Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

This 1932 film runs for just over one hour but still manages to pack quite a punch.   There's not a moment wasted.  A short initial scene on a yacht introduces us to Rainsford, a big game hunter, played by Joel McCrea.  He's asked to empathise with the hunted, to which he confidently asserts that he will always be the hunter, so that's the theme of the film introduced in neon lights right there. Then the yacht is shipwrecked, and only Rainsford survives, washed up on an island in which the only dwelling is a sinister mansion owned by the equally sinister Count Zaroff (memorably played by Leslie Banks).   At least, I found him sinister but Rainsford is surprisingly chilled out, all things considered.   There are two other guests, a brother and sister, Martin and Eve, who coincidentally or not have also suffered a shipwreck.   Rainsford isn't bright enough to realise that Zaroff might be moving warning lights so as to deliberately cause sh...

If this film is anything to go by life in Scandinavia circa 900AD was no bed of roses whether you were a king or a peasant. If the former you might get bumped off by your brother, as happens here in the opening scenes when King Aurvandill (an unrecognisable Ethan Hawke) is killed by Fjolnir.  If the latter you were at risk of being the victim of rape and pillage raids or of being enslaved. Our protagonist, Amleth gets to see both sides of this coin.  As a young boy at the start he sees his father Aurvandill get killed.  After fleeing for his life, he ends up years later surreptitiously joining a gang of slaves which is en route to Iceland, having been acquired by Fjolnir who has lost his kingdom and gone down in the world. At this stage all Amleth can think about is avenging his father’s death and rescuing his mother, Queen Gudrun, who was last seen being carried off by Fjolnir.  However his straightforward desire to wreak vengeance suffers a couple of complications....

This 1967 Sidney Lumet film is an adaptation of John le Carré's first novel, 'Call for the Dead', which features George Smiley who would of course reappear in many later le  Carré novels, although for legal reasons his character name here is Charles Dobbs. Dobbs is played by James Mason, which is decent enough casting.  Less satisfactory is Swedish actress Harriet Andersson as his wife Ann, given that she is over twenty years younger than Mason.   Which is not to say that Andersson doesn't give a good performance.  In fact all of the cast are up to the assignment. Simone Signoret is memorable in the two speaking scenes she gets, and I liked both Harry Andrews and Kenneth Haigh as Dobbs' two sidekicks as he tries to get to the bottom of the mystery of the apparent suicide of a Foreign Office mandarin.   Roy Kinnear gives a nicely judged performance as a small-time criminal caught up unwittingly in the espionage goings-on. Freddie Young used this fi...

This 1932 film is an adaptation of a Noël Coward play directed by Ernst Lubitsch.  If the combination of Coward and Lubitsch suggests a concoction that might be a little too arch for its own good, one can rest easy because it seems that screenwriter Ben Hecht coarsened the play almost beyond recognition. And if that wasn’t enough coarsening, the unlikely duo of Gary Cooper and Frederic March play the two male leads, rather than Lubitsch’s initial choice of Ronald Colman and Leslie Howard. Cooper and March are a struggling painter and writer respectively, eking out an existence in Paris. When they meet Gilda (played by the wonderful Miriam Hopkins) they both fall for her. She for her part seems equally attracted to both, creating a Jules-et-Jim-type love triangle. Rather shockingly, one imagines for cinema-going audiences at the time, they agree to live together, but as Gilda states explicitly, with “no sex”. This film was made just before the Hays Code came into effect, so that it ...

The title song over the opening credits of this 1959 Douglas Sirk melodrama informs us that à life without love is just an 'imitation of life'. Most obviously this description applies to the main character, Lora, played by Lana Turner, who at the start of the film is a struggling wannabe actress.  Budding photographer Steve proposes marriage but makes the mistake of linking it to her giving up on her acting dreams. Big mistake!  She has a burning ambition to tread the boards, which means love in the form of a life with Steve is tossed aside.  She of course goes on to become an incredibly successful star of the stage (it’s that sort of film) but there’s not much love in her life.  After the elapse of some ten years, and when we are getting towards the end of the film, she finally does decide to retire and marry Steve (h e has somehow remained unattached in the meantime  despite being handsome and becoming a successful advertising executive ). Turner, and John Gav...

In a recent Guardian poll of writers, critics and academics 'The End of the Affair' by Graham Greene was rated as one of the 100 best novels of all time. I don't disagree.  In my youth I was totally gripped by this story so much so that in my memory at least I read it in a single sitting, finishing it late into the night. So I couldn't pass up the opportunity to watch this adaptation, especially since it stars Deborah Kerr, possibly my favourite actress.  Even so I approached it with some trepidation given the mixed reviews it received. It divides into two halves.  The first is narrated by Maurice, an American write living and working in London during World War II.  He meets Sarah, the wife of boring civil servant Henry, and they instantly fall in love and begin a passionate affair.  When Maurice survives (miraculously?) a bomb falling on his house Sarah breaks off the affair without explanation. A year later Maurice bumps into Henry, who is worried that Sarah m...

A film that has always been on my must-see list is 'The Thin Man', but so far the opportunity to watch it has never arisen.   So I decided to make do instead with the 1936 sequel, which also has a very high reputation. . It stars William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles.  He's a retired private detective and she's a charming heiress, and they have an easy-going relationship in which they gently tease each other, and drink copious quantities of alcohol whilst never seeming to get more than tipsy. As a bonus, this film also features James Stewart in very much a supporting role, because as late as 1936 he wasn't yet that big a star.   The first 'Thin Man' film was based on a novel by Dashiell Hammett which was something of a departure from his normal hardboiled style in that it was lighter and more comedic.  Although he didn't go on to write any more novels featuring Mr and Mrs Charles, he contributed the storyline for this follow-up. Based on ...

This 1950 mystery thriller is a sub-par Hitchcock film which fails to deliver the thrills and suspense we expect (although to my astonishment it gets 92% on Rotten Tomatoes). The main protagonist is Eve, an aspiring actress, who is in love with Jonnie, who has got himself into a spot of bother, to say the least.  As he explains to Eve (in a flashback which we are thrown into, rather jarringly, at the start of the film) famous actress Charlotte Inwood has killed her husband, but now because of his attempts to protect her it will look to the police that he is the murderer.   As to why he helped Charlotte, it seems that there has been some relationship going on between the two.  Despite this, Jonnie seems to expect Eve to help hide him, which she does. In fact she goes far and beyond this, because the rest of the film is taken up with her trying to prove to the police that Charlotte is guilty.   It is only at the end of the film that she (and we) learn that i...

This 1947 film is the start of a run of three extremely impressive films directed by Carol Reed, the others being 'The Fallen Idol' and 'The Third Man'.   It stars James Mason as Johnny, an IRA leader who gets badly wounded during a robbery.  Given that  he killed a bank employee (albeit somewhat unintentionally)  it's clear that he has to die by the end of the film, which made me fret that the journey getting there might be a bit of a downer. But I needn't have worried, such is the excellence of everything on view.   The black-and-white cinematography is stunning, and the visual compositions are such as to suggest that had be been born a few decades earlier Reed would have been an outstanding director of silent cinema.  Some of the scenes of men in silhouette trying to evade capture in the streets of Belfast anticipate what Reed would do even more strikingly in post-war Vienna two films later. Mason himself doesn't have to do that much other than...

This was a hugely successful film in its day (1953) but I hadn't got around to watching it until now, probably because I suspected (correctly as it turned out) that it wouldn't be my cup of tea, despite the presence of two of my faves, Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr. It's set in a US army base in Hawaii in 1941, before America enters World War II. Lancaster is an extremely capable First Sergeant and Kerr is the dissatisfied wife of his commanding officer.  Inevitably they start a passionate affair, the highlight of which is the iconic scene of them kissing on a beach at night.  Until now I hadn't really thought of Kerr as sexy but here she proves that there really wasn't any role she couldn't play convincingly, even one such as this where she is somewhat miscast. I was very happy whenever Lancaster and Kerr were on screen together but unfortunately their story is one of only three unfolding over the duration of the picture.   There's also a dull romance bet...

This is a 1961 British mystery comedy film, based on the 1957 novel '4.50 from Paddington' by Agatha Christie.   It stars Margaret Rutherford as Miss Jane Marple, but as a very different character to that in the novels.   Here she is an energetic, assertive and somewhat eccentric character which plays to Rutherford's strengths as a comedic actor.  It is also means that she can take a more active role in the solving of the crime, by becoming a maid in the household under suspicion, something which Christie's creation would never have done. Christie purists are likely to be offended by this take on the character.   In other respects though, the film follows the plot of the novel quite closely.  Unfortunately it is not one of Dame Agatha's best, in that due to the absence of any clues Miss Marple doesn't get to do any detection and it is well nigh impossible for her to solve the murder, despite her claim at the end to have done so. Whether Jane has c...

This is the second in a series of four films starring Margaret Rutherford as Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple, and t he studio was clearly very happy to repeat a winning formula since the structure of this picture is identical to the first. In both, Jane is witness to a murder, is not believed by the police, inserts herself among the suspects, and then traps the killer by using herself as bait. Again the suspects are primarily members of a family who stand to inherit money, and the film ends with the head of the family proposing marriage to Jane. In this case the patriarch is played by Robert Morley, and the scenes between him and Rutherford are of course a delight.  Also very funny is the dance scene towards the end in which Jane and Mr Stringer energetically do the Twist.  And Jane's outfit is something to behold! My main gripe is that as with the first film there's very little detection as such.  Although Jane claims to have worked out who the killer is it's very har...

This is the third film starring Margaret Rutherford as Agatha Christie’s Jane Marple and for me it’s probably the most satisfying. Thankfully there are some small changes to the formula of the first two films, signalled right from the off.  Instead of Jane witnessing or stumbling upon a murder, here she’s a member of a jury.  The other jury members, and long suffering Inspector Craddock, are convinced the defendant is guilty of murdering Mrs McGinty but Jane of course begs to differ, forcing a retrial and an opportunity for her to investigate. Compared with the two previous outings Jane actually does some serious detective work, and the mystery to be solved is more intriguing.   So ha ts off to the screenwriters who took the extremely complicated plot of an Hercule Poirot novel ‘Mrs McGinty’s Dead’ and totally rewrote it other than retaining the motive for the murder.   As before, the rewrite includes a means for Jane to embed herself within a group of suspects,...

Having failed to get to the end of the Bret Easton Ellis novel I’m very glad I could watch instead this excellent adaptation, which somehow got made despite Ellis himself thinking that his satire was unfilmable. I'm also glad that Christian Bale eventually was cast in the main role of Patrick Bateman; it's really hard to imagine anyone else playing the part. Bateman is a New York investment banker who, if you believe him, is also a serial killer although as the violence escalates and becomes more surreal it's unclear how much on the screen is real and how much is just in his head, Bateman being a classic case of an unreliable narrator. As a result the film is open to various interpretations, mine for what its worth being that the killings start off as being real before Bateman suffers a major meltdown and becomes prey to delusions. Ultimately maybe it doesn't matter because one thing is for sure, Bateman is one seriously disturbed individual.  Appropriately for someone ...

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.  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, 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 qualities her late mot...

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 advises him to simply make up stuff, which it  turns out that Wormold has a flair for, 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 every scene featuring either Coward, or Ralph Richardson as his boss, is a delight. But when the story takes a darker turn ...