The New Cross Eleven (1946)

D. Randall Smyth
Dusty B&W


In British cinema there have always been films which look back at the Second World War with something approaching fondness. Ah, the memories – all those kids playing on the bomb sites, the camaraderie, the sheltering in the tubes, the interminable sing alongs. As long as one ignores the doodlebugs, husbands and fathers fighting overseas, the victims of the blitz, then clearly it was a bloody great time. This is one of those movies with a halcyon glow, made just as the war was ending and so managing to combine a war time story with a pleasure and relief of a job well done.
It’s an optimistic film, a film about promise from the rubble of the past, a film about youth. That’s what I particularly like about it, the fact that the cast is so goddamn young. The principals are all fifteen and younger, and they look it. This is the British youth of 1945: gawky, all elbows and knees and terrible, terrible teeth. If anything is going to reinforce our American cousin’s impression of our dental work, it would be this movie and its pre NHS gnashers. (It’s a shame that barely any of the cast stayed in acting, as Hammer Horror could have used their faces ten years later.) On one hand it’s a sweet film and an innocent film, but it’s also a film about still lingering threats and that adds a jab of cold steel to the centre of it.


‘The New Cross Eleven’ is a boy’s brigade football team, who might look rag-tag but are apparently the best side in their division. The scenes on the football pitch are lovely, even with the bomb sites in the background – they have a charming fluidity that feels fresh and real. It’s as if they’ve just filmed these lads actually playing and captured all the exuberance and fearlessness of youth. It’s particularly stunning – with this soulless, corporate football spectacular going on at the other side of the world – just how divorced what we have today is from this film. The looseness of the football, the length of the shorts, the sense of mischievous community, even the Knobbly knees – all this has gone now. These are not pampered and preening popinjays. They would take one look at Ronaldo and decide he needs to be made less pretty; although spud-faced nipper Wayne Rooney has very much the right appearance. What we have here are good, down to Earth lads. They may be a little scampish at times, but they’re definitely warm and happy presences. Probably I could have just watched them play football in their bombed-out South London suburb for the entire film, but before long the plot kicks in when they start to suspect that the new referee in their league may be a German spy.
Our boys start to investigate.


There’s probably more broad humour in the investigation than I would ideally have liked (certainly most of the toilet jokes fail to flush satisfactorily), but the charm remains and the story takes some fun twists and turns. No doubt the executives behind the much maligned Children’s Film Foundation saw this and thought they saw the future: fun and undemanding films about children solving mysteries and being heroes. However unlike a lot of that body’s output, this film actually works. This isn’t spoon in the mouth drama school kids pretending to be working class, but the real thing; and this isn’t a shaggy dog story where the stakes are only high when looked at from a very middle class nursery in Hampstead, but something that matters. This is a kids’ film but it isn’t a soft film. Indeed anyone who has ever been to New Cross would know that I’d be impossible to make a soft film there. Even at the end of the war, a war that people were already starting to be fond of, there are dangers still apparent and this film isn’t shy of them.

Munich Murder (1985)

D. Otto Haus
Colour


Oh crumbs, there’s a World Cup on, isn’t there? And that probably means I should be topical and write about some of the strange and curious football related films out there. So let’s try this one on for size, shall we? A European/German movie about a grizzled, hard-bitten detective investigating the murder of the left back of a Munich football club. (The club in question is named Borussia Munich, although they obviously play in Bayern Munich’s stadium and in Bayern Munich’s kit. Quite why this name change happened is not made clear, but it’d be like making a film about a North London football club, which play in red and white at Highbury, and are named The Gun Factory.) In the German version – which I have not seen – the detective is played by Maximillian Schell. I have no idea of what Mr Schell’s take on the role is, but here we have Jon Voight giving us a performance of such aggressive, intense boredom that it’s worth tracking down just to see Mr Voight scowl through every scene and to greet every emotion he’s called on to play with a glower. It’s as if he couldn’t be bothered to learn anything about football, detective work, Germany and possibly the whole continent of Europe itself before the film was made, and so strides around distinctly pissed off that he’s being forced to fake an interest in them. Normally an actor so disengaged from the film around him is said to be Zen, but Mr Voight is clearly so livid at being there that peace and calm are clearly not attributes anyone would associate with him.


The other problem with Jon Voight playing the role and the film being made in English to accommodate him, is that the other parts in the film are all played by Germans. Performing in another language would be hard for trained actors, but this film further makes it much more difficult by hiring footballers to play – well – footballers. So amusingly we have Franz Beckenbauer playing the retired captain of the club with all the charm of a haughty, out of touch, autocratic, blue-blooded despot; while Jürgen Grabowski manages the incredible feat of looking even less happy to be there than Jon Voight. His character is minor, so minor in fact that there’s no chance of him being a suspect – although in any other movie he’d have been lead henchman at least, if not someone who went on a murderous rampage before the end. Very, very amusingly there is also a cameo from Mighty Mouse himself, Kevin Keegan (or Keggy Keegle, as he’s sometimes known in his home country) – where he manages to demonstrate even less talent than he did on ‘Head Over Heals in Love’


The film plods along in rhythm with Mr Voight’s pissed off stride, throwing in herrings of red, pink and purple shades, until the killer is revealed. And it becomes clear, the more Mr Voight hangs around the football club, that this film could easily have been made about any sport or indeed any industry. As by the end the film has clearly joined Mr Voight’s disinterest in football, football players, as well as any and all round balls. This could easily have been a movie about a murder of a foreman in a diamond mine, or a welder at a dockyard – both of which would no doubt have elicited no more interest on Mr Voight’s face than the contents of his handkerchief on a wet Thursday afternoon. At the very end Mr Voight trudges off, presumably for a lie down, I hope he enjoyed it more than he did this movie.

Runaway! (1970)

D. Michael Winner
Colour (but a really washed out colour, as if it woke up hung-over that morning)


Reading Robert Galbrath/J.K. Rowling's tale of a down on his luck private eye in Soho, reminded me with sudden incredible clarity (like I’d just eaten a madeleine) of this neglected Michael Caine private eye movie. And that memory gave me particular satisfaction when I realised that Caine's character is actually named - and I'm not making this up - Barry Potter. Not that I’m suggesting for one second that Rowling based either of her recurring characters on this film. Having read ‘The Cuckoo’s Calling’, Michael Caine certainly isn’t Comoran Strike. Admittedly I’ve only seen the Harry Potter films rather than read the books, but unless there’s something in the novels about the teen wizard having a porn collection and liking rough sex, he’s not a student of Hogwarts either.


This is a tale about a down on his luck London private eye, but Comoran Strike has nothing on Barry Potter for rough living. Yes, both sleep in their offices and squander their money on booze and fags, but Strike doesn't steal a tenner from the elderly lady upstairs for electric metre money. Nor does he effectively mug a homeless man when said homeless man is cheeky. Nor, indeed, does he steal a chip from a nun in a chip-shop before suggesting flirtatiously that he remove her from the habit. There is an aggressive unpleasantness and seediness to this character - the anti-anti-anti-Philip Marlowe. It's almost as if the filmmakers looked at Caine as Harry Palmer and decided that he was still just too upwardly mobile for their tastes, it was time to bring him down several dirty and greasy pegs. And Caine relishes the part, clearly on paper this is an unpleasant man, but our favourite cockney knight uses all his charm to make sure he still deserves to be the hero.


Philip Marlowe is undoubtedly a (much more noble) background presence, as the plot isn’t far off Raymond Chandler's ‘The Little Sister’ (which had been filmed far more glamorously in Hollywood a few years earlier). A prim librarian type seeks out Potter's help to find her missing sibling, who’s disappeared into the Soho netherworld of strip clubs and pornographers. Before long Potter finds himself up to his neck in sleaze (not necessarily a problem, Potter admits to liking “a bit of naughty”), and murder (more of a problem, particularly when he finds himself the prime suspect). It's up to Potter to stay one step ahead of the police as he tries to solve the crime.


The audience stayed away en mass, which is why the British tough guy Michael Caine picture people remember from the early 1970s is ‘Get Carter’ and that’s fair enough as it’s much stronger and looks far better. However good performances abound: from Ray Milland as a disgraced former copper with an accent so very, very Welsh (so much so I couldn’t work out whether he was putting it on or that was indeed his real accent), surprise guest-star Frankie Avalon, hamming it up as a would be gangster even when he looks a little lost in seedy London, and most astonishing of all Cilla Black – of all people – as a hard as nails prostitute. If those punters who stood excited at her side in the ‘Blind Date’ and ‘Surprise, Surprise’ years had watched this, they’d probably have come armed. 


(Casting Director-wise, the movie credits one Phyllis Dunfield, who clearly had a very left-field mind that’s hard not to admire.)


The Rowling/Galbrath book is better, as despite a not bad cast and a suitably muddy storyline, this is a film which – even with Sir Michael’s efforts – is so seedy and depressive it leaves you wanting to have a good scrub down afterwards.

Statuesque (2007)

D. Bertrand Shore
Colour


The most decorative part of ‘Mad Men’ these days is Jessica Paré. I mean that both in the sense that she's lovely to look at, but also she’s the lady the programme clearly has the most lascivious interest in. Yes there’s Christina Hendricks and her bosom, and there's the trim figure of January Jones - but Jessica Paré is the actress most likely to strip down to her underwear, or a bikini, and have the camera linger licking its lens-like lips over her shapely form. Obviously the thing with having a young trophy wife is that she should be attractive and willing to show herself off, but it's not only Don who enjoys her, it's the show itself. In fact we’re all guilty, as she's put there on camera for the audience to ogle and – yes – we duly ogle. And as much as I love ‘Mad Men’, I can't help thinking that her character suffers a little through her being so decorative, as sometimes she's not there to add weight to a scene, she’s just there to appear in her bra and knickers.


I guess though the actress is used to it as earlier in her career she appeared in this strange portmanteau spin on the mythic legend of Pygmalion. In a role which must have sounded distinctly weird when her agent described it to her, she plays an ancient Greek statue in a fusty old museum, which actually comes to life when someone sees her and most desires and needs it. So older divorced businessman Elliot Gould gets to take her – her wearing only a slip of a dress – to an event in an art gallery, where he gets to show her (and her lovely, slim legs) off to his workmates who think he's more ancient than a dinosaur fart. Gould to be fair though doesn't require any more than a quick smack on the lips from his Greek goddess. Heather Graham though is a nervous bi-curious girl who has had her heart broken by too many men and needs some company. A girly afternoon of course becomes something hotter and heavier (Heather Graham is another highly objectified actress, with filmmakers seeming to adore pressing her against other girls); while finally Joseph Fiennes overacts horrendously as a mad theatre director who needs a night of sheer naked passion to unleash his genius.


This ridiculously over-qualified cast elevates it above what it really should be, which is of course porn. Indeed the audience most likely to gravitate towards this might be a tad disappointed, as when things do get steamy it’s all decidedly soft-core. Without a doubt though it’s a highly sexist film, and at the centre of this sexism is Jessica Paré – who is simply there to be ogled and lusted over through every frame. She’s literally a doll that comes to life, a perfectly carved pieced of marble which springs into existence when somebody is sad and needy enough to desire her soft and feminine touch. Once alive she can be dressed however the beholder wants, and then undressed on demand. In no way is she a real character, certainly not a real woman and, really, the whole thing is a tad depressing.


Of course it's seedy, of course it's objectifying – but is it really so massively different to Mad Men's approach to the actress?

The Female Boss (1964)

D. Valentine Woolf
B&W


Here's a moody black & white melodrama that was no doubt on Matthew Weiner's radar when he created ‘Mad Men’ (although since he oddly claims that he hadn't read Richard Yates's superb ‘Revolutionary Road’ – which looks, feels and smells like a full drawn out blueprint [bathrooms, windows and all fixtures included] for ‘Mad Men’ – then perhaps it actually, and slightly incredibly, wasn't). It’s set in New York in the early 1960s, centring on a high-flying business executive in a power suit, played with charismatic authority by a born star performer. This is a character who drinks and smokes far too much across the course of the day, there’s office intrigue and drama, and even the possibility of romance with a younger member of staff. Except, the twist here is that this executive is played by the divine Ms Joan Crawford.


Clearly latching on to Ms Crawford’s role at Pepsi Cola (she had married an executive and did a hell of a lot of work for the second of America’s fizzy drinks companies, and at his death wound up on the board); we have on the back of her marketability in ‘Whatever happened to Baby Jane’, Ms Crawford in corporate America. There she is in a dark tailored suit staring down subordinates (and particularly insubordinates) when she finds herself Acting President, steering the company through a crisis after the beloved old President dies. The industry she works in is left deliberately vague, but even if it’s not advertising she does get to stride around like a proto feminist Don Draper exuding ruthless arrogance or delicate feminine charm, depending on the encounter. As Don is far luckier than her, because she also has to face blatant sexism in the workplace: snide voices plot against her, believing her to be just as a token women who has risen too far, or refer to her as “the secretary”, or say that her power has come through some undescribed (but no doubt salacious) incident.


Unfortunately beyond 'a woman in the boardroom, that’s a crazy, new idea!' the film doesn’t seem to have anywhere else to go. She’s Acting President for most of the film, but the main thrust of the story is her trying to find the right candidate to be full time President and at the end she does and it’s a man (albeit a very liberal, modern sort of man). So the film isn’t ready yet to accept a woman as full-time head of the boardroom. But more than that it strives to show how hard this corporate life is, but it also strives to show that it's especially hard on a woman, which kind of undermines its supposed ‘sexes are equal’ ethos. Still the pressure of proving herself means we get lots of great scenes of Joan in angry meetings, steely-eyed confrontations, and then – afterwards – her jaw wobbling when she's back in her own office supping a much needed tumbler of whisky. Jon Hamm’s Don Draper may be many things, but he rarely lets his jaw wobble – and certainly not as divinely as Joan’s does here.


With an aesthetic borrowed straight from ‘The Apartment’ (so much so you expect a cameo from Jack Lemmon, talking to his wife on the phone and still calling her “Miss Kubelik”) this is without a doubt a well-intentioned film, but one which hasn't really thought through its convictions enough to have courage in them.

Dropper Harris and the Menace from Beyond (1939)

D. Ted Green
B&W


The third Dropper Harris film clearly realises it’s the last in the series. That’s not to say it’s lazy, everybody involved is clearly giving a hundred percent even when they know the material they’ve been given is utterly ludicrous. Cary Grant in particular looks like he’s relishing the absolutely ridiculous dialogue and lunatic scenario, knowing that this isn’t something he’d find himself doing for Howard Hawks or George Cukor. This has the feel of everybody letting their hair down, of an entire production team chilling out and just throwing stuff to the wall to see what would stick. Cary Grant later wrote (and indeed directed a film) about his experiments with LSD, and this feels like he’s slipped some to the crew to give the whole production that blissed out, psychedelic, “logic is there to be broken, man” type of atmosphere. As here we have a plot involving Dropper Harris, London citizen and number one agent for the British secret service, taking a trip into space. Yes, this is Dropper Harris goes to the moon.


If you were expecting some common-sense plot to explain this development, then I’m sorry you’re out of luck. There are reasons given for why all this happens, explanations offered for all that takes place, but they don’t stand up to even the briefest scrutiny. Indeed this is the second version of this paragraph I’ve written, in the first I tried to explain the plot, but after much head scratching and confusion I just gave up. Again the makers aren’t being slap-dash, this is a film that knows its money shot is Dropper Harris (Cary Grant) and Binky (Tommy Harrison) bouncing around in Flash Gordon outfits on the moon with big silly grins on their faces. That’s what’s on the poster, that’s what the public wanted to see and – goddamnit! – that’s what we got.


Yes, there’s some nonsense about the Russians having opened a moon-base and sending rays back to Earth, but it’s purely window dressing. This is about Dropper, Binky and new team member/love interest Catarina (Dorothy Lamour) going to the moon. That’s where the fun lies and everybody is set to have the time of their lives. Grant in particular has a big, very un-Cary Grant-like goofy grin, as he prances around in Buster Crabbe’s cast-offs spouting alternatively meaningless mumbo-jumbo or over the top atrocious dialogue. He’s still brilliant in this film. Indeed the genius of Cary Grant’s acting is that even when he knows what he’s doing is totally ridiculous, even when part of him is obviously making fun of each scene even as he acts in it, he still takes the audience with him. He never capsizes the film, never ruins it by playing it like panto – somehow he manages to be both serious and in on the joke at the same time, and the result is some of the most joyful silliness you will ever see.


There was nowhere else for Dropper Harris to go after this (except, perhaps, Mars), but we should be thankful these movies exist. A gleeful series of mad, lunatic 1930s adventure films, which always felt out of this world even before they actually went there.

Kiss Me Dangerous (1972)

D. Henry Levin
Colour
 

So here’s a question: why isn’t a series of film starring the one and only Tom Jones as an ultra-cool private detective in The City of Angels an almighty camp-fest? Those Matt Helm films made in the 1960s are far camper. Batman the TV series was off the scale campness compared to this, and that didn’t even have the added value of a singer smugly strutting his way through the lead part. Here we have Tom Jones as private detective, Wayne Wales – but really just playing Tom Jones as a private detective – tackling crime in downtown Los Angeles, punching bad guys, showing off nifty gadgets, and even in this film sporting a brand new catchphrase (“Not bad for a lad from Ponty”) and yet it isn’t total over the top camp of the campest fashion.


Why, oh why, is this?


Partly I think the answer is because it’s made in the 1970s. Matt Helm, ‘The (Mis)Adventures of Kitty Spectacular’ and all those other Bond knock-offs were shot in the bright shades of the 1960s, which was very much the in-palate back then; while these films have more 1970s hues which don’t lend themselves to sheer campness. (Try and imagine a camp comedy that looks like ‘The Conversation’. Not easy is it.) But more than that, we have as the star the ultimate macho-man; the muscled, hairy Welsh love god. A lad from Ponty made very good. Yes, Tom itself keeps it from being camp. In fact, if you were to tell this good boyo from the valleys – now apparently a private detective in LA – that he was camp, he’d probably punch you in the nose.
 

In much the same vein as ‘Vengeance Man’, Tom tours around LA, sorts out bad guys, foils an evil plot and gets it on with lots of nubile young nymphettes who are waiting like moist peaches for him to pluck. When Italian nuclear physicist, Claudia Cardinale, (not the most likely of nuclear physicists, I agree, but still doing a much better job than Denise Richards in ‘The World is not Enough’) is kidnapped on an LA stopover it’s up to Tom to spring into action and save the day before the knowledge inside her head is harnessed to create a new super weapon. His best source of information is bored party girl, Pamela Tiffin (still best known for dancing in a bikini in ‘Harper’), who Tom has the predictable frosty relationship with right until he seduces her. Along the way there are fistfights, gunfight, car-chases, more than one helicopter explosion and smooch after smooch after smooch. Until at the end when the gorgeous Claudia (in what is really a cameo) is so grateful for being rescued she makes her way to Tom’s bed. Of course she does.
 

The bad guy’s representative on Earth is played by Barry Nelson (himself a one-time James Bond), but what’s really interesting is who he seems to work for. We see this Mr Big in Las Vegas, in a distinctive rhinestone jumpsuit and barking orders in an unmistakable drawl. There’s big rings, the glimpsed side of an enormous pair of sunglasses and a medallion with the legend ‘TBC’. We never see his face and that’s led to some writers believing it isn’t really him – but no, this is Elvis, in his very last acting role, playing the supervillain against Tom Jones’s superhero.
 

So the ultimate boy’s adventure, getting it on with Claudia Cardinale, amongst many other gorgeous ladies, and to top it all, having Elvis fucking Presley in a guest appearance – not bad for a lad from Ponty indeed.

An American Gangster in Pall-Mall (1985)

D. Ted Kotcheff
Colour



Every so often Ernest Borgnine left his genial, bear-like presence behind and went back to being the tough guy of his younger days. (Have you seen ‘Bad Day at Black-Rock’? You really must.) He did old and grizzled in ‘The Wild Bunch’ and he did it before he died in ‘Red’. And here he does it in this bizarre 1980s British movie, as an American gangster, dressed in a pin stripe suit, fedora and with a toothpick constantly between his incisors – like a walking, out of time, homage to John Dillinger. His niece is dead in Mayfair, but Borgnine hasn’t come to London to avenge her, all he’s interested in are the jewels she was carrying. That’s what’s really got his attention. As next of kin the jewels are his, he reasons, and he is going to stomp around the West End – kicking ass and pancaking noses – until he gets them.


Like Robert Stark’s ‘Parker’, Borgnine’s unnamed character is an unfeeling machine. He doesn’t care who gets in his way or who he hurts, all he thinks about is the jewels. Now there are in the Parker series, entries where our lead character is a fish out of water, but he’s still in a locale that is very much America and he learns how to adapt quickly. Here though we have that same unstoppable and untouchable hard guy, but also a quirky ‘ain’t Brits strange’ London travelogue. It makes for an odd movie, with Borgnine’s toughness contrasting with comical cab drivers, unarmed policeman with whistles who can only run helplessly after any perpetrator and gangs of punk rockers lurking around most corners. (Seriously the similarly titled ‘An American Werewolf in London also has menacing punk rockers. Surely any punk rocker in London in 1985 would have felt like they belonged on the ‘Antique’s Roadshow’.) Most baffling is Prunella Scales as an incredibly posh, English divorcee Borgnine meets on the plane and who shows up to flirt with him every so often. Scales plays it with a certain comic charm, but in the face of which this hard as nails version of Borgnine looks actually panicked.


The film is at its best when its lead character is punching people. First off its his niece’s foppish boyfriend, who is forced to abandon his grieving of drinking and enjoying prostitutes to have his face bashed in until he starts spilling the secret life about the dead girl; then it’s onto her drug dealer, who makes the horrible mistake of calling Borgnine “an old fart” and receives a cricket bat repeatedly to his own personal cricket balls; then the drug supplier, who has to be dropped out of a window and through the windscreen of his pride and joy Jag before he’ll cooperate, and on and on. The look on Borgnine’s face says he’s having the time of his life, that all this violence is so much fun. Of course for the film the danger is that all that face-slapping, head-butting and knee-kicking might become a bit unremitting, which is no doubt why it has Scales show up every so often – although the scenes have such a jarringly different tone, they’re amongst the most disturbing here.







So far, so late night Channel 5. But what really elevates it, what takes it above so many other violent films of the 80s, is the final scenes – when Borgnine reaches the top of this criminal empire. And who does he finds there? None other than Lord bloody Olivier. That’s right darling Larry Is lying back on a chez lounge, looking so elderly and weak, but clearly relishing every line of villainous dialogue. And here these two older Oscar winning actors (the 1948 and 1955 vintages, if you’re interested) size each other up, pad around each other, recognise each other’s distinct styles and then play an elaborate game of acting one-upmanship.  They’re really tense and delicious scenes that ensures the film builds to a tense and beautifully written ending it in no way deserves.

Those who Enter the Skaneateles Hotel (1939)

D. George Waggner
B&W


Whereas other film trilogies ebb and flow, with some entries clearly not matching the quality of others, the original Skaneateles Hotel trilogy manages to hold a fantastically consistent line of quality all the way through. The first two entries are variations on a theme, showing what an innovative studio can do with a fantasy setting in a hotel, while this third does what fantasy does best and aims for epic. Picking up on one of the themes of the second film, the refugees from some unknown conflict, here we have the hotel in wartime. Except of course that the Skaneateles Hotel is too big to ever really be affected by some far off conflagration and so here we have a war between two distinct and implacable tribes taking place in the hotel itself. Now I’m well aware that a war between two different parties in a hotel sounds like a Marx Brothers movie that never was (and certainly would have been preferable to ‘Room Service’), but such is the scope and vast vistas already created within the Skaneateles Hotel that the whole thing seems utterly believable and incredibly tense.


Once again we’re greeted by the smiling and menacing form of Boris Karloff, but here there are four separate and very different guests – there’s English aristocrat, Basil Rathbone; the brilliant Peter Lorre in his stock role as mysterious European; reporter, Ginger Rogers (on loan from RKO and definitely not dancing); and loudmouth, Jack Carson. Although the four arrive at different times of day and night, they soon find themselves thrown together by the ever changing corridors of the Skaneateles Hotel. Wary at first, the four are forced to get over initial reservations, to learn to trust to each other, so they can survive in this world of rogue spies, murderers and distant gun battles.


This is the film where Karloff seems at his most vulnerable. Unlike in previous entries, the omnipotentcy deserts him when he’s suddenly dropped into the action with the others, and he flails as much as they do. It’s an unusual and distressing sight. Fans of these films have gotten used to his unflappability, his almost imperious façade, to have that taken away from him feels like the crushing of something. The five of them flee, hole up, make alliances and try to leave the hotel, as they know that outside its cavernous walls  – and this becomes increasingly hard to imagine as the film progresses – there is peace. At first glance much more of an isolationist tract than the last film, this is a film about how much more preferable peace is than war, and how you shouldn’t stick your nose into the conflicts of other peoples. Except is it? As the film progresses it seems more and more the case that Karloff is just misdirecting, that he knows exactly what he’s doing, knows precisely what is needed. As the film progresses it becomes clear that he is in no danger, that he is still directing matters, and that it is his war.  And at that point the message seems to be there are some conflicts in this world of ours, be they within the Skaneateles Hotel or without, that are impossible to avoid.
One of my favourite scenes of this whole series is at the end. After all the chaos, fear, bloodshed and danger, Karloff calmly returns to the front desk, wipes his hands and gets on with his day. Anything is possible in the Skaneateles Hotel.


The establishment would go dark for a little while now, but the doors would reopen….