Film review: The Man in the White Suit (1951)

Another classic Ealing re-watch.  It's a jolt to see the (not much, but seeming so) younger Alec Guinness playing a completely different character from the sinister professor of Ladykillers.  He manages to be completely convincing at both while at the same time being a bit alien.  Some actors wear their hearts on their sleeves or are the same in every film and he's the complete opposite - I feel I wouldn't know him at all if I met him.  Here he's Sidney Stratton, who has in common with the professor a kind of obsessive focus, but for Sidney it's on creating a super-molecule fibre that will be both indestructible (because to break it would require breaking a molecule) and never need cleaning (because of its static-electric properties).  As nobody will willingly give him the equipment and (expensive) chemicals he needs for his experiments, he has resorted to taking odd jobs at various textile mills (all oop North, naturally) and inserting himself into the R&D department, relying on his fellow scientists' absent-minded assumptions that that equipment belongs to one of their fellows.  

He is eventually found out by Daphne Birnley 

(not quite the "Birling" of An Inspector Calls) - played by the delightfully-voiced Joan Greenwood (think Glynis Johns), the daughter of one of the mills' owners, whose fiancé (Michael "Celestial Toymaker" Gough) 

is a bigwig at a rival mill, who convinces her father to give him a chance.  After much explosive destruction he succeeds, to the horror of every Birling rival in the textile industry and Sidney's former friends (including the loyal Bertha, who is even more loyal to the Union) among the workers, who immediately realize that indestructible clothes are the everlasting gobstoppers of the garment industry and will put them all out of business/work.  Sidney doesn't see it that way, thinking that this advance will be good for humanity, right up until the point at which his former landlady finally drives the point home, at which point he has been chased all over town be everyone in his glowing white suit.  

This is probably my third favorite Ealing (after Ladykillers and Kind Hearts), with Greenwood rivaling Guinness as the main reason to watch.  

It's another Alexander Mackendrick production, which means it's a comedy shot like a film noir, which is a good combination.  

It is also almost too bracingly cynical, which means no happy ending for Sidney and either woman who seems drawn to him.  

And also a hint of disaster to come.  Oh, another standout is the little girl who helps Sidney escape after Bertha has briefly imprisoned him, who went on to record a song that I know mainly because of the Toy Dolls.

Film review: The Small Back Room (1949)

I had never heard of this, despite it being a Powell/Pressburger production (the three films they made before this were the murderer's row of: A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes - all glorious technicolor, whereas this is a black and white number), and it turns out there's a good reason for that, because... well, it's not very good.  I cannot recommend this to anyone, except maybe for two segments.  One is a kind of fever-dream-sequence where the main character hallucinates his furniture becoming huge and looming over him, which is gloriously silly, and the other is the climax of the film, where he defuses an explosive device, 

that is genuinely very tense.  The rest of the film was frankly tedious.  It seems to be a kind of propaganda film (a bit late, in 1949!) praising the efforts of the boffins behind the scene who helped unglamorously but essentially in the war effort (meanwhile Alan Turing was probably being chemically castrated at that very moment).  The main character is a, frankly peevish Sammy Rice (well played, I will grudgingly allow, by the dishy (pipe-smoking) David Farrar) who is peevish because he lost a foot in the war and now has a tin one that causes him constant pain, for which the "dope" that the doctors give him appears to do nothing.  This drives him to whisky, despite the entreaties of his bartender "Knucksie" (Sid James, 

looking seemingly exactly the same in the late 40s as he did in the Carry On films) (you should hear the sneering way Sammy says "Knucksie" when he's got surly drunk) and his long suffering love Susan, 

played saintlily by Kathleen Byron, which in itself is distracting, because this is how I think of her:

Most of the film alternates between office politics 

(Sammy is the brains of an outfit run by blowhard RB Waring (Jack Hawkins) with whom he is constantly bickering) and scenes of Sammy moping and Susan trying to cheer him up, and Sammy criticizing himself for dragging Susan down, and Susan saying isn't that for me to judge and so on.  Meanwhile the interesting part of the film, which takes up frustratingly little screen time, is that a new kind of German weapon has started cropping up all over England and Wales (cue some very scenic shots), about the size of a bulky flashlight (I was interested to note that they called them "flashlights" rather than torches), which keeps blowing up the people who pick them up.  The mystery is why they don't blow up before then, and what triggers them, but they keep blowing up before the boffins can get to look at them.  Anyway, the film drags on until Sammy drives Susan away 

(she even takes her picture from his frame and her cat), he gets raging drunk, and then the friendly soldier Captain Stuart (played by Celestial Toymaker Michael Gough) 

who first introduced Sammy to the concept, calls up and says they've acquired two of the things and can he come down to Portland Bill.  Despite Sammy's entreaties Stuart insists on trying to defuse one of them himself, with predictable results.  Cue the tense scene where Sammy defuses the device (dictating what he's doing over a funny strap-on telephone to a very pretty female soldier 

(Renée Ascherson, aunt of renowned journalist Neal Ascherson) who was doing the same for Stuart when... well, you know).  Anyway, Sammy comes out of it smelling of roses and gets to run his own section of the army, and comes home to find Susan's picture back in the frame and the cat back on its mat, 

and a refilled bottle of whisky waiting for him.  All's well.  There's also a minor subplot about a stuttering Corporal who's great with fuses but whose wife is unfaithful and everyone knows it.  I will say that it's possibly the most convincing stutter I've ever heard (handily beating Michael Palin's) - so kudos to Cyril Cusack. 

Overall: just for Powell/Pressburger completists, or those with less stony hearts than me, methinks.

Oh yes, one oddity: they appear to have filmed at Stonehenge, and fired off a big old gun there.  Those were the days.

 

Film review: Richard III (1955)

Only 7 films remain unwatched (well, now 6) in our 50 film Criterion set, and Jami picked this one to watch first.  It would have been my last choice, but it turns out pretty entertaining (although, given its extreme length, we watched it over two nights). It's a bit jarring, at first - the colors are very technicolor, and the costumes look more like a Danny Kaye production than (say) the much more realistically grimy first season of Blackadder, but it's all about the fantastic performances.  And what a murderer's row of a cast!  Obviously Olivier (although his Richard is not nearly the caricature that familiarity with Peter Sellers' "Hard Days Night" bit would lead one to believe), but Gielgud!  Richardson!  Claire Bloom!  

And a steady stream of "oh, that guy!" character actors, from Patrick Troughton in a tiny role as Tyrell, to the pairing of Michael "The Celestial Toymaker" Gough and Michael "the chauffeur from Butterflies" Ripper as the two murderers.  

I must confess to being unfamiliar with the play (apart from the opening "Now is the Winter..." monologue and the ending "My kingdom for a horse" scene) and the machinations were a bit bewildering.  And I have to wonder if some parts were severely truncated, as there's a scene before the climactic battle (which is rousingly handled, even if it looks a lot less like Salisbury and a lot more like Southern California) when messengers keep rushing up to Richard with new bulletins to a laughable extreme, but nonetheless the delivery of the lines and the inventive staging 

kept both of us pretty rapt.  Particularly entertaining is when Richard (with the help of Richardson's Buckingham) 

feigns unwillingness to accept the crown and affects to be found praying between two clergymen.  Olivier manages both to play up the comedy while being convincingly evil (and there are chilling moments in the film to pair with the comedic - a standout one is when everyone but Hastings (played by Alec Clunes, who was at the time a leading stage actor) realizes that he's doomed, and moves to the other end of the table from him), 

and this despite his ridiculous getup 

(and very spindly legs in those unforgiving tights).  The man knew how to bring the bard to the masses, that's for sure.

Film review: Horror of Dracula (1958)

For some reason there's no "the" in the title, which bothers me.  Anyway, this is the granddaddy of all Hammer Horrors, and we watched it as a kind of cozy horror to ease into the run-up to Halloween.  It's interesting largely because of the changes to the original.  It begins as usual with Jonathan Harker arriving at Castle Dracula (to be a librarian, though, rather than to sell real estate (isn't that what he does in the first one?  Anyway, he can't be doing that for reasons that shall become clear)) and he finds a meal waiting for him and a note that the count is away.  In the middle of the meal he drops a plate and while he's picking it up from out of nowhere a woman appears 

who begs him for his help but stops mid-sentence because she sees something behind him that terrifies her.  It is of course, the count (Christopher Lee) and she scuttles off.  Right off the bat (ooh, look what I did there) Lee both references Lugosi and draws a line between his performance and Bela's, because he says the line "I am Dracula, I bid you welcome," but delivers it in a completely clipped and off-hand fashion.  He then takes Harker to his room and shows a little too much interest in a picture he has of his fiancee, Lucy.  

He then tells Harker he'll be away for a while and then leaves, locking the door behind him.  Harker seems somewhat amused, and sits down to write a letter, that reveals the first really major difference from the original: Harker knows what Dracula is, and has come to kill him!  Alas, however, he is visited in the night by the woman who again begs him to help her escape (and now, of course, it makes sense that he would help her) but has she embraces him in her relief, the sight of his pulsating jugular is just too much for her and she takes a good ol' bite.  Just then Dracula reappears, and here you get the first taste of the Hammer gore, because his eyes are bloodshot and there is ample technicolor blood dripping out of his mouth.  

He intervenes, throwing the blood-crazed woman away from Harker (she has become feral and hisses at him) and in the tussle Harker is knocked out.  When he wakes up it is light (but is late in the day) and he escapes out of the window, first hiding his diary at a crossroads in front of the castle, then returning to find both vampires in their coffins in the crypt.  Foolishly, he stakes her first, and her scream awakes the count whose eyes swivel around to catch the failing light, at which a smile plays across his lips.  

Harker then stumbles over to the count's coffin, to find it empty.  Suddenly he realizes it's dark, and looks up to see the count closing the door to the crypt and advancing towards him...

Sidenote: this film zips along, largely because it is content to cut out scenes that later horrors would see as the main point of the film.  So we never see Dracula feasting on poor old Harker, we just cut to a figure arriving at a nearby inn, who is revealed to be the great Peter Cushing as (a rather young) Van Helsing, who has come to see what's happened to his pal Harker.  The innkeeper is very cagey and basically tells him the usual thing of we don't want your kind stirring up trouble, but his kindly barmaid (who is, of course, called Inge) slips him Harker's journal, so he finds out everything that's been happening and rushes to Castle Dracula.  As he arrives, a carriage that matches the description in the book, all black and gothic, rushes past him, obviously carrying Dracula away.  (Another big difference: there is no sea voyage because Harker, Van Helsing etc., live in the unnamed country just over the border.  This allows everyone to come back to the Castle at the end of the movie for the big finale.  And the reason they believe the Count is leaving is to claim Lucy as a replacement for his staked mate.  So there's no hint, as in the book, that he'd planned on going anywhere to do anything nefarious - it was all prompted by Harker.)

Van Helsing finds the now pointy-toothed Harker in a coffin in the crypt (as well as the mummified corpse of the woman) and you see him very sadly about to stake Harker, when again it cuts away.

Peter Cushing is listed first in the credits, and indeed, Lee gets very little screen time.  In fact, the second star if there is one is reliable British actor (see Doctor Who, and these films we've watched) Michael Gough, who plays Arthur, brother of Lucy, husband to Mina.  Lucy has already been bitten when we find Van Helsing telling Arthur (who is very suspicious of Van Helsing) and Mina about Harker's fate.  We see Dracula arrive to a clearly welcoming Lucy (very sexual undertones - racy for the 1950s, but not as racy as Hammer would soon get) to feast again on her neck.  Van Helsing is called in by Mina and he insists on garlic everywhere and locked windows, but the maid (Gerda?) is called in by Lucy and agrees to get rid of the garlic and open the windows, and so much for Lucy.  However Lucy comes back and almost makes a victim of Gerda's young daughter before Van Helsing intervenes.  Arthur is then convinced and he and Van Helsing visit the customs to find out where that black coach was heading.  They find out the address just as we see a messenger boy deliver a message to Mina (played by the comely, if rather dowdily coiffed and uncomelily named Melissa Stribling) back at home that Arthur wants to meet her at that address.  And she does, and is later seen with a very suggestively satisfied look on her face. 

Anyway, by the time our two men show up at the address (a funeral parlor) the coffin is gone.  They find out Mina has been bitten when Van Helsing presses a crucifix into her hand and she faints (and is burned - as Lucy was earlier).  They set her up as bait and wait outside the window, but little do they know Dracula has got in the house 

and gets to her a second time (to her credit, she looks a little less welcoming than Lucy this time

 - earlier we've seen Van Helsing recording notes to himself on a wax cylinder (very Professor Higgins) say that those affected are like drug addicts who hate themselves for it).  She is treated with a blood transfusion from Arthur, who is told to drink wine to replenish himself, but when he asks Gerda to get more from the basement, she says "ooh, after all the bad things that have happened when I've disobeyed orders, I'm not going to disobey the mistresses' order not to go in the basement" and Van Helsing instantly realizes (a) where Dracula's coffin is, and (b) how he got in without them seeing.  However, he finds the coffin empty, only to see Dracula just arriving, then locking him in the basement, grabbing Mina, and it's a race to the castle for the big standoff (which features the now iconic fashioning of a crucifix out of two handy candlesticks).  

Short and sweet!

This is a very solid film, surprisingly un-campy (apart from two comic-relief characters - the easily corruptible customs officer, who has to keep repairing his gate, and the drunken funeral parlor owner), which is in large part to the excellent leads, all of whom were already very respectable stage actors, and the dialogue, which is well-written and grounded.  A British film industry is (temporarily) saved!