blacknorth

Based on Francis Clifford's novel of the same name, The Naked Runner is an obscure but creditable thriller, and a rarely seen entry in Frank Sinatra's filmography.

To discuss the plot would be to spoil it so I won't do that. Suffice to say, furniture designer Sam Laker is pressured by a friend working for British Intelligence into doing a job in Leipzig to help an old wartime flame... but nothing is as it seems once he reaches East Germany. At that point we are firmly on Le Carre territory, with cross following double cross all the way to the end. And it is the end that is the problem; it cannot carry the weight of everything that has passed before.

The reasons for this are fairly obvious: firstly, in the novel, the reader is as oblivious as Laker as to what is going on and greets every new plot twist with a frustration and incomprehension that Laker shares. This serves to heighten suspense at every level, and Laker's character becomes a fascinating comparison exercise with our own reactions as a reader. The writer of the film, Stanley Mann, chose to place the viewer firmly on the other side of the plot - so we know what is happening to Laker, and why. This serves to undermine him as a character, making him appear hapless, transient, and surly; that Sinatra plays him as such reflects, I think, that he understood as a performer that a narrative mistake had been made. Secondly, the ending is abrupt; indeed Laker's exclusion, you might almost say his quarantine, from the plot is solved by precisely five seconds of hurried dialogue over the end credits of the movie. This is a serious error of judgment that leaves the viewer with a profound sense of disappointment, which is why I've titled this review The Non-Nude Runner: I felt a little robbed.

Apart from the botched ending it is an entertaining yarn. There are excellent performances by Peter Vaughn and Derren Nesbitt. Sinatra is very good too - his performance is low-key and it's obvious he had carefully studied the textbook performance for this kind of role; that of Richard Burton in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

Recommended for fans of Sinatra, and followers of cold war thrillers. But make sure you read the book - it's excellent.

This pointless reduction of Cornell Woolrich's bleak and terrifying story makes one suspect that the golden age of US television experienced as many lows as highs. We are short-changed by at least three murders leaving us with a grand total of one manslaughter - not exactly what Woolrich had in mind when he crafted a story that heaped death upon death as a kind stumbling escalator of no return. I suppose the original story might have been too disturbing for a faithful translation to the small screen - in which case, I'd rather they hadn't bothered; there is nothing of Woolrich here, nor of his themes.

Skip Homeier plays Richard Pain, a fellow down on his luck, out of a job, broke and desperately seeking the rent money before he and his lovely wife (Joanne Woodward) are evicted from their apartment. Owed $450 by his former boss, he goes to ask for the money, ends by taking it, and leaves a body behind. From then on he's paranoid, on the run and still out of luck. The point of the original story was that Pain got used to killing - so much so that, after the first, he killed almost everybody he met. In this version he's reduced to knocking them out, locking them in cupboards - so his flight loses its deadliness. From being a bumbling psycho he is reduced to a petty criminal, and the momentum, the scrummage of casual murder, is all lost.

Read the original if you want to experience the full horror of an ordinary guy under Woolrich's treatment, and forget this pale imitation was ever made.

Who Pays The Ferryman is a seminal BBC television series, transmitted in 1977. The programme was a major success, watched by millions, the theme tune made the top ten and Michael J Bird established himself as one of the leading screenwriters of the time. The script and acting are of a quality rarely seen since on UK TV, the plot of the series reaching the unbearable pitch of a genuine Greek tragedy by the stunning final episode. Not surprising, as the series is set on Crete and uses local history and lore to move the story along to this extraordinary climax.

Jack Hedley plays Alan Haldane, a British ex-serviceman and boat-builder who takes early retirement and returns to Crete to look up the friends he had made while fighting with the partisans there during the war. He finds he had unknowingly fathered a daughter and determines to stay on the island to assure her future as best he can. Unfortunately, his daughter's clan is headed up by Patience Collier, a classic Greek dowager, who intervenes to settle old scores. Much pain and tragedy ensue.

This story is told over eight episodes. Several episodes only touch on the main plot, having stand-alone stories of their own (the Gareth Thomas episode is especially good), and throughout all of them Haldane has an on-off love affair with a local woman who is unaware of his full history - she is played with great depth, gentleness and sympathy by Betty Arvaniti. Other performances of note are Stefan Gryff as the seemingly nonchalant police inspector who seems to act as a moral oracle arbitrating between Cretan traditions and his duties as a modern policeman. And Neil McCarthy as Haldane's oldest friend - an actor of great character with a fantastic ravaged face.

I can't praise this series highly enough - it's everything that good television should be. More than that - it's event television - a series so good that it captured the public imagination regardless of its complex structure and classical references. Unfortunately, the BBC never bothered to release it on video, so it has faded from living memory. But recently it was issued on DVD in Holland - it is worth tracking down a copy to see just how good, how pure, how brilliant, once casual entertainment was on British television. We have fallen a long way since then. Who pays the ferryman, indeed.

This rather curious series is a hybrid in more ways than one.

A US-UK co-production, with the UK input coming from LWT, as far as I remember, it looks like a period Dempsey & Makepiece. It seems to have been shot on video stock which has degraded over the years or been damaged in storage. But, thankfully, that doesn't affect the viewing experience very much.

Chandler's stories feature a number of different Private Detectives, of whom Marlowe is the most famous. But many of the original stories, from which these episodes are adapted, actually featured John Dalmas as the shamus, rather than Marlowe. As a reader of Chandler I was always mystified as to why Marlowe eclipsed Dalmas - the latter character seemed witter, surer, with more tragedy about him and less of the throwaway line. What we have in this series is many of the Dalmas stories given over to Marlowe. And, to be frank, it doesn't feel right - Marlowe doesn't have the intellectual equipment of Dalmas, and I think the scriptwriters recognised this and took some severe liberties with the plotting when making their adaptations. One compromise leads to another...

Having said all that, the series is very enjoyable as it stands. Powers Boothe is good as Marlowe, more of the laconic thick-ear than the closet fist. The supporting actors are all fine and there are some very effective action set-pieces scattered throughout.

Recommended. I feel sorry for Dalmas, though I know he'd shrug it off.

Spyship is one those those excellent cerebral thrillers which used to make every new season at the BBC a treat to look forward to. Sadly those days are long gone. In the meantime, we can remember.

Plot: Tom Wilksinson investigates the sinking of a British civilian vessel in the North sea. As his father was a seaman on board he has a very personal interest in the case, but he becomes drawn into the plight of the other families too. They want answers; later they don't. Not surprisingly, he meets with opposition and even violence from the powers-that-be in their attempts to cover up the truth.

The ending of the series was regarded as shocking at the time. Strangely, in our supposedly more civilised society, it seems less shocking now, probably because we've come to expect such things in the name of 'national security'. I won't give it away.

I found the title of the series - Spyship - curious. It's a spoiler in itself, but when I look back on the series as a whole and at a little distance, I don't think the title refers to a ship at all - I think it refers to Britain and so stands as a rather involving metaphor.

Solid production values and good performances all round, with a tense script. Directed for bleak suspense, and succeeds at it.

Highly recommended.

The IMDb details for this show are all wrong but I suppose that's to be expected as it's rather obscure. First, it doesn't run the listed 145 minutes but only around 60 minutes. It was a one-off play produced for the BBC's Summer Season strand in 1985. Second, its main stars were Dinsdale Landen, Dermot Crowley and Frances Tomelty. Geoffrey Palmer made an appearance too.

The play was about the various intrigues and tensions surrounding the production of a radio drama. Crowley is the shy writer of the drama, Landen the old lecherous ham of a lead actor, and Tomelty the opinionated leading lady. Tomelty is unhappy with Crowley's script, Landen is attempting to seduce Tomelty, and the peeping tom of the play within the play presides over them all.

It's an excellent piece of work all round, with some great writing for ensemble acting, and it confirms (for me, at any rate) that Parker was, and still is, head and shoulders above all other Northern Ireland dramatists, fully the contemporary of Brian Friel. It's also fabulous to see Dinsdale Landen let rip with the kind of full-blooded performance we expect from his generation - along with Parker, badly missed.

Highly recommended.

It's a matter of deep regret that Woman In A Dressing Gown remains unreleased on DVD and is rarely, if ever, screened on television. As a previous commenter noted, it's the first of the kitchen sink drama's which became so fashionable in the 1960's, and it's the best.

The story is unremarkable; clerk Anthony Quayle is having an affair with his firm's secretary, Sylvia Sims. His wife, Yvonne Mitchell, devoted, but suffering from a clinical depression which leads her to be alternatively hysterical and morose, knows nothing, believing her husband to be equally devoted, so when Quayle breaks the news that he plans to divorce her, she goes to pieces. This unpromising situation is electrified by several elements; Yvonne Mitchell's searing performance, a spare script, and some very claustrophobic settings.

Mitchell owns this film; her character is so helpless, so self-effacing, that Quayleand Sims offer her the best kind of support - they let her do her own thing. Long sequences find Mitchell alone - at the cooker, at the kitchen table, at the window - and each of these scenes is a masterpiece of momentum worthy of any noir. But isn't kitchen sink drama the most casual noir and therefore the most terrifying? Really one would have to see Mitchell in action - her habitual burning of family breakfasts, her abortive trip uptown to dolly up and win back her man, most of all her only companion - a faded dressing gown which acts as comfort blanket to the woman. She is stunning and deservedly won many plaudits for her performance.

Credit must also go to Anthony Quayle who underplays his natural strengths as an actor. His perplexity at finding himself an object of desire is played out beautifully and logically to the conclusion. Sylvia Sims also impresses as the other woman, a slip of a thing whose scenes are fragile but safe because we know she is in no danger from herself.

The script is taken from a television play by Ted Willis which was broadcast in the early days of ITV. I have no idea whether it still exists, probably not, given British television's habit of treating archives as ephemera - there is nothing ephemeral about Woman In A Dressing Gown. It is blindingly and viscerally memorable. Neither do I have any idea who currently owns the rights to this film but I must say they ought to be ashamed of themselves - it needs to be restored and issued on DVD before it's completely forgotten.

All in all, a lovely and unsung classic for connoisseurs of everything vital.

The thing about making a particular film brilliant or unbrilliant, memorable or unmemorable, is availability. There were over 20 other entries in the 1976 series of Play For Today, but Bar Mitzvah Boy is probably the only one which has remained in print and, therefore, in memory. The success of the play was almost unparalleled for a BBC film - it played repeatedly on US television throughout the 70's and 80's, there was talk of a feature film, even a musical. Bar Mitzvah Boy isn't substantially better than any other Play For Today I've seen. In fact, it's one of the poorer episodes of the 80 or so I've been lucky enough to find. So why did it make such an impact? First, it is a cultural product - a young Jewish boy's rite of passage. Not being Jewish, I can't share the cultural experience, but I can compare it, say, to a First Communion for a Catholic child and empathise. Second, that empathy is key to the writing, and it is the late great Jack Rosenthal who delivers a script which transcends the Jewishness of the occasion, making it widely accessible to everyone. It is through the family's petty preparations and squabbles over the head of the boy that he achieves this empathy.

My gripe about Bar Mitzvah Boy is that it is one of those esteemed successes which unfairly eclipse their contemporaries. For that reason it needs to be treated with caution - too much praise can be a bad thing. This is not the fault of writer Jack Rosenthal, or director Michael Tuchner, or the cast, all of whom do a sterling job - it's because of the BBC's absurd closed archive that we have no yardstick against which to judge the quality of Bar Mitzvah Boy. The preceding play, House Of Bernada Alba, and the following, Bet Your Life, remain as mysterious to me as any Bar Mitzvah.

After seeing his wife and young daughter gunned down by a British soldier during a riot in Belfast, Hennessy, (Rod Steiger), decides to blow up the state opening of Parliament by way of revenge. As you would.

As a revenge fantasy, Hennessy is fine, apart from the end. As a political thriller, it's laughable. To think the IRA would issue a contract on one of its own volunteers for attempting to kill the British head of state when ten years later it tried and came close to killing Margaret Thatcher demonstrates a lack of research and familiarity with the subject matter.

The renewed Troubles were only five years old at the time of filming, and film-makers are always looking for ways of giving us the same old same old in new surrounds - so Hennessy is nothing more than an old-fashioned thriller - implausible, slightly absurd and highly engaging - in no way does it ever address or seek to address the causes of conflict in the north. That comes as a welcome relief.

What I liked most about Hennessy the man were his bull-like qualities, his tenacity in the face of over-whelming odds, and the audacity of his revenge fantasy. By seeking to assassinate no less than the head of state he immediately revokes status - the pomp of the Queen's entourage is contrasted bleakly with his family's funeral procession on television. He is conspicuously missing - he has a job of work to do. As a man who strips wires for a living he inhabits all the subtleties of a tradesman - untiring, no-nonsense, get the job done...

This film outraged the establishment and liberal press in Britain, who wanted IRA men portrayed neither as heroes or anti-heroes, but criminals. But every country has its own establishment and in Ireland Hennessy is counted a hero, not because of what he did do, but because of what he didn't do - the death of his wife and child are real enough set against his non-act, let that stand.

Incidentally, don't miss the wonderful opening of this film which shows footage of Belfast city centre before it was demolished by redevelopers at the behest of the city council. The old town was a beautiful place - if you're ever in Belfast take a walk down Joy St and see the last remaining cultural architecture in the town. It's somewhat ironic that Hennessy's job is that of a demolition expert, and we first see him demolishing a piece of old Belfast by explosive. Maybe what goes around comes around, eh, Niall.

I was delighted to find this episode of ITV's Armchair Theatre was, in fact, an early version of Ernest Gebler's novel, Shall I Eat You Now? and the later Peter Sellers film vehicle, Hoffman.

The short version of the plot is that Hoffman (Pleasance) blackmails 'typist second-class' Miss Smith (Cornwell) into spending a week in his apartment, all mod cons and more. Miss Smith comes to appreciate Hoffmann and the cultural world he opens for her. But the exchange isn't all one-way...

Donald Pleasance and Judy Cornwell are a less attractive and therefore more satisfactory couple than Sellers and Sinead Cusack. Pleasance is more energetic, less vulgar and rather more creepy in this incarnation of Gebler's romantic misanthrope Hoffman. Cornwell strikes a common note with her broad accent and peaked cap - she is not at all dainty and this likens her experience to disappointment. She's quite lovely in her way, and wants fetching from the village, as Hoffman does, to claim the wedding night privileges of a feudal lord.

In one lovely scene they discuss the meaning of a Beckett play they've just seen and how it relates to their own 'cultural exchange'.

As a cry of frustration and help from unmarried middle-aged men, it's quite an effective sort of revenge fantasy, almost auto-suggestion, as Hoffman says. I loved it, and the performances by Pleasance and Cornwell are superb.

This episode of Armchair Theatre demonstrates why it remained such a long-running and seminal drama anthology series. One hopes the single play will make a return to television soon.

This fully realised little film, from the northern part of Ireland, is a model of strange beauty.

Lexie is too young to heed her widower father's admonition of joy - 'we don't dance' and undertakes Irish dancing despite being from the wrong side of the sectarian divide. By application, by innocence, by sheer exuberance she draws her father into step with her, dancing him across the divide into a region of beautiful and cathartic grief.

For a moment this film turned the head of the peace process in Northern Ireland, and made a difference. That makes it unique and valuable. It's a bad treaty that doesn't take into account such an act of union as this.

Give My Regards To Broad Street is Paul McCartney's ultimate folly but, as folly goes, it's not quite up there with the sacking of Rome or the sinking of Atlantis. In fact, it's not half bad.

The music matters. McCartney's voice is on top form and he has picked and arranged a fine song-track to decorate a film which must have been scripted on the back of a plectrum. The plot is so inane and childish it doesn't warrant repeating here.

Paul's not an actor so don't expect the method but, strangely, do. The method is in the music, graceful and plaintive as ever, with a few new tracks to take the edge off the Beatles classics. No More Lonely Nights is one of his finest songs, arranged in sky-line melancholy, a London nod to Manhatten. The Silly Love Songs sequence is amusing and inventive if you get the gag - basically an opened out song playing like an opened out big-screen sit-com. And the extended Eleanor Rigby takes us briskly through a dream-sequence which formulates the 80's penchant for action aping introspection.

The supporting cast is odd - Ralph Richardson is wasted, Bryan Brown disinterested. Ringo sucks as ever. Only Linda seems to enter into the spirit of Paul's conceit, as though the script was pillow talk.

Slated at the time, the film is a must for Beatles, Wings and McCartney fans, and it's worth repeating that the man himself doesn't need to act the method, the method's in the music.

What is wrong with people? Only two reviewers here at IMDb appear to have 'got' this film - etna3 and crankscorner, and I thank them for their insight.

The Yin & Yang of Mr Go is probably the kinetic masterpiece of the cold war. It's a film so stoked in symbolism, meditation and nudity that Strindberg himself could have called it a wrap. In the end Burgess Meredith settles for Joyce in his script, which is almost the same thing.

Following a voice-over by Christopher 'Bhudda' Lee, we meet James Mason as Mr Yin Yang Go, criminal, murderer, drug-addict and seducer, making ready to move into the big nuclear league. He tricks broke writer Jeff Bridges into a compromising love scene with a male American scientist, then blackmails the scientist to get plans for a new nuclear defence system. But Christopher Lee has other plans for Yin Yang Go - the nuclear plot turns to meditative karma and Go becomes the focal point of all human history, past, present and future. In short, Go goes nuts and becomes a kind of karmic superhero, saves the world etc, you know the score. If this is the effect radiation has on karma we could all use a shot.

Throw in Mason's real life wife, Clarrisa Kay, as a butch sort of lesbian, Jack McGowran as nominal CIA, a script that will not come into its own for another 500 years, and you have a classic.

This film really needs to be restored directly from the negative, in its true colour and original aspect ratio. If I were a monastic or Bhuddist monk, or alternatively, the leader of the People's Republic of China, I would make the restoration of The Yin & Yang of Mr Go my life's work.

A classic.

Highly Dangerous is a rare original screenplay by novelist Eric Ambler. It draws heavily on elements of his early pre-1939 thrillers, but reposts them behind the Iron Curtain. This film leans particularly on Ambler's first novel The Dark Frontier, most notably with the super-agent coda, which is very fashionable today.

Ambler's problem with Highly Dangerous is that most of the plot devices he invented single-handedly in the 30's were used to the point of saturation by film-makers during the 40's. By the time he got around to an original screenplay it all seems very unoriginal. For that reason I like to think of this film as British cinema's homage to all Ambler's great work in the 30's. An adaptation of one of Ambler's post war novels, say, Judgement On Deltchev, would have been much more satisfactory at this point in his career - as it was, he had to wait ten years until Topkapi before the cinema recognised his post-war novels.

Margaret Lockwood makes for a very beautiful and personable innocent, drawn into a cold-war plot about a form of biological warfare, not entirely a new thing, but a change from the nuclear threats of the time. Lockwood's career was on the decline, and this film can't have offered her very much compensation. Additionally, she is badly served by her make-up artist, her hair being mocked up to middle-age very badly.

Don't treat this film as a serious attempt to translate Ambler's art to the screen - you can find that in just about any war-time thriller - from Journey Into Fear to The Mask of Dimitrios. Highly Dangerous is minor Ambler, and an opportunity for a fading Lockwood to make one more impression, and what an impression - innocent, scientist and secret agent.

James Mason & Leslie Stevens' beautiful and obscure rendering of one family's escape from indentured slavery through the entreprenurial violence of pirate Major Steed Bonnett, AKA Sailormaster to Captain Teach (Blackbeard), AKA The Devil.

Manx, upon gaining her freedom, is granted title to Bull Island, off the coast of Carolina. Upon arrival with her husband she finds a family of fisherman in residence who claim the island for their own - in the ensuing struggle her husband is killed and she is ordered to leave under threat of death. By sheer providence, stranger James Mason is washed up on shore unconscious, a floater reading 'Dead Man' around his neck. The mysterious Mason joins her struggle...

The morality of the film is fine, tracking a passage from the sureties of slavery in the old Empire to the anarchy of a land-grab in the new World - Manx has the deeds to the island, but none of the fishermen can read worth a damn. The script is refracted through sunlight into blood, most violence happening in superb colour, and mixing colour into those insane words...

-He knows how to use that axe. Would you fight a man with a axe?

-You tore up her books, killed her birds.

-My father told me he was the king of the moon. He was the king of the moon.

In one extraordinary scene, film in a ten minute take with no cuts of any kind, Manx explains the mechanics of slavery to Mason, shows him her indenture and the two parts of paper representing her whole person - the reason why the scene was filmed without cuts, its narrative integrity intact.

-One person, undivided and whole.

Nicolas (Rip Torn) is tempted into the New World, wanting to learn to read, and deserts his fisherman brothers to throw his lot in with Manx. The remaining fishermen send to the mainland for help from the brutal Kingstree (Neville Brand) and the scene is set for a confrontation between land and sea, life and death...

Only Cimino's Heaven's Gate shares the same canvas as Hero's Island, both showing an interior landscape, a projected journey, an intellectual sword-fight. The sheer physicality of the final clash between Mason & Brand birthing the notion of everything we have seen and heard.

A stunning, stunning film, a masterpiece, and probably the finest film of the 60's. There is a letterboxed print which occasionally shows on TCM - see Hero's Island in all its glory and all its obscure and forgotten pain.

The Philanthropist is Christopher Hampton's witty and incisive reversal of Moliere's Misanthropist. According to Hampton 'it occurred to me that in the climate of abrasive candour which characterised the late 1960's, Alceste would have been quite at home: whereas his opposite, a man concerned above all to cause no offence and be an unfailing source of sweetness and light, would very likely succeed only in raising heckles where-ever he went'.

Thus we have the impeccably mannered Ronald Pickup falling over himself to be pleasing and honest, and instead finding that honesty is taken as a subtle form of insult and that to be pleasing is to be unfashionable and rude.

This BBC adaptation, made in 1975, is superb and superbly cast. Pickup is a wonderfully self-absorbed philanthropist, reminding one of Humbert Humbert without the crime. James Bolam is perfectly cast as Don, ostensibly Pickup's friend, but finding how easy it is to dupe the innocent quite without design. Of all the actors only Helen Mirren fails to come to grips with her role, possibly because she is miscast, rather than misreading the part of Celia.

This great play is included as part of the Helen Mirren At The BBC DVD box-set. I do not really understand the fashion for releasing these plays as sets under the umbrella of an actor - much more useful would be a box-set of Christopher Hampton At The BBC. It's his play, Mirren just happens to be in it.

THE most essential play of the 60's and 70's. And shame on the BBC for leaving it unseen in the archives for 33 years.

A strangely and unhappily compelling film from the pen over the wildly over-rated Bernard MacLaverty. The script piles improbability on improbability but, given that its premise is so unlikely, perhaps that is the point, a kind of coincidental momentum of the poor and the bad.

Helen Mirren doesn't fare too well as an RUC widow - there are many Irish actresses who could have suited and played this role much more convincingly. John Lynch is fine, looks the part, capturing something of the long-haired, unwashed aesthetic of the hunger-strikers of the time. The best performance is easily by Donal McCann as Lynch's Da, greasily working up a sweat at the local slaughterhouse. Ray McAnally is wasted in a small part.

I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but it's an interesting addition to the Troubles archive. Some fine photography and backdrops go a long way towards salvaging a rotten script.

A splendid old-fashioned action film, with all concerned giving it their best shot.

A few people have objected to the average age of the actors in this film, from Burton to Kenneth Griffiths - but they don't seem to realise that the age of these mercernaries is the point. The Wild Geese is about a generation of men who demobbed from the Army after the Second World War, were unable to make peace work, and who sold their services as soldiers in the world's troublespots to the highest bidder. The late 1970's would have been the time of life that their age at last compromised their work, and the film is a recognition of the last of them.

For me this film is like a beloved childhood toy, kept and never forgotten - when it aired recently on television I just didn't want it to end.

Brilliant, gloriously sentimental and the anti-thesis of PC. 10/10

Ireland's resurgent film industry (in swing since Michael Collins) has yet to produce anything as convincing as this extraordinary and moving story of heart-sided Anne Devlin, caught up in the 1803 rebellion through the carelessness of her men.

Brid Brennan's near maid belongs to the hidden history of Ireland opened by Sebastian Barry's later Steward Of Christendom, but she shares none of that character's sense of revisionist sweepstakes. She's an open faced young woman, on a cart, on a horse, under torture. She is escorted from scene to scene, but her suitors are guards or informers or both, and the sullen blush on her knows it. Brennan's performance is superb - she anticipates all the famine faces to come.

The film has an extraordinary visual sense of the age - the damp is captured as crisply as any hanging, even going to muffle the dialogue, as though mock recording of that time simply could not take, or water got into the boom. The period decor is well produced and the photography (by O'Sullivan) is beautiful, stark, cruel.

The essence of her dilemma is expressed perfectly after her capture. She asks,'Do you know, did my family tell them anything?'

Holy Cross purports to be a true representation of the horrifying and shaming events in Belfast back in 2001 when Catholic schoolgirls were subjected, by protesting loyalists, to a tunnel of verbal and physical abuse on their way to classes. But the whole film is filled with fictional episodes and characters which seek to condition the audience into a deeper understanding of the background to the story. There is a wholly moral line of thought which suggests such attacks on children require no forgiving back story and are disgraceful in themselves, with or without the nod of history, but that doesn't seem have occurred to the makers (BBCNI, of course). In their heavy-handed attempt to rewrite the facts any understanding of why the loyalists behaved in such a shocking manner is put well beyond use.

This is one of those films where editorial and political concerns about content seek to revise the truth. And under those strictures any comment about performances or technical graces is irrelevant.

Absurdly this one part drama was split into two pieces by the BBC on the night it was shown, interrupted by the news - this only added to the fiction of the whole film.

Who would have thought this carefully archived Son Of Man, brilliantly written by Dennis Potter and searingly played by Irish actor Colin Blakely, would make for the most compelling and moving portrayal of Jesus yet committed to film?

In an astonishing turn of events the camera is made a witness. The Sermon on the Mount is not delivered from a height - Blakely's Jesus walks among his listeners, pleads with them, harangues them, shouts and screams his message. He's often a brute of a man, sweating and swearing, at times beating his brains like wood for examples and metaphors that he might make fit. Blakely's performance is a great teacher, a fine carpenter, and not a Messiah in sight. His final plight becomes harrowing because Son Of Man is such a physical play, like the man himself addresses the cross - 'You should have stayed a tree, and I should have stayed a carpenter.'

I was never more sure of an actor turned carpenter.

The Spongers is one of the triumphs and one of the shames of British television - triumphant because it succeeds in presenting the true state of social affairs in jubilee Britain, shameful because none of its frightening lessons have been learned by our society.

Jim Allen brilliantly demolishes the social consensus with his very simple conceit, comparing the British royal family to a poor single parent family in 70's Britain. And it is painful and harrowing to follow the fate of this family at the hands of social services against the background of nationalistic fervour created by the jubilee celebrations.

The ending is probably the most shocking event in television history, but was eclipsed at the time by tabloid uproar over the opening titles of the play, which (super)imposed a picture of the Royals beside the word Spongers. This controversy itself demonstrates Allen's concerns and serves to illuminate his lifetime themes and specifically the themes of this sadly almost forgotten play.

It appears British television no longer has a social remit and, though I hate to admit it, this play is probably partly responsible for that - it's just too powerful, too awkward, all too true. I hope someday it finds its way back into public consciousness.

Required viewing for every human person.

Other users here at IMDb seem to have a hard time locating this film, leading to talk of it having been suppressed. The reason The Magic Toyshop has become (unfairly) obscure is simply because it was screened on British television before having any major theatrical release. Technically it's a TV movie, made by the Granada network (not the BBC), and it has suffered the same fate as many British television movies of the 70's and 80's. Thankfully this film was released by Palace video in the UK - I located a copy and have now archived mine to DVD.

Caroline Milmoe was not underage when the film was made - she was 23 years old, playing a 15 year old. It is true that the nude scenes present a minor through a grown woman, and that is one of the central themes of the film - the sexual element itself is disturbingly grim.

The whole film has a unworldly sheen and inhabits magical realism long before it became fashionably known as such. Watch the camera track the parrot's gaze to get an idea of the sheer level of invention and ingenuity. And Milmoe really knows how to torment those braids...

This is one of the best films of the 1980's, and certainly the best film I have ever seen about childhood's end. I don't mind it being obscure because that lends it cult status, but I feel unhappy for the cast, particularly Caroline Milmoe, as this film is the top of their art and that deserves a wider audience.

Brilliant.

This is a great little comedy deserving of all the praise it has here from other posters.

Cary Grant shakes off his usual polished self as the grizzled hard-drinking loner, Walter Ekland, staying out of the war and harms way. Enter Leslie Caron and her charges, and Ekland finds the war isn't so easy to stay out of if you have something to lose.

The script is pleasant and well-observed and the humour is gentle. It's probably a little too long at almost two hours but the characters are so well-etched and performed that the humour is sustained to the end.

Well worth seeing.

Self-confessed waster and non-literary man Gulliver Sheils hatches a plan to escape glum 40's Ireland for the South Seas...

This beautiful little Ealing comedy is rarely seen, probably because it has no big names and is an Ealing experiment in Irish humour rather than their usual business of English. Robert Beatty, fresh from his turn as an IRA man in Odd Man Out, makes a very convincing loafer, all excuses permanently in hand - 'I'm not a literary man, at all.' The rarely seen Moira Lister shines as his middle class love interest, much more rooted to the real world and trying to make Beatty respectable enough for marriage. And there's a small turn by Wilfred Brambell looking very much like Albert Steptoe fifteen years before Albert Steptoe.

The ending is very much an English solution to an Irish problem. If only Home Rule assured us all a wage and girl...

I also wonder if Brendan Behan saw this film, through a beer glass in the late 40's in some Dublin fleapit, and decided to adopt its style. It certainly anticipates much of his take on Irish character and humour.