Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

This 1949 film, set in nineteenth century New York and directed by William Wyler, is an adaptation of a play which itself was an adaptation of a Henry James novel, 'Washington Square'.   I've never read anything by James but my impression is that his writing is complex and rather cold, in which case this film is true to the spirit of the novel, even if the plot has been much condensed and made more direct.  So  I'm not surprised that it was a commercial failure because it's a bleak and cruel film in many ways, but one of undeniable quality which the critics loved and which led to several major Oscar nominations. The heiress in question is Catherine (played by Olivia de Haviland, despite being a few years too old for the part), who despite the best education that money can buy is socially gauche and lacking in self-confidence.  The latter is hardly surprising given that her father Dr Stoper (Ralph Richardson) makes it clear that she falls a long way short of the ...

On paper this 1959 adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel couldn’t fail. It reunites Greene with director Carol Reed some years after ‘The Third Man’ and it has the perfect casting of Alec Guinness in the lead role, a couple of years after he won an Oscar for ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’. Guinness plays Jim Wormold, a humble seller of vacuum cleaners in Havana, who improbably is recruited by Noël Coward for British Intelligence.  Of course Wormold hasn’t a clue how to recruit agents or how to uncover secret information.  But a friend Dr Hasselbacher gives him the idea to simply make up stuff.   It turns out that Wormold has a flair for this, so much so that the bosses back in Whitehall get very excited about the drawings of secret weapons he sends them little realising that they are based on vacuum cleaners.  This is all good comedic entertainment, and any scene featuring either Coward or Ralph Richardson as his boss is a delight. But when the story takes a darker tur...

This 1945 British film is a horror anthology which had been on my watchlist for a long time, simply because the last of the five stories, with Michael Redgrave as a ventriloquist, is always spoken of as something quite special. As indeed it is.  It has a neat premise, of a ventriloquist being controlled by an evil puppet.  Or is he?  One of the clever things about the story is that even at the end it is open to two interpretations, either a supernatural one or one in which it is simply a case of the ventriloquist undergoing some sort of mental breakdown.  Redgrave is superb either way. I was prepared to find the rest of the film disappointing in comparison, but this was not the case.  Admittedly only one of the other stories, about a sinister mirror, is up to much but this doesn't matter as much as it might have because of the high quality of the linking story.   It concerns an architect who turns up at a farmhouse for an assignment who then realises t...

I didn’t have very high expectations of this 1957 musical.    It stars Fred Astaire who was in his late fifties and Audrey Hepburn who was not renowned for her singing or dancing.  Given the thirty year age gap between them any romance would make for uncomfortable viewing. And there's only two songs of note,  one of which (''S Wonderful') I don’t much care for. Astaire plays Dick, a photographer for a fashion magazine which is looking for a new model, whilst Hepburn plays Jo, a bookish young woman who has an interest in philosophy.  It’s blindingly obvious where we're heading.   That I found the journey passably entertaining rather than crushingly tedious is testament to the charm of the two leads and to the skills of director Stanley Donen who brings visual flair and a light touch to proceedings.  Another plus is the lively presence of Kay Thompson (à new name to me) as Dick's swaggering boss.   At 103 minutes the film moves breezily al...

  This film is a fictionalised account of the Profumo scandal.  Profumo was the Secretary of State for War in the early 1960s when it emerged that he,à married man in his forties, had been enjoying a sexual liaison with Christine Keeler, a young woman barely twenty years of age. To make the scandal even juicier she was at the same time having a fling with a Soviet attaché who was probably a spy. It may be one of the biggest scandals in British political history but I’m not certain it has enough substance or interest to justify a feature length film with Ian Mckellen as Profumo (sporting a bizarre haircut). The film focuses on the relationship between Keeler (played by Joanne Whaley) and Stephen Ward (John Hurt) with the result that Profumo himself barely features, with Mckellen’s talents wasted. Ward was an osteopath whose clientele included many high profile people from the worlds of politics, business and entertainment . He had an eye fro pretty girls who he encouraged to ci...

This 1948 Billy Wilder film is set in post-War Berlin, which must have added to its interest for US audiences at the time.  Wilder and his co-writer Charles Brackett do a great job of smuggling into the story details about the challenges of rebuilding Germany after the War, and the suffering the civilian population had endured. In addition of course it wouldn’t be a Wilder film without some dark humour. We learn that on the day Berlin’s gas supply is restored there are 160 suicides.  Hitler and Eva Braun killing themselves after marrying in the bunker is described as the ‘perfect honeymoon’.  There are some references to gas chambers and shaved heads which made me wince. The film doesn’t shy away from the fact that US servicemen in Berlin are trading small necessities and luxuries of life for sexual favours.  In fact this activity is front and central to the story. Captain Pringle has no intention of returning home to Iowa given that he is enjoying a relationship wit...