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Reviews
The Spiral Staircase (1946)
Morbid Burrowings in Hollywood Melodrama
Close up. A bulging, abhorrent eye watches a woman getting dressed. A voyeur? Michael Powell would borrow the same technique for Peeping Tom.
Then he strikes. A killer who cannot tolerate women with imperfections. The screams alert a congregation of villagers who have gathered to watch the mysterious spectacle of early-century cinema. The birth of voyeurism.
A theremin plays, bathing the film in a morbid, oneiric tone. Making the psychological connections clear. A number of red-herrings are established. A mute girl is to be the next victim.
Siodmak, working in expressionism and film noir, uses both influences to effect. Combines with the legendary Nick Musuraca. Camera captures dark projections. Tracking shots. P.O.V. Distorted angles. Fear becomes heightened.
And then...Hollywood intervenes. A happy ending...not so dark after all.
The Green Man (1956)
Kind Hearts and Coronets it ain't!
In Britain we have a long tradition and history of being able to see an irreverent, macabre humour in murder. We have been as disgusted by it as we have been fascinated. Look at the evidence; the fevered interest of the public and media in Dr. Crippen in the early 1900s, the success of the films of Alfred Hitchcock and of course it was the newspaper magnate Alfred Harmsworth (or Viscount Northcliffe) who tapped into the interest of the nation when he uttered that famous phrase: "get me a murder a day." But sadly The Green Man fails in the above because the humour falls flat and leaves the macabre looking uncomfortable and out of place. It tries, perhaps too hard, to be a successor to Kind Hearts and Coronets – and there are seldom few films that can stand up to Ealing's masterpiece. It's a shame because it should work. The lugubrious, wild-haired, pinwheel eyed Alistair Sim plays a freelance assassin. Sidney Gilliat wrote the play, and the great Basil Dearden (Cage of Gold, The Blue Lamp) directs. Even a young George Cole and the presence of Terry Thomas cannot save it.
It is hard to say what would have improved this. Perhaps more pathos and less slapstick would have made a difference. Certainly some dark, low key lighting and photography (the film is incredibly grey) would have been welcome. The films one saving grace is the performance of Alistair Sim; it might be worth watching for him alone.
Tomorrow at Ten (1963)
A Minor Masterpiece
Tomorrow at 10 (1962) is a minor masterpiece only let down by a short running time (77 minutes) which does not allow its themes to be more thoroughly explored. But with a stand out performance from a young Robert Shaw (Jaws), and an effective film noir style adopted by underrated British 'B' film director Lance Comfort, it is worth watching.
Briefly this is a story of child abduction. A crook kidnaps the child of a wealthy industrialist and locks him in the room of an abandoned house with a time bomb. But woven into the narrative is the issue of class (particularly relevant in 1950s/early 1960s Britain). Robert Shaw is working class, and it is with him that our sympathies lie – not with Alec Clunes' arrogant Anthony Chester who believes that any problem can be solved if enough money is thrown at it.
Lines like "they probably met at a hunt ball" and "that's what I like about the police force...the informal relationship that exists between all ranks" delivered by John Gregson's honest detective about the social climbing Commissioner Bewley, highlight a sneering attitude towards class, rank and insignia. And ironically, it is the respectable and bourgeois Chester who commits murder.
Tomorrow at 10 works because it does not waste time with police procedure, and the result is taut and fast paced. Sharp and terse dialogue combine with Comfort's fluid camera work and Peter Pitt's economic editing to keep the viewer alert as every action seems to provoke an immediate reaction.
Finally, this review would not be complete without mentioning the opprobrious 'Golly' that appears in the film. Unjustly stigmatised by the politically correct, the Golly's origins are relatively innocent, and it is nice to know that there was a time when this harmless toy could be used without fears of reprisal. Here it serves its purpose as a totemic emblem of Robert Shaw's corrupted childhood, appropriate then that it should be stuffed with a time bomb and given to his child victim.
Inception (2010)
Lost in its own complexities
A visual Tour De Force that gets lost in its own complex world, Inception stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Dom Cobb; a rogue 'extractor' who steals elements of dreams and sells them to the highest bidder, all in the name of corporate espionage. But things start to go drastically wrong when Cobb takes on a seemingly impossible job and his dead wife turns up to make trouble.
Ingenious but convoluted, Inception may not be to everyone's taste – but it is undoubtedly a Chris Nolan picture; the same man who gave us Memento, The Prestige and of course, The Dark Knight. The problem is that for all the slick visuals and clever narrative structures, we end up with something cold, clinical and frustratingly diffuse.
Why Inception falters, and I appreciate that I may be in the minority, is that for such a surreal and imaginative concept to work, it requires an equally surreal and imaginative mind, and Nolan is just too conservative and too technical for the content. It might have made a more interesting film had it been directed by P.T Anderson or, dare I say it, Terry Gilliam.
The Damned (1962)
Damned Youth
That the very mention of the word 'Hammer' brings to mind the Gothic settings, garish colours and tightly corseted maidens of British horror films of the 1950s and 1960s might explain why Joseph Losey's The Damned is something of an oddity. That Hammer is often seen as British cinema's only viable claim to an indigenous phenomenon gives a further indication, because The Damned is transnational; directed by an American filmmaker, with an American distributor (Columbia) and, it could be argued, rife with American themes - specifically the connection of rock n' roll culture to violence and the threat of atomic science on mankind. The setting here is not a fog filled stage set masquerading as period London or Eastern Europe but a post-war seaside town (Weymouth) terrorised by a gang of recalcitrant teddy- boys led by Oliver Reed's menacing hoodlum. The scientists are not camp, eccentric, wild- eyed mad men creating monsters and surrogate families in outrageous laboratories using vague and nonsensical science but are government men experimenting on children with atomic power. The solid and steady British directors employed by Hammer make way for an American 'auteur' who, stigmatised by the House Un-American Activities Committee, had been forced to move to Britain and adopt a pseudonym. Instead of Cushing and Lee doing battle as literary man-and-monster we have a dandy and violent youth in a tweed jacket fighting patriarchal threats and his own repression, while the victims here are not the aforementioned tightly corseted maidens at the mercy of a lustful monster but a group of precocious, emotionally starved children living in a bunker. Finally, the good-defeats-evil ending seen in Hammer's more popular stock has here been subverted to something far more bleak and nihilistic in keeping with the zeitgeist (though it should be pointed out that by the time The Damned was finally released, such concerns had to some degree become nugatory.) That The Damned recapitulates concerns of the 1950s and 1960s at all is down to Losey's political astuteness and penchant for social commentary. Cold War paranoia, the Cuban Missile Crisis, clandestine governments experimenting with nuclear power and disaffected youth are all touched on here just as Losey had touched on the increasingly diffuse class system of the 1960s in The Servant (1963) and capital punishment in Time Without Pity (1957). While in his first British film, The Sleeping Tiger (1954), a young thug is experimented on by a psychiatrist who attempts to 'cure' him of his violent ways; a progenitor of sorts to A Clockwork Orange's Alex. Troubled youth is encapsulated in one line in particular as one of the military men barks to young gang member Ted "Your sort don't have any rights," reflecting the stifling patriarchal rule and lack of freedom of the 1950s and early 1960s that would give rise to the angry- young-men of the same period, and it is perhaps no coincidence that Hammer were keen to make a more contemporary film grounded in realism at this time. Violent, youthful rebellion is the first thing the camera shows us where The Damned begins in Losey's typical style of exposition (sound and action with no dialogue) as the teddy boys orchestrate with military precision the mugging and gang-beating of Simon Wells, a middle-aged American tourist, by using a honey-trap in the form of gang leader King's sensual but subjugated sister, Joanie. Recovering in a hotel lobby a battered and bruised Simon prophetically remarks that he did not expect such senseless and asinine violence to be present England; an issue that should resonate today with socially conscious audiences and those with an interest in the 'hoodie-horror' sub-genre.