lucyrf

The kind of play that was popular in the 30s. Someone some day should write a book on how they feed into the mysteries that were being written at the time. Murders in steam rooms and dark screening-rooms would be really effective in the theatre. I recognised few of the actors. They are usually seen in stagey, static tableaux, with few close-ups. Philip Ahn is incapable of being bad, even when half-naked and worshipping a cobra god. He went on to better things as Prince Chung in one of the Mr Moto films.

When Mrs Chenko the lovable Hungarian office cleaner tells the head of the firm that her daughter is getting married in a couple of days you fear for her. And you'd be right. Alfred Burke (Logan) is the ideas man brought into the cosmetics company who has ideas of his own. He is the embodiment of evil and his wife isn't much more friendly. The head's daughter is also his secretary. After the fire - you know it's coming after the book-cooking, the lack of sales and the unpaid debts - she and the insurance investigator team up as the wholesome couple. There's some great 60s atmosphere in the beauty showroom and the Logans' penthouse. I always wonder who painted the pictures. But the story is quite painful as the good (and repentant) suffer.

I love the gritty urbanism of films like this, the hangouts of the Wanda Skutniks of this world.

The lie-detector scene is almost a lecture on how the machines work, and the operator seems like a real-life functionary rather than an actor. Lee J Cobb is good as the gruff, hard-hitting editor with a heart of mush.

The moment when the pivotal wire photo arrives at the official pardon hearing is both thrilling and utterly mundane. Five or six elderly men in suits gather round an amazing piece of 50s technology. Those of us who've worked in the media will recognise it as a step on the way today's instant beaming of information around the world. Brings back memories of taking down copy from South America over a faint, crackly phone line, typing while holding the handset between shoulder and ear. They wouldn't even give us phone holders!!! But then the internet began to happen, and ageing mastodons of journalism (also in suits) were forced to put their fingers on a (gasp!) keyboard.

Anyway, see this movie, it's brill. Shame Mrs McNeill just has a couple of scenes.

I suppose most audiences are going to go "Aaaaaaaah!" whenever the dog appears. But I am dog proof. I don't have the dog-soppiness gene. I just waited for the humans and horses to come back on.

The episode starts with a hunt about to go off and tear a defenceless fox to bits. They bring the audience up to speed by calling each other "brother dear" in sarcastic tones. When not going "Aaaah!" over a dog, are we supposed to go "Oooh!" over the habits of the aristocracy?

The only one of the no-good family who's at all convincing is Echo, a kind of proto-punk. Her mother, Morgana, is the worst New Age flake I have seen in any movie or TV show. She talks as if she was drugged, or very stupid.

Lynn Redgrave is present as a horse trainer, using a fake posh English voice. Or are her lines dubbed? Surely not.

If you're impressed by archaic hunting rituals and the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable, and go all gooey whenever a dog appears on the scene, this is one for you.

What DID happen to all the millions in the end?

Others have told the story - the junk dealer wants his son to be a gentleman, and an architect, but the son is sent down from Oxford for reasons unspecified. Son Julius then falls in with some crooks, while his wife gets a job as secretary to a diamond merchant. Well, you can guess what happens. But there are a couple of twists at the end and a very dramatic finish.

As always, I love the authentic feel of grimy old London. The junk in the shop has flowed into the house (watched over by Thora Hird in a small role). Charles Victor, memorable in The Woman in Question, puts on a convincing Italian accent as the deluded dad.

It is very well shot, with high contrast and dark shadows, especially in the last scenes. Unfortunately the sound is not very good. I kept missing lines of dialogue, so turned on the subtitles. Unfortunately the subtitler had not been able to hear all the dialogue either, resorting to (MUMBLES) and confusing the names of Rosselli and Marcella. Some lines came out as a complete word salad.

Michael Ward is good as Cornelius the educated sales assistant in the antique shop. Mr Big the gangster taunts him for smelling of roses, Julius calls him "that Victorian gramophone", and Mr Rosselli reminds everybody that Cornelius is fond of his mother. Perhaps his maltreatment is intended to show us these characters' true natures, however charming or paternal they appear to be.

But wouldn't the police arrest Mrs Rosselli too, instead of just leaving her in the street? Will she find happiness with the policeman? Will she take over the antiques business?

But that's about it. The premise is promising - a British agent in Baghdad gives an oilman a coded message to deliver in London - but the whole thing is boringly and blandly shot, and the acting would shame the Charles Vance Players. Even the Haslemere Thespians could have done a better job.

It was an awful fashion year, and the oilman's rather chunky girlfriend sports some frumpy outfits and the most dreadful hat I think I've ever seen.

I like this plot, and this one is pretty well acted and carried through. It's mainly worth watching, though for the bizarre wigs worn by the Major (couldn't they have found a toupee to match his hair?) and Mrs Jason, who sports a kind of Eiffel Tower of red hair rising from her cranium.

The best scene is at the beginning, when the conspirators meet as strangers in a City pub, and devise their scheme.

See him in The Man Who Knew Too Much and Went the Day Well!

Here he is an eccentric investigator first glimpsed showing his police beauty chorus how to dance. He tracks down the murderer from among footballers, a model, the manager, the model's flatmate...

Banks' act is rather camp and his dialogue witty. There are references to the "phoney" war of 1939 - a poster mentioning "Hitler's Friends", a sight gag with a bottle brush as a brief moustache, lines from the popular radio show ITMA. Banks introduces himself as "It's That Man Again" and one of the suspects says "I tink I go 'ome" (another catchphrase).

The model who was having an affair with the first (first?) victim while being engaged to the second is rather a racy character for the time. The fact that she spent the night in the victim's flat is taken as read by the characters. However - is Inga her flatmate or her maid? Inga seems rather creepily close to her, and they share a bedroom. (I love their flat, which is done out like the interior of a boat.)

Fashions are wartime and quite military, but skirts hadn't quite risen to the kneecap, where they stayed for the rest of hostilities, to save on fabric.

I loved this film. The complicated plot is evanescent, but there are some spies in wartime London, and James Mason and Joyce Howard are on their track. The humour is treated lightly, and mastermind Tom Walls is convincingly evil. There's an "old dark house" segment, but most of the action takes place in hotels and nightclubs. The intended audience must have been service men and women on leave - there are plenty in the film. The spies use a dancing school and talent agency as a front (shots of solemn sailors foxtrotting, and Joyce ends up in an auditioning chorus line). There are plenty of pretty blondes - which one will Mason settle down with? One is a singer who's not bad, and the obligatory "featured song" is passable, and gives more girls an opportunity to show their legs. Great fun, plus fab 40s fashions.

Who wrote that it's a mistake to think that all you have to do to be funny is to lighten the tone? The makers of this film should have read these words. It starts well, with passengers on a Swedish freighter who may not be what they seem. Valerie Hobson spars with Conrad Veidt and it is obvious that they will fall in love. Hobson goes AWOL to London while the ship stops in a South Coast port. Veidt follows to bring her back. London is blacked out, and they go to a Danish restaurant, and there's a comic proprietor, and a complicated plot, and Hobson is really a spy and... I fast forwarded at about this point. Someone said that this could be a Hitchcock film - I wish it had been. It's OK to be funny during a noir thriller, but you have to take the danger, suspense and deep shadows seriously. Instead, we get Hobson being arch, and Veidt looking uncomfortable as he is constantly humiliated.

What a joy! I had no idea that there was another in the series set in - let's say the 1880s. It is very noir, with deep black shadows. There are wonderful moments. Holmes singing (and dancing), and furiously driving a cab. Moriarty sparring with his butler. Watson sharper than usual. "I've listened to seashells that made more sense!" Watson lying in the gutter imitating a corpse. Ida Lupino as the Damsel in Distress. (Later Holmes heroines seem modelled on her.) "Our family has no history - my father was a self-made man." The dialogue is witty throughout, and everyone wears the period clothes beautifully, not least the men. The costume designer can't quite do a bustle - but never mind.

This film has lots to recommend it. I like the way it starts, among grey men in offices. I wondered if it would continue in this "Tinker Tailor" fashion or become the usual danger + romance? It keeps the TTSS aspect, but yes, danger and romance come along.

Random thoughts: It's much too long, but at least it's not padded out with car chases or travelogue. It is filmed with plonking realism, and this mostly works. It's in colour and you wish it was in high-contrast black and white. Holden is great, but his hair looks awful. Whoever thought Brylcreem was attractive? Swedes and Nazis have very bad bleach jobs or wigs. It was made in 1962 and the clothes are all wrong. Lilli Palmer looks fabulous.

When Palmer and Holden meet as "contacts" they pretend to flirt during a seething cocktail party. They are trying to look natural rather than signalling to the audience "they're spies, you know!" as usual.

Apart from the acting, which is great, it really gives a sense of what life was like under a murderous regime. People are still giving cocktail parties! Most citizens carry on, though they know about concentration camps, and the Nazis can get them to do anything by threatening their families. And there are a couple of summary executions which are utterly horrifying. Not everybody goes calmly to their deaths.

If only Hitch had been in charge! There are a couple of Hitchcockian moments, however - in a confessional, and among some Swedish cyclists.

I don't need to repeat what other reviewers have explained - old dark house - secret - screams in the night - sinister footmen - shades of Jane Eyre.

The old pile, which is just about to receive a long-needed makeover, is a relic of past glory days. Now the reduced family rattle around its medieval corridors - Lady Lebanon, her son and her secretary (his cousin) plus staff. You long for Lord L and Isla to escape - he to play in a dance band and write the Warsaw Concerto or Dream of Olwen, she to marry the architect.

But sinister old dark houses have a personality of their own and a habit of imprisoning youth until it withers (see Great Expectations). The only thing to do is to tear down the dusty curtains, shouting "I have come back, Miss Havisham, I have come back!"

I really started writing this review to give a credit to the dim but posh PC at the lecture who's "frightfully sorry he's late".

Early 50s fashions made all women look 50. I think they were trying to revive the 1850s - they succeeded too well.

While on the trail of the mysterious corpse, the cops end up backstage at a music hall. This means we have to sit through a couple of tedious and inept acts. It takes a lot to make Lionel Blair look inept!

The fun is in spotting actors like him, Rachel Roberts and Jean Marsh.

Set in the world of industrial espionage. There are some good atmospheric shots in a darkened lab with light reflected on faces from a turbulent tank of desalinated water.

The fussy, middle-aged librarian was such a cliché that I was sure she was the spy. Dr ?Revelli is a young woman scientist hired by a US company for her expertise, but under pressure she reverts to the usual Hollywood broken English. Do no foreigners ever use the word "the"? "I come in lab and I see body in tank."

One of the suspects is Japanese, and we get a lot of atmosphere in a Japanese restaurant.

Lots of "lika da girla" accents, which audiences must have gone for, but I loathe. Worth watching for the plot twists, and the quiet performance of the daughter of the family who is just realising she has been trapped working for the business for a low wage, without a social life, since she was 15.

They all seemed trapped, being bullied verbally and financially by the patriarch. I hope the story helped viewers stuck in a similar situation. Of course dad gaslights them all "You're lucky! I've been so generous! You owe me!", but if you shout at your children and keep them stuck working for meagre wages they're quite likely to dislike you, not regret your death and refuse to follow your instructions to "carry on the business exactly as I ran it". It's refreshing that the kids are all beginning to rebel.

Perhaps this story has a message for bullying fathers, too.

Starts well, with a bickering couple driving along an empty coast road through one of those noir rainstorms. It's a plot worthy of Agatha Christie, but the best thing about it is the way the script (and the actor concerned) give a textbook display of gas-lighting and spousal abuse.

If your husband begins to behave like this ("Me? An affair! You imagine things my dear!"), leave him flat and do NOT share the inheritance from Auntie Ethel.

I thought they didn't make them any more. Compelling story, LOTS of forensic detail, loads of atmosphere, great performances.

Standout points: complete lack of women among the police or the newspaper staff - apart from the editor's secretary. An investigation into a serial killer "run" by different local police squads who can't tread on each other's toes or share information. Taking two days to send a picture of a suspect because the Vallejo squad doesn't have a "telefax" yet. Golfball typewriters. Telephones. Downmarket but adequate restaurants with formica tables (probably all now over-priced coffee shops furnished with old school chairs and kitchen tables). Fingerprints and handwriting treated as science, when they've been shown up as having more in common with tealeaf reading.

I found the first third of the film hard to follow as it was filmed in documentary style, with actors speaking very fast, in the middle distance, and often turned away from the camera. Robert Downey Jr wore a muffling moustache and beard and spoke without moving his lips. Jake Gyllenhaal (who aged from nerd to haunted man) at least speaks clearly. In the early scenes, it was as if the actors had dubbed their own lines, rather ineptly.

Directors - spare a thought for the hard of hearing.

C Aubrey Smith and Erich von Stroheim? What more could you want? The premise is a good one too - Stroheim is that crazy art collector of urban legend who steals fabulously valuable art works because he just wants to own them. (The Mona Lisa in the Louvre is one of the many copies, of course.)

The terrible title and somewhat clunky exposition can be put down to Hollywood recreating London (shot of Scotland Yard, thick fog). Everyone (apart from the French, German and Cockney characters) is terribly British - apart from Smith's granddaughter, who couldn't be more American. Never mind, she's feisty and pretty and wears some glamorous clothes.

Those loveably inept Brits keep European art treasures in an old mine. When two French emissaries from the Louvre turn up to take Lisa home, the party waltzes in past the one pensionable guard, and find the gallery cared for by another 80-year-old. Not a man with a rifle in sight.

The shady Cockney art dealer and his wife are excellent and their relationship genuinely affecting. I longed to browse round their shop, full of "Victorian monstrosities" that had not yet come back into fashion.

I am from the UK and have never been nearer the United States than Venezuela, but even I could tell that Amy Jo's accent was unconvincing. She is pretty, but does she have to be such a dimwit?

Interesting what another reviewer says about folk music - yes, it was about to be supplanted by the Beatles. Amy Jo's voice isn't that terrible, she just sings Greensleeves at a funereal pace and then has a slightly better stab at Careless Love. You'd think her backing band would up the tempo. At the end, Jazzbo reveals that he has no voice at all.

Perry is on holiday in Switzerland and he helps the son of an old friend prove his innocence, not find some Nazi treasure, hang on to his German girlfriend, while a crew of incompetents dive for the gold/pound notes/jewellery/old masters.

Greta can sing, but as someone pointed out, she can't act. She's only supposed to be German, and a displaced person who doesn't know who she is - not a dimwit or a six-year-old. She spends most of her screentime blubbing, or twisting her head from side to side, or running awkwardly through a pine forest.

If they're not really in Switzerland, it's a clever illusion. I suppose back then Switzerland was still charming and exotic, rather than kitsch. Even the snow-covered mountaints are going to be out of fashion, design-wise, for another few hundred years.

As always, the shabby streets, the little shops, Ron's cafe, the bombsites, the grimy rooms - are the real star. There are some good slimy villains, and Alan Curtis's humdrum business partner is not only well acted but turns out to be far more perceptive than we guessed.

Alan Curtis is lucky enough to be married to Joy Shelton, wearing the "cast-iron permanent" of the respectable woman (copyright Raymond Chandler). But she can talk of nothing but visits to mother and the bargains she's picked up at the "jumble sale" - she seems to spend her life shopping. For fun, they play bridge with their toothy next-door neighbour.

Alan is looking for excitement, but gets more than he bargained for. But at the end he returns to his perfect 30s bungalow with its sunburst stained glass.

Mainly filmed on location in Ireland, where one car a day passes the pub, if you're lucky.

Baxter is sent by his bosses to investigate a dead frogman washed up on the beach. It was found by a young girl, Miss Howard (what was she doing there?), and a reporter and photographer just happened to be on the spot. There's a mysterious beardie in a bungalow who's employing the (female) photographer as a fellow spy. Is the dead man a double agent last seen in Berlin? Baxter and Miss Howard stay in the same rather staid hotel in the nearest town as they wait for the inquest. The reporter and photographer hang around, ostensibly on the scent of a story.

1963 wasn't a great year for fashion, and all the women wear frumpy styles, big coats and awful hairdos. Staff at the hotel and airport have very English accents. The only "Oirish" is attempted by a barmaid and the mortuary attendant. Everybody smokes all the time, and drinks all day. Miss Howard becomes a bit giggly after her tenth gin and bitter lemon.

The sound was so bad that I turned on the subtitles. Miss Howard in particular EMphasized one word in every sentence but died away for the rest. The subtitler gave up on an Irish barman in a lonely pub where the last showdown takes place. We shall never know what he was saying. However, we are helpfully told when the soundtrack becomes sinister, menacing or resolutive.

Overall, it is like a substandard Francis Durbridge enacted by the Charles Vance players (the worst amateur troupe I have ever witnessed). The music is the best thing about this dreary movie - with a few genuinely lovely Irish folk tunes at the beginning.

England's south coast doesn't really have mile-high cliffs...

There is lots to like about this film. It was made in 1941, and set in England, but the war isn't happening. Joan Fontaine is excellent - though she's playing a character who has something in common with the heroine of Rebecca and the part she played in The Women, she tones down her usual twittering and gibbering. In the early part of film Hitchcock has fun with the appalling deportment of the English debutante. There are whole families of them, with parents clearly desperate to get rid of them. They clomp about wearing "good" tweeds, and stand about with their mouths open looking blank ("catching flies") as we used to say. Joan's unsophisticated manners fit her background. Another reviewer accused Grant of "buffoonery" in the early scenes, but I found him funny. Nigel Bruce is always appealing, here as the dim patsy "Beaky".

I enjoyed the scenes at the detective novelist's cottage - her bespectacled forensic brother, her entire run of the "famous trials" series, the discussions about mystery-writing and her close friend who wears a rather mannish suit rather than an evening dress.

There's no suggestion that Joan should get a job, or that they should move out of their palatial pad and into a studio flat. But then there wouldn't have been a plot.

Agatha Christie used this idea rather more neatly in her peerless short story Philomel Cottage, twice filmed as Love from a Stranger. Joan Hickson is in the first one as a dimwitted servant. Basil Rathbone is the husband in the second version - set for some reason in the late 19th century. Sylvia Sydney sets out a cold supper while Basil tells her he's really Bluebeard...

We have the Hemingwayesque sculptor who goes on benders. His Irish best friend who thinks he's wonderful and writes puff pieces about him for "File" magazine, or whatever they've called it. There's a very pretty Greek model whose broken English makes it even easier for her to come over as a) childish and b) moronic. Did men really find that kind of baby talk attractive? I fast-forwarded over the benders and we found ourselves in court discussing blackmailing attempts and a wool-sorting process. At least the lust-for-life sculptor does the decent thing in the end.