Film review: Bank Holiday (1938)

I must admit I felt very impatient with just about every character in this film at one point or another.  We found it because it was Margaret "The Lady Vanishes" Lockwood's first big film (immediately before that one, actually) and, to be sure, she's very good in it, and, get this, it was directed by Carol "The Third Man" Reed... but...  That said, it's a fascinating slice of pre-WWII class-ridden British life, and everyone in it is good, it's just very frustrating to see everyone essentially so trapped.  The set up is that Lockwood is a nurse, Catherine, whose patient is an expectant mother having unspecified difficulties.  She feels for the father, who is a rather simpering toff in my estimation, who completely collapses when (inevitably) the wife dies in childbirth.  (And he rejects the baby, who survives, and won't even look at it!  And this doesn't turn her against him.)  In a case of bad timing, she is late for the train to a hot bank holiday weekend with her "friend" Geoff, who has been saving for months to afford the best hotel in "Bexborough" (Brighton?) and insufficiently enthusiastic when she gets there.  Geoff gets all pouty (every man in this film is obnoxious) even after she explains that her patient died, and is instantly suspicious (rightly, it turns out) that she's fallen for the husband (whom we see wandering about London, having every landmark remind him of his dead wife, in scenes intercut throughout the film) whose lighter she still has.  Also on the (ridiculously crowded) train are: a working class family, consisting of a fat husband, harried wife, obnoxious two boys and toddler girl, 

and a pair of young women, one of whom is "Miss Fulham," off to the Miss England pageant in Bexborough, 

and frantically jealous of the Miss Mayfair, who is also on the train, and getting all the attention.  These provide what passes for comic relief, although some of it is a bit too close to the bone (especially when the fat husband abandons his family to go to the pub - but don't worry, the wife eventually grows a spine by the end of the film, thanks to a dance with Geoff of all things).

Anyway, there are (predictably) no rooms at the inn, so everyone has to bunk down on the (crowded) beach.  The next day is more fun 

but Catherine can't stop thinking of the bereaved husband, and eventually gets it into her head that something terrible is going to happen to him and ditches Geoff (who ends up with Miss Fulham, who misses her competition to commiserate with him (she has also been dumped)) and catches a ride with the dishonest manager of a troupe of boardwalk entertainers absconding with the take.  Meanwhile our widower has been shown reading Shelley poems lauding suicide and somehow has access to a sophisticated chemistry set that can produce poisonous gases.  Will Catherine get there in time to save him?  Well, watch it if you're a Lockwood completist, but you can probably guess the answer.

First tentative lake-walk

 Frederick decidedly unsure about this...

Frozen River

It's been a few years since this happened.  It might not last, though - it's supposed to be in the 40s today.

Film review: Inspector Hornleigh Goes To It (1941)

The third and final installment of the Hornleigh films, two years after the first two, and firmly acknowledging the war.  It has the same director as the second one, different from the first (although both men have the last name "Forde" they appear to be unrelated).  There seems to be a bit of a shift in the portrayal of Hornleigh - maybe I'm misremembering but it seemed to me that he sounded more Cockney in the first two, and also he's occasionally as much of the butt of the joke as Bingham.  Indeed, the film begins with him dictating his memoirs to Bingham and they are ludicrously self-serving (and, as the hurt Bingham notes, have yet to mention him in their hundreds of pages).  He insists that the final chapter be headed "The Fifth Column" even though, as Bingham also notes, Hornleigh has never had anything to do with the Fifth Column.  But he will, he believes, because he has read about an incipient investigation that requires the nation's best lawmen and figures that includes him.  He is mocked by a new antagonist, fellow Inspector Blow, whom, it emerges, has actually been given the job.  But Hornleigh doesn't know this when he is called into a meeting involving top army brass and is smug as he goes in.  However, the job he's being given is simply to catch whomever it is has been stealing merchandise from army provisioners countrywide.  Worse yet, it requires him to enlist as a (very old) private in order to catch the crooks. Of course this means Bingham has to as well, and we see further scenes of Hornleigh's hypocrisy as he chides Bingham for planning to get out of a long march by feigning sickness just before he does just that.  However, Bingham scores a date with a nice barmaid, 

except that it quickly emerges that she has leaked things he told her to the secretive shortwave radio operator who has been transmitting secrets across to mainland Europe (the Fifth Column!), something the hated Blow reveals when he visits just as Hornleigh and Bingham are doing their bin duty as punishment having been caught ransacking a storehouse looking for clues and mistaken for the thieves.  Anyway, at this point we ditch the stolen provisions storyline and the army uniforms as our heroes start investigating the barmaid's suspicious dentist, obviously her link to the shortwave operator (who can't be caught because he broadcasts from a different place every night).  Hornleigh works out that the dentist and wife will be out one evening and our boys break in and find a safe with all kinds of useful information about contacts, when the doorbell rings and a very pushy patient demands that his aching tooth be removed.  Bingham is eventually forced to do this (with the help of gas) while the real dentist is upstairs, having come home unexpectedly.  But then, after helping the drugged, now missing two teeth, patient to a bus, Bingham returns to find the dentist dead (gassed) in his own chair.  Hornleigh goes upstairs to investigate, and after finding no one, decides to look for clues, leaving Bingham to telephone in the list of contacts from the safe.  And that's when the dentist's (young and gorgeous) wife returns...

From there we have a whole final act set in a small town, involving Hornleigh scaring off a rival history teacher candidate so that he can impersonate said teacher at a small private school, 

hotel shenanigans, a tragic postmaster, and an exciting finale on a mail train 

(that's rather fascinating) [In fact, when this film was released by 20th Century Fox in the US, it was called Mail Train, and the whole film begins with a disclaimer announcing that the real Royal Mail couldn't be manipulated in this way because of safeguards.]  Oh, and the provisions-theft-investigation?  Blow gets assigned that.  And Hornleigh gets proved prescient with his final chapter title.  It's a shame that after this film Alastair Sim was tired of being the bumbling Scot sidekick (at one point the villain describes Hornleigh and Bingham as "the tall one who looks intelligent but isn't and the short one who doesn't but is") and his departure ended the series.  He was too good to be contained!

Film review: Inspector Hornleigh on Holiday (1939)

Well, we enjoyed the first Hornleigh enough to invest in this one (also on suspiciously anonymous, menu-lacking DVD) and it was even better.  They really ramped up the comedy and there's some truly excellent dialogue and set pieces.  I just wish it was (a) a better print, and (b) came with subtitles (of course, these are available if you watch it on YouTube).  Thinking of setting up my own Criterion that specifically targets niche forgotten British movies.  We'd need access to whatever AI process Peter Jackson used on the WWI footage in They shall not grow old, ideally.  (Maybe we'd branch out into German silents, too, so we could do a really good Hands of Orlac, but I digress.)

Anyway, our film begins with our plucky pair, Hornleigh and Sim's Bingham, in civvies, staring glumly out of the window 

of one of those notorious benighted British seaside hotels (this one grandly named "Balmoral") as it is lashed with rain.  It becomes clear that they've been here for 12 days already, only one of which has been anything but miserable, and it was Bingham's idea to go there instead of abroad, as Hornleigh wanted.  (Why they have to go on holiday together is not revealed - have they no family or other friends?) Anyway, as the Ludo board is already taken they resort to playing snooker, 

when somebody walks into the hotel with a dog.  He is "Captain Fraser," supposedly ex-Royal Navy (he has the anchor tattoo to prove it) who has been out taking the sea air.  He horns in on their snooker game and is proceeding to demolish them (he is clearly a bit of a shark) when he gets a phone call which makes him suddenly nervous and he demurs and leaves.  Hornleigh bets that he's never even sniffed the sea because, in re-arranging the yellow and green balls he revealed that he didn't know his port from his starboard.  However, that's the last they see of Fraser alive* because the next they hear (after supper) is the police coming to the hotel to report that his car fell off a cliff and he was roasted inside.  Hornleigh and Bingham get dragooned to identify the body, and they do, while attempting to keep their identities secret (Bingham in particular is keen not to interrupt their holiday), even going so far to claim to be undertakers when Hornleigh lets slip that they have seen innumerable dead bodies.  However, the ruse doesn't last long, in part because Hornleigh cannot stop himself taking over the the questioning of a couple who witnessed the car going over the cliff (and heard a car which had been idling nearby before the car went over the cliff and drove off immediately afterwards).  This couple present the first laugh-out-loud moment because you think they're a courting couple, and the woman keeps asking that their involvement be kept secret because "his family doesn't approve" until it's revealed at the end that the family is not parents but "his wife and 4 children".  That wouldn't have made it past the American censors!  In general, this film is well-stocked with very solid minor actors - nary a weak link among them, and all capable of delivering a punchline.  Anyway, once the local cops find out that it's Hornleigh, whose fame precedes him, they do rope him and the reluctant Bingham in, and the investigation is off (in part because Hornleigh argues convincingly that it's neither suicide nor accident ("Fraser" let his dog out of the car, for one thing).  The film then bounces around from a small-town reading-of-the-will (where we first see his "cousin," played by Linden Travers, 

whom we've just seen in The Lady Vanishes, complain that she was cut out of the will in favor of his old nursemaid) attended by Hornleigh disguised as an "old navy friend" of Fraser's, to London (where Bingham follows Travers' character to a house and is astonished to see Fraser alive and well* walking his dog (and whistling "Loch Lomond," as he had done at the snooker game) into the same house.  Bingham breaks in and is exploring when the phone rings.  He answers it and there follows the best scene in the film: unbeknownst to him, the person on the other end is Hornleigh, who found this number written by the old nursemaid and is investigating.  Both affect ludicrous fake voices - first Bingham pretends to be a butler, then adopts what appears to be an American accent (because he's pretending to be a gangster!), while Hornleigh talks posh.  Both finally confess to being hoodlums, one called Spider (I can't remember which) and come away convinced until Hornleigh works it out when Bingham calls him back at the station with the same phone, and Hornleigh unleashes one of his usual anti-Scottish insult barrages.  Anyway, after getting off the phone Bingham is startled to discover an inert Fraser in one of the chairs in the room he's been in this whole time.  Fraser has been violently struck on the head and in fact, staggers up, mumbles "Chelsea Bridge and..." and collapses dead.  Finally.  Anyway, Bingham is spooked and waits outside for Hornleigh and co to arrive with the wagon, by which point (predictably) the body has vanished (although Bingham is believed because (a) they find the dog, and (b) Fraser also gave him an ornate ring with a family crest.  After assigning Bingham to watch Chelsea Bridge (in case that's where Fraser's corpse is to be disposed of) overnight (to no avail) Hornleigh drags the exhausted Bingham up to the country estate associated with the crest, where they find an estate sale in process because the local bigwig died a couple of weeks ago.  Hornleigh works out that it must have been that corpse that they identified (by the tattoo) as Fraser after the car wreck, and aims to prove it by exhuming the coffin.  They break into the crypt and discover... Fraser's body!  Anyway, we're now into the final stretch which is all set in London and involves shenanigans in a hospital (where Bingham, who closely resembles one of the gang, has to play a terminal case, and Hornleigh again puts on his posh voice to play his attendant doctor) 

and a gang who use said hospital in some kind of insurance scheme where they identify fatal cases that resemble one member of the gang and perform some kind of switcheroo that eluded me (is it the gang member that's insured?  Presumably, given the will-reading.  So does the gang member have to change identities?  Or are they already fake?  Too clever by half.)  Anyway, the leader of the gang communicates by Ham radio (his contact with the gang is one of the more recognizable faces - an early role for Peter Bull, whom you'll recognize from Dr. Strangelove, and who has a great biography on Imdb) so his identity is secret.  Great stuff!  On to the third Hornleigh.

Film review: Inspector Hornleigh (1939)

Watching Christmas Carol sent me down an Alastair Sim rabbit hole and I discovered, (a) that he was late to acting, starting only around age 30, and (b) that his earliest popular roles were in a series of films based on a successful radio program called Inspector Hornleigh.  So here we are.  The quality isn't great (it's not just that it's a DVD in a 4K world, the print is rather blurry) and there are no subtitles, which we put on for everything now, but it's a fun little romp.  Sim is actually the comic-relief Scottish sidekick (his actual accent), which is a bit jarring after seeing his Scrooge), while the titular Hornleigh is played by a crusty William Hartnell-esque cockney actor called Gordon Harker. Sim's Sergeant Bingham gets no end of abuse (it's no chummy Holmes-Watson relationship, although Bingham is a good deal more competent than the Nigel Bruce version of Watson), much of it outright nationalist.  And that's an interesting feature of this eve-of-WWII production: London is littered with non-Londoners - not just the Welsh, Scots and Irish, but Hungarians (?).  It's as if everywhere has emptied into London, which, prior to the Blitz, I imagine was the case, although there's no mention of the war, probably because the film is an adaptation of a much earlier play.  The plot is almost inconsequential, although it does involve the unlikely event of the theft of the Chancellor of the Exchequer's famous little briefcase, which is only discovered when a murdered man is found in a boarding house and a statue noticed to be missing.  

Also featured: a former IRA (or whatever the resistance movement was called back then) soldier threatening people with a grenade!  It's a very solid little number, which makes you realize how many perfectly enjoyable films were being cranked out by the British Film Industry and have been lost to history.  So congratulations to the completely anonymous bare-bones DVD company that churned this one out (and the two sequels which are on the way from Amazon even as I type this).  Inspector Hornleigh is an interesting character: irascible, although he does have a sneaking fondness for his sidekick, and definitely working class.  No nonsense, polite enough to everyone he's questioning 

(usually posh people) but definitely never cowed by them.  A copper's copper - fond of a pint, with his eye on retirement, but a steely resolve to put lawbreakers behind bars.  Why isn't there a streaming service devoted to showing these kind of films?  Now I think about it, there probably is...

Film review: A Christmas Carol/Scrooge (1951)

This was called Scrooge in the UK, but A Christmas Carol in the US.  I read the actual thing aloud over Christmas and we meant to watch it but we never got round to it.  Then we were trying to watch The Elephant Man as a continuation of our Celebration of Lynch, but found that it's unavailable anywhere, so settled on this.  Not much to say except that having just read it we recognized how much of it was just verbatim from the book (except for the screenwriter (Noel Langley - author of one of my favorite children's books, The Land of Green Ginger, as well as the screenwriter of a little film called The Wizard of Oz) adding a scene in the present featuring the woman to whom Scrooge was fiance-ed, but who gave back the ring when she saw him being corrupted by greed).  It's hard to imagine a more perfect Scrooge, of course - Alastair Sim has long been one of my absolute favorite actors, and this is pretty much his defining role.  His face (those eyes!)

and voice are just so wonderful, and I would say inimitable, but Alec Guinness does such a good job of imitating them in The Ladykillers (which Sim turned down) that many people think it was him, that he almost overshadows the other wonderful elements of the film.  But they are certainly there - not only is there an absolutely stellar cast (Michael Hordern as Marley!  Jack Warner as Mr. Jorkin, Hermione Baddeley, George Cole (who, of course, appeared with Sim in the St. Trinians films, and I now discover was taken in by Sim as a young man when his family was in dire straits) and Patrcik McNee!  Mervyn Johns!) but the supernatural elements are taken very seriously and presented in a genuinely scary way.  And, against all my better judgment, I found myself getting decidedly moist-eyed in the scene that Scrooge witnesses in the "Christmas future" segment after the death of Tiny Tim 

(who is also excellent, and not at all treacly).  Finally, Sim is equally excellent as the reformed Scrooge.  The face that is so effectively sinister suddenly becomes impish and he positively capers around in a very endearing fashion.  

It's tricky to convey a transformation that is convincing - if you're an actor who is ideal to convey the mean-spirited "are there still prisons?  Are there still poor houses?", "Let them die to reduce the population" Scrooge, chances are strong that you won't be the ideal actor to portray the anguished "stop showing me this, spirit" Scrooge 

and certainly not the "what day is it, boy?" happy Scrooge, but Sim is perfect at all three.  Shout out to Bob Cratchit, too, who acts convincingly bewildered and frozen at the change in Scrooge.  

Sidenote: Sim was only 51 when he played Scrooge - at least 5 years younger than me!  People were older then.

When this finished, it was still early, and Prime Video suggested Charade, so we (re-)watched it.  Another corker.  As Audrey Hepburn says to Cary Grant: "you know what's wrong with you?  Nothing!"

Flint in the snow

 It's been brutally cold (down to -5 Fahrenheit at one point) but warmed up enough to snow a bit.

Film review: Eraserhead (1977)

So, David Lynch just died, and as we own Eraserhead (I bought it for Jami a while ago because she saw it as a teen and it blew her mind, to the extent that she bought the (very strange and dissonant) soundtrack album on vinyl) I thought we should watch it.  I have always put it off because it looks so gloomy and oppressive, and while there are certainly elements of that, it's so strange and has such surprising flashes of humor (on top of the truly disgusting special effects (mainly the baby, which for my money is far more impressive than ET), 

which Lynch did himself, this being the equivalent of a student film on a shoestring, but refused to say how he did them) that it didn't bring me down.  If anything, it has the nourishing effect of a great work of art, albeit one that challenges rather than seduces.  So what is it about?  Well, that's another thing that Lynch steadfastly refused to get into, and indeed doing so is probably a fool's game.  It's well-known that Lynch himself was married young (and separated during the making of this film - that dragged on for years, partly because he was so broke), had just had a child, and said child was born with a club foot.  So it's easy to see the film as the expression of a man feeling trapped and unprepared for family life, particularly as he'd always intended to give his life to art.  After a truly surreal prologue involving something like the moon and a horribly scarred man (played by Sissy Spacek's then-husband - apparently she helped out on set) who pulls on some train-points-like levers, we see our protagonist, Henry (whose stacked hairdo is never explained, but is not (as I'd thought) the explanation for the film's title) returning to his dreary apartment in what looks like an industrial estate only to be told by his sultry neighbor-across-the-hall that Mary has been calling him.  This does not seem to make him happy (to be honest, very few things do - I can think of one occasion in the film when he smiles) but next we see him walking through the dark (everything takes place at night) to a very shabby little house where Mary is scowling out through the screen door and tells him that he's late.  This sets them at odds immediately, and there follows the most nightmarish "meet the parents" sequence imaginable.  Highlights include him being asked to carve the tiny chickens they are served 

only to see what looks like blood gush from their nether regions, a taste for the bodily-fluid-based horrors that are to come.  The whole family is strange in an exotic range of ways, from the inanely grinning plumber father to the the apparently immobile grandmother, to the alternately petulant and sexually aggressive mother, 

who badgers Henry about whether he and Mary have had "intercourse" because, it emerges, a baby has arrived (at which Mary corrects her that "they don't even know if it's a baby yet") and thus they have to get married and go and collect it from the hospital.  Then we cut to Henry's apartment, where Mary is trying to feed the tightly-swaddled, clearly alien child who is mewling pitifully.  She is clearly disgusted (a running theme) and gives up, until Henry arrives home and we see the one moment of happiness as he gazes at mother and child and then flops on the bed to stare into the radiator.  But the happiness is not to last: the next scene has the couple being kept awake by the crying baby until she storms out to go home (after a very Lynchian scene of her taking an absurdly long time to pull her suitcase out from under the bed that made such an impact on young Jami that she had described it to me years ago).  Henry wonders if perhaps the baby is sick 

and checks its temperature, only to find it perfectly normal, and then the very next second he looks back at the baby to see it covered in horrible boils and he says mildly "oh, you are sick").  Anyway, things don't get much better, but we do get famous scenes of a tiny woman with swollen pockmarked cheeks appearing on a tiny stage inside the radiator where, with hands clasped nervously in front of her, 

she sings "In heaven, everything is fine" (a song I heard in 1988 covered by The Pixies), and several scenes involving tadpole-like versions of the baby, first being pulled out of Mary as she sweats in bed and then raining down on the lady in the radiator (I may have the order reversed) where they splatter disgustingly.  The sultry neighbor reappears and seduces Henry in what looks like a pool of milk (but later shows up at her apartment with another man)... 

You get the idea.  Lynch has, more successfully than any other film-maker I've encountered, put a dream on film.  It's quite remarkable how fully-formed his vision was in this first film, put together on a shoestring.  The beautiful high-contrast cinematography.  The obsession with the wind and flickering lights.  The scenes held so long that you pass through discomfort to absurdist humor.  The body horror.  (Oh, the real reason it's called "Eraserhead" is because Henry's head falls off 

(replaced by the baby's face) and is found by a boy who takes it to a couple of seedy salesmen (one called Paul, who is berated, in another Lynchian moment, by his thuggish boss) who in turn take it to a man with a machine that makes pencils, who uses its insides to provide the erasers.  So there you go.)  The film is mesmerizing both because it's such an alien vision, but also because we get occasional very definite winks from the filmmaker that let us know he knows what we think, and knows that we are discomforted, and is amused by this.  We may not get him, but he gets us, but does not feel the need to pander to us.  Lynch is sort of like Superman: an alien raised in small-town America who loves it but has seen the universe beyond it, too.  A true original, who united such exalted but diverse filmmakers as Kubrick, John Waters and Mel Brooks in loving this startling first film.

The warm before the freeze

Here comes the polar vortex!  It's all sunny and drippy today, but look what's coming (temperatures in Celcius so those who kowtow to Napoleon can understand):

Frederick bounces back