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EMMA

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About a third of the way in I was feeling that this Jane Austen adaptation was OK but all a bit lightweight. Emma is happily arranging everyone’s lives to her satisfaction, absolutely confident that she is always right. In the case of her recently acquired best friend, Harriet, who is new to the area, Emma’s influence is potentially disastrous, causing Harriet to turn down an offer of marriage from a suitor, Robert Martin, whom Emma considers to be too low on the social ladder. Other than this though there was not a lot to report.  Bill Nighy was being Bill Nighy as Emma’s dad and Johnny Flynn was hovering in the background as George, a childhood friend of Emma's (I think - his status was rather unclear to me) who disapproves of her haughtiness and interfering ways. Thankfully though things pick up with the introduction of several new characters, notably Frank Churchill who Emma has her eye on, and the mysterious Jane Fairfax who is annoyingly accomplished and opaque. I’m not sure ...
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SHIP OF FOOLS

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This 1965 film couldn't be made now.  Imagine asking an American audience to sit through 150 minutes of assorted characters on an ocean voyage doing nothing much, other than performing some sort of allegory as to the nature of human existence, where the two biggest roles go to an Austrian actor and a French actress! Even in the 1960s it can't have seemed a very commercial proposition, except that it is an adaptation of a 1962 bestseller.   Given that it takes place in 1934 on a German passenger ship going from Mexico to Germany, via Spain, I was expecting Nazism to crop up, and indeed it does. There is a German salesman, Lowenthal, who is Jewish, so naturally he is excluded from sitting at the captain's table at mealtimes.  Prominent among the German passengers who do enjoy the honour of sitting there is a businessman, Rieber, played by  José Ferrer, who dominates the conversation, loudly  extolling the virtues of nationalism and eugenics.   The c...
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TWELVE O’CLOCK HIGH

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This is a 1949 film about US bombing of targets in Europe in World War II which is almost entirely set on a n air base in England, there being no action to speak of apart from a bombing sequence near the end which skilfully integrates actual combat footage from the war. I'm making the film sound dull but quite the opposite, I found it curiously gripping thanks to the excellent screenplay which explores the subject of leadership:  how best to get the 'maximum effort' from your men, and how much we can reasonably expect by way of sacrifice. The answer to the second question seems to be to drive people until the point that they either commit suicide (as happens here, off-camera) or suffer a nervous or mental breakdown. The person doing the driving is General Frank Savage (played by Gregory Peck) who gets the job of knocking into shape a USAAF group which is underperforming, possibly because the previous commander got too close to his men.  Savage is made of sterner stuff, appl...
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FRACTURED

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Count me in for any film with the same premise as in ‘The Lady Vanishes’ i.e. someone vanishing but whose existence is then denied by everyone except the unfortunate protagonist. In this variation, a daughter, Peri, (accompanied by her mother) is taken for a CAT scan at a hospital, and then disappears.  At least that is what her father Ray claims, despite all the hospital staff denying that his daughter was ever admitted, whilst there is a record of Ray being admitted that day for a head injury. Peri is at the hospital in the first place because she suffered a potentially fatal fall at a nearby gas station, which we see happen early on, although there is a significant ambiguity as to how badly she is injured. Ray manages to get a couple of passing cops involved and to be fair to them they do a competent job of trying to get to the bottom of things.  This comes down to either Ray is suffering from delusions, or there is something sinister going on involving the harvesting of bo...
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CRISS CROSS

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On the face of it this film noir looks promising: it has  a decent director (Robert Siodmak) and cast (Burt Lancaster, Dan Duryea), and some critics do like it. On the other hand some critics don’t and (spoiler alert) I am with them. In fact I don’t think anything about this film works.   For starters there's a love triangle at the heart of the story which I never bought for one moment, in which Yvonne de Carlo plays a tepid femme fatale who both Lancaster and Duryea are supposed to be in love with, obsessively so in Lancaster's case.  Her character is so underdeveloped that when there's an  indication towards the end that she might have been planning to betray Lancaster all along, rather than opportunistically, it's really hard to care, so it doesn't much matter that we never do find out what she was up to, if anything.   Siodmak has a nice visual style but he can’t get any dramatic tension going, partly due to a meandering screenplay,   I perked...
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THE MAJOR AND THE MINOR

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This romantic comedy was the directorial debut of Billy Wilder, who also co-wrote it.  Later in his career he would achieve comedy immortality with the idea of men masquerading as women, in ‘Some Like It Hot’.  Here to rather less comic effect he has Ginger Rogers pretending to be a 12-year old in order to pay the train fare home.   Not that it’s a bad film; quite the contrary it has its fair share of funny lines and the somewhat farcical plot is neatly developed and then resolved. It features an unusual setting in the second half, of a military school.   Considering that Wilder is often criticised for being tasteless he manages to avoid all the pitfalls inherent in the basic setup, he even gets away with Susan and the Major, Philip, (played by Ray Milland) sleeping in separate beds in a railway compartment.  I was amused that when Susan says she has been warned about strangers Philip thinks that merely introducing himself gets over that problem. But this h...
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WHEN EIGHT BELLS TOLL

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I have a clear memory of seeing this film at the cinema when it came out in 1971, which means I was fourteen years old when I saw it.  So out of nostalgia I revisited it although I had no memory of any specific scene or moment. As I watched it nothing rang any bell with me, until  near the end when Anthony Hopkins slightly loosens the front of a blouse of a young woman so that she can distract a guard. For some reason this moment evidently created a memorable erotic frisson for the young me.  The woman then strokes the barrel of the guard’s gun suggestively and asks whether it is loaded. That I had no recollection of this unsubtle innuendo suggests it passed right over the head of 14-year-old me. This is Alistair Maclean’s adaptation of his own bestseller and the producers hoped it would repeat the success of ‘Where Eagles Dare’ and maybe even be the start of a new franchise to rival the James Bond movies. But it was a commercial flop for which the producers seemed to hol...
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