Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

This is a decidedly odd Australian film starring two US actors, Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis, which is a kind of inversion of ‘Duel’ in that the hero of this story (played by Keach) is the truck driver, who goes by the name of Quid. He's a singular character  who plays harmonica whilst listening to Mozart, keeps up a one-sided conversation with his pet dingo Boswell, and is apt to quote lines of poetry at the drop of a hat. There’s a serial killer on the loose who is murdering and dismembering young girls. Quid, admittedly on the basis of not a whole load of evidence, begins to suspect the driver of a green van to be the killer. When he picks up Pamela (Lee Curtis) they immediately strike up a rapport and she’s more than happy to help him prove his theory, especially when it becomes apparent that the van driver is trying to frame Quid.  This leads to a suspenseful sequence which has echoes of ‘Rear Window’ when she climbs into the Van to try to get evidence, especially to ...

This is one of those quirky small scale films that Powell and Pressburger seemed to excel in.  . It’s 1943 and we’re among an odd collection of scientist types who are beavering away somewhere in the bowels of Whitehall, working on weapons research or who knows what, one of whom is Sammy, the main protagonist.     He's in constant pain from an artificial foot, which makes him prone to grumpiness and to self-pity.  It also means he is often tempted to resort to alcohol. It's not a film that is overly full of dramatic incident, but there are two story arcs to follow. One concerns a dastardly new German weapon dropped from the sky: a small cylinder which contains a booby-trap bomb which goes off if anyone is foolish enough to handle it clumsily. The climax of the film is an eerie and suspenseful sequence on Chesil Beach where Sammy has the unenviable task of defusing one of these bombs.   The other, more interesting, story arc concerns Sammy and Susa...

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...

Middleclass white Americans in the 1950s never had it so good, but that doesn't mean they were happy, as William Holden's character, Hal, discovers when he turns up in a small Kansas town.  He's planning to look up an old college friend, Alan (Cliff Robertson),  whose father is probably the richest guy in town and who may offer Hal a job . One of the first people Hal happens to meet is 19-year old Madge (Kim Novak) who's the prettiest gal in town, and who just happens to be dating Alan (it's a small world).  But is she happy?  Not at all.  Turns out she doesn't love Alan and doesn't feel that she will fit into the country club set.   She is also prone to complaining that people only like her because she's pretty.  Fair enough, except she doesn't seem to have much else to offer by way of personality or talents.  Unlike her younger sister Millie, say, who has just won a scholarship.  Needless to say Millie isn't happy either, because she e...

Anthony Asquith made something of a speciality of directing adaptations of plays, this being a prime example.  He was clearly confident enough in the material that he makes no effort to make this film cinematic in any way, not even adding any music. It all takes place at an army barracks where the court martial of Major Carrington VC is happening; indeed we spend a high proportion of the running time in a single bare room where the trial is conducted. But it's not at all boring, given that the play is in its quiet way a very effective drama, and that the cast is more than capable of putting it over.   Carrington (David Niven) is accused of stealing money fraudulently, and his defence is that he did it out of necessity and that he had informed his commanding officer, Colonel Henniker, of what he was doing.  Henniker, who envies Carrington's war record and his popularity with the men under him, denies this. One person who can help corroborate Carrington's story is his ...

This animation was a big hit with critics, for whom it is a heart wrenching story about friendship.  So I am rather embarrassed to say that I wasn't that taken by it, to the point of almost nodding off during the middle section. It's set in a 1980s New York inhabited by animals rather than humans. The main character is a dog (let's call him Dog) who is lonely, so he buys a robot companion (Robot). They hit if off straightaway but their first visit to the beach ends badly when Robot loses power and is stranded there, where he has to stay until the beach is reopened next summer. So we then get a series of episodes mainly comprising of Robot dreaming of being reunited with Dog, or of Dog either trying and failing to repair Robot or occupying himself some other way. The ending is a major surprise in that Dog and Robot are not reunited.   Instead Robot ends up in a scrapyard and gets repaired (in a fashion) by a new owner.  Meanwhile Dog buys himself a new robot companion...