JamesHitchcock Reviews

Three Faces West (1940)

A Bonus Point for Courage

[6/10 · 23 April 2024]

Before America's entry into the war, Hollywood did not have a particularly distinguished record in the fight against fascism. Few films were made explicitly criticising the German or Italian regimes. There was one film, "Blockade", about the Spanish Civil War, but it nails its colours so firmly to the fence that it is impossible to tell whether it was made from a pro-Franco or anti-Franco viewpoint. After 1939 the British contingent in Hollywood- Chaplin in "The Great Dictator", Hitchcock in "Foreign Correspondent", Korda in "That Hamilton Woman"- took up the cause of their mother country, but their efforts were not appreciated by the influential isolationist movement. According to one story Korda was summoned to appear before an angry Senate Foreign Relations Committee and was only excused attendance when the attack on Pearl Harbour took place a few days before his scheduled appointment. (To be fair to America, in the years before 1939 the British film industry could be equally pusillanimous when it came to appeasing Hitler. Hitchcock wanted to set "The Lady Vanishes" from 1938 in Nazi Germany, but the on the insistence of the studio this became an unnamed Central European dictatorship).

Frank Borzage's "The Mortal Storm" is one of the few exceptions, and "Three Faces West" is another. Both films were made in 1940, after the outbreak of war but before America entered it. Karl Braun, a Viennese doctor, and his daughter Leni arrive in America as refugees after the Nazi takeover of Austria. They move to a small Western farming town to provide much-needed medical services. Exactly where the town is situated seems to be a matter of debate, with some reviewers on here stating that it is in North Dakota and others plumping for Oklahoma. It probably doesn't matter; Hollywood scriptwriters often had a rather hazy idea of the geography of anywhere east of the Sierra Nevada.

The town has been badly hit by drought, soil erosion and dust storms, phenomena which affected many areas in the Plains states during the 1930s. The Department of Agriculture persuade the townspeople to move en masse to make a new start in Oregon. The film then becomes essentially a modern-day Western, a 20th century version of all those old wagon train stories with cars taking the place of covered wagons, as it follows the townsfolk on their journey. (John Ford's "The Grapes of Wrath", another tale of climate refugees from the Dust Bowl making their way west, also came out in 1940).

Another strand in the plot deals with the romance that grows up between Leni and John Phillips, the leader of the townspeople on their great trek. At first it appears that their is an obstacle to their love. Leni is already engaged to Eric, a young man she knew in her days in Austria. Although she loves John, she believes that she owes Eric a debt of honour because he risked his life to help her and her father escape to America. Her dilemma, however, is quickly resolved; when she meets Eric again, he reveals that he has (rather improbably) renounced his former liberal ideals and enthusiastically embraced Nazism. It becomes clear that he and Leni are not for one another, and Eric is sent on his way with the Doctor's prophetic words foretelling the downfall of the Nazi Reich ringing in his ears.

I was rather surprised to discover that a film with a liberal political message starred that great Hollywood conservative, John Wayne, who appears here as Phillips. Of course, not all conservatives in 1940 were necessarily isolationists or pro-German- another famously right-wing actor, James Stewart, starred in "The Mortal Storm"- but I doubt if Wayne relished being directed by Bernard Vorhaus, who was known for his communist sympathies, for which he was later to be blacklisted. Perhaps in 1940 Wayne was not yet a big enough star to pick and choose who he would work with.

"Three Faces West" is not a film in the same class as either "The Mortal Storm"or "The Grapes of Wrath", both of which have more gripping plots and more detailed characterisation. It is mostly interesting today as an example of a film which it bucked the isolationist trend which was so widespread in Hollywood in the days before Pearl Harbour. 6/10/ (5/10 for the movie, with a bonus point for political courage).

Outcast of the Islands (1951)

Disreputable, seedy, selfish, lustful and avaricious with no redeeming qualities

[8/10 · 19 April 2024]

How do you follow up a masterpiece? This was Carol Reed's first film after what I (and many others) have always considered his greatest, "The Third Man". That was the second of Reed's trilogy of films noirs, all with a contemporary setting, the other two instalments being "Odd Man Out" and "The Man Between". With "Outcast of the Islands" he decided to do something a little different. It is a late nineteenth century period drama, based on a novel by Joseph Conrad and set in what was then the Dutch East Indies.

The main character is Peter Willems, an employee of a Singapore shipping company, who is sacked for dishonesty. He meets Tom Lingard, a ship's captain who once befriended him as a boy. Although you might think that Willems is the author of his own misfortunes, Lingard feels sorry for him. Lingard has made a considerable amount of money through trading with a village which can only be reached via a dangerous river mouth; the secret of navigating this difficult passage is known to Lingard alone. He takes Willems on his next voyage and introducers him to Almayer, his son-in-law and his representative in the village. The idea is that Willems should act as Almayer's assistant while Lingard is away on one of his trading ventures.

Well, they say that no kind deed goes unpunished. Willems, predictably, proves just as untrustworthy in his new position as he was in his old one. He quarrels with Almayer after the two men take a deep dislike to one another. He seduces Aissa, the daughter of the local village chief and betrays Lingard by revealing the secret of the navigation channel to an Arab trader, one of Lingard's rivals. Eventually he leads the villagers in an attack on Almayer, who escapes with his life but at the cost of a loss of his dignity.

Trevor Howard had appeared in "The Third Man" as Major Calloway, a humane and decent British officer. He appears again here as Willems, a very different type of character. "Outcast of the Islands" is a rare example of a film with a wholly unsympathetic protagonist. Reed's main characters are rarely paragons of virtue or clean-cut heroes, but for all their flaws they generally have some redeeming points. James Mason's IRA man in "Odd Man Out" may be a terrorist, but at least he eventually comes to realise the futility of violence and hatred. Ivo Kern in "The Man Between" (also played by Mason) is a complex, tormented figure, a one-time idealist whose idealism has been cruelly shattered by his witnessing the horrors of Nazism. Even Harry Lime in "The Third Man", although he is a monster of cynical self-interest who has no regard for the sufferings of others, manages to achieve a certain monstrous grandeur.

There is no grandeur about Willems. He is a disreputable, seedy little man, selfish, lustful and avaricious with no redeeming qualities. Even Lingard eventually recoils from him in disgust. It is to Howard's credit that he managed to make so unpleasant a character fascinating enough to hold the audience's interest, even if we only watch in a spirit of "I wonder what this scoundrel will get up to next" or "I wonder how he will get his comeuppance". There is another good performance from Robert Morley as Almayer, a man who, while not as dishonest as Willems, is nearly as unsympathetic- arrogant, pompous, patronising and self-satisfied. It is hardly surprising that they detest one another, as both are detestable.

"Outcast of the Islands" is not quite in the same class as "The Third Man", but then few films are. As an account of colonial-era villainy it remains very watchable. 8/10.

Immaculate (2024)

The Sound of Music It Ain't!

[2/10 · 16 April 2024]

Cecilia, a young, deeply religious American woman, becomes a nun and enters a convent in Italy. And no, this isn't going to be Audrey Hepburn in "The Nun's Story" or Julie Andrews in "The Sound of Music". Or even Whoopi Goldberg in "Sister Act". You can tell it isn't when Cecilia discovers that she is pregnant. Upon being questioned, Cecilia swears blind that she is still a virgin and has never had sex with a man. The church authorities seem surprisingly quick to accept Cecilia's assurances, and hail her as the new Virgin Mary, who will give birth to the Second Coming of Christ.

Of course, there is something nasty in the woodwork. It transpires that Cecilia has been deliberately impregnated by a fanatical group within the Catholic Church who are hoping to bring about the Second Coming using a Holy Nail relic in the convent's chapel; they believe that this relic still contains samples of Christ's DNA. Or are they(as Cecilia comes to suspect) trying to bring about the advent of the Antichrist. I won't set out the plot any further, but you can take it from me that it gets not only extremely gory but also extremely silly.

I should point out that I am not a Catholic and that I have no objection to the cinema or other media being used to voice criticism of organised religion. We certainly do not want a return to the days of the Production Code which forbade any criticisms of the churches or the clergy. I would, however, prefer it if such criticisms were made by those who know what they are talking about, which the makers of "Immaculate" patently do not. To take a few points:-

The expression "Immaculate Conception" does not refer to the Virgin Birth of Christ, as the film presupposes. It refers to the Catholic doctrine that the Virgin Mary was herself free of original sin from the moment of her conception.

The birth of Christ is, in Christian theology, a unique event. Any woman who claimed to have become pregnant without having sex would doubtless be dismissed by the Church as a liar, however much she insisted she was telling the truth. Any group of Catholics who tried to claim her as a "second Virgin Mary" would be disowned by the mainstream Church and their claims regarded as blasphemous.

According to the Bible, the timing of the Second Coming is known only to God the Father himself. It is therefore inconceivable that a group of Catholics, however fanatical, might believe that they could force God's hand by monkeying about with ancient DNA supposedly found on a Holy Nail relic. (And today even the Catholic Church would admit that not all these nails are genuine).

A film whose plot revolves around a series of theological absurdities like these cannot be regarded as making a valid critique of Christianity or of Catholicism. I suspect, however, that the film-makers were less concerned with theological accuracy than they were with using religion as a peg on which to hang a crude and tawdry little shocker of a horror film. This is a film which gains a certain frisson by depicting nuns and priests, more often portrayed in the cinema as peaceful and benevolent, as cruel, violent and evil, but which fails to convince us that they are anything like that in real life.

There have been films in recent years- "Priest", "The Magdalene Sisters", "Philomena"- which have made valid and pertinent criticisms of Catholicism, but these films were all grounded in reality. "Immaculate" is founded in nothing but the unlovely history of the "nunsploitation" film, a genre which has frequently been a vehicle for bigotry and prejudice. I had recently heard of Sydney Sweeney, who stars here as Cecilia, as a promising and upcoming young actress, but I had not seen any of her other films. Seeing "Immaculate" made me think that she desperately needs a new agent. 2/10.

Wuthering Heights (1992)

You Could Do a Lot Worse

[8/10 · 16 April 2024]

There have been a number of feature film adaptations of Emily Brontë's novel, including Spanish, Indian and Japanese versions, but the only two I have seen are this one and the 1939 version with Orson Welles. This film was officially marketed as "Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights"; incorporating the name of the author into the film title in this way was a common practice in the nineties. At the time I assumed that this was done to imply that the film would be more faithful to the author's intentions than previous adaptations had been, but in fact it was normally done for copyright reasons. Some such films- "Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book", for instance- are far from faithful to the original book. In some ways, however,"Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights"is a faithful adaptation; it retains, for example, elements which were omitted from the 1939 film.

I won't set out the plot at any length, partly because of its complexity and partly because the novel is a famous one. It starts when Mr Earnshaw, a wealthy Yorkshire merchant, finds Heathcliff, a young foundling, on the streets of Liverpool and brings him up as an adopted son at the family home, Withering Heights. Heathcliff falls in love with Earnshaw's daughter Catherine ("Cathy"), but he is hated by Earnshaw's biological son Hindley, and when the old man dies Hindley treats Heathcliff as a servant. Cathy and Heathcliff are in love, but there can be no question of their marrying, and Cathy eventually marries Edgar Linton, the son of a neighbouring landowning family. The film then traces the story of Heathcliff and the Earnshaw families over two generations.

Bronte's novel does not just have a complex plot, it also tells it in a complex manner. Those readers who think that non-linear narrative and multiple, possibly unreliable, narrators were inventions of twentieth-century modernists ought to try "Wuthering Heights", which has a particularly labyrinthine structure. Director Peter Kosminsky wisely does not follow suit and tells the story in a more linear fashion, but he includes the story of the second generation- the children of Heathcliff, Cathy and Hindley- which was omitted from the 1939 film and some other adaptations. (Such adaptations, along with that infamous Kate Bush song, have done much to popularise the idea that Bronte's novel is simply the love-story of Cathy and Heathcliff, when it is considerably more complex than that).

When first released in 1992 the film was neither a critical nor a popular success, and since then it has largely fallen into obscurity. Yet I like it, principally because of a fine performance by that fine actor (pun intended) Ralph Fiennes in his feature film debut as Heathcliff. This was also Kosminsky's feature debut; to date he has only made one more feature film, "White Oleander", having mostly worked in television.

In any adaptation which preserves the whole of Bronte's plot, Heathcliff becomes by far the most important character, because he is the only one who remains alive throughout. (Cathy dies about halfway through). He is in some ways the embodiment of the Byronic romantic hero who was so popular in early 19th century literature. The bond which unites him with Cathy is that both are fierce, passionate free spirits with a deep love of the moors which surround Wuthering Heights. They represent the wild and untamed in human nature- the romantic- whereas the Lintons represent the rational and the conventional, the classical. It is notable that Wuthering Heights is a remote Gothic structure, whereas the Lintons' home is an elegant stately home in more conventionally picturesque scenery in a valley.

Yet Heathcliff is a more complex figure than a mere romantic hero; he is also, especially in the second half of the story, dark, brooding, obsessive and vindictive, capable of treating others (especially his wife Isabella and Hindley's son Hareton) as badly as he was once treated. For all her love of the wild and unrestrained, Emily Brontë was a devout Christian who saw clearly that there was something demonic and dangerous about the Byronic hero- perhaps more clearly than her sister Charlotte, whose own creation Mr Rochester is essentially a Byronic hero tamed. Fiennes brings out well all these aspects of Heathcliff's character, and it is said that he so impressed Steven Spielberg that he offered Fiennes the role of Amon Goeth in "Schindler's List", the following year.

I was less taken with the idea of casting the same actress, Juliette Binoche, as both Cathy and her daughter (confusingly also called Catherine). Nevertheless, Binoche copes well with the task (often a difficult one for French actors) of sounding convincingly British and makes the older Cathy convincingly wild and passionate. Kosminsky's photography of the wild moors- so all-pervasive a presence in the book that they can be said to be a character in their own right- is particularly striking. Anyone looking for a film adaptation of Bronte's classic could do a lot worse than this one. 8/10.

On the Waterfront (1954)

I Couda Been a Contender

[10/10 · 12 April 2024]

To celebrate my 2400th review for IMDb, I turn to another of my favourite films. In the 1940s and 1950s American labour unions were often run in the interests of organised crime; waterfront unions were a frequent target for this sort of infiltration because of the opportunities they afforded for embezzlement and extortion.

"On the Waterfront", based on a series of non-fiction articles in the New York Sun by the investigative journalist Malcolm Johnson, is a film noir about this issue. It deals with the longshoremen (or "dockers" as we would say in Britain) working on the waterfront of Hoboken, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from New York City. The men's union has fallen under the control of a local gangster named Johnny Friendly. Friendly by name (or at least by pseudonym, his real name being Michael Skelly), but not friendly by nature. Although on first acquaintance he may seem affable, even amiable, you cross him at your peril. The union members accept Friendly's control because without his approval they lose their union cards and be unable to work. And for those who try and stand up to him he has more violent methods of enforcing his will than a mere threat of unemployment.

The film opens with the murder of a young longshoreman named Joey Doyle, thrown from a roof by Friendly's henchmen to prevent him from testifying to the Waterfront Crime Commission, which is investigating Friendly's activities. The main character is another young longshoreman, Terry Malloy, and the driving force behind the plot is Terry's inner conflict about whether or not he should himself give evidence to the Commission. His initial reluctance to do so is due not just to fear of the possible consequences. Family loyalties are also involved because his elder brother Charley is Friendly's right-hand man.

Terry's conscience, however, is troubled, for a number of reasons. Joey was his friend, and he feels guilty about the man's death, having persuaded Joey to speak to Friendly's men in the mistaken belief that they wanted to do no more than talk. There is his religious faith; he is a practising Catholic, and the local parish priest, Father Barry, is urging his parishioners to stand up to Friendly. There is his growing relationship with Joey's sister Edie, who wants justice for her brother's death. And Terry has a personal grudge against Friendly. He was previously a promising professional boxer but his career came to an end when in one fight he was ordered to "take a dive" by Friendly, who had backed his opponent to win, thus costing Terry the chance of a title fight.

The film was a controversial one when first released in 1954. This was the era of McCarthyism, and both the director Elia Kazan and the scriptwriter Budd Schulberg were former Communists who had renounced their one-time allegiance and "named names" before the HUAC. When Terry finally decides to denounce Friendly to the Commission, it seemed to many that Kazan and Schulberg were using the film to justify the stance they had taken, a stance which had cost them many friends in Hollywood. Despite the controversy, "On the Waterfront" was a huge critical and commercial success, being nominated for twelve Oscars and winning eight, including Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay for Schulberg and Best Director for Kazan.

The film's success was well deserved. Schulberg's screenplay is a powerful, affecting one. Kazan's direction gives the film a gritty integrity and a visual look comparable to the "kitchen sink" social-realist dramas which were becoming popular in Britain around this time. The film's greatest asset, however, is the acting, which is uniformly excellent. Marlon Brando (Terry) won the Oscar for Best Actor and Eva Marie Saint (Edie) in her film debut won Best Supporting Actress. Three of the cast, Karl Malden (Father Barry), Lee J. Cobb (Friendly) and Rod Steiger (Charley) were nominated for Best Supporting Actor, but all three of them lost out to Edmond O'Brien in "The Barefoot Contessa". Of these my favourite would probably be Malden as Father Barry, a man of great integrity and moral stature. I would have awarded Malden the Oscar ahead of O'Brien, but he may have been handicapped by the fact that he had won this award for "A Streetcar Named Desire" three years earlier; the Academy like to spread their honours evenly.

Excellent though the supporting cast are, however, this is Brando's film, the one in which he gives what, in my view, was his greatest-ever performance. (This was probably the performance which finally persuaded Hollywood of the value of Method acting in the cinema). With any other actor as Terry (including Frank Sinatra, himself a native of Hoboken, who was once considered for the role) this would have been a quite different film. Brando makes Terry America's Everyman, the little man faced with a big issue, who we know will eventually find the courage to do what is right. In the film's most famous speech, he complains "I couda been a contender instead of a bum which is what I am". In the end, however, Terry faces a struggle- with his own conscience- more important than any boxing match, and proves that he is indeed a contender. 10/10.

The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936)

Exciting Adventure Story with a Nasty Aftertaste

[7/10 · 10 April 2024]

The success of "Lives of a Bengal Lancer" starring Gary Cooper from 1935 led to a vogue in America for adventure films set in the British Empire. "The Charge of the Light Brigade" from the following year was one of these. Although it was made by an American studio, Warner Bros., and was shot entirely in California, there is not a single American character and most of the leading actors were British (or, in the case of Errol Flynn, Australian).

The film may take its title from an incident during the Crimean War, but for about three quarters of its length the action is set in British-ruled India. There are two strands to the plot. The first concerns a love triangle involving the main character, Captain Geoffrey Vickers, an officer with the 27th Lancers, and his brother, Perry, both of whom are in love with the same woman, Elsa Campbell. The second concerns the attempts by a treacherous Indian princeling, Surat Khan, to foment a rebellion against British rule; it culminates in the massacre by Surat Khan's men of the British troops and loyal Indian sepoys holding Chukoti, a remote frontier outpost, along with the civilians in the fort.

When the action eventually moves to the Crimea, Vickers discovers that Surat Khan, having fled India, has allied himself with the Russians. In order to avenge the massacre, he takes it upon himself to alter the wording of an order from the British commander Lord Raglan. As altered by Vickers, the order commands the Light Brigade, of which his regiment forms part, to attack the Russian positions where Surat Khan is known to be. The result is the famous Charge.

The Charge of the Light Brigade was of course an immense tactical blunder which led to the unnecessary deaths of many British soldiers, and historians have long debated exactly why it took place. (The main cause appears to have been an ambiguous order issued by Raglan to the cavalry commander Lord Lucan). The explanation given in this film, however is pure fiction; both Vickers and Surat Khan are fictitious characters. The scriptwriters' original idea was to have Vickers lead the charge to avenge the Cawnpore Massacre during the Indian Mutiny; upon being informed that the Mutiny did not take place until after the Crimean War was over, they rewrote the script to invent the "Chukoti Massacre".

Despite the historical absurdities, and despite too much time being taken up with the Geoffrey/Perry/Elsa triangle, this is actually a pretty exciting adventure film. (I will not compare it with the 1968 remake, which I have not seen for many years). Flynn had a limited range as an actor, but within that range he could be very good, and he is very good here as the dashing Vickers. The attack on Chukoti is a spectacular action sequence, and the depiction of the Charge even more so.

The Charge scene, however can leave a nasty taste in the mouth when one knows the story behind it. In the 1930s animal welfare was not a prime consideration on film sets, and tripwires were used to bring down the charging horses. As a result 25 horses were killed. Flynn, a keen horseman and animal lover, was outraged, and he and director Michael Curtiz came close to blows. (This incident, however, did not prevent them from working together; they were to make several more films, including "The Adventures of Robin Hood" and "Dodge City"). The one good thing that came of it is that the public shared Flynn's outrage and this led to Congress passing legislation to ensure the safety of animals used in films. It is, however, this nasty taste which prevents me from awarding a higher mark. 7/10

Some goofs. The opening titles state that The Charge of the Light Brigade took place in 1856. It took place on 25th October 1854. The hunting sequence involving Surat Khan and Vickers is described as a "tiger hunt", but the animals we see are leopards, not tigers. Raglan's order, as originally worded, orders the Light Brigade to withdraw "three kilometres", but Britain did not use the metric system in 1854 (or, for that matter, in 1936).

Not a goof. Some have claimed that the words "Quis superabit?" used in the opening titles are an error for "Quis separabit?" (Latin for "Who shall separate them?"), the motto of several British regiments, especially those with an Ulster connection. "Quis superabit?" ("Who shall excel them?") is, however, a perfectly good Latin phrase, and there is no reason why the scriptwriters should not have used it as the motto of the 27th Lancers, a fictitious regiment. (Or at least they were fictitious in 1936. A real regiment of this name was raised several years later during the war).

Murder! (1930)

Learning His Craft

[6/10 · 3 April 2024]

Apart perhaps from Blackmail, famed of being the first British talkie, Alfred Hitchcock's early British sound pictures made between 1929 and 1933 have never attracted much attention, unlike the films he made during his later years in Britain, the period between 1934 and 1939. These include classics like "The Man Who Knew Too Much", "The 39 Steps" and "The Lady Vanishes".

"Murder!" was Hitchcock's third film, after "Blackmail" and "Juno and the Paycock". It is a murder mystery set in the world of the theatre. Diana Baring, a young actress in a travelling theatre troupe, is accused of the murder of a colleague, Edna Druce. The two young women are known to have disliked one another, and the motive for the killing is presumed to have been either professional or romantic jealousy. Diana seems to have no memory of what happened, so at her trial her counsel puts forward a defence of automatism, but this is rejected by the jury and she is sentenced to death.

The theme of an innocent person wrongly accused of a crime was to become a common one in Hitchcock's work, but his treatment of it here is quite different from the way he treated it in most of his later films on the subject. In these films the wrongly accused person is almost always a man rather than a woman, "Dial M for Murder" being the main exception. That man normally plays an active role in establishing his innocence and bringing the real perpetrator to justice- examples include Derrick de Marney's character in "Young and Innocent" or Cary Grant's in "North by North-West.

The two later Hitchcock films with which "Murder!" has most in common are "Dial M..." and one from the opposite end of his career, his penultimate film "Frenzy". In all three a wrongly convicted person is held in jail while someone else tries to prove his or her innocence. Moreover, in each case the self-appointed defender is someone you would expect to be on the opposite side of the law. In "Dial M.."and "Frenzy" that person is a policeman involved in the original murder investigation. In "Murder!" it is one of the jury. Sir John Menier, himself a famous actor, begins to have doubts about Diana's guilt and regrets his "guilty" vote. He begins to investigate the crime, seeking fresh evidence which will prove Diana's innocence and lead him to the real killer.

Despite Hitchcock's fascination with crime and the criminal mind, two genres which held little interest for him were police procedurals and courtroom dramas. The trial scene in "Frenzy", for example, is very brief and perfunctory. "Murder!" is therefore unusual in that it contains a lengthy courtroom scene. ("The Wrong Man" is about the only other Hitchcock film I can think of that contains one). It also contains a lengthy scene set in the jury room which inevitably put me in mind of "Twelve Angry Men", even though this film was not made until nearly thirty years later. I wonder if "Murder!" might have influenced it.

I was shocked, when the real murderer was unmasked, that the motive for the killing was to prevent himself from being exposed as a "half-caste" (a term which was much more acceptable in 1930 than it would be today) when he has been "passing for white". We can all be grateful that black ancestry is no longer regarded as a shameful secret that must be concealed at all costs.

Trying to evaluate a film like this, made nearly a hundred years ago, is a difficult task, and not just because of its outdated attitude to race. Sound pictures were in their infancy, so it is not surprising that the plot creaks a bit and the acting can seem to us artificial and stagey. (I was not surprised to learn that the film was based upon a stage play). Yet Hitchcock was still learning his craft, and in making "Murder!" he seems to have learned some lessons that would stand him in good stead in the future. 6/10

A goof. During the trial the prosecuting barrister states that "neither beauty nor youth nor provocation" can be a defence to the crime of murder. In fact provocation can, under certain circumstances, be a partial defence, reducing murder to manslaughter. (This was an important distinction in 1930 when murder carried the death penalty and manslaughter did not).

A coincidence. The character Diana Baring and the actress playing her, Norah Baring, both have the same surname, an unusual one in Britain. This was not something contrived for the purposes of the film. Norah (nee Baker) had used the stage name Baring from the beginning of her career in 1926 and the character had had the same surname, albeit with a different Christian name, in the originals stage play.

Accident (1967)

Dull and uninvolving tale of adultery in academia

[4/10 · 28 March 2024]

"Accident" was the third of four films made in Britain by the director Joseph Losey, an American refugee from McCarthyism, in collaboration with his friend the writer Harold Pinter. I have never seen their first film together, an adaptation of Pinter's play "The Servant ", but the other three differ wildly in subject-matter. "Modesty Blaise" is a spoof of Bond-style spy dramas, "Accident" a serious-minded contemporary tale of adultery in academia and "The Go-Between" a late Victorian/Edwardian romance in the "heritage cinema" style. They also differ wildly in quality; "The Go-Between" is one of the best British films of the early seventies, whereas "Modesty Blaise" is a complete flop, a supposed "comedy thriller" which is neither comic nor thrilling.

Pinter adapted the script for "Accident" from a novel by Nicholas Mosley. The film opens with a car crash, the "accident" of the title, outside the home of Stephen, an Oxford don. Both the occupants of the car are students of his. One, a young man named William, is killed; the other, a girl named Anna, survives.

The rest of the film is essentially one long flashback telling the previous history of Stephen, William and Anna. Although Stephen is married, he falls in love with the beautiful Anna, with whom William is also in love. Neither his marriage nor his feelings for Anna, however, prevent Stephen from having an affair with an old flame, Francesca, while his wife Rosalind is having a baby in hospital. Anna is also having an affair, with Stephen's colleague Charley (also married), even though she is now engaged to be married to William.

And that's about it. For a film written by a writer as eminent as Pinter- he was later to win the Nobel Prize for literature- "Accident" has a surprisingly dull and uninvolving script. It simply chronicles the infidelities of Stephen and Charley, without making any serious attempt to understand or analyse what motivates them or the other characters. As a result we cannot sympathise with any of the figures we see on screen, but are reduced to mere observers without any emotional involvement, especially as the plot is not always easy to follow.

The film did badly at the box office in the UK, but won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury award at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival, thereby confirming that old British prejudice that the more boring and incomprehensible a film is, the more the French will enthuse over it. For me, "Accident" is in nothing like the same class as "The Go-Between". The most I can say about it is that at least it is not quite as bad as the abysmal "Modesty Blaise". But to say that a film is not as bad as "Modesty Blaise" is to damn it with the faintest of praise. 4/10.

Mother Lode (1982)

When the best thing about your film is an unplanned accident, you've got problems

[3/10 · 27 March 2024]

"Mother Lode" was one of only two feature films to have been directed by Charlton Heston, the other being his version of Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra". He also directed a made-for-television version of Robert Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons", and it was an open secret in Hollywood that he had directed the final scenes of Sam Peckinpah's "Major Dundee" when Peckinpah was too incapacitated through drink to continue. "Mother Lode" was a collaboration between Heston and his son Fraser, who acted as both scriptwriter and producer. Two years earlier, Heston had acted in "The Mountain Men", for which Fraser had also written the script.

Gene Dupre and his girlfriend Andrea Spalding head for northern British Columbia in an amphibious plane. They are searching for Dupre's friend George Patterson, who disappeared in the area while prospecting for gold. Patterson believed (a belief shared by Dupre) that a rich "mother lode"- a principal vein of gold ore- is located somewhere in the area. On arriving in the area, they become involved with another prospector, a Scotsman named Silas McGee, who with his brother Ian has been looking for the "mother lode" for many years and has opened up a mine. They soon realise, however, that Silas is not as friendly as he seems at first sight.

Apart from the photography of the Canadian wilderness, the most striking thing about the film is the scene where Dupre, attempting a water landing, manages to crash his plane, although both he and Andrea survive unhurt. This scene, however, was not in the original script. The crashing of the plane was a genuine accident, but after it happened Heston decided to incorporate the footage into the film and rewrite the script accordingly. In fact, he had no alternative, because there was insufficient money on the budget to acquire another aircraft to reshoot the scene.

And when the best thing about your film is a fortuitous accident, you know you've got problems. Heston's "Antony and Cleopatra" is an excellent film, and his "A Man for All Seasons" a reasonably good one (if overshadowed by the Fred Zinnemann/Paul Scofield version of the same story), but his directorial touch seems to have deserted him with "Mother Lode".

To begin with, the acting is not of a high standard. Heston wrote in his autobiography that he had problems with his leading couple, Nick Mancuso and a young, pre-stardom Kim Basinger, who took a strong dislike to one another and had difficulty working together. There is certainly very little chemistry between them, but this does not matter as much as it might have done in other circumstances. The film is an adventure story, not a love story, so the emphasis is on the search for the gold, not the development of the romance between Gene and Andrea. Heston's own performance as Silas is not his best. I will leave comments on the accuracy of his Scottish accent to the Scots, but to me it always seemed a distraction.

The film is also badly directed. The storyline is never easy to follow, and we cannot always keep track of which characters are still alive and which are dead, and who has been killed by whom. A lot of the problem is due to the fact that we cannot always hear or see clearly what is going on. Too much dialogue was obscured by background noise, such as the noise of the plane's engine, and too many scenes were almost impossible to follow because they were shot in near total darkness, especially those in the mine.

Working as a father/son team does not always seem to have been beneficial for the Hestons. "The Mountain Men" was a mediocre film, but "Mother Lode" is a downright bad one. When I reviewed that reactionary, bigoted Western "Arrowhead", a film from much earlier in Heston's career, I said that it was the prime candidate for the title of his worst-ever film. Having now seen "Mother Lode", it has at least one rival for that unwanted title. 3/10.

The Wooden Horse (1950)

Patriotic "How We Won the War" Tale

[7/10 · 26 March 2024]

In the summer and autumn of 1943 the British prisoners of Stalag Luft III, a German prison camp housing captured air force officers, began to show a particular interest in gymnastics, especially vaulting. (Stalag Luft III was also the POW camp featured in "The Great Escape"). The reason was not just a concern for physical fitness. The prisoners had designed a special vaulting horse which could conceal men, tools and containers of soil. Each day the horse was carried out to the same spot near the perimeter fence and, while the prisoners vaulted over it, the men inside set to work on digging a tunnel. At the end of the day, these men would conceal the tunnel entrance with a wooden board covered in soil, before being carried back to their huts inside the horse. Remarkably, these arrangements were never detected by the Germans, and by October the tunnel was ready. Three prisoners, Michael Codner, Eric Williams and Oliver Philpot made their escape, and all eventually made it back to Britain.

"The Wooden Horse", based on a book by Williams, tells the story of the events. The first part of the film deals with the escape from the camp, the second with the adventures of Williams and Codner (renamed here Peter Howard and John Clinton) in making their way back to Britain. The adventures of Philpot (renamed Philip Rowe), who travelled separately from the other two, are not shown in any detail. In reality, Williams and Codner made their way to the German port of Stettin, from where they escaped by boat to occupied Denmark and then, with the help of the Danish resistance, to neutral Sweden. In the film they take a similar route but via Lübeck rather than Stettin. The reason was that in 1950 Stettin, under the name Szczecin, had become part of communist Poland, and the British film-makers doubted whether they would be allowed to film by the Polish authorities.

The film started something of a vogue for prisoner-of-war films in Britain, leading to the likes of "The Colditz Story" and "Danger Within". The Americans also got in on the act with "Stalag 17", and in my view all the best films in this genre- "Bridge on the River Kwai", "King Rat" and "The Great Escape"- were made by American studios about British POWs. "The Wooden Horse" is not really in the same class as any of those three masterpieces, but then it was made on a much lower budget without any big-name stars. (Many of the cast were in fact amateurs). It is a patriotic "how we won the war" tale of a sort popular on both sides of the Atlantic during the late forties, fifties and early sixties, and as such it works very well, conjuring up a good deal of tension. Nearly three quarters of a century after it was made, it still repays watching. 7/10.

Entertaining Mr Sloane (1970)

Looking beyond the Shock Factor

[8/10 · 22 March 2024]

Joe Orton was the enfant terrible of the British theatre during the mid-sixties. His public career only lasted three years from 1964 to 1967, but during this period he both shocked and delighted audiences and the critics with a series of dark and cynical, and often sexually explicit, black comedies. In August 1967 he was bludgeoned to death by his lover Kenneth Halliwell, who then committed suicide.

"Entertaining Mr Sloane" is based upon the play which first brought Orton to the public's attention in 1964. It tells the story of how a young man, the "Mr. Sloane" of the title- we never learn his first name- is invited into the home of a middle-aged brother and sister. The sister, Kath, meets him one morning while he is sunbathing in the cemetery next to her home, and invites him to become her lodger. Kath's brother Ed initially objects to Mr Sloane as a lodger, but he soon takes a liking to the young man and offers him a job as his chauffeur. Indeed Ed, who is a closeted homosexual, takes something more than a liking to Mr Sloane, and the young man quickly becomes the lover of both siblings. The one member of the family whom Sloane is unable to charm is Kemp, Kath and Ed's elderly father who works as the cemetery groundsman. Kemp takes a dislike to him, largely because he recognises him as the man who killed his boss.

There are two wonderful contrasting performances from Beryl Reid and Harry Andrews as the two siblings. Kath and Ed are very different from one another. Kath is slatternly, blowsy and emotionally incontinent, always wearing her heart on her sleeve and making no secret of her obsessive desire for Mr Sloane, with whom she will openly share all the most intimate secrets of her past life. (And she has quite a few, including an illegitimate child).

Ed is uptight and reserved, doubtless due to the need to keep his homosexuality a secret. He dresses smartly and conservatively, probably works in some well-paid white-collar job and can be quite snobbish about his social position. His one concession to the otherwise hidden flamboyant side of his nature is that he drives a bright pink Pontiac Parisienne convertible, and makes Sloane (dressed in a tight leather uniform) his chauffeur. Andrews, normally seen as a "character actor" in supporting roles, was here making a rare appearance in a leading one. You could argue that, at 59, he was too old for the part- he was only five years younger than Alan Webb, who plays his father- but watching the film I hardly noticed.

Peter McEnery as Sloane gives an unsubtle performance, but in an Orton play this perhaps does not matter. You never really get the impression that he is anything other than a handsome thug and you wonder how he managed to insinuate his way into the good graces of Kath and Ed when there is nothing insinuating about him. On the other hand, McEnery was strikingly good looking, and director Douglas Hickox may have been trying to suggest that the siblings were so blinded by pure lust for him that they managed to overlook his obvious thuggishness.

The manner of Orton's murder may have been shocking but it cemented his reputation as an edgy, transgressive writer, and in the years following his death he became even more of a cult figure than he had been while alive. In the sixties the British theatre was in some ways more liberal than the cinema, and it is hard to imagine a film like this being made in 1964, the year when the play was first produced. Things, however, were changing quickly and by 1970 it was no longer taboo to make a film focussing on homosexuality and nymphomania, and in which a murderer is allowed to go unpunished. The film must, however, have seemed very controversial and even shocking at the time to many cinema-goers.

More than fifty years on we have become used to far worse things in the cinema, and a film like "Entertaining Mr Sloane" no longer seems shocking, except perhaps to those of a particularly puritanical disposition. That is, perhaps, all to the good. We can look beyond the controversy and the shock factor and see Orton's writing for what it is- mordant, cynical and very funny. 8/10.

Doctor Who: The Web Planet (1965) Season 2, Episode 16

Smearing Lenses with Vaseline

[4/10 · 20 March 2024]

The First Doctor and his companions Ian, Barbara and Vicki find themselves on the planet Vortis, which seems to be the home of giant, human-sized insects- the ant-like Zarbi, the Menoptra, who look like a cross between bees and butterflies, and the Optera, a degenerate form of the Menoptra who live underground and look liked gigantic fleas. The planet has been taken over by an evil intelligence known as the Animus who has enslaved the Zarbi and driven the Menoptra into exile. The Doctor and his companions arrive just as a force of Menoptra arrive on the planet bent upon reconquering their former home, and are caught up in the ensuing conflict, allying themselves with the Menoptra. Despite the title, webs do not play a large part in the story, although the Animus is eventually revealed to be a spider-like being.

I won't set the plot out any further because "The Web Planet" is far from being one of the best in the history of "Doctor Who". The acting is not particularly bad, but writer Bill Strutton had no previous experience of writing science fiction, and it shows. The plot is not only confusing but also overlong; six episodes are dedicated to a story which could have been told in three or four. The director Richard Martin apparently overspent his budget on visual effects, which doesn't always show, except perhaps where the elaborate costumes are concerned. We are told about a massive invasion of the planet taking place, but never see anything of it; the budget clearly did not run to convincing recreations of interplanetary warfare. I couldn't really understand just why the contending armies were so determined to secure control of Vortis as it seemed like a barren and unpromising place, less a habitable planet than an uninhabitable corner of the Beeb's studios. Martin took to smearing the camera lenses with Vaseline in an attempt to make the place look more alien. He didn't succeed. All he succeeded in doing was making it look as though something had been smeared on the camera lenses and the cameramen had neglected to clean them. 4/10

Some goofs. If Vicki is, as she claims, medically trained, she would realise that aspirin is not a sedative. And why does she express surprise that Barbara and Ian were in Nero's Rome? She was there with them! (See the previous serial).

Play for Today: Clay, Smeddum and Greenden (1976) Season 6, Episode 18

Comic relief sandwiched between two tragedies

[6/10 · 20 March 2024]

Most "Plays for Today" only told a single story, but "Clay, Smeddum and Greenden" is what might be called a "portmanteau", combining three stories in a single film. In this it is similar to another "Play for Today" from 1971, "Orkney". Both plays are based upon short stories by Scottish writers, Lewis Grassic Gibbon here and George Mackay Brown in the case of "Orkney". Both are set in rural parts of northern Scotland, "Orkney" as the title suggests in the Orkney Islands and "Clay, Smeddum and Greenden" in Gibbon's native Kincardineshire. In 1971 the BBC also broadcast "Sunset Song", a drama serial based upon a novel by Gibbon.

"Clay, Smeddum and Greenden" might seem like the name of a provincial firm of solicitors, but each word is the title of one of the three stories. All three are set in the same Scottish east coast farming community in the 1920s and 1930s; several characters appear in two of the stories, or sometimes all three. The same character, the local grocer Alec Webster, acts as narrator of all three parts. (He is played by Fulton MacKay, who also appeared in "Orkney").

"Clay" deals with a farmer who becomes obsessed with trying to tame an unpromising "park"- a local word for farm- consisting mostly of heavy clay soils, gorse and heather, but neglecting his wife and daughter while doing so. This story reminded me of Sheila Kaye-Smith's novel "Sussex Gorse", set at the opposite extremity of Great Britain, but which also deals with an obsessive farmer trying to wrest a living from a barren and unproductive tract of soil while neglecting the needs of his family. The difference is that Kaye-Smith's character, Reuben Backfield, eventually succeeds in his endeavour, although at great personal cost, whereas Gibbon's Rob Galt is defeated.

"Smeddum"- Scots dialect for spirit or determination- is lighter in tone, a comedy about a woman trying to run both her farm and the lives of her children after the death of their shiftless father. (I was going to say "her husband", but it is finally revealed that they were in fact never legally married, something which would have shocked her pious neighbours had it come out during his lifetime).

In "Greenden" George and Ellen Simpson, an urban couple from Glasgow, move to the countryside for the sake of George's health. ("Greenden" is the name of the farm on which they settle). George has been advised to take up farming because he has been diagnosed with tuberculosis, and his doctors think that fresh country air and hard work will do him good. George does indeed take to country life, and his health improves, but Ellen, feeling lonely and neglected, sinks into depression.

In my view "Clay" was the best of the trilogy and contains the best acting performance by Victor Carin as the obsessive Rob. He is difficult to like, particularly in the way in which he treats his wife and daughter, yet it is also difficult to avoid admiring his dogged determination. "Smeddum", by contrast, never really engaged me and suffered from being a slight piece of comic relief sandwiched between two tragedies. "Greenden" was potentially an interesting story, but I felt it would have benefitted from a longer and more expansive treatment, possibly being the subject of a full-length drama in its own right. I did not enjoy the trilogy as much as "Orkney", and certainly not as much as "Sunset Song", one of the best BBC dramas of the seventies. 6/10.

Two Women (1960)

Not enough substance to justify its reputation

[7/10 · 18 March 2024]

The original Italian title of this film was "La Ciociara", literally "The Woman from Ciociaria", but this could not be used in English-speaking countries, where hardly anyone knows where Ciociaria is. (It's a mountainous rural area south-east of Rome). It was released as "Two Women", the title used for the English translation of the novel by Alberto Moravia upon which it is based, but even that title seems inappropriate in the context of the film, given that one of the "women" is a girl of only twelve years old.

The "two women" of the title are a mother and daughter Cesira and Rosetta. In Moravia's novel, Cesira was middle aged and Rosetta in her twenties, and the original idea was to cast Anna Magnani as Cesira and Sophia Loren as Rosetta. When, however, Vittorio De Sica became the director, he cast Loren as Cesira, making her much younger than in the novel, and made Rosetta a young girl rather than an adult.

The story is a simple one. Cesira is a widowed shopkeeper living in Rome during World War II. To escape the bombing of the city, she flees with her daughter to her native Ciociaria. While staying there, she forms a friendship with Michele, a young anti-Fascist intellectual, who is later captured by the Germans. When Rome falls to the Allies in June 1944, she decides to return to the city, but on the way she and Rosetta are raped by the Goumiers, irregular Moroccan troops attached to the French army and fighting with the Allies in Italy. (The story of Cesira and Rosetta is fictional, but the Goumiers did indeed perpetuate a series of mass rapes and murders in Italy in 1944, events which became known as the "Marocchinate", or "deeds of the Moroccans"). The rape scene is dealt with very cautiously, so much so that it was difficult to tell what was happening at the time, and what has happened to Cesira and Rosetta only becomes clear in retrospect. Today I doubt if a rape scene involving a twelve year old girl could be filmed at all.

This was the film for which Loren won an Academy Award for Best Actress, making her the first actor, male or female, to win an acting Oscar for a foreign-language film. Whether she deserved to win over, say, Audrey Hepburn in "Breakfast at Tiffany's" is difficult to say because I have only seen the version dubbed into English, not the original Italian version, so it is difficult for me to assess the quality of her acting. I felt, however, that Loren was miscast as Cesira; she was only 25 in 1960, and it was difficult to accept her as the mother of a twelve year old girl. Although Jean-Paul Belmondo was of Italian descent he could not speak Italian, but he was cast as Michele because the producers needed a major French star to attract funding from France; his voice is therefore dubbed even in the original version.

For much of the time the film seems very slow-moving with little happening. Only at the end, when Cesira is desperately trying to help her daughter to cope with the devastating trauma of the rape does it become deeply affecting. Even so, I felt that there was not enough substance in the film to justify its reputation as a classic. 7/10.

Thérèse (2012)

La France Profonde

[7/10 · 13 March 2024]

Francois Mauriac's novel "Thérèse Desqueyroux" is set in the Landes, a sparsely populated rural area of south-western France consisting mostly of pine forests and heathland. (Argelouse, the village where much of the action takes place, is a real one). His heroine Thérèse is in a similar position to Emma Bovary, another French literary heroine who finds herself dissatisfied with marriage to a dull provincial bourgeois and with the conformist culture of "la France profonde". The difference between the two is that whereas Madame Bovary ends up poisoning herself, Thérèse tries (unsuccessfully) to poison her husband, Bernard.

By the standards of the 1920s, Mauriac's was something of an experimental novel, making use of non-linear narrative, jumps backwards and forwards in time and sudden switches between first-person and third-person narration. The director Claude Miller, in his last film before his death, keeps Mauriac's plot but, wisely, does not attempt to imitate his structure, telling the story in a much more linear fashion. It starts with Thérèse's girlhood and her friendship with Bernard's half-sister Anne; because Thérèse comes from another well-to-do family it is assumed that she will many Bernard, even though he is considerably older than her and they have little in common.

Their marriage is predictably unhappy, to the extent that she comes to see murder as the solution to all her difficulties. She is, however, never punished for her crime- fearful of any scandal attaching to their name, all the family, even Bernard himself, conspire to secure Thérèse's acquittal, on the understanding that they will afterwards separate. The do not, however, divorce, something which was officially legal in the France of the 1920s, but would not have been socially acceptable in a conservative, Catholic rural area.

A sub-plot deals with the romance between Anne and a young man named Jean Azevedo which scandalises her family because he is Jewish and regarded as an outsider. As in the book there is some suggestion of a lesbian attraction between Thérèse and Bernard's younger half-sister Anne, but this is not fully developed.

The novel has a powerful sense of place; Mauriac is able to conjure up a vivid picture of the Landes, something reflected here by the striking photography of the area. This is important, because Mauriac uses his descriptions of the physical landscape as a metaphor for the mental and moral landscape of its inhabitants, whose stifling conformity is as barren as its sandy soils.

The main difficulty I had with the film was the same as the one I had when reading the novel, namely that we never get a clear view of what sort of person Thérèse really is. In particular, Mauriac never provides a clear explanation for her crime. Bernard- dull, conventional, complacent and selfish, obsessed with hunting, his dogs and his estates- is far from being an ideal husband, but he is not a monster, and we never really understand why his wife should have conceived so violent a hatred for him or why she should have resorted to such desperate means of trying to rid herself of him. There is a good performance from Audrey Tautou, a better actress in her native language than she is in English, and another good performance from Gilles Lellouche as the stolid Bernard, but even these performances do not help me overcome this difficulty. 7/10.

Tarka the Otter (1979)

The Country of the Two Rivers

[8/10 · 5 February 2024]

I note that most of the reviews on here, especially those that award the film a low mark, seem to concentrate on whether or not the film is suitable for children. Not having any children of my own, I am not in a position to enter this debate; in any case, it should be for individual parents, who will know what their children are interested in and what is likely to upset or frighten them, to decide this question for themselves.

Although it has long been popular with younger readers, Henry Williamson's "Tarka the Otter" was in fact written for adults. It is the story of the birth, life and death of a wild otter living in the Country of the Two Rivers, the valleys of the River Taw and River Torridge in North Devon. Because Tarka is killed by a pack of hounds, some have seen it as an anti-hunting tract, although I am not sure that Williamson intended it as such. He disliked sentimentality about animals- one reason why he would not allow Disney to make a film of the book- and probably accepted hunting as part of country life. In 1927, when the novel was written, otters were much more common in the British countryside than they are today, and were widely regarded as vermin, at least among the angling fraternity who never take kindly to any creature that preys on fish.

It is therefore unsurprising that they were widely hunted during this period; otter hunting did not cease until 1978, a year before the film was made, when the otter was placed on the list of protected species. (Since then otters have made something of a comeback; ironically, they are now less endangered than otterhounds, the dogs once used to hunt them, which are among the rarest breeds in Britain).

How does one make a film of a book like this? One solution would have been to make it as a cartoon, as had been done the previous year with another classic of the English countryside, Richard Adams's "Watership Down", but this would probably not have met with Williamson's approval. (And feature-length cartoons have always been very much the exception rather than the rule in the British film industry).

In the event the job of making the film went to David Cobham, a maker of wildlife documentaries. Cobham's solution was to make what the film in the style of a wildlife documentary, with lovingly photographed scenes of the English countryside and its animals, birds, insects and flowers. The only difference is that it is set in the past rather than the present day and tells a fictitious story, narrated here by Peter Ustinov. The result is a film of great visual beauty and, as it keeps closely to Williamson's story with a few minor changes, also of emotional power. A must for all nature-lovers. 8/10.

Bitter Harvest (1963)

Perhaps They Ran out of Money

[5/10 · 3 February 2024]

Jennie Jones is the daughter of a small shopkeeper in a rundown Welsh mining village. Her relationship with her father is not a close one, and he wants her to live with two elderly aunts in Cardiff, a prospect which appals her. After a couple of adventures, Jennie ends up in London, where she is befriended by a kind-hearted barman named Bob Williams. The two begin a romantic relationship, and Jennie moves into his flat. Bob plans to marry her, but the attractive Jennie feels that she could do better than become the wife of a barman. She hopes to get work as a model or actress, and leaves Bob for Karl Denny, a leading film producer.

This is an example of the social realist kitchen sink dramas that were popular in the British cinema during the late fifties and sixties. The phrase "kitchen sink" originated in the visual arts, where it was used to describe the work of painters such as John Bratby, but it was quickly taken up by critics to describe the novels and plays of writers such as John Osborne, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe and Stan Barstow, works which were frequently turned into films. "Bitter Harvest" also has a literary source, although in this case one written more than thirty years before the film was made, Patrick Hamilton's novel "The Siege of Pleasure". Most kitchen sink films had a young man at their centre, but this one, unusually, has a female protagonist. ("A Taste of Honey", based on the play by Shelagh Delaney, is another example).

Some kitchen sink films- "A Taste of Honey", "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning", "A Kind of Loving", "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner", "Alfie"- have become classics of the British cinema. "Bitter Harvest" has not and remains little known today, and I think that there are reasons for this. The main one has been mentioned by other reviewers, namely that part of the film seems to be missing. As soon as Jennie has left Bob for Denny, the film abruptly ends with a scene in which her body is found in her flat after she has committed suicide. We can infer that her relationship with Denny went badly wrong and that it was this which led her to kill herself, but this is not shown, only implied. The film would have been a lot better if the progress of the Jennie/Denny relationship had actually been shown on screen. These scenes could have acted as an exposé of the dark side of the "Swinging London" of the sixties and made it easier for us to understand Jennie's suicide. I have o idea why the film-makers chose to end the film in the way they did. Perhaps they ran out of money. (Don't laugh. It is said that the previous year another film, the American war movie "Hell Is for Heroes", had been released in an incomplete form for precisely this reason).

None of the cast are particularly well-known today, although Janet Munro probably counted as a star in 1963, having made several films for Disney. (She was to die tragically young at only 38, which may explain why she has largely been forgotten). She is reasonably good in the early scenes in which Jennie is portrayed as a naive and innocent young girl, but is not really convincing in the later scenes when Jennie suddenly becomes hard, brassy and materialistic. She knows that, unlike Bob, Denny does not love her and is only using her for sex, but she is happy to accept this because she thinks that she can use him to realise her ambitions. There is, however, a decent performance from John Stride as the sincere and kindly Bob, and an amusing one from Thora Hird as his old battle-axe of a landlady.

The film was directed by Peter Graham Scott, who on this showing was not in the same class as other kitchen sink directors such as Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson. At times the action seems to drag, whereas at others the camera-work seems unduly hectic. "Bitter Harvest" still occasionally turns up on television, but when it does it reminds us that not every kitchen sink film was a masterpiece. 5/10.

Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl (1982)

We used to live in a shoebox in't middle o't road....

[9/10 · 1 February 2024]

Although Monty Python humour seems quintessentially British, the Pythons had a considerable following in other countries, especially America, and in September 1980 they gave four live performances at the Hollywood Bowl. Many of their American fans were college students, which may explain why many of the sketches included here have a rather intellectual flavour. These performances were captured on videotape, and the tapes were edited to produce this film which was released two years later in 1982 The film also includes excerpts from a German version of the television show, "Monty Python's Fliegender Zirkus", including the "Silly Olympics" and the "International Philosophers' Football Match". Some sketches which had been performed during the live show were omitted from the film. These include, rather surprisingly, the famous "Dead Parrot sketch", possibly because it had been included in an earlier Python film, "And Now For Something Completely Different".

"Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl" is similar to "And Now..." and "The Meaning of Life", which was to come out in 1983, in that all three films consist of a series of unrelated comedy sketches and songs with no linking theme. In the other two Python films, "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and "Life of Brian", the various sketches were linked together to form a coherent narrative, or something resembling one.

Pythonesque humour is an acquired taste, and attempting to explain its appeal to anyone who is not already a Python-worshipper is a forlorn hope. Indeed, the film itself contains an object lesson in the perils of trying to explain or analyse humour, in the sketch in which Graham Chapman, playing a highbrow academic, lectures the audience on the history of slapstick. The "japes" which Chapman describes, are acted out by Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin, with the humour deriving from the contrast between Chapman's earnest, rather pompous manner and the silliness of the various japes performed by the other three with deadpan faces. To avoid sounding like Chapman's rather absurd academic, therefore, I will avoid trying to analyse the sketches in any depth, merely pointing out a few of my favourites, which include:-

"Sit on My Face" - A parody of Gracie Fields' famous, and sunnily optimistic, "Sing as We Go", here given a ribald twist to celebrate the joys of oral sex.

"The Last Supper", in which Michelangelo defends an unorthodox painting of the Last Supper (including, among other things, a kangaroo and three Christs) to a sceptical Pope.

"The Philosophers' Song" - In which a group of Australian philosophy dons enlighten uses to the drinking habits of some of the great philosophers from history.

"The Ministry of Silly Walks" - In which John Cleese discusses the possibility of Palin getting a grant to develop his silly walk and make it even sillier, with the humour mostly deriving from real-life bureaucratic jargon being used in an absurd context.

"Nudge Nudge" - In which Eric Idle, posing as an experienced man of the world, uses innuendo to imply that Jones's wife is sexually promiscuous; the punchline, however, reveals that Idle is still a virgin.

"Four Yorkshiremen sketch" - In which four wealthy Yorkshiremen discuss their humble origins, with each man trying to outdo the others in tales of the poverty he had to endure as a child. ("We used to live in a shoebox in't middle o't road...."). This was not originally a Monty Python sketch but was written for an earlier comedy show, "At Last the 1948 Show", in which Cleese and Chapman also appeared.

"The Lumberjack Song" In which a rough, tough lumberjack unexpectedly reveals a softer, feminine side to his personality, shocking his girlfriend and the accompanying chorus of Mounties. This song is here sung by Idle, rather than Palin who had performed it on television.

Not all the sketches are of this quality; I have never really seen the point of Chapman wrestling himself, and the "Never Be Rude to an Arab" song doesn't hold up well in these more politically correct times. The ratio of hits to misses, however, is higher here than it was in "And Now....", when the Pythons had less material to choose from, and certainly higher than it was to be in "The Meaning of Life" when the well of inspiration was starting to dry up. To any practising Pythonist like myself, this film is essential viewing. 9/10.

The Secret of Convict Lake (1951)

Well worth seeing if you can catch it

[7/10 · 31 January 2024]

In 1871 a group of convicts escaped from prison in Carson City, Nevada, and took refuge near Monte Diablo Lake, in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. They were pursued by a posse, and in the ensuing shootout a number of posse members and convicts were killed or wounded. The convicts who survived the shootout were subsequently lynched. Following this incident, the lake was renamed Convict Lake, a name which its retains to this day.

"The Secret of Convict Lake" is very loosely based upon this story. In real life 29 convicts were involved in the jailbreak, but here there are only six. The original incident took place in September, but here it is the depths of winter; one of the men freezes to death while crossing the mountains. The five survivors make their way to a small settlement by the lake, currently occupied by eight women while their menfolk are away prospecting for gold. Out of a mixture of fear and pity, the women agree to allow the convicts to use an empty cabin, and a curious relationship grows up between them.

I suspect that if the film were to be made today, the convicts would be treated in a more sympathetic manner, depicted as being not all bad and as having a more human side. In 1951, however, the Production Code, which forbade sympathetic depictions of criminals, was still in force; the only one who has any sense of decency is Jim Canfield, who turns out to have been wrongly convicted on perjured evidence. Much of the plot turns upon Canfield's desire for revenge upon Rudy Schaeffer, the man who put him behind bars. (Schaeffer is the fiancé of Marcia, one of the eight women, and the brother of another, Rachel). The other four men all turn out to be thoroughgoing villains; the youngest, Clyde, initially seems sympathetic, but turns out to be a psychopath who tries to kill one of the women when she resists his advances. Canfield finds that he needs to protect the women against his own companions.

In the fifties there was a growing tendency to shoot Westerns in colour as Hollywood saw that it could use the spectacular scenery of the American West as a weapon in its battle with the newcomer, television. "The Secret of Convict Lake" is an exception, even though it is set in a particularly scenic location. I think the reason is that it is one of those Westerns that, even though it is set in a remote rural location in the late nineteenth century rather than an urban one in the mid-twentieth, can also be seen as a film noir. ("The Ox-Bow Incident", from 1942, is another). Glenn Ford, who stars here as Canfield, often appeared in noirs such as "Gilda", "The Big Heat" or "Human Desire". Canfield has much in common with the heroes of films like these, being a basically decent man who finds himself in a position of emotional or psychological conflict, here between his desire for revenge on Schaeffer and his growing feelings for the lovely Marcia. The decision to shoot in black-and-white, with much of the action taking place at night, may have been based on a wish to make the film resemble a noir in its visual look as well as its storyline.

Gene Tierney as Marcia is perhaps a little too lovely; it seems difficult to believe that she is a woman sitting out a harsh winter in a remote settlement, far from the nearest boutique, hairdresser or cosmetics store. (She is, however, far from being the only Hollywood goddess to look impossibly glamorous in a Western setting).

The film was a critical and commercial success when first released in 1951, and seventy years on it still holds up well. It is well acted, has a well-written script and manages to generate a good deal of dramatic tension. It is well worth seeing if you can catch it on one of its rare television appearances. 7/10.

The Wrong Box (1966)

From the Sublime to the Ridiculous

[5/10 · 30 January 2024]

Around the year 1830, a group of families agree to organise an investment on behalf of their young sons. £1,000 is invested for each boy taking part, making a total of £20,000. The capital and all accrued interest will be paid out to the last surviving member of the group of boys. (The scheme is described as a "tontine", but under a true tontine interest is not capitalised in this way but paid out regularly to all surviving members of the scheme. It is uncertain whether investments of the type depicted here have ever existed in realise).

Fast forward to the late Victorian era. Eighteen members of the tontine have died; the only survivors are two elderly brothers, Masterman and Joseph Finsbury. They detest one another and have not spoken in may years, although they live next door to each other. They have very different personalities. Masterman is greedy and avaricious, obsessed with winning the tontine to such an extent that he makes several unsuccessful attempts to kill his brother. Joseph is an eccentric scholar, with little interest in money and unconcerned with the tontine.

The plot revolves around a complicated scheme by Joseph's nephews Morris and John to obtain the tontine money by fraud. Wrongly believing Joseph to have died in a train crash- in fact he escaped unharmed- and that Masterman is dying, they try to hush up news of Joseph's supposed "death" until Masterman has died. The plot then gets very complicated, involving mistaken identities and boxes being delivered to the wrong address. (Hence the title). Another important element is the romance between Masterman's grandson Michael and Joseph's granddaughter Julia. To avoid twentieth-century sensibilities about cousin marriages, Michael and Julia are both adopted and therefore not related by blood, although I doubt if the Victorians would have worried much about a marriage between second cousins.

The cast includes a number of leading lights of the British acting profession and comedy scene, including John Mills, Ralph Richardson, Michael Caine, Peter Sellers, Tony Hancock, and Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Unfortunately, whereas a talented cast may be a necessary condition for a good film, it is never a sufficient one, and "The Wrong Box" is one of a long list of movies that don't really work despite a cast-list stuffed with big names. It must be said that few of the actors here are at their best.

No actor, however talented they may be, can guarantee that every film they make will be a good one, but Caine, more than most actors, seems to have an infuriating ability to go from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again. "The Wrong Box" was his first film after his great performance in one of his biggest hits, "Alfie", but here he just seems to be strolling though the picture without much effort. I must say that I always preferred Cook and Moore as comedians rather than as comic actors, and the attempt to recreate their "Pete'n'Dud" personas by casting them here as Morris and John never really works. (They were to be better the following year in "Bedazzled"). Probably the best here are Sellers as an eccentric doctor (although his is only a small role) and Richardson as the equally eccentric Joseph, the sort of intellectual who possesses a vast store of useless knowledge on the most arcane subjects and who will happily share it with anyone who will listen, or even with those who will not.

The storyline is over-complex and at times difficult to follow. The film has elements of both farce and black comedy, but lacks the manic logic of a good farce and, despite its subject-matter, is never really dark enough to qualify as a true black comedy. Given that his previous film had been the excellent "King Rat", director Bryan Forbes, like his leading man Caine, can be said to have gone from the sublime to the ridiculous in one step. 5/10.

The Hanging Tree (1959)

Good Example of a Psychological Western

[7/10 · 28 January 2024]

"The Hanging Tree" is set in Montana during a gold rush in the 1870s, although filming actually took place in Washington State. (One of many Westerns which were not filmed in the area in which they are ostensibly set). The main character is Joseph Frail, a doctor who arrives in the boom town of Skull Creek with a view to combining a medical practice with prospecting for gold. Frail is a strange and contradictory character. He can treat his patients with great kindness, but in his dealings with others he can be cold and abrupt. He rescues and saves the life of Rune, a young man who was shot while trying to steal gold, but then forces Rune to act as his unpaid servant because he has no money to pay for his treatment, threatening to expose him as the thief if he refuses.

I won't set out the whole of the plot, but much of it revolves around the relationship between Frail and another of his patients, Elizabeth Mahler, a Swiss immigrant whose life he saves after she has been seriously injured in a stagecoach robbery. She moves into a house next to his so that he can oversee her recovery, but the situation is misinterpreted by narrow-minded locals who wrongly believe that they are having a sexual relationship. Another important Character is Frenchy, a disreputable prospector. He was responsible for shooting Rune, but does not recognise him as the man he shot, and the two later go into partnership with Elizabeth to stake their own claim. The "hanging tree" of the title is an old oak just outside the town used for public hangings; one character is threatened with this fate towards the end of the movie.

Although it was directed by Delmer Daves and stars Gary Cooper, "The Hanging Tree" reminded me of the "Mann/Stewart Westerns", directed by Anthony Mann and starring James Stewart, which had been made a few years earlier. The characters played by Stewart in these films are not outright villains, but neither are they traditional clean-cut Western heroes. They are flawed, morally ambiguous and psychologically complex individuals; Howard Kemp in "The Naked Spur" and Will Lockhart in "The Man from Laramie" are good examples. Cooper's Frail- his name has obvious symbolic significance- is a man of a similar type. Throughout the film there are hints of some dark secret in his past, and towards the end we learn the nature of the event which has left him psychologically scarred.

Roles like this can be difficult to play, and Cooper copes well with the challenge of making Frail neither a heroic, self-sacrificing medical man, like his character in "The Story of Dr Wassell", nor so hardened that we are unable to sympathise with him. The real villains of the story are not Frail, but Frenchy, so blinded by greed for gold that he will do anything to get it, and Dr Grubb, a quack faith healer who tries to turn the townsfolk against Frail. This was one of Cooper's last films- he had only another two years to live- and his last Western apart from "They Came to Cordura".

As with many Westerns from the fifties, this one is marked by striking photography of the landscapes of the American West, landscapes which Hollywood was using in its battle with the newcomer, television. I wouldn't rate "The Hanging Tree" as highly as "The Naked Spur" or "The Man from Laramie"- the plot is not always easy to follow- but it is nevertheless a good example of the sub-genre that has been called the "psychological Western". 7/10.

Young Wives' Tale (1951)

Only for Audrey Hepburn completists. (And even they are likely to be disappointed).

[4/10 · 26 January 2024]

On the rare occasions when it turns up on British television,"TheYoung Wives' Tale" is normally billed as "starring Audrey Hepburn", but only because Hepburn went on to become an iconic star, far better known than any of the other cast members. In 1951 she was still an aspiring young actress in her pre-stardom days, and she only plays a minor role here.

The film is set in the years immediately following World War II, when Britain was suffering from a serious housing shortage. Many houses had been destroyed during the war, and the country had neither the manpower nor the financial resources to start building new ones. The film centres upon the efforts of two young married couples, Bruce and Mary and Rodney and Sabina, to overcome the shortage by sharing a house. As the house is also occupied by two young children, a live-in nanny and a young female lodger (Hepburn's role), it would probably today be classed as statutorily overcrowded, but in the late fifties and early fifties nobody seemed to worry about that.

Some attempt is made to differentiate between the personalities of the two couples. Bruce and Mary are both staid, conventional bourgeois types, working in nine-to-five jobs. Rodney and Sabina are more bohemian; he is a writer, and she a former actress, although she has given up the stage in order to be a housewife and mother to their young son, even though she seems to lack domestic skills entirely. Perhaps because her character is an ex-actress, Joan Greenwood gives a rather odd performance in the role, making Sabina the sort of actress who constantly overacts, even when she is away from the stage, and delivering even the most commonplace of lines with exaggerated dramatic intensity. (If this is what Sabina is like in her private life, I would have hated to see any of her stage performances).

Most of the humour (or perhaps I should say attempts at humour) derives from Bruce and Mary's struggles to retain the services of a nanny or from various mix-ups and misunderstandings to do with sex. This being the early fifties, however, the scriptwriters have to proceed on the basis of "nudge, nudge, wink, wink" rather than being explicit about what they actually mean. The film is based on a stage play (which I have never seen), but today it comes across as a sort of over-extended episode of a seventies domestic sitcom. Whatever humour it once possessed seems to have evaporated with the passage of over seventy years, and today it just doesn't come across as funny. Its only appeal today will probably be to Hepburn completists, and even they are likely to be disappointed at the revelation that not every film in which their idol appeared was a "Roman Holiday", "The Nun's Story" or "Breakfast at Tiffany's". 4/10.

Last Night in Soho (2021)

The good old days were never as good as we like to think

[7/10 · 25 January 2024]

Ellie Turner, a teenager with aspirations to become a fashion designer, moves from her home in Cornwall to study at the London College of Fashion, then situated in Soho. (Since the film was made it has moved to Stratford in East London). Unusually for a modern teen, Ellie loves the music and the fashion of the Swinging Sixties, perhaps because she herself was named after a sixties pop song, Barry Ryan's "Eloise". Indeed, the film itself is named after another song from the era, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich's "Last Night in Soho". Ellie is always playing sixties music, especially songs by girl singers such as Cilla Black, Sandie Shaw, Dusty Springfield and Petula Clark, and tries to reflect the look of the period in her fashion designs.

After falling out with her unsympathetic roommate Jocasta, Ellie moves into a bedsit owned by an elderly landlady, Ms. Collins. Soon after moving, Ellie discovers that she can travel back in time to the sixties where she has visions of Sandie, a young woman of the period with ambitions of becoming a singer. At first Ellie is intoxicated by the glamour of the era, but a common theme of time-travel movies (as in something like "Pleasantville") is that the good old days were never as good as we like to think.

Soho is today a smart and respectable area of central London, but in the sixties there was a a darker side to the district. It may have been the home of Carnaby Street, the centre of London's fashion industry, but it was also the centre of London's sex industry and vice trade. Sandie thinks that she is on the path to fame when she finds a boyfriend, Jack, who promises to act as her manager, but he turns out to be cruel and abusive, forcing her to work first as a stripper, then as a prostitute. Eventually Ellie has a horrifying vision in which she believes she sees Jack murdering Sandie. I won't summarise the rest of the plot, but it becomes very dark and sinister, changing from a "Pleasantville"-style anti-nostalgic parable to a supernatural horror film.

The film introduced me to a new star, the New Zealand-born Thomasin McKenzie as Ellie. She gives an excellent performance, playing her character as a sweet, sensitive but mentally troubled girl, whose retreat into nostalgia for a period several decades before she was born is perhaps rooted in the difficulties she has in dealing with the modern world. It may also have something to do with the fact that she was raised by her grandmother, who would have been a young woman in the sixties, after her mother committed suicide. Other good performances come from Anya Taylor-Joy as the glamorous and self-confident Sandie, whose confidence proves sadly misplaced, and from Diana Rigg as Ms. Collins, a character who plays a more important role in the second half of the film and who turns out to be not the respectable old lady she initially seems. This was Rigg's last film, as she died shortly after it was completed and before it was released.

The film is also visually attractive, recreating the London of the sixties with the same loving detail that "heritage cinema" productions devote to their recreations of the Victorian or Edwardian eras. In some ways it reminded me of another British horror film I saw recently, the M R James television adaptation "A View from a Hill", screened as part of the "Ghost Story for Christmas" series. The two films represent different styles of horror, "A View from a Hill" being made in the more traditional understated British way with the horrific elements being implied rather than shown directly, and "Last Night in Soho" being much more direct in this respect. What they have in common is that both are rooted in British history and British culture rather than simply trying to imitate Hollywood. The Swinging London of the sixties is now becoming recognised as being as much a part of our cultural inheritance as the Victorian era or the Age of Shakespeare. Director Edgar Wright here reminds us that there was more to the period than just fun and glamour. 7/10.

Number 17 (1932)

Apprentice Work

[5/10 · 24 January 2024]

Alfred Hitchcock's early British talkies made between 1929 and 1933 have never attracted much attention, unlike the films he made during his later years in Britain, the period between 1934 and 1939. These include classics like "The Man Who Knew Too Much", "The 39 Steps" and "The Lady Vanishes". When, therefore, the specialist movie channel Talking Pictures showed his 1932 thriller "Number Seventeen", I took the opportunity to watch it.

I won't set out the plot in any detail, as it is a complicated one. It essentially concerns a stolen diamond necklace and the efforts of a police detective to recover it and arrest the thieves. The first part of the story takes place in an empty house, the Number 17 of the title, in which the necklace has been hidden. The second part takes place on board a train on which the thieves are trying to make their getaway.

Apparently Hitchcock did not want to make this film but was ordered to do so by the studio after his previous film, "Rich and Strange", flopped at the box-office. It is perhaps unsurprising that he was later to call it a "disaster." Creative artists are not always the best judges of their own work, but I wouldn't really dissent from that judgement. It is generally described as a "comedy-thriller", a description which can often translate as "not very comic, and not very thrilling either". It was based upon a burlesque play by Joseph Jefferson Farjeon, and for the benefit of American readers I should point out that in a British context the word "burlesque" does not refer to striptease but to "a literary, dramatic or musical work intended to cause laughter by caricaturing the manner or spirit of serious works, or by ludicrous treatment of their subjects". I have never seen Farjeon's play, but there is little about Hitchcock's treatment of the story to suggest that he was trying to caricature serious films. The best comic relief is provided by Leon M. Lion as Ben a homeless tramp who assists the police their efforts, but the rest of the storyline comes across as a failed attempt at serious drama rather than as a successful parody of it.

In his later films Hitchcock succeeded in integrating comedy into serious films- think of, say, the auction scene in "North by North-West" or the two elderly crime buffs in "Shadow of a Doubt", eagerly discussing detective novels, unsolved murder cases or the best way to commit the perfect murder, while comically unaware of the real murder mystery unfolding under their noses. In films like these, however, the comic elements come as light relief in a basically serious drama. Attempting to give the comic element equal billing with the dramatic, as he does here, does not really work. The kindest thing to say about "Number 17" is that it is an apprentice work, produced by a young director who just three years later was to produce his first great talkie, "The 39 Steps". 5/10.

A View from a Hill (2005 TV Movie)

The Haunted Binoculars

[8/10 · 24 January 2024]

Between 1971 and 1978 the BBC used to dramatise a ghost story every year under the title "A Ghost Story for Christmas", and the first five entries in the series were all based upon tales by that great master of the genre, M. R. James. The tradition has been revived in recent years, and nine more Christmas ghost stories have appeared at irregular intervals since 2005. All of these, apart from "The Dead Room" in 2018 and "Lot No. 249" in 2023, are based upon stories by James.

"A View from a Hill" was the first episode in the revived series, broadcast at Christmas 2005. Dr Fanshawe, an academic archaeologist, is invited to the country manor house of Squire Richards, in order to catalogue and value the Squire's archaeological collection which is to be sold off to pay debts. He also takes the opportunity to carry out his own explorations of the area, and borrows a pair of binoculars from the Squire, his own having been broken in an accident.

Fanshawe discovers that the binoculars have the strange property of being able to show him how a place looked in the past. In particular, they reveal to him a local abbey, not how it is in the present- a ruin- but how it was in the sixteenth century, before the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII. From conversations with the Squire and his butler, Patten, Fanshawe learns that the binoculars were made by a craftsman named Baxter, now dead, who was deeply unpopular with the local people and had a reputation for being a necromancer. He begins to fear that Baxter may have used dark forces to make the mysterious binoculars and that it was these forces which led to Baxter's death. (He was found dead on the sinister Gallows Hill, a one-time place of execution).

I have not seen all of the twenty-first century "Ghost Stories for Christmas", but of those I have seen I would rank this one as my favourite, along with "The Mezzotint". Strangely enough, neither of these are really among James's most scary stories on the printed page, but those who adapted them for television- Peter Harness here and Mark Gatiss in the case of "The Mezzotint"- realised that certain changes needed to be made to make them work in the new medium.

For much of its length, "A View from a Hill" keeps fairly closely to James's story although it makes a couple of minor changes such as updating it from the Edwardian period to the mid twentieth century. In the original story, Fanshawe was visiting Richards as a friend, and there was no mention of Richards being in debt. As with "The Mezzotint", the most important changes come at the end, with the protagonist realising that he himself is in danger from the dark forces which he has unwittingly unleashed. (In the original, the binoculars lose their power when Fanshawe takes them into a church, with the implication that the holiness of the place has overcome the evil they once contained).

Credit also needs to be given to Luke Watson for his skill as the director in conjuring up an atmosphere of unease, uncertainty and dread without ever showing us anything too explicit. This is an excellent "Ghost Story for Christmas". 8/10

Some goofs. The ancient abbey revealed to Fanshawe through the binoculars is in the Gothic style but is crowned with a large, elaborate dome. No mediaeval Gothic building in England would ever have had a dome. (In James's story it had a tower topped with four pinnacles). The story is set in the Chiltern Hills and Thames Valley. On a couple of occasions we see a red kite, a bird which at the time the story is set could be found in Wales but nowhere in England. (They have been reintroduced into parts of England and Scotland from 1989 onwards).