Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

We are in the South Atlantic in World War II for a cat-and-mouse conflict between a US destroyer and a German U-boat. So cue the familiar tropes. Depth charges vs torpedoes.  Tense periods of silence wherein a guy with a headset tries to work out where the hell the enemy is.  Captains able to read the mind of the enemy captain one minute, yet making a foolish error the next.  The sub being taken down to a depth it’s not designed for. It’s all here.  Admittedly we don’t get the scene where the sub ejects clothes etc to give the impression it is kaput but by way of compensation the destroyer captain does order his men to set fires on deck to exaggerate the damage it has incurred. So yes, this film is predictable but it’s directed well enough to hold my attention and to generate some excitement at the end.  There’s even a nice visual moment when we follow a fishing line down from the deck of the destroyer through the surface of the water to reveal the U-boat below ...

Very confusingly there is no character called Colonel Blimp in this 1943 classic by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The central character in the film is in fact Major-General Clive Candy.  When we first meet him in 1942, when he is well into his sixties, he does indeed seem to be a Colonel Blimp type,  Blimp being a cartoon character created in 1934 who is pompous, irascible and jingoistic, and associated with reactionary views.   But we then embark on a series of flashbacks starting forty years earlier, taking us through Candy's life, which help us to see him in a much more sympathetic light. In 1902 he is on leave from the Second Boer War (where he earned a Victoria Cross) but soon he is on his way to Berlin to help a stranger, Edith Hunter, counter the spread of anti-British propaganda.   Candy is rather hot-headed and inclined to speak his mind, so he soon finds himself fighting a duel with a Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (chosen by drawing lots fro...

I watched these two adaptations of the Chandler novel on consecutive nights, and then quickly raced through the book itself for good measure. As he was wont to do Chandler created the novel from short stories he had previously written, in this instance no less than three of them.  In the novel these stories become two cases  which Marlowe is working on which at first appear to be unrelated but of course turn out not to be.  It's to Chandler's credit that he manages to connect them in a way which doesn't rely on mere coincidence. In the more memorable case, Marlowe is helping an ex-con Moose Malloy track down 'his little Velma' who he is still in love with despite her not writing to him or visiting him whilst he was serving time. In the other case, Marlowe is trying to get to the bottom of two related mysteries: who killed a guy called Marriott, and who stole a jade necklace belonging to Helen Grayle, the young and beautiful wife of a much older, but rich, man. Marlo...