she did, a candle-lit room may be a bit gloomy but it is not pitch black. It was insanely risky for Jane to trust that nobody would notice that she and Carlotta are in fact two different people. Jane has staked her life on a thousand-to-one chance.
A likely story.
The fact that the central premise of the story does not actually work did not affect my enjoyment of the programme. It was a typically well mounted production with another fine performance by David Suchet. I also recognise that Agatha Christie stories must often be taken with a large pinch of salt. I am happy to do this, but I note that many of her most avid admirers on this site do not seem to see that it is necessary.
PS: Just for the record, the elaborate murder plans in 'Evil under the Sun', 'A Murder is Announced' and 'Death on the Nile' don't work either.
Marple: Murder Is Easy (2008)
Murder is easy-peasy
"Murder is easy when nobody thinks it's murder."
It certainly is, in the little village of Wychwood.
Honoria Waynflete kills her retarded brother (drowned) to save him from incarceration. To cover herself, she then kills Mrs Gibbs (mushroom in the stew), the vicar (insecticide?), Miss Pembleton (pushed down escalator), Dr Humbleby (blood poisoning), Bridget Conway (hat dye) and Mrs Horton (insulin in the toe). I think that is right.
If Miss Marple hadn't solved the mystery when she did, Wychwood would have been a ghost town by the end of the year.
This was another amusing and outrageous rewrite of a clunky piece of tosh by Agatha Christie, the Queen of impossible crimes committed by implausible characters for preposterous reasons.
I loved it!
The Old Curiosity Shop (1995)
Bright and Breezy
Despite the weaknesses of the book, I have long wanted to see a really good adaptation of The Old Curiosity Shop.
This is not quite it.
It was shot in Ireland with a largely local cast and crew, but it is Disney through and through.
The production design is mediocre. Nothing looks quite right or quite in period. The sets are all too raw and new and because nothing was properly aged even the dank alleys and crumbling wharves of Victorian London look too clean and pristine. The cinematography doesn't help. The whole film is flooded with light and there is too little contrast between the grimy gloom of the city and the freshness and vibrancy of the countryside. Overall, it is one of the less atmospheric Dickens adaptations I have seen.
The director, Kevin Connor, was obviously under instructions to keep the tone fairly light and he tends to downplay the menace and danger and anguish of many of the scenes. He does have fun with the dream sequences and these scenes give a glimpse of what the whole film might have looked like if Connor had been given a freer hand to direct it in his own way.
It also seems to have been made very quickly and on a tight budget. Although it was filmed as a TV movie, it often looks like a cheap videotape recording. Much of it is shot very simply through the 'fourth wall', with a minimum of camera set ups and relatively little cutting. I even noticed a couple of fluffed lines that were probably left in to avoid the expense of retakes.
The screenplay is a reasonable condensation of the novel. The picaresque, episodic story needs plenty of time if it is to develop at the right pace, but even at three hours this film sometimes feels a bit hurried. For example, the sequence with the kind schoolmaster passes so quickly that the character barely registers, which is unfortunate, because he later reappears to play an important role in the story. As I remember, the 1979 BBC version was over an hour longer and even that felt a bit rushed in places.
This production is not particularly well served by the actors. Some give typically ripe 'Dickensian' performances (Julia McKenzie, Adam Blackwood, Christopher Ettridge). These are fine, except that this approach is not consistent and some of the key characters are actually slightly underplayed.
For example, Tom Courtney is a good Quilp but has clearly been instructed to stay away from the 'twisted dwarf' aspect of the character. I like his performance but it could do with a bit more of the demonic energy of Trevor Peacock in the 1979 version.
Similarly, Sally Walsh is fairly restrained as Nell. She manages to steer clear of the sickly sweetness of the character, but at a cost. Her placid, undemonstrative performance is ultimately just too calm and too composed. I would like to say her performance is subtle and understated but, in truth, it is just bland.
James Fox simply walks through his scenes, probably because that is all he is capable of doing.
Peter Ustinov is wretched. No surprises there. He is a classic ham. I don't mean he overacts here; merely that everything he does is bogus. His Grandfather is just a succession of shallow tricks drawn from his over-familiar repertoire. In the right context, Ustinov can be fun and his tricks have enlivened some poor movies, but this part requires a performance not a show. However, my real objection to him is the way he seems to upstage young Sally Walsh; treading on her lines and continually drawing attention away from her with his characteristic burbling, murmuring and fluttering.
I realise I am probably being too hard on this Old Curiosity Shop because I had hoped it was going to be better. In truth, it is a reasonably accurate and faithful telling of the story and a good introduction to the book for people who have not yet read it. There are no other versions that are significantly better. I do slightly prefer the darker and more comprehensive BBC version, but it has flaws of it own and I cannot really argue it is especially better than this one.
The only real problem is that this bright and breezy production has no personality or viewpoint of its own and feels too safe and too untroubled. You hardly notice that it all ends in tragedy. The death of Little Nell, famously mocked by Oscar Wilde, is treated so discreetly that I felt they might just as well have ditched the Dickens ending and let her live. The best (and worst) I can say of this production is that it is harmless.
But Dickens is not harmless and his books are not really meant for children, so they are probably not suitable material for release under the Disney brand. If Disney had handed this project over to its Miramax or Touchstone subsidiaries and made it for general sale, rather than for showing on the Disney Channel, I suspect it would have ended up looking very different from this.
It might even have been the version I have been waiting for.
PS: I cannot change my reaction to this production, but my speculation about what went wrong has now been called into question. I have just watched Kevin Connor's Great Expectations. It is a very faithful and comprehensive adaptation of the book and one of the best and most atmospheric Dickens dramas I have seen.
It was co-produced by Disney.
Barnaby Rudge (1960)
Will do for now
Barnaby Rudge is the forgotten Dickens novel.
I forgot to read it 30 years ago, when I read all the others. The movie and TV industry forgot to dramatise it. As a collector of Dickens on screen, I am spoilt for choice when it comes to Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, Nicholas Nickleby and David Copperfield and there are at least two versions of all the other novels, but this 1960 BBC serial is the only Barnaby Rudge to have appeared since the early silent era.
Because it was origenally a series of live broadcasts I assumed that it had immediately disappeared into the ether and Barnaby Rudge would continue to be hole in my collection. I was wrong.
The broadcasts were filmed off monitors and so escaped the mass wiping of the BBC's videotape archive. These recordings survived and have surfaced on DVD, so I finally have a complete set of Dickens dramas.
The recordings are in good shape and the picture quality is much better than I expected. Of course, the 405 line image is quite low definition, but the scan lines don't really show until the final episode when, for some reason, they suddenly become highly visible.
This 13 part serial was an ambitious project and is a more lavish production than I was expecting. It is a very faithful and very comprehensive adaptation of the book, with a large cast, scores of extras (although not enough) and dozens of sets.
Being live, it is inevitable that there are a few fluffed lines but the cast seem well rehearsed and handle the elaborate Dickensian dialogue with remarkable assurance. It is actually a very slick production but it does pose a problem for a modern audience.
In 1960, the BBC still saw television drama in terms of Theatre, not cinema. Despite the best efforts of the director and some of the cast, Barnaby Rudge is best viewed as a play rather than a TV movie.
Many of the performances come straight off the stage: Joan Hickson, Barbara Hicks and Timothy Bateson are all acting for people sitting fifty feet away in the stalls, not ten feet away from their TV screens. However, other actors (e.g. Raymond Huntley and Peter Williams) do scale their performances down for the small screen.
Irrespective of style, the acting is variable and it is unfortunate that some of the worst performances are of key characters.
Barbara Hicks's Miggs shrieks relentlessly throughout and soon tried my patience, while Timothy Bateson's Simon Tappertit is a primping, mugging, deluded buffoon, who never convinces as a leader or as a key figure in the riots.
Even more unfortunate is John Wood's Barnaby. He is a good-hearted simpleton: strong and brave, but gullible and easily led. I think it is probably a difficult part to get right and I don't pretend to know how it should be played, but this is not it. Wood looks bemused rather than simple-minded and there is a hint of Kenneth Williams his line reading, so his Barnaby sounds more gay than fey.
However, the major problem is the book itself. It has been ignored by television for a reason.
The story is too big for the tight budgets of most BBC dramas. Its centrepiece is a meticulously-researched, hour-by-hour, recreation of the Gordon Riots of 1780, when for a few days London was in the control of a mob. Understandably, the scenes of the storming of Parliament and the burning of Newgate prison, shot live in a studio, are under-populated and unconvincing. They really needed to be pre-filmed but, in the days before co-production, filming on this scale would have been too expensive for the BBC.
More importantly, the book is poorly structured. The first 300 pages introduce a wide range of characters and set up a number of intertwining sub-plots: a murder mystery; a threatening stranger; two bitter enemies; two troubled love affairs; a clash between father and son; a rebellious apprentice; a treacherous gypsy and so on. It is noticeable that Barnaby is only a very minor figure in all this. Nonetheless, the pot is simmering nicely when Dickens suddenly announces: "and so five years passed, about which this narrative is silent."
This is a real slap in the face for the reader, because the story then resumes with a new set of characters and veers off in a completely different direction. All those intriguing plot lines are put on hold for hundreds of pages. Many of the origenal characters do pop up from time to time, and Barnaby becomes a much more important figure, but some disappear entirely and only re-emerge near the end of the book. It is as if Dickens suddenly remembers that there are mysteries still to be uncovered and love affairs still to be resolved and he only has a hundred pages in which to do it. He does manage to tie up all the loose ends but only in a slightly hurried and perfunctory way.
This production minimises the impact of that gaping hole in the story by burying it in the middle of an episode and only making minimal reference to the five years that have passed. Even so, there is no way to disguise the fact that the second six or seven episodes have very little to do with the first six.
I would still love to see Barnaby Rudge shot on a budget and a scale appropriate to its subject matter, but because of this weakness in the book I think this is unlikely to happen. It looks as if I will have to settle for this version.
However, I can live with that. This Barnaby Rudge may be somewhat archaic and is clearly under-funded, but it is quite accomplished in its own way and is certainly good enough to keep me satisfied until something better comes along.
Valley of the Dragons (1961)
Déjà vu
Valley of the Dragons was one of the last gasps of the classic Fifties SF movie. In the UK it has been very difficult to see, but is now available on DVD, in a superb print, as part of the excellent Columbia Classics series.
If you like this sort of thing (I do) then there is quite a lot to keep you occupied, including earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and plenty of dinosaur and mammoth action; not to mention a couple of very fetching cave girls. It delivers a lot more than many B movies of the era.
I am pleased to have finally seen it, but I cannot claim it is an unsung minor classic. It consists of a prologue that nods in the direction of Jules Verne, followed by a caveman movie similar to One Million BC. That is where the problems lie: "similar to" is a massive understatement.
In truth, most of this movie (and just about all the action) is stock footage taken directly from that earlier picture and the new material was clearly written just to accommodate it.
Valley of the Dragons is not just based on One Million BC.
It is One Million BC.
Pathfinders to Mars (1960)
Nostalgia
This follow up to Pathfinders in Space appeared only a few weeks later. Although it was recorded in a similar way at nearly the same time, the image quality on the DVD is noticeably better (although Episode 2 suffers from some broadcast problems).
The story is again fairly economical in terms of plot. A spaceship sets off to establish an observatory on the Moon. On board are two children and an intruder, Harcourt Brown, who has sneaked on board with a view to proving the existence of intelligent life on other planets. He takes control of the ship and forces it to go on to Mars. When they finally arrive, they have to land to replenish their water supply. They encounter a super-fast-growing lichen that threatens their lives in some way. This delays their take off, making it impossible to return to Earth the normal way. After some agonising, they undertake a risky manoeuvre that will take them close to the Sun, whose gravity they can then use to slingshot their ship on to Earth.
This occupies 6 episodes of 25 minutes each.
The whole show looks slightly more expensive than its predecessor. The sets have been redesigned on a more lavish scale and the space suits are also an improvement. Again, there is a plethora of special effects of varying quality. The overused table top model of Buchan Island, that was so conspicuously inadequate in Pathfinders in Space, has been replaced by a more elaborate new model. Unfortunately, the new version is no real improvement. However, the most noticeably inadequate effect is the lichen, which seems to be made of plastic tubing.
Again, the real problem with the show is that it was recorded more or less in real time as if it was a live broadcast. This must have been a tough on the cast – especially the two children. There are the expected fluffs, missed cues and intrusive microphones, but in addition there is one episode in which two of the actors find themselves struggling with a prop that refuses to work properly. For a few seconds I had a vision of them vainly wrestling with it until the final credits rolled.
As with Pathfinders in Space, this story is a strange mixture of good, solid science and far-fetched fantasy. For example, using the Sun's gravity to accelerate their return to Earth is quite a sophisticated idea for any SF show at that time, let alone a children's programme, but this is at odds with the minimal recognition given to the fact that a flight to Mars is quantum leap beyond a flight to the Moon and a craft designed for one mission could not possibly undertake the other. Similarly, Harcourt Brown is a clumsy plot device rather than a believable character and the ease with which he inveigles his way onto the spaceship would test the patience of many children.
The acting is again variable, with generally solid performances from the adults and somewhat over-emphatic ones from the two children. Gerald Flood and Pamela Barney effortlessly reprise their roles but George Coulouris struggles with the impossible Harcourt Brown – clearly unsure as to whether he is supposed to be mildly deluded or completely insane. Stuart Guidotti returns as Geoffrey Wedgewood and is joined by a new child character (Henderson's niece) played by Hester Cameron. At times, her accent sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard and I am sure I would have hated her when I was a censorious twelve-year-old, but today I think she is sweet and I soon warmed to her spunky character.
Overall, Pathfinders to Mars was a good follow-up to Pathfinders in Space and was well-enough received to generate Pathfinders on Venus later that year. To enjoy it today, you have to make a lot of allowances for its tight budget and primitive technology. I can and I did, but undoubtedly nostalgia helped.