Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

In 1944 director Otto Preminger and actor Dana Andrews combined to great effect with the film 'Laura', so I guess it's no surprise that the following year they got together again for another crime film. In 'Laura', Andrews played a police detective who falls in love with a woman whom he's never met and whom he presumes has been murdered, only to discover that she is alive, whereas in this film he plays a drifter, Eric, who falls in love with a woman who's very much alive, only for her to be murdered. The woman in question is a diner waitress, Stella, played by Linda Darnell who possessed the kind of sultry beauty that was big in the 1940s. Eric is so taken with her that he wants to marry her but for that he's going to need some big money.  No problem because even though he's only been in town a few days he's a bit of a charmer, and he already has his eye on June, who is rich.  She has led a sheltered life (she plays the church organ, reads books ...

In this delightful 1984 comedy Woody Allen plays the title character, a small-time theatrical agent, who is extremely loyal and dedicated to his clients, no matter how hopeless they are. Sadly that loyalty is often not reciprocated on the rare occasions when one of his clients hits the big time, and the  plot concerns one such client, Lou Canova, a singer who once was big and who is now attempting a comeback. The other main character is Lou's mistress, Tina Vitale, played by Mia Farrow.  Lou wants her to be present at a big concert he has coming up, with Danny pretending to be her boyfriend. As a result of T ina having an ex-boyfriend who still loves her, and who happens to be a gangster, c omplications ensue in which the gangster wants Danny killed. It's a light and entertaining story in which Farrow shines, partly down to the simple fact that she is playing very much against type as the brassy, fast-talking Tina. Allen extracts the humour you would expect from his roster of ...

The setting for this 1955 psychological thriller, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, is a Parisian boarding school for boys, run by a headmaster who is both married to one of the teachers and having an indiscreet affair with another (it is France after all). He’s a nasty piece of work who physically and emotionally abuses his wife, Christina, whom he only seems to have married  for her money (apparently she owns the school, which stuck me as weird, but never mind). Because he is so unpleasant it seems that his mistress, Nicole, has taken Christina under her wing, even to the extent of concocting a plan to murder the guy.  Christina is rather weak-willed but Nicole (who has a very strong personality) manages to persuade her to be an accomplice to the crime. There is considerable suspense in the first half of the film arising from whether the plan will succeed, which essence it is to drug the husband so as to be able to drown him in a bathtub, before transferring the body to the...

I wasn’t expecting that much from this obscure 1942 film by the Boulting brothers (Roy directed it, John produced it) especially since it seemed like it had a supernatural element to it, which I have an aversion to. It starts with an amusing scene, in Chicago of all places, which serves to establish that the British lighthouse keeper at Thunder Rock in Lake Michigan is an odd cove (he hasn’t been cashing his pay cheques). So we’re off to the lighthouse by way of a seaplane piloted by Streeter (played by James Mason) who is an old friend of Charleston, the lighthouse keeper (played by Michael Redgrave). The two friends have an argument because Streeter disapproves of his friend trying to become a recluse when Streeter has himself enlisted in the Chinese air force to help them in their war with Japan (the year being 1939). Anyway the visitors leave so that we can spend the rest of the film at the lighthouse with just Charleston for company. Except that it’s not quite accurate to say that...

This highly regarded film from 1948 has the unusual setting of a foreign embassy in London,  and  is directed by Carol Reed from a short story written and adapted by Graham Greene. Ralph Richardson plays Baines, the butler there who is unhappily married to the head housekeeper, and who has for a few months been conducting an affair with Julie, a foreign typist at the embassy. Things come to a head one weekend when Julie, realising that Mrs Baines will never agree to a divorce, tells Baines that she is returning home.  Around the same time Mrs Baines learns of the affair, leading to a violent argument with her husband.   When a few minutes later she falls to her death from a window ledge, unseen by anyone, landing at the foot of the embassy's huge staircase, B aines reasonably assumes she must have slipped and fallen down the staircase.  The police are brought in and when their investigation reveals that Baines’ explanation is inconsistent with her injuries, and ...

Twenty years have elapsed since we saw Renton walking into the sunset with drug money he has stolen from Begbie and Sick Boy.  And unsurprisingly it is Renton who in the intervening years had made the best go of leading a normal life.  He has been living in Amsterdam, got married, and has held down an accountancy-type job. But now his wife is divorcing him and he is about to lose his job, so he is back in town to look up his old mates, just in time in fact to stop Spud killing himself. Spud has tried and failed to get off drugs, and as a result he is estranged from Gail and his son Fergus, and he has just about reached the end of the line. Likewise Sick Boy has a wife and child in London he never sees, so he now has the crazy idea of setting up a brothel to be run by a young Bulgarian woman, Veronika, whom he is in a very casual relationship with. Meanwhile Begbie has just escaped from prison, and still has the old anger management problems, so what his reaction will be if and...

If you wrote out a bare bones plot summary of this film it might sound as though it is a sad tale of heroin addicts, in which inevitably there are a couple of fatalities, one of a baby. So the fact that it's often very funny and in a weird way uplifting is testament to the screenplay (an adaptation by John Hodge of the novel by Irvine Welsh) and to how Danny Boyle manages to bring it to life in surprising and surreal ways which had stuck in my memory even if I struggled to recall much about the story. Although it could be said to be an ensemble piece, none of the characters had stayed with me other than the narrator, Renton, and Begbie, the one guy who doesn't take drugs but who has severe anger management issues.   Renton is played in uncompromising fashion by Ewan MacGregor.  He's not an actor I naturally warm to but there's no doubt that his energy is a key element in the film's success.  I appreciated that the film doesn't try to make Renton especially likea...

In 1863 an all-black regiment in the Union army suffered heavy losses in a futile attack on a Confederate fort, and their courage inspired many other black Americans to enlist, helping the Union side to eventually triumph in the Civil War. This film tells the story of the regiment and their young white colonel, Robert Gould Shaw.   This is done in a conventional manner and therefore the result might have been a rather dull piece of hagiography, but f ortunately this is not the case, thanks to the unobtrusive direction by Edward Zwick and to some fine performances. When we first meet Shaw he is a fresh faced 23-year old who is a captain in the Union army due to his parents being wealthy and well connected Bostonians. Shaw’s first experience of warfare is an ignominious one in which his men are routed and he falls to the ground, pretending to be dead. But back home he is made colonel of the first ever black regiment.  It’s a promotion but a daunting one given that his men l...

I was in the mood for something undemanding and comforting, so I decided to watch Kenneth Branagh's take on the Agatha Christie classic. Although I have to confess that this is not one of my favourite Christies.  It's one of those stories of hers where once you know the outcome there's not a lot of pleasure in going over it again because neither the plot mechanics nor the characters are that interesting. And unlike other stories of hers that have been adapted (such as 'Death on the Nile' and 'Evil Under The Sun') this story doesn't lend itself to a light or camp approach. We start off with a dire but mercifully short episode in Jerusalem which introduces us to Hercule Poirot.  Well, a version of the famous Belgian detective at least.  Not one that is very close to Christie's creation - that would of course be David Suchet's portrayal on TV.  Nor a version that has Peter Ustinov's charm. Instead this Poirot is very active (he can run for examp...

Having just watched a disappointing Western directed by Henry Hathaway (‘Nevada Smith’) I didn’t have high hopes for this one by the same director released two years later in 1968. However I was pleasantly surprised. Intriguingly the basic story is a Western version of ‘And Then There Were None’ except here it is five characters who are getting knocked off, rather than the ten in Agatha Christie's original.  The five in question are guilty of murdering a newcomer to the town who is discovered to be  cheating at cards during a poker game.   A seventh player at the game (Van, played by Dean Martin) had stepped away at the crucial moment and was unable to prevent what happened. He doesn’t approve of the lynching but nor does he feel like helping the marshal arrest the guilty parties.  Maybe that’s because their ringleader Nick (a superb performance by Roddy McDowell) is the brother of Nora who is sweet on Van.   Presumably Nora is aware that Nick is an obnoxio...

Nevada Smith was a character in the hit 1964 film ‘The Carpetbaggers’, a former Wild West outlaw who becomes a film star in the 1920s.  Given that the film hints at Smith's early life being an eventful one, including a prison escape, s omeone had the bright idea of making this film two years later which tells the story of that life. Who better to play Smith than rising superstar Steve McQueen who had already enjoyed success in both a Western (‘The Magnificent Seven’) and a prison escape film (‘The Great Escape’)? Given that the whole thing is directed by veteran Henry Hathaway (who knew where to point the camera) and written by John Michael Hayes who had written the screenplay for 'The Carpetbaggers’ (not to mention 'Rear Window’ ten years earlier) what could possibly go wrong? Well quite a lot as far as the critics were concerned, and I too found this a hard slog.   For starters McQueen is badly miscast.  It’s not simply that he is about ten years too old, it’s more...

This 1964 French film musical, written and directed by Jacques Demy, is entirely sung, by a cast whose voices are all dubbed.  Add to this that the score, by Michel Legrand, contains only one memorable song and one would think this would be a film to avoid. But no, it won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and I for one was totally taken by it, Francophile that I am. It helps that it stars a young Catherine Deneuve, and that it is gorgeous to look at despite being shot entirely on location in the port city of Cherbourg.  Demy achieved the picture's vibrant look by the careful repainting of facades, the changing of wallpapers, etc. The story itself isn't very complicated, featuring as it does barely half a dozen characters, but on the other hand it does go in some unexpected directions.  We start off with a couple of young lovers, Geneviève and Guy, who are separated when Guy is drafted to go fight in the Algerian war, but not before a night of passion, whic...

Depending on your point of view this 1984 science-fiction film is either a brilliant satire or an excessively violent piece of trash.   As a centrist dad I necessarily fall somewhere in between these two extremes.   It is set in some near future where a mega-company (Omni Consumer Products or OMP) is being paid to help the Detroit police force, which certainly needs it judging by the amount of crime going on.  When a cop (Murphy, played by Peter Weller) is shot to pieces and killed by a gang of sadistic criminals what remains of his body is used by OMP to create a cyborg policeman (Robocop). It's debatable who are the most obnoxious characters on view, the aforementioned criminals or the top executives at OMP who have lost any semblance of humanity in their desire for money and power. Not altogether surprisingly it emerges that the head criminal and the CEO of OMP are in cahoots, and the story ends up as a kind of revenge tale with Robocop going after both of these villai...

This 1951 comedy starring Alec Guinness has a weird science-fiction premise to it, the possibility of creating a  synthetic cloth that never wears out.   Sidney Stratton (Guinness) is obsessed with the idea, and given that he might be a brilliant scientist (rather than a simple crackpot) maybe he's the one to invent such a cloth.  No-one though is prepared to back his ideas so he has to get himself employed at textile mills in order to carry out experiments surreptitiously, before then getting fired when he is discovered. This is the pattern until he meets Daphne Birnley (played by the delightful Joan Greenwood) who thinks he might be on to something and persuades her father, who owns a mill, to give him all the resources he needs. Cue a series of comic explosions, but then (eureka) Sidney succeeds!  It will revolutionise the clothing industry and Mr Birnley is all set to tell the press of this amazing breakthrough.  Not only is the cloth indestructible but it r...

This 1967 Western by Monte Hellman (a new name to me) is a real oddity.  It has been described as an existential Western, a kind of ‘Waiting for Godot’ and it certainly has a minimalist narrative which after some initial scene setting reduces to the four main characters making their way across hot and inhospitable terrain. Of these characters an ex-bounty hunter, Willett, is ost ensibly the main one (played by the veteran Warren Oates). He's a stoical kind of guy who’s not easily taken in, unlike  his young companion Coley who is not very bright and is an accident waiting to happen. Then there is Millie Perkins playing someone given in the cast list as simply 'The Woman' (yes, it's that sort of film).  She's the driving character behind what little story there is, hiring Willett and Coley to take her to a place called Kingsley.    She won’t say why but Willett thinks he knows why. Willett has a brother, Coigne, and at the very start of the film we learn that Coi...

I recently watched 'Criss Cross', a film noir directed by Robert Siodmak and starring Burt Lancaster, which I was very underwhelmed by.  Nevertheless I approached this film noir, with the same director and the same star, with high hopes, as it is a highly regarded adaptation of an Ernest Hemingway short story.  To add to my interest the story was adapted again, in the 1960s, in a terrific version directed by Don Siegel which I have fond if distant memories of. When I say adaptation that’s a bit of a stretch.   Judging from the plot summary on Wikipedia, Hemingway’s story is quite sparse - all that happens is that a couple of hired hit men turn up in a small town, find their victim, and shoot him dead.  The reader is left with the  intriguing question of why the victim doesn’t try to escape from his killers or at least plead for his life. So it would be more accurate to say that this film (like the later one) is inspired by Hemingway’s story in that it att...

This is maybe a unique John Ford Western in that it is about real Wild West characters and events.  In this case we’re in Tombstone so of course the film must climax with the gunfight at the OK Corral.   Not that you would know this from the title, which was apparently chosen by Ford simply because he liked the song.   Accordingly a fictional character, Clementine Carter, was created as a love interest for Wyatt Earp. Many other liberties were taken so that what we have here bears very little resemblance to historical fact. This is a story about two warring families, the Earps and the Clantons.  The former consist of four brothers at the outset, although two are killed by Old Man Clanton before we get to the gunfight itself.   The murder of the first brother prompts Wyatt to become marshal but if the viewer is expecting an exciting revenge tale they will be disappointed. Instead Ford directs at a leisurely pace, with the Clantons not much to be seen, and Wyatt i...

Apparently it was Katherine Hepburn who when perusing a draft script for this film made the astute observation that Ginger gave Fred sex appeal, and he gave her class. That’s so true, even in this film where Ginger’s character Dale seems plenty classy, judging by her lavish London apartment, which  is directly below that of Edward Everett Horton’s theatrical producer Horace Hardwick.   Naturally the star of his latest production, Jerry Travers (Astaire) feels the urge  to do some tap dancing in the apartment (why wouldn't he?) which annoys Dale by keeping her awake.  Never mind, they are soon falling for each other and everything seems set fair. Except that  due to an unfortunate misunderstanding Dale then learns (so she thinks) that Jerry is Horace and therefore a married man.  Cue much hilarity given that Mrs Hardwick is a matchmaker who is keen to bring Dale and Jerry together. Mrs Hardwick is staying at a hotel in Venice so that is where the rest o...

This 1942 wartime drama opens with the viewer being welcomed to the peaceful corner of rural southern England that is the fictional village of Bramley End, where the so-called 'Battle of Bramley End' took place. Strikingly, we are casually informed that this 'battle' took place some time ago, before Hitler was defeated.  That the War would eventually be won must have been reassuring news for the audience of the day, and it is the first hint that what we are watching has a propaganda element to it. Not that it is without artistic merit, far from it given that it is based on a 1940 Graham Greene short story and that it is directed by a decent (if now forgotten) director, Alberto Calvacanti (who rather pretentiously just referred to himself as Calvacanti). The intriguing premise of the story is that the village is taken over by a group of German soldiers masquerading as British, in order to support an imminent full-scale German invasion, their role being to interfere with ...