Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

This film (directed by Zoltán Korda) is one of several adaptations of the famous novel by AEW Mason, set against the backdrop of the British army's tribulations in the Sudan in the 1880s and 1890s, and is (according to Wikipedia) the best of them. I dare say each adaptation plays around with the story, but the essentials are firstly, that Harry Faversham is accused of cowardice by three erstwhile army comrades for resigning his commission just before his regiment ships out to Egypt, and secondly, he redeems himself by going out to Egypt, disguising himself as a native, and rescuing said ex-comrades.  The four feathers of the title refers to white feathers that are sent to Faversham by those ex-comrades as a symbol of his cowardice, as they see it, plus for good measure one from his fiancée, Ethne, prior to breaking off their engagement. To add some more colour to the story, one of the three, Durrance (here played by Ralph Richardson) goes blind with sunstroke, and upon being i...

This 1939 film is the first collaboration between Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, so  I was quite prepared for it to be a bit odd, but I didn't expect the first half of it to be quite as disorientating as it was. The year is 1917, and the two main characters are a German U-boat commander, Hardt (played by Conrad Veidt) and Fräulein Tiel (Valerie Hobson), his contact in an espionage plot to destroy a significant proportion of the British Fleet at Scapa Flow. She is pretending to be a schoolteacher,  Miss Burnett, on the Orkney Islands, and her home forms a base for a few days for her and Hardt, plus a disillusioned Royal Navy officer, Ashington, who is prepared to betray his country. As I was watching this I was thinking, wow, am I really supposed to be rooting for them to succeed?  Surely not, especially since there is a sinister bit of business early on where German agents drug the real Miss Burnett and then throw her off a cliff. Admittedly Hardt seems a de...

I wasn’t keen to see this film because I hate the thought of someone being ridiculed or mistreated simply because of the way they look (so no, I have no intention of ever seeing 'The Elephant Man'). I also feared that this 1939 adaptation of a classic novel of Gothic romanticism might be rather heavy going and sentimental, especially given the pathos inherent in the relationship between Quasimodo and Esmeralda (or so I assumed).   So I was pleasantly surprised by how entertaining and dynamic this film is, and by how little running time is taken up by Quasimodo and Esmeralda.  However when they are together there is  one moment that genuinely moved me, when Esmeralda gives him water after he has been flogged in the market square. The source novel runs to over 900 pages, so there is no shortage of characters and plot machinations to keep the viewer intrigued and entertained, including a murder which quite took me by surprise. In order to bring medieval Paris to life no...