Category: film reviews

Film Review: It Happened One Night

Since Hollywood began handing out gold plated statues in 1929 for the recognition of excellence in the movie industry, only three films have ever won all five major awards – the Oscar Grand Slam – Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay. The most recent was in 1992 when The Silence of the Lambs swept the board and Hannibal Lecter declared to the world his penchant for fava beans and a nice chianti. Prior to that it was Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1976. The first time occurred forty one years earlier when It Happened One Night became the movie that helped put the then minor studio of Columbia well and truly on the map.

Frank Capra, a rising star when the silent era morphed into the ‘talkies’ directed It Happened One Night and would later go on to make such Hollywood gems as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). In total, he would win three Oscars out of six nominations for his directing and another three out of seven nominations for Outstanding Production/Best Picture.

Numerous actors were considered for the two leads before Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert signed on. Robert Montgomery and Myrna Loy were among them but rejected the parts because they didn’t feel the script wasn’t good enough. It’s said that Gable was lent to Columbia by MGM’s boss Louis B. Mayer as some form of punishment for refusing roles at his contracted studio but while this may or may not be true, it does give an air of plausibility to Gable apparently turning up for work on the first day of shooting and grumbling – ‘Let’s get this over with.’

The atmosphere on set was pretty tense as filming got under way but Gable and Capra enjoyed making the movie. However, it is said that Colbert did not. She was the sixth actress to be offered the role and reluctantly accepted the part only after Capra had agreed to double her salary to $50,000 and guarantee that she would have to work no more than four weeks. One might think that would make the pill easy to swallow but  she was reportedly difficult on set and whined about something virtually every day. When filming had wrapped, she complained to a friend, “I just finished the picture in the world.”

After opening to luke warm business and indifferent reviews, it gained a secondary movie house release, word of mouth spread and the box office receipts went through the roof. It became Columbia’s biggest hit to date and had an immediate impact on the public. One scene has Gable undressing for bed, taking off his shirt and revealing himself to be bare-chested. This was because removing his undershirt as well didn’t fit in with his humorous dialogue and so the undershirt was abandoned altogether. It apparently lead to a noticeable decline in the sales of men’s undershirts. Also because the two characters travel on a Greyhound bus for a significant part of the film, the public’s interest in bus travel increased nationwide.

Although the plot may be well-known to our modern audiences, at the time it was a story largely untapped. Spoiled heiress (Colbert) runs away from home because her father has forbidden her to marry a man he doesn’t like. She boards a bus to New York City to reunite with her husband-to-be and runs into a struggling newspaper reporter (Gable), fellow passenger and all-round charming rogue. She’s soon without the means to get to her desired destination and so he (recognising who she is) offers to help in exchange for her story. She agrees out of necessity and they form a squabbling, travelling alliance. Their adventures together leads them to fall in love but in the finest tradition of great storytelling, it’s not as straightforward as it might sound.

There’s great humour throughout this wonderful film and both leads play their parts superbly (regardless of how they felt). The scene where they first meet aboard the bus sets the standard but a hitch-hiking scene later on is possibly the highlight. Gable’s assurance that he’s an expert in thumbing a lift and Colbert’s subsequent belittling him is an absolute joy to watch. Gable’s nibbling on a carrot while rapidly talking at the beginning of this sequence is rumoured to have influenced the creation of Bugs Bunny too. The subtleties of Gable’s performance is a perfect blend of rapidly delivered wisecracking dialogue and moments of romantic tenderness but he never loses that hard-as-nails streak of downright manliness that personified him throughout his career and helped cement his status as The King of Hollywood. When he tells you to “Beat it!”, you really don’t want to hang around to find out what’ll happen if you don’t. Likewise, Colbert’s portrayal of the spoiled brat who suddenly finds herself roughing it outside of the pampered world she’s only ever known is a marvel. It’s no wonder she would soon become the highest paid actress in Hollywood and I’m sure as the box office receipts piled up, Capra would have admitted she’d been worth her hefty fee.

In 1993, It Happened One Night was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.” I think the word ‘significant’ is a good one to wrap this review up with. It is a significant film and a sublime example of a romantic comedy of its time. In cinema terms, it also epitomises the word ‘classic’.

 

 

 

 

 

The Killers – Film Review

The more I delve through the cinematic archives, the clearer it becomes that the 1940s was the decade for film noir. Like Double Indemnity two years earlier, The Killers, made in 1946, is a terrific example of the genre. Once again, I watched this classic for the first time a couple of days ago and am amazed that I’d never seen it before. I make it no secret that I’ve always been a great fan of the genre.

The Killers is the title of a short story by Ernest Hemingway and the first twelve minutes of the film which sees a pair of hit men enter a diner one evening in their search for and ambush of “Swede” Andreson is a faithful adaptation of his writing. Played by William Conrad (later of TV’s Cannon and Jake and the Fatman fame) and Charles McGraw, the two assassins open the movie with an incredible sense of menace and deadly intent. The dialogue is sharp and typical of tough guys of the era and you are immediately gripped by the tension and sense of foreboding.

Their mission is to kill Swede (Burt Lancaster) who they know comes in every evening at around 6pm for his dinner but tonight he’s late and the diner’s owner manages to convince the gun men that he won’t be coming in so late. So they leave the diner and head for Swede’s apartment. Swede’s co-worker, who was in the diner when the killers arrived, bolts out the back way and warns Swede that the men are coming for him but Swede, laying on his bed in a cold sweat of resignation, makes no attempt to escape. The killers break in his door and gun him down. Brilliant, brilliant opening.

The rest of the film (an original screenplay co-written by an uncredited John Huston) follows life insurance investigator Jim Reardon (the always excellent Edmond O’Brien) who has been assigned to locate and pay the beneficiary of Swede’s policy. As he tracks down and interviews the dead man’s friends and associates and slowly pieces together the puzzle of Swede’s life, we learn through well-constructed flashbacks that the Swede was involved in a $250,000 heist and then how he came to meet his demise the way he did.

Being a noir, the film obviously has a big cheese bad guy and a delicious femme fatale and Albert Dekker and Ava Gardner fill these roles superbly, respectively of course. Indeed, the entire cast is well put together and Lancaster, 33 years old and in his screen debut, plays his role of a pro boxer washed up through injury then falling for a mobster’s girl and mixing with the wrong crowd admirably. He has a likability and the unmistakable presence that would quickly make him a star.

The black and white cinematography, so often a defining trademark of the noir genre, doesn’t disappoint here. There are many moments of beauty where starkness, shadow and silhouette take turns to create mood and enhance the atmosphere. Sometimes it’s worth watching these films just to see what the director is doing and in this case, Robert Siodmark, a pupil of the highly influential school of German Expressionism really knew his beans.  The lighting inside Swede’s apartment when Reardon encounters “Dum Dum” looking for the loot and then later inside the Green Cat night club towards the end of the film are just perfect. Check it out and see what I mean.

All in all, a great film and a great noir. The use of flashback gives it a different feel to the usual main character narrative but it takes nothing away. Full of colourful, untrustworthy characters and intrigue, it’s definitely another one worth watching.

 

Film Review: Double Indemnity

Well, yesterday it happened to me again (and I don’t mean another bout of embarrassing public itching). I watched an amazing old movie for the first time and wondered how on earth it is I’d never seen it before. ‘Course, I’d heard of it somewhere, sometime but never felt inclined to watch it. Maybe it’s the film’s title, I don’t know. But having recently read a biography of Raymond Chandler – that wittiest and most influential of all hard-boiled crime writers – and learning that he had, in the 40s, worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood and had in fact co-written Double Indemnity, I sought it out and gave it a viewing.

Chandler is perhaps most famous for creating the character of Phillip Marlowe, the private detective that was made universally famous by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep in 1946. His distinct writing style and in particular, his ability to pen incredible dialogue has been often parodied but never bettered. This “Chandleresque” touch is clearly evident in Double Indemnity as the actors deliver their lines.

The story, based on a novella of the same name by James M. Cain, begins when Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) an insurance salesman for Pacific All Risk makes a routine house call on Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) to renew her husband’s car insurance policy. There is an instant attraction between the two and plenty of flirting takes place until she asks about taking out a life insurance policy on her husband without his knowledge. Neff understands immediately that she has murder in mind and does what any sane insurance man would do and gets the hell out of there. But later that evening, she turns up at his apartment and continues to seduce him and before long, his gullibility and lust for her vanquishes his caution and the two agree to kill her old man.

Neff, being a hotshot insurance man, knows all the tricks of the business and comes up with a foolproof plan to get rid of Mr Dietrichson in such an unlikely way that it will trigger the “double indemnity” clause of the policy thereby making Pacific All Risk liable to pay Phyllis twice the policy amount of $50,000. The plan (which I won’t divulge so as not to spoil the film for those of you who haven’t seen it) goes off pretty smoothly and before you know it, the mourning Mrs Dietrichson is preparing to get her blood-stained hands on the dough.

But Neff’s friend and colleague at Pacific All Risk, Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson, who plays a claims investigator) begins to smell a rat and although the head of the company believes the death to be suicide and is willing to settle the claim, Keyes persuades him otherwise by quoting a bunch of statistics on the probability of suicide. There are further complications for Neff when he becomes friendly with the victims daughter who believes Phyllis is responsible for her father’s death and…under the masterful direction of Billy Wilder the tension grows and grows.

As a film noir, it really is one of the finest American examples and clearly set the standard for those of the genre that would follow. The dialogue is a thing of beauty (typical Chandler), the acting is faultless – particularly Edward G. Robinson who in my opinion steals every scene he’s in – and the black and white cinematography is superb. The way they used light and shadow and silhouettes in those days was simply genius. It was nominated for seven Oscars but bizarrely failed to win any but in recent years it has been recognised in all manner of the American Film Institute’s 100 Years…100 something or other categories.

Stanwyck plays her femme fatale with controlled coolness and MacMurray is ideally cast as the charming yet somewhat weak willed louse. It’s interesting to note they were both playing against type in these roles and equally interesting that they were also the two highest paid stars in Hollywood around the time of filming. Robinson is always value for money and despite being third on the bill, he received the same pay as the two leads. To watch the scene where he’s spouting statistics is to watch a true pro at work. Sublime stuff. And if you don’t blink, you’ll even see Raymond Chandler in a one-off cameo (and the only known film footage of him in existence), sitting in a chair as Neff walks by on his way from Keyes’ office.

The film noir genre is probably something that I’ll come back to soon because there are a great many movies worth writing about and watching but for now, if you’re in a mind to watch just one, watch this one. You won’t be disappointed.

Film Review: Went The Day Well?

Summon up an image of a quintessential picturesque English village and it’s quite likely you’ll get somewhere close to Bramley End, the fictitious setting for this 1942 WWII drama. Surrounded by rolling countryside, bees hum in untended hedgerows and butterflies flutter by in the warm spring sunshine. Narrow country lanes connect Bramley End to the neighbouring village of Upton Ferrars nearly seven miles away. There are picture-postcard cottages aplenty, their windows and front doors half obscured by climbing roses and honeysuckle and a church at the heart of the village and the church is our first stop as the film’s opening titles end. It’s here that a friendly pipe-smoking local welcomes us with a “Good day to you,” and leads us to the unusual memorial that we have no doubt come to see. It’s unusual because it has the names of German soldiers written on it. German names in an English graveyard? How bizarre. The local then proceeds to tell us how such a thing came about.

Saturday morning on a sunny Whitsun weekend in 1942 and a group of lorries filled with British soldiers rolls into the village. Apparently on an exercise of some sort for three days, they ask the villages for billeting for sixty men who, once the arrangements are made, settle into various houses around the village as well as the village hall. The villagers see it all as frightfully exciting and welcome them gladly but it doesn’t take long for them to discover that the soldiers are actually Nazis forming the vanguard of a German invasion of England. With their cover now blown, the Germans round up the villagers and lock them in the church while the children are held captive in the local manor house and supervised by the kind matronly lady of the manor. An attempt by those locked in the church to escape and get word to the neighbouring village is thwarted by a traitor among them, the village squire (played by Leslie Banks) who is revealed to be collaborating with the Nazis.

That night at the manor, a plucky young lad named George shins down a drainpipe after lights out and escapes into the woods to get help from Upton while at the same time, a group of extremely stiff upper lips finally manage to overpower their Nazi guards at the church. There follows numerous gun-butts to Nazi heads, a lot of gunfire and plenty of heroics from the stoic and defiant locals and just as their bullets are running out, a force of nearby British soldiers arrives to bring an end to proceedings. Oh, and as for the traitor….well, you’ll just have to see for yourself.  All in all, a nicely shot little film from Ealing Studios with a cast packed full of familiar faces, some that you’ve never seen so young – if you thought Thora Hird was born a bespectacled granny then check this out; it was her first major role and she was a 31year old sweetheart.

But what marks this film out as truly interesting is its propaganda quality. Bearing in mind it was made when the Second World War still had two years to go, the introduction that the pipe-wielding local gives us at the start of the movie is a post-war one. He speaks of the newspapers calling the event at the village “The Battle at Bramley End” but that nothing was said of it until after the war was over and “old Hilter got what was coming to him.” One can only guess the impact such a film would have had on its audience, particularly one that knew all too well that the only thing separating them from occupied Europe was a narrow strip of water. Hitler’s planned invasion of the UK “Operation Sea Lion” may have been indefinitely postponed by 1942 (due in part to the Germans not having air superiority over the channel) but to a war-weary British public, the threat must have still been real and constantly in the backs of their minds. What this film did was to show the audience that even if such a thing were to happen and Nazis did land on British soil, with cool heads, brave heart and plucky British spirit, the Germans wouldn’t stand a chance. Simply put, evil would never triumph over good and the Nazis were the personification of evil.

Based on a short story entitled “The Lieutenant Died Last” by the English author Graham Greene, Went the Day Well? was directed by Brazilian born Alberto Cavalcanti who would go on to make a handful of films for Ealing Studios in the 40s most notably, “Champagne Charlie” and “Nicholas Nickleby”. The film’s reputation has grown significantly with the passing of time and in 2005 it was named as one of the “100 Greatest War Films” in a Channel 4 poll in the UK. In 2010, the British Film Institute National Archive released a restored version of the film and it was met with critical acclaim.  I think Tom Huddleston of Time Out London summed it up perfectly by writing that it was “jawdroppingly subversive. Cavalcanti establishes, with loving care and the occasional wry wink, the ultimate bucolic English scene, then takes an almost sadistic delight in tearing it to bloody shreds in an orgy of shockingly blunt, matter-of-fact violence.”

Went The Day Well? is a great little film and a window into a time and a place that has long gone and yet to watch it and to understand its message is to truly find respect for the men, women and children that lived through those dark years of Nazi terror. A classic in every sense.

 

 

Film Review: School For Scoundrels

For me, the fact that this film stars Terry-Thomas makes it worth watching. Throw in the wonderful talents of Alistair Sim and Ian Carmichael and you have three of the biggest stars from Britain’s golden age of cinema. Terry-Thomas has always fascinated me, even when I was a child. Whether he was oozing villainous charm dressed and manicured as a perfect cad while fawning over some young lovely or blustering dastardliness as his suave persona fell apart when events turned against him he was and still is wonderfully entertaining. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the definition of the word “Dastardly” in any reputable dictionary said something about a Terry-Thomas character being up to his neck in some plan or other. In fact, the cartoon character Dick Dastardly from the Wacky Races kids TV show was essentially a caricature of Terry-Thomas.

The plot of the film is fairly simple. Ian Carmichael plays Henry Palfrey, a mild-mannered young man and ineffectual businessman who considers himself a failure. Everyone from his employees to his tennis club pals seem to take little notice of him and so he enrols in the “School of Lifemanship” run by Dr. Potter (Alistair Sim) who explains to his class of new students that “Lifemanship is the science of being one up on your opponents at all times. It is the art of making him feel that somewhere, somehow he has become less than you – less desirable, less worthy, less blessed.”

After the good doctor surmises that a woman must be involved when interviewing Palfrey, we see Palfrey recount in flashback how he came to meet the lovely April Smith (Janette Scott) by bumping into her getting off a bus and how his carefully planned dinner date was ruined by Raymond Delauney (Terry-Thomas). There’s a wonderful scene where Palfrey arrives with his charming date at the restaurant only to be refused entry by the maître d’ (a brilliantly snobbish turn by the marvellous John Le Mesurier) because of some mix up with the name of the booking. Unfortunately for Palfrey, before he acts on April’s advice that they go elsewhere to eat, Delauney saunters into the restaurant and, being a casual acquaintance of Palfrey through the tennis club, invites him and (more importantly) his date to join him at his table. Delauney then proceeds to spend the entire evening seducing April and in a perfect example of one-upmanship, reduces Palfrey’s fragile ego even further by getting him to foot the bill. Palfrey then makes several further puny attempts to impress his new girlfriend, including buying a car and trying to prove his tennis prowess against Delauney but fails on both accounts miserably.

Then the flashback ends and we concentrate on Palfrey’s time at the school and how quickly he picks up the art of gaining the upper hand in any given situation. The film then follows him using his newly-acquired skills as he gets his own back on pretty much everyone who had looked down on him earlier. Hilarity ensues as we see how easily he trumps Delauney’s caddish behaviour by becoming an even bigger and more skilful cad himself. However, it’s not all plain sailing for him and…at which point I’ll say no more.

School for Scoundrels is definitely worth checking out as it’s one of those charming black and white comedies that Britain made so well in the ’50s and ’60s. There’s also a wonderful sense of nostalgia to be enjoyed when seeing parts of London as they were half a century ago, when roads were clearer, trees were more abundant and social etiquette was still bordering on formal. That and three of the finest comic talents from the era. Absolutely one to be enjoyed. One final word of caution though: don’t suppose for a minute that the 2006 Hollywood remake starring Billy Bob Thornton will be in the same league.

 

Film Review: The Man Who Never Was

I’m even more excited than usual to be writing a review of this British-made Second World War drama because not only does it tell an incredible story based on actual wartime events but also because it follows on rather satisfyingly from an earlier article I scribbled entitled ‘Podcasts – an alternative to bad TV’. For it was while listening to a podcast from the unfailingly listenable Sarah and Deblina from ‘Stuff You Missed In History Class’ that I learned all about “Operation Mincemeat” – a highly devious and clandestine plan British Intelligence cooked up in 1943 to deceive the Nazis into thinking a planned Allied invasion of Sicily would take place elsewhere.

 

The Man Who Never Was was made in 1956 and, directed by that stalwart of British cinema Ronald Neame, it tells how that deception was accomplished. Neame produced such celebrated pictures as Brief Encounter, Great Expectations and Oliver Twist in the 1940s before turning director in ’47 and delivering such cinematic gold as Tunes of Glory, The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie and The Poseidon Adventure. His career, from humble assistant cameraman on the first ever “talkie” made in England went on to span six decades and he was awarded the CBE in the 1996 Queen’s Birthday Honours List for his services to the film industry.

 

The film is based on the book of the same name by Ewen Montagu who, while serving as a Lt. Cmdr. in Naval intelligence during WWII was responsible for conceiving “Operation Mincemeat”. Clifton Webb portrays him in the picture. The premise of the story is that in order to attempt to divert German forces away from Sicily, an invasion of which the Allies have planned in order to open up the Mediterranean to Allied shipping, a deception is needed to convince the Germans that the Allied objective is really Greece and Sardinia.

 

“Operation Mincemeat” came into being when an idea was suggested to Montagu early in 1943 that if a dead man carrying top-secret documents which contained intelligence about a fake invasion was to fall into enemy hands and that if those documents were convincing enough to be believed, the Germans might move part of their forces from Sicily to Greece and Sardinia, thereby sparing the lives of countless Allied troops during the real invasion. Of course, even if the plan was given the green light by his superiors, where would Montagu get a dead body and if he did, what of the moral dilemma? After all, “Every body belongs to somebody and it isn’t a thing people want messed about” runs a line in the film. Also how would Montagu convince the Germans that the dead body was the sort of person who would be carrying such sensitive documents and equally, how would he convince them that the documents themselves are genuine etc etc? It’s almost guaranteed that the German High Command would investigate the man and the documents for authenticity.

 

It’s an absolutely fascinating story and the film does a great job of re-telling it. The lengths that Montagu and his small team go to to create a fictitious “life” for the corpse that they acquire is extraordinary – the dead body belonged to a Welsh man named Glyndwr Michael in life but then became Captain William Martin of the Royal Marines in death. Even though the film adds just a little fictitious sparkle to proceedings, the level of detail written into the screenplay lends the film a great sense of realism. The pace throughout the hundred or so minutes of the movie is steady rather than spectacular but it promotes genuine intrigue and it builds to a wonderfully tense conclusion thanks to the introduction of an Irish spy played by Stephen Boyd. Although this latter character was a complete fabrication, Montagu later said he was happy with it because despite the fact that there wasn’t a spy involved, there may well have been.

 

“A dead man goes to war!” cried one of the taglines that went with the film upon its release and with that, I’ll reveal no more as to how exactly that happens – it’s definitely worth checking out. But I will say that the cast is top notch – lots of familiar faces from a golden age of British cinema including Laurence Naismith, Geoffrey Keen and Michael Hordern while Ewan Montagu himself has a cameo role of an Air-Vice Marshal. There’s even a romance entwined within the plot which, as you will see, becomes a crucial subplot to maintaining the deception’s secrecy.

 

All in all, it’s a terrific film telling a fantastic and extraordinary true story. I shall end by simply saying you never what you can learn from podcasts. I knew nothing about this covert operation until a few days ago but now I’m all the more educated for learning about it and to see it told well in a film is a satisfying bonus. Thanks Sarah and Deblina from ‘Stuff You Missed In History Class’. I eagerly await your next episode.