Adira-2

Although this movie is nearly fifty years old, it had me on the edge of my seat the whole way through. What was going to happen next? Would the characters escape? I can't say much more, without giving away the story except - "Hunted" was brilliantly plotted and directed. Thumbs up to everyone concerned, including Dirk Bogarde as the wanted man, and Jon Whitely as the little boy whom he first used, and then befriended.

My local TV guide gave me high expectations for this movie ... but alas I was disappointed. It's not that the acting is bad. With Ralph Richardson in the lead how could it be? Nor is the subject matter uninteresting. However "School for Secrets" is poorly constructed. It piles scene on scene, without building up to a proper climax. It has too many main characters - and most of them are written as semi-humorous stereotypes. One day someone will make the definitive movie about the development of radar during World War II, but this isn't it.

About halfway through the Second World War in Britain, people started envisaging a brave new postwar world. "The Way We Live", made shortly after the war, taps into this idealism.

This movie reminds me of my school days, when we were ushered into a darkened room and treated a film on some instructive subject such as atomic power, fluoride or sugar production. In this case the topic was town planning, and the town in question was Plymouth. Using some slender fictional devices - a writer investigating postwar reconstruction, and a "typical" family suffering from overcrowding - "The Way We Live" sets out to inform rather than entertain. There isn't much drama, and no plot to speak of. It borrows a lot of footage from contemporary newsreels. In the end we don't even get to see the rebuilt city of Plymouth, because in 1946 the city was still awaiting reconstruction.

"The Weaker Sex" is two things. Firstly it is a tribute to the British housewife ("To those who also served, though they were too busy to stand and wait"). Secondly it is a look at contemporary (1948) history through the eyes of a middle-aged housewife.

Though both these goals are admirable, the way they were carried out made a lopsided and rambling film. The first half of the picture, which takes place from D-Day to VE Night, shows a family under the stress of war. The incidents which fill this part of "The Weaker Sex" - air raids, lost and wounded brothers and sons, D-Day landings - are exciting enough to mask the fact that there isn't really any overarching plot, and the characters are going nowhere.

However the second half of the movie, which takes place in the postwar "Age of Austerity" doesn't have this built-in excitement factor. While watching a family coping with peace and the aftermath of war should have been interesting, if only for the novelty value, this half of the picture felt like an epilogue to the real movie. It is possible, even probable, that real life felt like this after the war, but sometimes reality doesn't

Perhaps there was a third purpose behind this movie. On the whole all the characters in "The Weaker Sex" are nice people: decent, doing their duty, law abiding, and not inclined to grumble. Given the era it was made in, it was perhaps intended to boost morale by reminding people how lucky they really were - that though times were hard they had peace, freedom and hope for the future.

"Waterloo Road" deserves to be better known than it is. If, like me, you were born after the war, it is a fascinating glimpse of a time gone by, but don't watch it for that alone. It is a story about ordinary people in wartime, without heroics and melodrama, but with an abundance of character and incident. The characters struck me as being true to life, and I didn't find a jarring line of dialogue or a scene which dragged. John Mills gave a fine performance as a soldier gone AWOL, and Stewart Granger as the cad out to seduce his wife. All in all, a wonderful little film.

Possible spoilers: I used to think that cute and winsome comedies were a Hollywood specialty, but after seeing "Adam and Evelyne" I realised the British can do them too. Stewart Granger plays Adam, a professional gambler. Jean Simmons plays Evelyne, the innocent orphan he adopts. About fifteen minutes into the film it becomes easy to predict how everything is going to turn out - Evelyne will grow up, she and Adam will fall in love, and after reforming him, she will marry him. Not surprisingly, Stewart and Simmons sail through their parts. Neither made heavy demands upon the actors. Stewart was required to be suave and charming, while Simmons radiated naive innocence.

Still, I have seen worse movies. There was nothing actually offensive or irritating in "Adam and Evelyne", nor was it slow moving or boring. The obligatory scene where Adam shows Evelyne the sights of the town was cleverly handled. Instead of the standard montage of famous sights, intercut with Evelyne's enraptured face, we saw a sequence of scenes depicting Evelyne's energetic and Adam's increasingly weary *feet*, with the characters' dialogue as voiceover. And if nothing else the sets and costumes were fun to watch.

Warning: spoilers. Gwen, a teenage girl leaves a brutal home and falls into bad company. Sent to reform school she gets wised up quickly, and embarks on a criminal career.

The British *do* do sordid nicely! From the heroine's slum home through to the gangland nightclubs she comes to inhabit I was given the clear impression that her world was nasty, corrupt and dangerous. Jean Kent, the actress who played Gwen, brought the part off well too. She was convincingly innocent and rebellious in the beginning; convincingly hard and amoral at the end.

The plot was fast paced and the script tight. The movie never bogged down at any point, possibly because it was tightly focused on the main character. The peripheral characters were neatly sketched in. Some verged on the edge of cliche, but since they were only there to move Gwen's story along, they never quite tipped over the edge.

That being said, there are parts of the movie which are hokey. The first instance which struck me was the scene where Gwen's father thrashes her with his belt - it was quite plain to me that the actor was doing his best to miss Jean Kent. The framing story which surrounds the main plot seemed unnecessary and begged the question how the narrator of Gwen's story knew all the details of her career. I suspect it was put there to point out the moral to "Good Time Girl"'s original audience. I also suspect that the movie was originally promoted with slogans such as "From Today's Headlines!"