Igenlode Wordsmith

This film is a decent little thriller with some lovely period yachting sequences -- it wasn't quite what I'd expected, which is probably a point in its favour. The running time feels briefer than its actual 80 minutes, and there really isn't much space for subtleties; the film leans happily on every post-war cliché going, has no room for red herrings or false leads (the treasure quest really is remarkably straightforward!), and makes good use of its one big mystery, Who Is Helene (and what is she really up to?) One interesting twist is that since the cast are all of them supposed to have been on active service during the War eighteen years earlier, none of them, even the two women, can be played by youthful starlets. For me Ronald Howard stood out as the avuncular Bill Webb, whose kindness and good humour help keep things calm; there is a small romantic sub-plot between Pru and David, the younger two (which is to say that they are probably not yet forty), but the film doesn't waste too much time on that. We have Incredibly Evil Nazis, stolen treasure with a map in multiple parts, the undercover radio operator leaving the tap running to cover the sounds of the Morse key (which is of course a heinous crime in its own right on board a yacht with limited water-tanks, and I was relieved to see the script point that out!), treacherous quicksands, sinister thugs (whose identity I don't think is ever explained, unless they were in fact simply the port police), a secret vault inside which one can become trapped, and a slightly jaw-dropping amount of alcohol being served out at every opportunity.

The twist at the end is well executed and took me for one completely by surprise; my stomach lurched in anticipation of one dramatic irony, and then we ended up with a completely different turn of events. (And that's about the one part of the plot that does actually get a scene afterwards explaining how it worked, which was obviously felt to be necessary -- given the 'convenient coincidence' attitude of most of the rest of the action, I don't think I would have questioned it myself!)

This was a massive disappointment. I saw "Toy Story" long after it came out, when the whole computer animation hype was long since old hat, but still loved it at once. I really enjoyed "The Incredibles" and thought "Ratatouille", "WALL-E", "Up" and "Inside Out" took animated film to a whole new level. But it turns out "A Bug's Life" is... a whole heap of steaming clichs.

Almost from the very beginning it felt as if they were sticking in just about every Hollywood/Disney trope aimed at the under-tens, many of them painfully inappropriate to the setting. Sorry, but ants don't have cute little child ants who set up a 'clubhouse' and save the world when the adults are busy giving up; ants have squishy larvae. Grasshoppers don't have mothers or little brothers. Worker ants don't have romantic moments with 'princesses', because worker ants are FEMALE. (And seriously, if you were going to design an ant-powered flying machine, why would you power it with child ants, instead of the strongest team in the colony? On the other hand, if it was originally designed for adult ants, how would the little ones even be able to get the wings to move?)

And then of course we've got the whole 'misunderstood loner whose brilliant ideas always go embarrassingly wrong' scenario, which I also found so clichd and obvious as to be almost painful. And 'the power of family/friendship can overcome everything' and 'you just need to believe in yourself'... it's practically a checkbox list of standard tropes, and while the same messages appear in many, many good films (there's a reason why they're standard), here I rapidly ended up with the feeling that it was Disney product being done by numbers. Watching "A Bug's Life" versus "Toy Story" is like watching "Flushed Away" versus "Chicken Run"; the magic isn't there and it's gone corporate.

It was also very noticeable that for all the gnashing mouthparts and serrated limbs, the worst anyone gets threatened with in the script is getting 'stomped' or 'squished', which doesn't really match up to the visuals and again is rather obviously by-the-book for small children. The hero's Grand Plan is discarded (for no very clear reason -- why would the discovery of his deception about the circus prevent the planned 'scare-crow' tactic from working?) and then heroically launched again at the last minute and then after a prolonged show fails anyway. In another context that might have come across as stunning originality, but by that point it just struck me as being an excuse for this film to have its cake and eat it; for him to be a Great Inventor, but also demonstrate that true strength comes from love and the power of unity and standing up to your fears, blah blah blah.

As a result the finale is incredibly prolonged -- like much of the rest of the film. The 'botched circus' scene at the beginning in particular felt as if it lasted far too long, partly I think because it was presumably supposed to be funny, and that's not my type of humour at all. (But then, thinking about it, that goes for quite a lot of the would-be-funny parts of this film.)

I'm afraid I found "A Bug's Life" actively annoying from quite early on, and I'm not quite sure in all justice why. It felt cynically manipulative and shallow, as if you could see all the cogs turning and buttons being pushed, and being stuffed with bad biology didn't help. (Heinrich the fat caterpillar pupates and turns into... a fat caterpillar with wings?) I felt zero chemistry where the characters were concerned. Yes, it's a U-rated children's film that was never aimed at the likes of me in the first place, but a good children's film ought to work for adults too.

After all, I've seen plenty of pictures that commit the 'sins' mentioned above, and loved them. "Chicken Run", for instance, features hens with teeth acting in a highly anthropomorphic way, and it even has an artificial flapping bird... but that production struck me as simply brilliant. And compared to a lot of children's films, "A Bug's Life" does more or less show its villain being killed and eaten, whereas a lot of classic Hollywood movies go to lengths to indicate that if the villain dies, that's absolutely not the hero's responsibility in any way.

I think perhaps what irked me about it was that there didn't seem to be any greater depth -- any references that adults could be expected to get over and above the target audience. The humour remains on the level of "Francis is a male 'lady'bird... haw, haw haw", the romance is school-gate stuff, and the attempts at emotional manipulation aren't exactly sophisticated. It was like being subjected to a lecturer who persists in talking to a mixed audience as if they were all six-year-olds.

I was expecting this film about a tramp steamer with a cargo of high explosives to be a wartime drama along the lines of "San Demetrio"; in fact, the war is pretty peripheral. Even when the ship does come under attack, somewhere around the middle of the picture, she apparently escapes unscathed via means unspecified (did the enemy simply run out of bombs after missing with all of them?) It's really a story about life on the lower decks, with the officers making distant appearances and the wartime background intruding from time to time, but with the main focus on the relationships among the crew.

According to the credits, it was adapted from a set of "sea plays" by Eugene O'Neill, which accounts for the very episodic feel of the film. It's not really a complete story; it's a set of individual isolated incidents, some of which are never really explained (all the signalling with torches, for instance, which is apparently not anything to do with undercover spies -- I actually assumed there were two ships in the opening scene, one being the tramp steamer and the other a British naval vessel!) On the other hand, it did succeed in several places in making me care about the characters; I was convinced that Smitty was being falsely accused, and desperate by the end for Ole to escape successfully from seaboard life as his shipmates are determined that he should do, despite the heavy foreshadowing otherwise.

The film was billed as "John Wayne in Eugene O'Neill's The Long Voyage Home", but that's presumably a retrospective attempt to cash in on Wayne's name; the lead actors are Thomas Mitchell as the burly Irishman Driscoll, and Ian Hunter as the middle-class Englishman who is the odd one out among his cheery companions. John Wayne plays Ole, the simple Swedish farmboy whose role is largely passive and monosyllabic, though he gets a good scene where he talks nostalgically about his home during the final drunken bar-crawl.

There are no very great surprises here, and the pace is quite slow -- extremely slow at the beginning, which is presumably intended to indicate the heat and tedium of a tropical night. I can see these individual 'episodes' working better in the original format as one-act plays, each with its definitive ending, than as an attempt at one continuing story. I didn't find the film quite successful (not nearly so much so as the English production "San Demetrio, London"), but on the other hand, it's not entirely mediocre -- and it's not as gung-ho as an actual war film would probably have been. (The shadowy role of the war is explained, in retrospect, by the fact that the source material was written twenty years earlier!)

I'd probably rate it 7/10: worth taping from TV, not worth paying for :-p

For a farce, this is actually quite entertaining - I'm not keen on broad humour, but this rarely goes over the top. Note that I say 'rarely' and certainly not 'never'!

The film opens with a vivid montage of London, with music winding out from a couple of down-at-heel players in a pub across street scenes, night life and even the river. Finally one of the characters we glimpse turns out to be our eventual protagonist -- a constable on 'point duty', guiding the traffic at a busy junction. But PC Mahoney has a sweetheart who is a lowly attendant at a nightclub, the Moonstone, and when she tips him off that there is an illegal gambling operation being operated above the club, he decides to take matters into his own hands and turn up to conduct an investigation in plain clothes in the hopes of getting promotion into the detective branch. Mahoney (who never loses his thick Irish brogue despite dressing up as a gentleman of means) is the most likeable and resourceful characterin the plot; Claude Hulbert plays silly-ass Aubrey, who is always eager to help but only ever seems to make things worse, and toothy Ralph Lynn plays Clifford Tope, who volunteers to pay off a blackmailer for the sake of a pretty stranger whose dancing appealed to him, but takes it into his head to try to confront the man instead, thus causing endless trouble.

The romantic interest, such as it is, lies between Tope and night-club star Cora, although since he is cowardly and not particularly intelligent (his only success lies in hiding behind a curtain and bopping Mahoney's assailants over the head) it's not clear that she feels anything for him beyond misplaced gratitude. Mahoney and his Molly, despite getting little screen time together, are much more endearing as a couple.

There's the obligatory scene where someone loses his trousers, which actually makes sense in the context of the plot; there's a sub-plot of a villain behind the villain, which leads to some amusing scenes. (Please can I blackmail her? Please?) Most of the funny parts involve the resourceful Mahoney talking rings round the other characters; a character being intelligent is always much more entertaining than characters being stupid. Likewise C.V.France, as the brains behind the whole gambling operation, gets the best lines out of the various villains, especially in the scene where he is attempting to interrogate three semi-conscious toughs as to exactly what happened to them.

The lanky Norma Varden and diminutive Robertson Hare make a study in comic contrast as Aubrey's redoubtable aunt and uncle with an eye for the ladies respectively; Mary Brough is Cora's gruff and indignant dresser, who has to put up with a succession of men in and out of the dressing-room and her mistress' flat. The on-screen dancing isn't particularly impressive by Hollywood chorus line standards -- apart from anything else the girls have very little room to play with! -- but Al Bowlly puts in a cameo appearance as the night-club's crooner.

The final scene ends with the villains being marched off en masse, followed by our victorious protagonists, which leads to a slightly surreal ending where the night-club audience and people in the street start applauding and the whole cast pauses and fans out down the front steps, heroes and villains alike, in what you eventually realise is the equivalent of the original play's curtain call. Otherwise the show's stage origins are not obviously intrusive and -- for a farce that features people getting bopped over the head, trapped in doors, and making eyes at pretty maids -- it's often genuinely amusing. The BFI bills this film as one of the best of the Ben Travers screen adaptations, and I can believe it.

I deliberately chose to watch Luis Trenker's original German version of this film ("Der Berg Ruft") instead of the English-language remake, because what little I'd heard about it wasn't promising, and despite my shaky German I felt it would give him and the film a better chance to see it as it had initially been intended. The German version turned out to be pretty good... so I was curious enough to check out the remake.

The interesting thing is that in fact "The Challenge" turns out to be very much a new version of the story, and not just a shot-by-shot translation of the script -- there are some very significant changes, and some of those relate directly to elements of the original that I myself had trouble with. I get the impression that someone was going through trying consciously both to improve on the completed film and simultaneously to tailor it to the English market, but the results are... a mixed bag, unfortunately.

Unsurprisingly, the elements that relate directly to the English protagonists have been expanded upon. This is evident from the very beginning, where the first fifteen minutes or so of the original opening have been dropped in order to start the story with Whymper's arrival on the scene (with the rockfall sequence being economically transposed to a later point in the film to explain away the Englishman's fall when he climbs solo -- in this version, it's no longer an unforced error on the climber's part but all the fault of the mountain!) In the final race for the peak, the scenes showing the English expedition have been considerably expanded whereas in the original the focus is largely on Carrel's attempts, and Hadow's fatal fall is both foreshadowed and excused by having the young man complain of feeling ill during the earlier part of the climb. The charming but fictional figure of his fiancée Miss Smeaton has been dropped, and a scene earlier on showing Whymper trying to raise money from his London publisher on the strength of his Alpine sketches has been inserted to tie the story back more closely to historical events -- we are a far cry at this point from the stereotypes of the original silent film, in which the Englishman sports a deerstalker and pipe and receives a letter from Carrel at the hands of the butler in his ancestral halls!

If you run the two versions side by side (a luxury the original film makers could never have imagined), it becomes evident that the actual climbing sequences have been considerably shortened -- all the more apparent because this footage, expensive to shoot and dialogue-free, is the one part of the film that in many places has been reused directly from one version to the other. I'm not sure if this was done because it was felt that English audiences had less tolerance for that sort of thing, or simply in order to make room for all the added dialogue.

One interesting observation is that while the footage of the disaster itself is very similar to that used in the German version, for some reason here it's much more obviously fake; the camera angle is slightly different, and it's evident that what we are seeing is dummies being thrown down the mountain rather than men falling helplessly pell-mell. I eventually realised that this is almost certainly left-over footage from the original: 'second-best shots' that had not been used in the German negative. Evidently it wasn't felt worthwhile to go back to the mountain and refilm a fall of several thousand feet unnecessarily!

The new version is definitely a good deal talkier than the original, and it's rarely an improvement. Criticism I've seen of this film has tended to centre around the tedium of the village sequences, which was something I couldn't really understand from my experience of the German version -- I'm afraid that here, yes, they really are too long and boring. The screenwriter has tried to inject some Ealing-style comedy by introducing an incompetent policeman and a drunken mayor, and played up the role of Luc, Carrel's dim-witted sidekick with the heavy Italian accent, whom I felt to be one of the less successful characters in the original. I didn't find Trenker's German accent too intrusive, and his dialogue is fluent enough, but since the motivation for the entire Matterhorn ascent now boils down to commercial rivalry between the villages of Breuil and Zermatt and their respective hotel-keepers, this element of the script has been considerably expanded, and it's not the most inspiring of material.

One interesting change is the added scenes showing Whymper's injury being treated -- the film-makers evidently felt, as I did, that there was simply too little relationship established between the two men prior to the 'betrayal', but I'm not sure that an elaborate sub-plot concerning the nursing abilities of Carrel's mother was a good idea. An odd decision was the removal of the eagle's feather (did they think English audiences would fail to appreciate the difficulty of getting one?) and its replacement by a weird dance of mutual greeting; as a result, later on, when Whymper simply sends back Carrel's rucksack as opposed to the personal gift the result is not nearly so effective.

Overall I think this script suffers from over-explanation; we don't need to see the precise process by which the Italians arrange to be in Carrel's mother's cottage, we don't need a convoluted explanation as to why Carrel isn't using Whymper's ice-axe, and we certainly don't need the Reverend Hudson's laboured summit speech to tell us what they're thinking when they take off their hats in reverence. But there were some places where I felt the clarifications did enhance the story -- the diagrams showing the progress of the rival parties up the mountain, for example, and the fact that Carrel's group discovers that they have climbed an isolated buttress and thus have to abseil down the far side to continue their ascent (a point I had totally failed to comprehend previously). And the expanded role for the rope-maker works well, both making the damning accusation seem less arbitrary and then helping explain something that had puzzled me -- how on earth Carrel could possibly prove that he has retrieved the right piece of rope and not just any random length, given that he has no witnesses as to where he got it!

However, the most significant changes to the film come at the climax and ending -- I actually had to go back and check out the German version again on YouTube because I thought I might have totally misunderstood it. But no; Carrel's motivation for going back up the mountain really has been completely reversed. Instead of rushing immediately to defend Whymper as in the silent original-- instead of going 'for the honour of all mountaineers', as in the German version-- in "The Challenge", Carrel climbs the Matterhorn single-handed in search of the missing rope in order to *prove* that Whymper is lying and in the active hope of seeing him hanged, and is very disappointed to discover the truth.

It's very hard to guess why on earth they did this, and I can only suppose that it's in order to have a subsequent lengthy confession scene in which Luc explains the whole thing for the benefit of the audience -- Carrel's discovery is one of the more confused parts of the German version, and perhaps they felt the character needed the misunderstanding explicitly spelt out before he could charge off to the rescue. But it's a complete about-turn to the story.

The second total reversal comes with the final courtroom scene; final, that is, for the original script, but not so here. Instead of Carrel bursting in, bloodied and exhausted, just in time to save Whymper from a murder charge, here the verdict of the enquiry -- which appears to be a pretty cursory affair -- is quite the opposite: the Englishman is actually exonerated. As a result Carrel ends up instead wading in Wild-West-style to save his friend from a public lynching at the hands of an angry crowd... presumably because the scriptwriter felt the film needed an action finale rather than a lengthy legal sequence, but it's a somewhat jaw-dropping development!

It also means that we lose one of the more powerful moments from the German version: the final, unspoken sequence in which the two of them celebrate by reaching the peak alone together. Instead -- presumably to flatter English sensibilities -- the film ends with Carrel conceding a graceful defeat at ground-level: "You won, and I am glad of it".

Comparing the lengths, I see that "The Challenge" is actually twenty minutes shorter than "Der Berg Ruft", but it manages to come across as longer. I suspect it has a lot of additional dialogue and plot devices and fewer mountain shots... but the result is that it feels busy and over-laboured, with few of the elaborations actually being an improvement. Perhaps it's not surprising that it failed to kick-start a genre of 'mountain films' in England to match those in Germany, even with Nazi exiles like Emeric Pressburger on hand to make them. But it's interesting in that it comes across as someone's deliberate attempt to fix perceived issues with the earlier attempt -- one wonders just how much input Luis Trenker had in the process and what, as director and screenwriter on the original production, he felt about the changes.

I watched this film out of curiosity after having seen the 2016 restoration of the original silent version, "Der Kampf ums Matterhorn", which made a strong impression on me - I'd heard that Luis Trenker had remade the film ten years later without the romantic subplot which is the weakest element of the silent version, and wondered how much difference it would make to the treatment of the subject. My own feeling is that it makes the film stronger in some ways, but that the silent version is actually more effective in others (and, as I discovered later after doing some research, to be honest neither of them is particularly historically accurate in any case - I don't know how close they are to the Carl Haensel novel on which the film claims to be 'loosely' based).

Removing the contentious sub-plot in which Carrel becomes jealous of the other man's supposed relations with his wife (I gather Whymper's family in England had strongly objected to the film's release with this story-line, even though it's shown that the jealousy is actually unfounded) ironically has the effect of making the friendship between the two of them seem less convincing; in this version, rather than selflessly going to the aid of a stranger after witnessing his fall, then having him convalesce in his house for months, Carrel quarrels with his English employer, causes him to fall by jerking on the rope at the wrong moment, turns back and leaves him to climb alone, and then rescues him with a side-order of "I told you so"... and that is basically all the interaction we see between them before the friendship is declared. They climb together on one afternoon and on bad terms, and I didn't find the rescue on its own enough on which to base a loyalty that is supposed to lead to violent feelings of resentment and betrayal.

I actually felt that the (equally fictional) version in which Carrel's suppressed hate is transformed into undying allegiance when he realises that he has been wronging the man who trusts him with his life -- and in which they have spent a lot of time together and climbed in company more than once -- was more psychologically plausible; this one just feels very abrupt. So far as I remember the scene in which Whymper's carriage leaves the village (and friendship is sworn) is almost identical between the versions, which makes the excision of all the preceding context all the more apparent. It's simply a pity the 'romantic' sub-plot was handled via the evil half-brother character, which means that the silent version isn't really satisfactory either!

Substituted for the unsavoury hints at rape and adultery in the 1928 version is a wholesome romance with Felicitas, who is here the daughter of the local innkeeper rather than Carrel's wife. This seems to be another major change (although my German was not good enough to pick up all the fine details); this version of Carrel, rather than being a prosperous and respected figure in the village who is approached at the start of the film to lead a rescue attempt after an avalanche, is an outlier and outcast whose obsession with the mountains goes down badly with his neighbours, and Felicitas' father is far from happy at the connection.

With the initial six reels of the silent film effectively removed, their place has been taken by a new and much more complex plot strand concerning the rival expeditions. In the original, Carrel simply writes to his friend in England warning him to come soon if he wants to be the first to ascend the Matterhorn, but Whymper arrives too late and sets off alone to try to race the Italian expedition; he would rather have climbed with Carrel, but if that's not an option then he will do his utmost to reach the peak first with any help he can get. In the new version there is a complicated intrigue aimed at separating the two men in the name of Italian patriotism; one element I found very effective was the touch whereby Whymper, stung by Carrel's apparent repudiation of their agreement, sends back to him the eagle's(?) feather he had received in token of friendship, valueless in itself compared to the foreigner's gift of an engraved ice-axe, but costing every bit as much or more effort to obtain. Another touch that I like is that, while the character is referred to throughout as 'Jean-Antoine Carrel', his friends call him 'Tonio', thus unobtrusively pointing out his Italian nationality.

In place of the three eager young Englishmen who make up the numbers in the earlier film, we here get a more realistic attempt at representing the actual English climbing party; we also get Douglas' young fiancee, whom I suspect has no historical basis but whom I rather liked as an addition. Her character is used effectively at several points in the film to lighten the atmosphere or conversely to raise emotion.

But as with the silent movie, the outstanding sequences are the actual climbing shots and the stunning location filming, shot in the Alps and on the Matterhorn itself above the clouds. We're watching men climb in tweeds, hobnails and gaiters, with heavy canvas knapsacks and using their long ice-axes as walking-sticks, without artificial aids of any kind, held only by a slender strand of manila rope anchored around the bodies of their fellows; these sequences are basically shot as pure silent technique, to the accompaniment of the beautiful score. (I can't remember whether any of the shots from the original film are in fact reused!)

One thing that did puzzle me a bit and never gets explained is the eventual outcome of the mistaken identity when all Breuil rejoices in the belief that the Italian expedition has reached the summit; this error is highlighted in several sequences, but never seems to lead to any payoff. Presumably the villagers learn their mistake at some stage, but this whole plot element seems a bit of an unnecessary extra complication without consequences...

One scene that is very definitely done differently from the silent version is the actual accident. This was ingeniously depicted in the original simply by showing the plunging camera viewpoint of the falling men, but here we actually get to see the fall, and it's horribly convincing, from the tumbling close-ups of bodies ploughing through the snow to the final long-shot views of splayed limbs cartwheeling down the mountain into a puff of snow and silence. And of course we get to hear the rope break.

The ending of the film also is very different, with Carrel's motives complicated beyond simple loyalty to risk his life in immediate defence of a friend, to a situation where he still believes Whymper to have disowned their friendship but is shocked to hear of the accusations against him, and acts in defence of 'the good name of all mountaineers'. In this version Whymper is actually being put on formal trial rather than menaced by an impulsive taproom crowd (and defends himself vigorously rather than simply turning away in a daze of shock and exhaustion) -- this felt lengthy and over the top to me as a plot device, though I discovered subsequently that there actually was an official enquiry to assign blame after the disaster.

At any rate Carrel discovers the remnants of the rope, discovers that Whymper also believed himself betrayed (although I was confused by this, since the contents of the accusatory note he leaves behind at the summit seems to be at odds with the speech he actually gives to old Taugwalder there, regretting that Carrel could not be with them -- and Carrel appears to be considering faking a cut end himself), and he makes the requisite dramatic last-minute entrance just in time to save Whymper from a murder charge. The ending here felt a bit abrupt, as the entire misunderstanding is brushed off with a single handshake and fade out... but it's redeemed by the wordless epilogue shot, in which we return to the panorama of the view from the Matterhorn's peak, and see the two men reach it together, reconciled and triumphant (in what is again a very elegant and economical bit of silent-style story-telling!)

I'm torn as to whether I prefer this version or the original; there are elements of both that I'm sorry to lose in the other and also that I found unsatisfactory, and to be honest the fact that I'm missing out on the subtler nuances of the German dialogue doesn't qualify me to pronounce on the treatment. On balance this is probably the better film, and Luis Trenker is excellent in both; the sound version is certainly much easier to get hold of if you want to admire the mountain sequences (and they are worth admiring). I confess to rather preferring the theme of straightforward personal loyalty/conflict used to underpin the silent version, as opposed to what I felt was the somewhat confused motivation here -- the historical truth proves to be, alas, that it was a strictly business relationship where neither particularly liked or trusted the other in the first place.

This film was showing as part of the National Film Theatre's 'Weimar Season', but it's really nothing at all like the 'Cabaret'/'Lulu'/'Dr Caligari' stereotype of weird, transgressive art. It's a straightforward morally unambiguous story, a member of a genre that has no English equivalent: a 'Bergfilm' (mountaineering melodrama).

I was vaguely aware of their existence, as they tend to get brought up when people are attacking Leni Riefensthal, but I'd never seen one before, although I've seen two or three genuine climbing documentaries from the 1930s and 1930s. This one was actually a historical picture supposedly set in the golden age of alpinism in the 1860s, although as usual the leading lady's make-up and styling reflected 1920s ideas of glamour instead :-p

It's (loosely) based on the events surrounding the real first ascent of the Matterhorn, but since I didn't know the history involved I was taken by surprise by the outcome (not what I was expecting, given the film's origin) and was as gripped by the nailbiting tension of the mountain sequences as anyone could have wished. Peter Voss is very impressive as the courtly, reserved English amateur, Edward Whymper. He reminded me rather of Leslie Howard, whom I can definitely see playing the part :-)

The leading man of the film, however, is Luis Trenker, who gets the starring role of the mountain guide Carrel (who, frankly, appears to be neglecting his nominal daytime business in order to spend all his time climbing -- his family have a right to object!) He is a man of rather more violent moods and tempers, and his evil half-brother plays on this. We expect to see Carrel's character flaws lead to tragedy... but in fact he manages to overcome them, which is an unexpected and welcome result.

His beautiful (and very 1920s) wife Felicitas only appears in half the film, in the bolted-on romantic subplot which is the real Achilles heel of the picture. (Apparently Trenker was sufficiently unhappy with this strand of the film, doubtless dictated from on high for commercial reasons, that he subsequently remade it in the sound era minus the unhistorical elements.) But the problem is not so much Carrel's jealousy of his wife's apparent interest in the injured and grateful Englishman -- the performances leave it nicely ambiguous whether there is any actual unspoken attraction between them or not or merely a warm friendship, although Whymper is too chivalrous and Felicitas too loyal ever to consider acting on it -- but the Iago-like characterisation of Giacomo, the evil half-brother, which is what's shown as dictating Carrel's suspicions.

The jealousy sub-plot might have worked perfectly well minus the character of Giacomo (although that would have required the hero to shoulder more responsibility for his own failings, which would have given greater depth to the character but might have been unwelcome!) Alternatively, if the younger brother had been given some decent characterisation himself then his actions might have been more credible; there are hints at the beginning, for instance, that Giacomo resents Carrel's swanning off up the mountain and leaving him to do all the work of the hotel (indeed, during the big 'temptation' scene Carrel is sitting around smoking while Giacomo is hard at work splitting wood, and nobody seems to question this), and that Carrel snubs him coldly by rejecting the flask of brandy he attempts to supply for the rescue expedition.

If there had been more shades of grey in the relationship between the brothers it would have been a better film. As it was, Giacomo's sole motivation for all this convoluted grinning scheming is presented as being his lust-filled and amazingly blatant assaults on Felicitas, which don't seem to be notably discommoded by his brother's existence. He is presented as all bad, and Carrel as purely his victim.

The best part of this sub-plot is probably Giacomo's rout at the hands of his crippled mother -- the best 'old lady to the rescue' action/drama suspense sequence you're ever likely to encounter! It helps that the old lady (Alexandra Schmitt) is an excellent performer -- although I noted with irony that according to film convention, Carrel can apparently rain kisses on the face of his 67-year-old co-star, but can only lay his cheek chastely against that of the actress playing his adored wife ;-p) The worst part is the segment where Felicitas apparently sets out to climb the Matterhorn herself in a state of hysteria to find her husband, having zero experience and totally unsuitable clothing -- watching her teetering through the snow is just silly.

Where the film really scores, however, is in what were no doubt the 'money shots' for this genre: the actual climbing sequences. We are told by an onlooker early on in the film that Whymper "klettert wie ein Affe" (climbs like a monkey), and it's a credible verdict (although later in the film it stung my national pride that the supposedly talented Englishman tends to get pulled up the mountain by Carrel :-p)

I've no idea how the climbing was done; whether they managed to recruit actors who could actually climb, whether German performers were more likely to have it as a hobby anyway, whether they used stunt doubles (it didn't look like it) and whether they shot on mocked-up rock faces in the studio or genuine long shots on the cliffs, or both. I don't know how accurate it was in its representation of Alpine equipment of the 1860s, but at the very least it's a fascinating record of techniques of the 1920s, an utterly lost era in modern terms.

We watch climbers ascending without harnesses, pitons or fixed cams, clad in a simple stocking cap or Tyrolean hat and encumbered with a coil of cotton rope slung over one shoulder and a five-foot ice axe danging from one arm, with their hobnailed boots clinging to tiny holds in the rock. We watch them abseiling with nothing more sophisticated than a loop of rope caught skilfully around the body, and cutting steps in a shower of ice-chips using those long-handled axes in lieu of spiked crampons. We watch one man belay another up a cliff-face with nothing more than an outcrop of rock or his own braced body to take the strain; we watch the 'second man' catch his leader when they are roped together and there is a fall. We watch men crawl up seemingly featureless stretches of cliff with strong fingers jammed into the rock to take their whole body-weight, and the camera follows them from above and below. (It *must* have been done in the studio to allow for those close shots, but it's extremely convincing.)

And we see some grim falls, in at least one case from the perspective of the falling man.

The impressive thing is that the film succeeds in making these lengthy technical sequences interesting by keeping up the tension, thanks to the maligned subplot; we honestly don't know whether Carrel is going to give Whymper the support the Englishman trusts him to provide, or whether he is going to succumb to his demons as Giacomo expects. And, as it turns out (for those of us whom don't know our 1860s mountaineering history), the eventual conquest of the peak is *not* the end of the story, nor the climax of the film. They still have to nurse the novices whom they were obliged to include in the expedition back down again....

This is one of those pictures where I do find myself wondering what kind of audience they were originally anticipating (and, given the late release date, what sort of audience a two-part silent epic actually managed to garner in 1929). Presumably with a story as well-known as this one, a three-hour-plus running time wasn't felt to be a drawback when it came to getting the punters through the doors...

As for "Gone With the Wind", the BFI gave it a whole-afternoon screening treatment with an interval between the two halves; as with "Gone With the Wind", I felt that the first half was on balance the stronger film. (Any adaptation of Dumas' novel always has to contend with the book's rather unsatisfactory ending; either you change it, or you allow the film to drift off inconclusively. This one attempts both at once!)

As a retelling of Dumas' classic via the language of silent movies, Fescourt's "Monte Cristo" makes for a workmanlike and entertaining outcome (though I was amused by the way that the picture carefully avoids showing the actual figure of Napoleon Bonaparte, treating his brief scenes with the reverential avoidance generally shown for Jesus Christ). I was struck in particular by the extensive use of filming on location (including a brief scene at the Pont du Gard itself) and of genuine nineteenth-century sailing vessels, large and small; given the routine use of tanks and models in Hollywood movies both new and old, it was fascinating to me to see shots of ships that were obviously really sailing.

Jean Angelo (fifty-four when the film was released) and Lil Dagover (forty-two) are both really too old to portray the younger Edmond and Mercedes convincingly, although they undoubtedly have the acting chops to differentiate the two versions of the characters effectively and look very natural in the older roles. But it's interesting to see Edmond shown as a burly Marseilles sailor, rather than the romantic figure often adopted in later adaptations; one can really imagine this version as a capable first mate. And he is suitably implacable in the scenes of revenge -- though I felt that his "count-down" ("That makes one", "that makes two") didn't really work in a version of the plot where there are only two men left to dispose of in the first place.

Pierre Batcheff (as a handsome and sensitive Albert de Morcerf) and Robert Mérin (as a sullen teenage Benedetto far more dangerous than his adoptive father) stood out for me among the younger members of the cast, and Henri Debain does a good job of making his drunken Caderousse an almost sympathetic scoundrel. Meanwhile, Gaston Modot depicts Fernand's shift from jealous Catalan to soldier of fortune and then pompous retired officer with complete conviction.

I did think the film went a bit over the top in its use of flashbacks; it's as if they didn't trust us to remember what had happened a couple of hours earlier, and the result was that the same 'meaningful' bits of film ended up being shown three or four times, e.g. Haydee being dragged off to captivity. (It might have been less irritating so far as I was concerned if they'd managed to show different bits of illustrative footage for each flashback!) On the other hand, the film does a generally good job in condensing the plot of the book into a smaller timespan. I liked what they did to tie together the Benedetto and Caderousse material to make the boy significant from an earlier stage than in the book; I questioned, however, the enormous amount of detail and length they then devoted to some of the surviving subplots using the time saved...

There is some fine imagery in here (I'm assuming the Paris Opera interiors were not filmed on location, but the sets are very recognisable), although Monte Cristo's 'oriental' inhabitation in the caves comes across better when viewed as young Albert's fever dream than when we're supposed to take it literally in the finale. The sinister scenes in Caderousse's inn and the long shots down the weapons gallery come to mind as memorable; apparently the exterior scenes in the Château d'If actually were filmed there for real, which makes for impressive sun and sea vistas.

The film is definitely worth seeing. The version we saw had some slightly idiosyncratic English subtitles, which I would guess probably originated from a French-language translator rather than a native English-speaker, but they suffice. (Ideally you'd be reading the original French title cards, where the language is mostly pretty straightforward.)

Just went to see Disney's latest "Beauty and the Beast", which was recommended by everyone from the conductor at our last orchestra rehearsal to the greengrocer, and was very disappointed :-(

Most of the film ranged from mediocre to downright annoying -- I don't know how I would have reacted if I hadn't been mentally comparing it to the animated version of which this was an adaptation, but in comparison with its predecessor I felt it came off very badly. The opening scene wasn't too bad as a fleshed-out live-action version of something that was heavily stylised in the first place, but as soon as we got to "Bonjour!" my heart sank. The busy town scene that was so full of life in its caricatured version was neither realistic nor convincingly stylised. Emma Watson in her liberated modern costumes looked completely out of place (which was only emphasised by the screenplay's attempts to explain this away by telling us that she was ahead of her time), and I felt that an air of nastiness had crept in to both sides of the equation. Belle doesn't just find her home provincial, she scorns it as oppressive; her neighbours don't just see her as a dreamy odd girl, they see her as a dangerous subversive. The days of fairy-tale are over; this film comes across as trying to sell a message -- pump a brand -- create 'Disney princess' material (with all its post-'Frozen' overlays of girl power and empowerment) -- in a way that the original never did.

I remember that sequence where Belle runs out onto the streaming grass of the hill-top and sings of her longing for "the great wide somewhere" away from the cheerful, well-meaning domestic preoccupations of her neighbours as being the great 'lift-off' moment of the animated version; it spoke to everything that I was and everything I hoped for. Here -- not at all aided by the obvious fake 'reality' of the flowers and scenery -- the presentation of it felt thoroughly manipulative and left me unmoved and resentful; that was the moment at which it first began to dawn on me that I might actually come to dislike this version :-(

Feminist Belle turns out to be... inadvertently annoying. Quite a lot of things about this film were annoying, not least its habit of trying far too hard to patch perceived plot holes and deficiencies in its characters by adding vast amounts of laboured backstory. (All that we really needed to know about Belle's missing mother, for instance, was conveyed in the single silent shot of her father at work beneath the painting of his wife and child.) "Tries far too hard" sums it up, really.

The one plot issue that I did feel needed addressing in the original was the improbable timescale of the idea that the Prince had to break the spell before his twenty-first birthday -- instead of trying to explain this one away, very wisely they silently drop the reference. And the additions I enjoyed were the added characters of the musical wardrobe and piano, plus the idea that the characters are not merely doomed to remain cursed, but will become items of furniture for real if it goes on too long. (Although having a lengthy would-be weepy sequence at the end where not only does the Beast actually die -- before being resurrected by the Dea ex Machina -- but all the other characters effectively perish, as well, was a case of over-egging the pudding, which this film does all too often.)

Cogsworth very much seems to get the thin end of the stick in this version, I felt -- in the original, I remember him as a by-the-book stickler of an English butler figure, but with unsuspected moments of dignity and heroism. Here he's basically the cowardly comic relief who is always on the wrong side of every disagreement, and the ending is soured with yet another laugh at his expense when he is restored to the arms of his unpleasant wife.

And while most people who disliked the film seemed to mention the character of Gaston as its one saving grace, I disliked Gaston as well... and not in the enjoyable way you were meant to dislike him :-( The original is handsome, conceited, talented in his own sphere, genuinely convinced that he is the best thing ever to happen to Belle and quite unable to understand why she can't see it. This version, who deliberately kicks mud over the girls who admire him and often seems to need talking down from a psychotic fit, comes across as rather less blindly self-centred and more coldly narcissistic. The original Gaston genuinely didn't seem to understand this unprecedented failure of his charms; this one is a sadist who actively prefers hunting down reluctant 'prey'. In trying (I think) to give him more psychological depth, they've removed the casual swagger of the original and the necessary charisma that would explain why people follow and adore him; he becomes simply nasty from the start.

I had no particular objection to Disney's live-action remake of their "Cinderella", possibly because I barely even knew the original; I saw the remake and quite liked it. With this one they took on the much more risky task of remaking something that was a hit in its own right to begin with, thus giving themselves a much higher bar to pass. (There's an aphorism that it takes a bad book to make a great movie -- something similar may apply to remakes...) The constant over-the-top urge to provide explanations and reinterpretations for every detail of the original by and large just doesn't work.

This was one of the Disney films I meant to see during the BFI's all-year Disney-a-week marathon, but managed to miss out on (my enthusiasm had rather flagged by the end of the year). I watched it today under less-than-ideal conditions, on a salvaged second-hand DVD that jammed and skipped, and without actually being able to concentrate on the screen for considerable periods of time, and I liked it a lot: more than "Tangled", more than "Frozen". Loved the Twenties aesthetic (little references like Naveen's ukulele), Tiana's realistic working-class parents, the New Orleans setting, the jazz, the voodoo (the Shadow Man has definite overtones of Baron Samedi). I liked the way that Charlotte, though clearly spoilt rotten, turns out to be a good friend and not an antagonist (and they even manage to make the friendship between the Sugar King's daughter and Tiana the black waitress come across as plausible). The Shadow Man makes an excellent villain. And, although this sounds cruel, I liked the fact that they went so far as to really kill off Ray, instead of pulling off the last-minute magical resurrection that seemed to be on the cards -- though any last words at all were a bit implausible under the circumstances!

I have a bit of trouble swallowing the idea of talking animals in New Orleans in the 1920s -- mainly the idea that the alligator can actually talk to ordinary people as well as to enchanted ones -- although that's a weird sticking-point given that I had no trouble with the idea that frogs can talk to alligators and fireflies... My main beef with the film would be that Naveen didn't really work for me as a character and I couldn't see what someone like Tiana would see in him; Flynn Rider as a similar 'reformed rogue' was much more interesting from that point of view.

Having watched the DVD extras I now gather that he was supposed to be a complement to Tiana's character in that he can appreciate the things of the moment while she is so focused on the future that she misses out on beauty and reality that she's in the middle of -- and that at least one of the jammed/skipped sections was one that apparently made this point :-( However, when I saw the film he came across as rather flat. (And why the French-sounding accent, when he's the one character in New Orleans with no reason to sound French?)

I wasn't especially fond of the songs as tunes -- nothing like as memorable as the numbers from "Beauty and the Beast" or "The Corpse Bride" -- but they work well as spectacle with the accompanying animations. "Friends on the Other Side" reminds me a bit of "Remains of the Day" in that respect, which is perhaps unsurprising! The film scores highly for me in that it repeatedly took completely unpredictable twists: I couldn't see the plot points coming, and yet they generally made perfect sense in retrospect. This is one picture where 'spoilers' are definitely best avoided, and somehow I'd managed to miss hearing any of them in advance :-)

High on the visuals (sorry, but I'm really not that sold on 3D animation), high on the plot, very high on the background and setting. Naveen drags it down a bit, I'm afraid, as I couldn't really get invested in the romance, but overall 8/10. It would bear watching again under better circumstances; I'd have been tempted to hang onto the DVD if it hadn't been damaged!

Loved this -- probably one of the funniest Will Hay films I've seen. I far prefer the pictures he made with Charles Hawtrey to the 'classic' teaming with Moore/Marriott, and an excellent supporting cast here includes Peter Ustinov and Frank Pettingell (of "Gaslight" fame).

I always find Hay funnier when he is being a pompous but resourceful twit rather than simply an arrogant incompetent, and here his schoolmaster character is put up against the Nazis and manages (with assistance) to rise to the occasion... aided by the fact that his opponents half the time are even bigger buffoons than he is. A sharp script relies heavily on verbal humour, with two outstanding scenes that riff on the absurdities of the English language. The invasion plan sequence in which Hay improvises strategy wildly in a cascade of puns while attempting to pick a German general's pocket deserves to be a classic of the genre (take them from the flanks in Lancs to keep the Paras all tied up in Notts... but don't get caught with your Panzers down in the Severn Tunnel).

There is also a clever yet natural-seeming series of gags making use of an asbestos suit, some of which you can see (and enjoy) coming in advance, some of which I didn't! The final reels of the film didn't work quite so well for me, chiefly because I couldn't help but be aware that with all those antics the plane wouldn't have lasted for a minute and had some trouble suspending my disbelief in the name of comedy -- it's always funnier when it's actually physically plausible, however far-fetched. (The ingenious tactic by which Hay contrives to prevent his friend Professor Hoffmann from drinking a glass of poison by triggering his "Heil Hitler" reflex precisely at the requisite moment, for example.) Up to that point I would have rated the film at a definite 8/10; I still rate it a solid seven.

The contrast between English and American propaganda films was never more marked; see also "Night Train to Munich", "Pimpernel Smith" and even "The Lady Vanishes" for Englishmen working against the Nazis who simply don't take themselves all that seriously.

I usually like this sort of thing (overwrought melodrama based on long-forgotten bestseller), and Phyllis Calvert's name is one that I know well from English cinema of the era. But this film began to irritate me more and more as it went on.

Partly I think there is just too much in it, an inherent problem with adaptations from novels: either the first or the second half could have stood as a separate film on its own, but tied together they are just too much. Partly I think the problem lay with the source material, as Chris becomes less and less sympathetic, and Kate's unthinking allegiance to him starts to look like an exercise in pathetic self-deception rather than the undying love which it ought to represent. And the final development by which we are supposed to believe that he is a musical genius after all when not being stifled by the deep trauma of his wife's money(!) felt a bit forced. (It would have helped if I had been able to detect any difference between the supposedly derivative and unoriginal concerto, and the "New England Symphony": both sound equally melodious to my uneducated ear!) Personally I feel that it might have been more interesting for Chris to discover in Paris, like "Little Women"'s Laurie in Italy, that talent is not necessarily genius and that early promise is no guarantee of success... however, that's an issue with the novel's plot and no reflection upon the film itself. Rissa's virtually incestuous obsession could also have done with more development and/or clarification, as could the role of Jake, who funds Chris without sympathising with him, and Jake's hinted-at relationship with Kate.

Technically there is nothing wrong with the film (save perhaps a railway scene with the arrival of what is a blatantly non-functional train). It has all the Hollywood production values of what was a big-budget picture for Universal: a high-end musical score, inventive camera handling (for example, we don't actually get to see Chris's face until the moment that he awakes from his coma, although he is the centre of the dialogue and action up to that point), director Siodmak's trademark use of light and shadow, and set-piece scenes with scores of extras in period costume. I just found my disbelief and hence tolerance for the soap-opera antics slipping throughout; the turnaround by which Chris is perceived/portrayed as the sensitive, persecuted protagonist escaping family oppression in the first half only to reappear as a self-pitying failure in the second half could have been a striking development, but instead it came over as rather annoying. As an earlier reviewer says, Gainsborough Films had done this sort of thing more effectively with Phyllis Calvert in England.

John Abbott turns in a memorable performance as the music critic Liebermann, and Ella Raines is notable as the tormented Rissa. As a contemporary reviewer put it in the "Monthly Film Bulletin" for 1947, "the rest of the cast do all that is expected of them", which is no reflection upon the actors concerned.

This is an absolutely unashamed B-movie... and about as sophisticated as can be expected of any picture featuring a beautiful, wicked snake-priestess, human sacrifice into a volcano, good and evil twins separated in infancy, a gigantic mute assassin, a lost heir(ess), a cobra-worshipping cult and a pet ape wearing a skirt for decency! It's technicoloured in more ways than one -- this is the pulp fantasy material of boys' comic papers come to life, and wouldn't be out of place as a lost novel by Robert Howard or Rider Haggard. Just about everyone sports a bare midriff at the slightest provocation, most of the women spend the entire picture clad in a skimpy band of material round their top half, and Sabu wears next to nothing throughout thanks to a magnificent young physique.

As the reader may have gathered, most of it is unabashed fun. There are a couple of suggestions that hint at something deeper: the idea that perhaps Tollea really ought to stay and improve life for her people instead of marrying her rescuer, for example (though the final outcome makes sense -- she was only ever herself a pawn in the hands of the would-be reformers, after all), and, despite the missionary upbringing of the main protagonists, an unexpected treatment of the cobra cult as a genuine religion, where offending the Powers can have consequences and people deserve to worship as they see fit.

The special effects are rather better on the costume front than they are where dangerous items are concerned, although there is a brave attempt at showing an advancing lava front by merely illustrating its effects, which works surprisingly well. The dialogue veers wildly between pidgin and fluent English as spoken by the same character at different times (sometimes within the same speech) -- it would be nice to think that this reflected an attempt to show whether they are trying to communicate in English or addressing others in their own native tongue, but I suspect it wasn't thought out in that much detail! Otherwise, the main criticism I'd make is that the final fight goes on perceptibly too long and in too repetitive a way: it could, with advantage and with more credibility, have been cut by several minutes to provide a more explosive climax.

But the film is thoroughly enjoyable for what it is. It has no pretensions to be anything more, and the characters generally look as if they're having a good time (when not being tortured, threatened with death, etc.) Sabu plays the hero's mischievous sidekick without a hint of embarrassment and tends to steal every scene in which he appears. Lon Chaney Jr has presence. Maria Montez plays a naive South Seas islander and a power-crazed priestess with aplomb and smoulders out of the screen (her snake dance in a scintillating costume is definitely a memorable scene).

Jon Hall makes an engaging romantic lead, though the plot suggests that the character is perhaps more honest than bright: his approach is generally to walk straight into danger and hope that circumstances will work out in his favour. Occasionally they do (this is the sort of film, after all, where you can walk straight into the inner sanctums of the palace after changing clothes with a high official, and nobody so much as notices) but generally he needs rescuing from the consequences!

I wouldn't actually describe this an unmissable camp classic, not because it's too bad but because it isn't. It's a perfectly good piece of entirely escapist entertainment which was never intended to be taken seriously, and while it has zero emotional depth it's easy on the eye.

This is the first time that I can recall that I have ever looked consciously upon the naked or the dead; when such sights are broadcast as news or entertainment, I've always felt that decency forbids us to look too closely. Bodies of strangers deserve some respect.

But here, decency itself obliges us to override that skittering reaction and to bear witness to these unknown thousands and what was done to them -- to the flopping bodies and their pitiful appendages, the calcined corpses that failed to burn and the slack-jawed eyeless masks that are not latex monsters from TV horror shows but people... what becomes of people when they are starved and killed and stripped even of their rags and left to rot. And like the German neighbours who were brought to the camps to see just what had been done in their name, we have no right to look away because it is improper or uncomfortable.

Ironic, since this film was abandoned simply because its message had become both uncomfortable and impolitic. Showings of earlier shock footage to German civilians provoked flat disbelief and had 'unsettled' communities; by the time the slow process of constructing a full-length documentary film in measured and accurate tones had reached its final reel, official policy had moved on from implicating all Germans in culpability of the crimes that had been committed to attempting to reconstruct a country that could be an eventual ally in the nascent Cold War. And Jewish agitation in the Holy Land made it unwise to release footage of concentration camp survivors being nursed back to health from their sufferings, when large numbers of them were then ending up in Palestine.

So the picture that was to have provided a factual record of what was then known about the Nazi concentration camp atrocities was quietly shelved and eventually abandoned. It remains very much a period piece, instantly recognisable as the product of the masterly British documentary movement of its day: understated and dispassionate, flavoured with irony rather than rhetoric, condemning by unemotional fact and asking the implicit question -- how would we have acted, had we been in the shoes of those happy, healthy German girls smiling self-consciously for the camera at Belsen or Ebensee, aware in a general fashion that undesirables were being shipped in to perform hard labour for the good of the nation and not troubling ourselves to enquire too closely as to how this was done...? The film makes a point of illustrating how close these camps were to major towns and cities, and how normal life seemed to the approaching soldiers outside -- save, the commentary remarks quietly, for the smell.

Given the circumstances of the revelations under which it was made, the script actually displays a notable lack of polemic: the facts stand for themselves (although the Imperial War Museum presenter at our screening noted that some of the statistics quoted are now known to be wrong). Despite its original conception as a document to educate the defeated German people, it shows a significant lack of newsreel national stridency: the condemnation is of how bystanders could have failed to rise up "to defend the good name of Germany" despite the likely consequences, and the hope at the end is that Germans will mend what Germans have broken. The moral drawn at the end is for the whole of humanity.

This is not a triumphalist film made by the victors (and one can see why there was a lobby who wanted the raw footage taken away from the Ministry of Information and used for precisely that purpose!) It's an attempt at showing what unspeakable things can occur on a routine, normalising basis along a long slope of acceptance and dehumanisation -- and a warning. It would be nice to think that if it had been released as planned, various modern-day atrocities might not take place... but while the Nazi industrialisation of death remains unique in its insane scope (what did they think they were they going to *do* with all those pairs of scissors, stored up and unused? with the toys of Jewish children, or the sorted sacks of hair?) human nature has not changed in its ability to ignore the uncomfortable where it suits us to do so.

This is a film conducted with a restraint that speaks volumes. It's also one that does not flinch from the depiction of the unspeakable. And yet in addition it does its best to re-humanise those who were imprisoned for extermination -- to show the recovery process of those who lived in addition to the discarded stacks of those who died, and to show the photographs, suitcase destinations (these were men and women who travelled to tourist hotels that would have been known to pre-war British travellers) and the toys of those whose very bodies have been obliterated.

Sometimes we must bear witness to remember that these were people and not just statistics to be argued about in some blame-game. I was reluctant to watch this film not because I anticipated unknown obscenities (I think in Britain we've all 'done the Nazis' at school, with graphic photos) but because it felt like welcoming a potential ghoulish thrill, a tasteless parade of horrors to send a chill up the spine at a safe distance.

But there are some things that should be seen and heeded.

I haven't seen the original Judex, but I've seen Ultus, the equivalent British serial of the era... and I definitely recognise the style here. Multiple disguises, hairbreadth escapes from death, jawdropping coincidences, gadgetry and sleight of hand... and villains who never kill their victims when they ought to!

The print in the BFI National Archive was in beautiful condition (save for some oversized and rather intrusive subtitling), and this film is visually and musically stunning; the Maurice Jarre soundtrack is lovely, fitting and eerie. The morality of the story -- despite its simplistic chase format -- is surprisingly grey, with Jacqueline the only pure innocent (and thus, alas, the least interesting character). It's hard not to sympathise with Favraux in his situation, despite everything that we learn, or with young Morales, caught between the ruthless woman he loves and his long-lost father, and Judex himself finds his self-appointed mission of punishment harder and harder to fulfil.

Scenes like the masked ball (shrouded in almost surreal mystery, since it is not until afterwards that we have any idea what was going on!) and the spider-like climb of Judex' minions to the roof are very memorable, while the film also has a nice line in self-deflating humour, courtesy of the fiction-obsessed detective Cocantin and his rapport with small children. For such a preposterous comic-strip confection the plot holds together quite well, although having displayed such crowning ineptitude in their first attempt to kill Jacqueline (and what happened to the original idea of questioning her first?), it's hard to understand why the plotters don't just make away with her immediately the next time they get the opportunity!

The one thing that really grated, as with all old historical dramas, was the very 'modern' hairstyles and make-up used on all the eye-candy characters in order to make them attractive to a contemporary 1960s audience -- the result now, of course, is that instead of appearing subconsciously appealing they appear distractingly out of period. It's hard to credit a swooning damsel of 1916 when she is made up to look more like Brigitte Bardot...

Casting a professional magician as Judex enables the character to perform some impressive sleight-of-hand, and there are some subtle references to the original era, like the opening iris shot, the super-advanced (and supersized) antique surveillance gadgetry, and the title cards setting the various scenes. But perhaps the most impressive thing is that this is basically played entirely 'straight': it's not a tongue-in-cheek homage to pulp serials, it's presented in its own right as a piece of poetry for us to suspend disbelief -- a 1914 adventure of a mysterious caped avenger, an athletic, resourceful villainess, and a celestial innocent who sought to redeem her father's deeds.

This is a totally bizarre amalgam of at least three different films: a wisecracking sex-comedy, an unsuccessful operetta, and a bedroom-hopping farce. Add into that mix 'disaster movie' and 'fashion parade', and you get a film that's worth seeing just for its jaw-dropping novelty value alone.

It's actually pretty good: most of the humour is intentional, and some of the rest of it may well be. (I'm not sure quite how seriously the film takes itself: I got the impression that the heroine is pretty much in the know about what is going on, for example, and is simply playing innocent when it suits her... either to get the information she's after, or merely in order to watch her misbehaving husband squirm.) Farce isn't my thing, but those scenes are pretty slickly done, while a lot of the risqué dialogue sparkles.

Sadly the film suffers from primitive sound recording techniques, to the extent that most of the lyrics of the musical sections are incomprehensible -- not too much of a problem for the stand-alone numbers, but a big issue for the ensemble songs that are supposed to drive the later part of the plot. A lot of the verbal punchlines to the visual jokes at the masquerade disappeared into the background fuzz, as well: for example, I still don't know what on earth Bob's costume was supposed to be, because I missed the announcement as he entered.

As a musical "Madam Satan" is not very successful: it's a story of missed opportunities (Cole Porter, Rudolf Friml, Oscar Hammerstein II, Sigmund Romberg and even Albert Ketelbey of "In a Monastery Garden" fame were all considered to write the musical numbers at one time or another, as were Jeanette MacDonald and Gloria Swanson for the lead). The operetta numbers are unmemorable -- the 'popular' numbers from Jack King and Elsie Janis have worn better in performance style, although you still won't find yourself whistling them as you leave.

There are lengthy ballet/costume sequences in the second half of the film that appear to be basically the equivalent of the gratuitous fashion parade colour reels that crop up in various 1930s films -- simply inserted into the story as an excuse to show off the spectacle. They are staggeringly extravagant, but to my taste the display dragged a bit after a while. (Watching all the revellers subsequently attempt to don parachute harnesses on top of these costumes, however, tends to confirm me in my suspicion that the film really doesn't take itself seriously!) And we learn, to my amazement at least, that on a dirigible the parachutes are not actually packed on the wearer's back but attached to casings in the hull itself -- no wonder the harnesses look weirdly skeletal. You can't simply jump free wearing a parachute: you have to be clipped on first...

The parachute sequence is another piece of disaster-comedy that has to be seen to be believed. On the whole I'd say that the film is at least 60% successful: MGM might have done better if they had ditched the musical elements altogether, since this is probably the weakest strand and the box office was saturated by musicals at this point, and gone flat out for shock value. It's certainly worth seeing for sheer bizarreness.

Following in the footsteps of Captain John Noel and his immensely popular documentaries taken on the Mount Everest expeditions of the 1920s ("Climbing Mount Everest"/"The Epic of Everest"), Frank Smythe hoped to help finance his 1931 attempt on Kamet, another Himalayan peak, by bringing back film footage of a successful ascent including summit shots which were at that time the highest ever taken in the world. Like Noel, he shot on full-size 35mm film stock rather than the 16m (or even 8mm) used by the later Everest expeditions -- but he had the benefit of the latest technology in the shape of Bell & Howell's compact 'Eyemo' camera with its clockwork mechanism, which he was able to use to document even the highest stages of the 25,000-foot climb, and the quality of many of these shots is extraordinary. Unfortunately he was unable to get a commercial release for the completed documentary with its recorded score and narrative commentary, and it eventually ended up being distributed in 16mm format as a schools' educational film. Smythe was left cynical and disillusioned by the whole experience, complaining that "photographs of toil and difficulty on the 'Roof of the World'... count for nothing when the 'accidents', 'blizzards' and 'avalanches' can be faked in the studio" and "the public has been so soaked in sensational make-believe that the unvarnished truth is no longer anything but boring".

In fact contemporary reviews suggested that the undoubtedly high-quality footage and dramatic content was somewhat let down by Smythe's commentary, and having seen a screening of the BFI's preserved archive copy I find myself reluctantly coming to agree. It's odd, because Frank Smythe was a prolific and vivid author who would go on to publish many popular mountaineering volumes and had at this juncture already written a highly successful book, "The Kangchenjunga Adventure". But the voice-over he penned to accompany this film (and recorded himself, occasionally with audible 'fluffs'!) is uneven in tone and effect, occasionally very much so: I thought it worked best in the central section of the film and rather less well at the beginning and end. We had the opportunity beforehand of comparing the sound print with an extract from the silent (and evidently slightly shortened) version distributed to schools, which has one advantage in that it is able to use the full width of the frame rather than sacrificing a strip to the soundtrack: a comparison which becomes evident when, for example, a nicely-framed shot of a Gurkha displaying his kukri knife reappeared in the sound print with the left-hand end of the blade truncated.

On the other hand "Kamet Conquered" makes a fascinating companion piece to Noel's artistically more successful "Epic of Everest". It is close enough in date to record what were essentially the same techniques and conditions -- the endless cutting of steps with long-handled ice-axes in the absence of forward-pointing crampons, the multiple layers of woollen clothing and nailed leather soles, the crates carried up to a succession of camps as an ever-decreasing team of porters drop out in exhaustion -- in far more close-up detail than Captain Noel sought or was able to do. It depicts eloquently what it was like to climb in the Himalayas in the 1930s: the achingly slow pace of a high-altitude ascent without oxygen, dwindling to barely 100 feet in an hour, the vertiginous paths along which the yaks and porters had to navigate, the makeshift cooking and eating arrangements, the plodding labour of soft snow, and crippling frostbite through layers of clothing. This is probably the closest we will ever get to seeing what those early Everest expeditions were actually like, when not being 'epic'!

And the ethnographic footage of the villages and pilgrims along the upper reaches of the Ganges is also fascinating: in place of Noel's Tibetan Buddhists, we get contemporary Hindu culture from the other side of the Himalayas. (Although Smythe comments that the Bhotias would happily suit their religion to whichever side of the border they happened to be on...)

Smythe has succeeded in getting some amazingly dramatic footage, whether of icefalls from the hanging glaciers, yaks crossing a raging torrent, or climbers like black specks on the upper slopes of the mountain. The quality of the close-up shots showing the final push to the summit -- with exhausted men labouring up a sheer ice slope or dragging booted and putteed feet over the shelf of a rocky outcrop -- is so high that I found myself ignobly wondering whether Smythe had resorted to later 'reconstruction' at lower altitudes: if this material was really shot on the way to the peak by a cameraman dulled by oxygen deprivation, it is the most incredible technical achievement. As to the panoramic shots taken from the top of Kamet itself, exceeding all previous height records, there can be no doubt as to their authenticity.

For anyone interested in the history of Himalayan climbing, this is unmissable. As a general documentary, it is fascinating: as an art picture it can be astoundingly beautiful. It's just that I can, after all, see why it was not a commercial success.

It was interesting to see this film immediately after Captain Noel's first Everest documentary, the optimistically-entitled "Climbing Mount Everest" covering the 1922 attempt on the mountain. The degree of public interest in the earlier film had prompted Noel into the venture of buying the commercial rights to the film of this new expedition outright, raising the amazing sum of eight thousand pounds in advance; effectively, "The Epic of Everest" financed the 1924 summit bid.

The difference between the two approaches to the same subject is notable. This film runs half an hour longer than its predecessor, but if anything feels shorter: it is constructed as an artistic whole, whereas the first attempt relies much more on the sheer novelty of its subject matter -- both Tibet and the mountain were being filmed for the first time ever -- and in consequence has a certain random "what I did on my holidays" feel to it. On the other hand, it's certainly worth seeing as a companion piece, not least because it explains some of the background detail that appears in "The Epic of Everest": the prayer wheel that we see here, for example, which is otherwise implied to be a musical instrument of some kind. And at least one shot (of Tibetans dancing) has clearly been inserted directly into this film from the 1922 version!

For the "Epic of Everest" Noel makes an attempt to create human interest, introducing individuals and showing us clips of Somervell sketching, Geoffrey Bruce at the typewriter, and Sandy Irvine swinging a thermometer(?): the tale of a newborn donkey provides another minor strand. To modern eyes I think the film would have benefited from more such material, especially given the practical difficulties of filming actual mountaineering (almost all the climbing footage had to be shot via telephoto lens at extreme long range) and the requirement for the photographic party to wait around in camp below to learn the results of each fresh summit bid: shots of camp life on a more human level would have helped bring the realities of the expedition home. As it is, we get little beyond a couple of scenes of the expedition members gathered at table in the open air, and learn nothing of, for example, the relay system of runners that dispatched Noel's precious negatives all the way back to Darjeeling for developing. An even more puzzling omission is the absence in this film of any coverage of the oxygen system eventually used by Mallory, a precursor of which is seen on Finch and Bruce in the 1922 footage.

And because -- presumably -- it was impossible to film in anything other than the most perfect of conditions, we get very little idea of the savagery of Everest's weather, which constantly frustrated the climbers' attempts. Only the billowing of the little Meade tents on the North Col gives any hint as to the conditions that entrapped four porters (and almost exhausted both Mallory and Somervell in a rescue expedition before ever they could make their respective bids for the summit).

But this film is conceived on a more elevated level, with sweeping tinted shots of the mountain and its approaches, the vast bulk of the north-eastern ridge above the cameraman, and the vertical precipices that await the climber who slips. To those familiar with the still photographs of the expedition, perhaps the greatest magic is to see those familiar scenes come alive: to see porters on Irvine's famous tent-peg rope ladder, to see climbers turn and grin at the camera, to see Norton and Somervell's stumbling, blind return from 28,000ft. Perhaps most memorable (and rightly selected by the BFI for their trailer) are those shots of the Himalayan sunset creeping across the folds of the mountain and finally extinguishing the highest peak: both art and metaphor.

In an similarly elevated tone are the intertitles -- although by the standards of silent drama/action films it can be very intertitle-heavy. If only the voice-over had existed for documentaries in 1924...

I was sceptical about the idea of the modern score composed for the film's re-release, but in fact I found that it worked very well. The use of 'found sounds' and natural noise goes some way to substitute for the lack of soundtrack, introducing heavy breathing and harsh winds to restore some idea of the sheer labour involved in those little black dots moving over pristine white, and providing ambient sounds for a Tibetan yak herd or Darjeeling bazaar, while it includes Captain Noel's own recordings of the Tibetan lamas who performed at the film's original London premiere.

Inevitably "The Epic of Everest" is constrained by the technical challenges of filming under extreme conditions -- I wondered also if the relative lack of human-interest footage was dictated by a limited supply of film stock -- and while Captain Noel greatly admired Herbert Ponting's pre-WW1 Antarctic achievements, despite technical advances I'm not sure he reaches the same artistic heights. Ponting's "The Great White Silence" is another film that began as a documentary and had to be re-edited into a memorial to a Great British Failure, and as such is an obvious point of comparison: but it contains some shots of truly jaw-dropping beauty. With the difficulties of altitude and long distance added to that of intense cold, the interest of Noel's film lies to a greater extent in its record of a historic event. I like this score better, though!

For anyone with an interest in the 1920s Everest expeditions it is certainly worth going to see "The Epic of Everest" during its general release; for the more curious, "Climbing Mount Everest" is also available to watch in person via the BFI's Mediatheque screens at various locations around the country.

Apparently this is teenage Star Trek, in which the juvenile delinquents take over the starship "Enterprise"....

I am not a particular "Star Trek" fan - my main knowledge of the series was gained by encountering various tie-in novels while devouring the science fiction section of my local library, although I've probably seen half a dozen repeated episodes of the original TV series over the years and watched (and disliked) some of the earlier films when they first came out -- and I know very little about the subsequent spin-off series. All of which goes to say that I didn't have a vast amount of emotional investment to be overthrown when watching this film. I simply remembered that it got good reviews when it first came out, that I'd intended to watch it at the time but never got round to it, and that it might be a good idea to have a look at it now in case I actually wanted to watch the forthcoming sequel.

I was at least expecting decent entertainment...

This film is simply one long string of modern action-movie cliché from start to end, with frenetic camera-work, constant shoot-em-ups and/or punch-em-ups, fights over multi-level platforms (haven't I just seen this same sequence shoe-horned into "The Hobbit"?), supposedly emotional scenes that leave me absolutely untouched and not a little irked at the intended manipulation, and the insistence that any action marginally more intelligent than charging head-to-head with vastly more powerful baddies and hoping for a miracle is simply arrant cowardice. All of which would be bad enough (plus the truly lazy use of time-travel as a deus ex machina for some hand-waving technology), but which is accelerated past the stage of merely being bad science fiction and into the stage of being deeply annoying by the teenage cast.

Presumably this was an attempt to win the vital Young Adult (16-24) market -- however, the scenario where a bunch of space cadets are sent out to save the universe because, whoops, the rest of the navy isn't in port yet, really doesn't hold water. Let alone the scenario where all the famous characters just happen to be the same age and end up on the same ship -- funny, that -- so that the series can be 'rebooted' with a complete cast of photogenic crew members under the age of twenty-two. I may not know much about Star Trek history, but I do have some idea of naval organisation and the workings of seniority! As for Kirk, he is unbelievably annoying -- I felt like cheering when Spock had him thrown off the bridge and off the ship after behaviour that should have got him cashiered. The idea that this delinquent stowaway cadet could commit mutiny via grossly insulting his superior officer and be rewarded for it by appointing himself captain is not only ludicrous but offensive to the intelligence of the viewer: as another reviewer points out, even Dr McCoy was senior to Kirk at that point.

What is -- or should be -- deeply worrying is that "Galaxy Quest", written as a deliberate "Star Trek" spoof, is actually infinitely more effective as straight science fiction than this 'reboot' is. It is perhaps unsurprising that it is also much funnier (what jokes exist in this film tend to fail badly), but the producers should be seriously concerned that the so-called spoof is also far more emotionally involving, more heroic, more exciting, and more scientifically coherent. You actually care about what happens to that crew of washed-up actors and hapless aliens: they face real challenges, evolve real relationships and manage to eat their cake and have it while poking gentle fun at the nerds who ultimately help save the day.

As for this film -- well, I liked most of Spock and what little we saw of McCoy, hated Kirk, found the other 'canon' crew members pretty ridiculous and thought the plot was detestably silly. Again, as another reviewer says, you could plausibly have made it an 'origins' story for Kirk alone (though the character would still have been a complete pain in the neck), but attempting to assemble a complete juvenile version of the crew really stretches credibility. It wasn't just a bad blockbuster: it was a blockbuster that I deeply resented seeing.

ITV chose to show the first series of this Canadian import directly after "Foyle's War", the British-made drama set in almost the same time period -- presumably hoping to pick up some of the same audience. Well, I watched it... but alas, the magic really didn't carry across for this viewer, and the contrast between the two productions was stark to say the least.

Perhaps the most massive difference, apart from the gloss -- the female characters in "Foyle's War" are far less glamorously made-up and dressed, although to be fair the Canadians hadn't been subject to years of rationing -- is the level of sentimentality in the two series. The English are understated, defensive, touchy, sometimes on the make, sometimes self-sacrificing, in some cases both at once -- but they keep just about everything implicit. The first episode of "Bomb Girls" spells everything out in giant letters, from the injured munitions worker whose looks (not life) must be prioritised over the needs of wounded soldiers because "she's a soldier too" to the patriotic declarations of all and sundry and the howls of the woman who learns bad news on the factory floor. Perhaps this reflects a different culture: it certainly reminds me of Hollywood 'home-front' propaganda films of the 1940s, but I found this episode about as unwatchable as that wartime US product and can't see myself bothering with the rest.

"Bomb Girls" covers very much the same material as "Millions Like Us" (1943), in which girls of different backgrounds find themselves thrown together in an aircraft factory. But while the WWII film, conceived as an educational propaganda effort, profited from a Gilliat-Launder script and top stars of the period to become a minor classic, "Bomb Girls" comes across as strictly by numbers. The Radio Times listing advised would-be UK viewers that as a formulaic drama "it could easily be any old soap, any old where": while I was interested enough by the concept that I disregarded this warning, I have to admit that it proved to be accurate enough. I'm not the target viewer for this material.

This film sounded interesting from the subject matter, especially the dance-hall setting: and there is some good acting from the 'heavies', Barry K. Barnes as Paul Baker, the suave, good-looking and dangerous master of ceremonies, and Barry Jones as 'Mr Gregory', the mind behind the scenes. Unfortunately I didn't find the young hero and heroine particularly involving -- they are basically blank spots in the script marked "Generic Virtuous Character" -- and as the plot begins to be twisted in their favour with more and more incredulity-straining coincidences I found my tolerance decreasing. Diana Dors catches the eye in an unbilled (and for all that surprisingly prominent) part as one of the 'professional partners' at the dance hall, and various character actors do their reliable stuff. There are moments of genuine tension: but, alas, for me at least they always involved conflict between the villains rather than the endangerment of Our Heroes which was supposed to provide excitement. I'm afraid I got much more worried by Toni Masters' possible fate at the hands of a psychotic lorry-driver -- since she is a Bad Girl and therefore has some actual character conflict -- than by a punch-up involving Ted Peters, who is bound to win by some total fluke anyhow.

The film looked promising at the start, but I failed to get involved and ended up feeling manipulated instead.

Decadent, frothy, amoral and deliciously funny -- sometimes to a rolling-in-the-aisles degree -- this film is likely to make your jaw drop with the delightfully brazen fantasy of it all: there's a real Viennese lightness to the tale of the Countess who longs to become an honest adventuress and the gentleman thief with a /modus operandi/ so civilised that his victims are caught completely off-balance -- it almost makes sense. (I particularly loved the gramophone in a hatbox that he carries everywhere with him, and the accomplice who deferentially presents him with a case containing the gun for use in the hold-up!)

The dialogue demonstrates, not for the first time, that suggestion is far sexier than explicit grunt-and-heave, and the costumes are Hollywood fantasy writ large for the audience's delight. Suavity naturally rules, irony is writ large, and my only complaint was that I inadvertently guessed one of the plot twists a few minutes before the heroine did, thus losing the pleasure of the surprise. I suspect that the Middle-European setting in a famously frivolous Vienna allowed the script to dare even further than would otherwise have been permitted, but basically if you think you hear an innuendo and it's funny then it's probably entirely intentional...

My main fear is that if I ever get to watch this again (probably unlikely, alas) it can't possibly live up to my memories of seeing it tonight, with a full house rocking with laughter and a freshly-restored print on the big screen.

The recent BFI restoration of the Hitchcock silents brought to light the unhappy truth that the negative of "Champagne" held in the National Archive -- which on research proved to be the ultimate source of every other surviving print around the world -- is explicitly labelled as the studio's 'second negative', in other words a substandard back-up copy assembled from the shots that weren't quite good enough for the distribution print. The digitally restored version looks good, and some improvements have been made where shots were obviously spliced out of sequence, but since we now know that there are specific problems in this negative with poor editing/pacing (e.g. shots being held a little too long) and the use of reaction shots that didn't originally make the grade, it's hard to be sure how many of the film's issues are due to this fact and how many to an actually weak storyline. Given that the major problems are the complaint that the film seems to drag and that characters' reactions just don't seem to make sense, I'm afraid that "Champagne" as originally released may well have been substantially superior to the only version that we will ever be able to see :-(

This was apparently a case of a film where the title and star were decided upon in advance, and then a scenario had to be constructed around them! Hitchcock's original plan was for a rags-to-riches-to rags plot (as opposed to the riches-to-rags-to-riches version ultimately used) in which a girl working at a rural champagne plant would go up to Paris and see for herself how the drink fuelled dissipated night-life, only to return disgusted to her poor but honest job. However, it was felt that the great British public would much prefer to see glamour celebrated on the screen rather than have their illusions popped -- cinema was an escapist medium for those whose life was hard -- and so a completely different scenario was developed. (It is interesting to wonder, however, how much of the cabaret sequence derives from this original concept.)

Like most of Hitchcock's early films, this is not a typical "Hitchcock" production -- the director was expected to do his job as paid by the studio rather than provide his own material -- and is of interest to those who enjoy films of the era rather than to those who are looking for traces of "The Master of Suspense". Betty Balfour is the quintessential Twenties Girl here: wilful and bubbly with a Cupid's-bow pout, cropped curls and the ambition to dictate her own life rather than acquiesce to the plans of the male half of the population. The plot is thin and in places rather contrived, but as this is by no means rare in comedies of the period (or later ones...) I think the problem is with the handling of the material rather than with the storyline per se.

The beginning is good (I particularly liked the description of the young man as a 'cake-hound'. a wonderfully period insult), and the wordless comedy of sea-sickness is very well handled without being merely crude: I love the way the Boy veers between outraged determination to confront his supposed rival and qualms from his uncertain stomach.

The concept of forcing the spoilt flapper to fend for herself (echoing Buster Keaton's hapless couple on board the "Navigator") is obviously intended as a major comedy hook for the plot, although it's not played intensively for laughs. I have to say that this is the first time I've ever seen a director actually get comic business out of the actual process of cooking (as opposed to simply miming that the rock-cakes are rock-hard) and did wonder if it reflected an impressive degree of domestication on Mr Hitchcock's (or Mr Stannard's) part!

The main problem with the film is I think the cabaret sequence, and I do wonder if this is a left-over from the original scenario. Instead of developing the comedy inherent in a girl who 'makes a mess of everything she gets her hands on' (including the back of her lover's jacket...!) looking for a job, we are plunged into what turns out to be a rather confusing and portentous sequence of events, as her 'job' at the cabaret seems to get forgotten in favour of sexual innuendo: the prostitutes, the lesbians, the would-be rapist... The plot becomes muddled (not helped by what turns out to be an interpolated dream/nightmare sequence) and ends up with the girl running off to throw herself on the mercy of a man she has previously -- and soon again subsequently -- seemed to be afraid of. Considered dispassionately, much of this section seems to be a digression that neither develops the comedy nor furthers the plot mechanics (although it is probably the most 'Hitchcockian' part of the picture!)

Having contorted the characters into the required situation to create the final comic set-up -- the showdown of mistaken intentions on board the returning liner -- the film concludes fairly happily with some genuine laughter through unforced farce. The acting is by and large good -- save for those moments when it is simply totally confusing! -- and the basic plot is a promising set-up for a typical light comedy of the period, complete with showy costumes for the leading lady and a hint of slapstick. The pacing is just a bit off; and, knowing what we now know, I do wonder if there is missing material -- intertitles, for instance! -- or even excess shots where alternate takes/ideas were *both* included in the compiled negative for a decision at some future point...

This "Falcon" entry relocates to Mexico and features all the stock characters and situations that one would expect from Hollywood in that setting - some of which (the repeated footage of songs in the cantina, for instance) is obviously used simply as filler. But what raises the resulting film somewhat above average is the unexpected twist it manages to place on much of its material. Barbara's exotic young stepmother turns out to be genuinely attached to her, for instance, while the grinning, thick-witted Mexican who seems to be playing a part in a bad film turns out to be a very cool bird indeed.

There is some artful photography and some smart dialogue, and while there does seem to be a certain amount of tourist advertising blatantly inserted -- literally, as in photographs of travel brochures -- this film is more interesting than I thought it was going to be. Oddly enough, while it features a number of murders they are all left more or less in the background to the main mystery, which is the question of who faked the stolen portrait... or indeed, if it was faked at all...

Opinions on this film seem to divide fairly dramatically between those who consider all the English cast to be 'wooden' and implausible and those who find them immediately recognisable and charming: "well-bred, smart, plucky and brave". (Apparently corresponding neither to the generational nor the national dividing lines one would expect, to judge by the comments I overheard at tonight's screening in London.) I would assign myself very definitely to the second camp: these are characters immediately familiar to anyone who knows the films or popular novels of the period, reassuringly akin in their reticence and understated courage and use of humour to defend their deepest feelings (American viewers, think 'hobbits'...). And it's refreshing to see an ordinary middle-aged couple taking a major role on screen rather than heavily glamorised star-types.

Hitchcock's films always benefited from a judicious dose of humour to alleviate the tension, and this one has a light touch with it, along with the usual touch of slight naughtiness (the mattress that is "still warm", for instance...) It manages to wrong-foot both the viewer and/or cinematic conventions a few times (when the villain fires at the hero and actually gets him, for instance, or when it is shown that the Secret Service have -- as of course they would -- ordered an intercept on the phone) although some of the plotting is inevitably somewhat arbitrary in order to force a more exciting set-up. I did feel that Peter Lorre's comic-book-mastermind performance was a bit over the top compared to the other actors (as with his character in "Secret Agent").

I was wondering why the name 'Nova Pilbeam' rang a bell. In fact, this is the same actress who was to give such a good performance as an adult only a few years later in "Young and Innocent". As a child actress she is adequate; she would do better things later.

I found this one of the more enjoyable Hitchcocks so far, probably because I got on with its sense of humour. The villains are just about ruthless enough to be credible (so often with this sort of plot, one is left asking "why didn't they just KILL him?!"), the authorities are less bumbling than convenience often dictates, minor characters are swiftly and vividly created (always a good sign... I loved Mrs Brockett...) and the ending is neatly foreshadowed in the beginning. I do hope somebody remembered poor Uncle Clive though :-)