No Face (1958)

D. Thomas Logan
B&W

What would it be like to be at the centre of a nuclear blast?

Well, obviously you wouldn’t survive long enough to dwell on it. That atom bomb would have splattered your particular atoms evenly over a square mile. But that moment, that sensation of the blast, when maybe the thought shoots through your mind that you’ve never been near anything so freaking powerful (right before the more understandable “fuck! I’m about to die!” screams through your mind) must be one of fearful awe. But what would happen if you actually did survive. If you were able to stand right inside that power and walk away; more than that, if you were actually able to absorb all that power and take it with you. What would it do to you? What would happen to your mind and body afterwards?

Our two films this week approach that Doctor Manhattan idea and take it in weirdly different directions.

Firstly paranoia and tension are on order in this gas-lit noir thriller, as down-on-his-luck-hack Leo McKern hears rumours that not only is a Russian atomic man at loose in London, but  his controllers want him to detonate himself at the State Opening of Parliament. However his investigation not so much ruffles feathers as plucks them furiously, so the authorities come down on him hard (with ‘The Official Secrets Act” waved in manic Neville Chamberlain style more than once), and McKern finds himself both pursued and pursuer as the clock ticks down to the moment London goes boom.

There’s a lot to admire here. Leo McKern as a journalist is like an embryonic version of his character in the excellent ‘The Day the Earth Caught Fire’; London exists in a kind of perpetual 1950s smog that must have required a man with a massive smoke-machine and the sets from every Jack the Ripper movie ever made, and there are fine character actors at every corner. Indeed in such a dour black & white film, there’s a surfeit of background colour – including Jack Warner as a shady Dixon of Dock Green, Kenneth Williams as the campest cockney snout who ever lived and Diana Dors as a foreign agent whose accent places her somewhere on the border between Minsk and Margate.

The problem, and it is a large – H-bomb sized – problem, is the villain. Because of scars from the blast, he hangs around London with a cloth perpetually masking his face. It’s tight to his features and makes him look something like an alien bank robber. Apparently he is supposed to be inconspicuous like this. He checks into the various hotels and guest houses and nobody winks an eyelid – as if they constantly give occupancy to people who won’t show their faces. He dresses like a faceless gangster, wanders about after dark, a bobby actually sees him near a dead body – but still he remains a mystery man on the run.

It’s a tense film, in many ways a clever film, but it’s difficult to take a film seriously where the hard-to-find bad guy is obviously saying: “Look at me! Look at me!”

G-Man! (1953)

D. Richard McCarthy
Brutal, torn from the headlines, B&W

Here's a film strangely neglected in Ronald Reagan's oeuvre, which is peculiar as it’s clearly and utterly so perfectly him. In fact it's so amazingly and absolutely him that this is probably what his wet dreams looked like.

Here he is as John ‘Duke’ Calhoun, a tough and uncompromising FBI agent running a hard-nosed operation against vicious gangsters in some unnamed American city. These gangsters are evil with a capital EVIL. You can tell from the way they sneer, or menace shopkeepers, or casually gun down one of their molls. Or you can tell by the way they run jazz clubs and sell reefer to further corrupt the wastrel patrons. Or you can tell by the way they have a comic book factory where soulless, conscience-less artists turn out violent and filthy comic strips to corrupt the young. Or you can tell by the truly damning fact that each night they salute the hammer and sickle and say thanks to their beloved Mother Russia.

Yes, Ronald Reagan is taking on communists, gangsters, jazz musicians (a couple of years later it would have been rock'n'roll) and comic books all wrapped up in one tight little bundle. Yes, he is on a crusade against everything a good right winger hates.

Part of that of course needs unpacking, as how could organised crime ever really be perceived as a communist activity? Surely the mafia is all about the profit margin, all about the bottom line, all about ruthlessness to keep their cash flow gushing. The cosa-nostra is really not interested in some higher principle or changing the world, they just want to be shady little capitalists and make lots of dough. If anything Ronald Reagan (government employee taking a paycheque from the state) is much more of a communist than they are. But it’s indicative of the muddy thinking of this film that everything bad has to be put into one pile, and everything good has to take one incredibly righteous Ronald Reagan shape. So even though these mobsters are clearly into gambling and prostitution, and obviously being creative with their revenue streams by publishing “disgusting and cruel” comic books (Reagan’s character’s description), they are still somehow men of the far left who despise the free market. They are working to destabilise all that’s good in America, i.e. capitalism, in the aid of communism, and they’re doing it by being the best capitalists they possibly can be. Please, don’t hurt your head by trying to get all this to make sense – it really, really doesn’t.

Ronald pushes the whole thing along – from every raid on a seedy nightclub, to the numerous interminable self-righteous speeches about the glory of America – in what is irrefutably one of his angriest and most committed performances. I can't say it’s a work of acting art, or even really that good, but evidently he believed furiously and wholeheartedly in it.

Bloody McDougall of the Black Seas (1955)

D. Alfred E. Green
B&W

What on Earth is ‘Bloody McDougall of the Black Seas’?
Well, you’re not going to believe this, but it’s Groucho Marx as a pirate.

Really? That seems an absurd film even for you to have found.
No, I’m being serious.

Tell me more!
Well, here’s the Marx Brother with the longest career (and one that actually makes sense to a modern audience) yukking it up in a puffy shirts, dark pantaloons and a nice triangular hat. Of course even as a pirate the very modern glasses, cigar and moustache stay in place.

Is it a real moustache?
Yes, by the 1950s Groucho was able to afford a real moustache.

Is he a good pirate?
I think so. Certainly he’s more of a precursor to Captain Jack Sparrow than a successor to Long John Silver. He’s, as you’d no doubt expect, more of a funny pirate, rather than a psychotic pirate. His heart is in the right place.

I actually meant good as in successful.
Oh, there are so many ways you can define the word ‘good’, aren’t there?

Don’t worry, we go back – I knew you’d pick the wrong one.
Sorry. Well that’s the thing, no he’s not a good pirate, or remotely adequate come to that. But he’s a braggart and a dreamer and so boasts about his pirate escapades, but these pirate escapades don’t really exist.

So he’s just saying them for larks?
Well, that and because they impress bad girl of the sea, Jane Russell.

Oh, Jane Russell is in it as well? I do like Jane Russell.
Don’t we all? She has a particularly fetching sneer in this film, which doesn’t leave her even in those moments when she is well disposed towards Groucho. As such she gives the impression of a cat toying with a mouse. Also, her cleavage here would undoubtedly have pleased Howard Hughes.

Um, a bit sexist, isn’t it?
Sorry, given the nature of her career break, one is always more inclined to discuss Jane Russell’s neckline than any other actress.

Okay, as long as you don’t make a habit out of it.
I promise I won’t.

So who’s the bad guy in this film?
Well, what passes as the bad guy is actually the force of authority, in the prim and prissy form of Claude Rains.

Claude Rains too? This just gets better and better.
I know. So the film is largely Groucho as Randell Q MacDougall, who is basically a land lubber, talking up his murderous exploits to impress Russell, then when he is arrested for said murderous exploits having to talk his way out of custody with Rains. It’s Groucho talking and insulting and wheedling and spinning nonsense in the way only Groucho can.

Sounds fun, if a little repetitive.
It is fun, if a little repetitive.

So are there any actual hi-jinx on the high seas?
It takes almost the whole length for Groucho, and the movie, to leave dry land. Once there it’s all played for laughs rather than drama though.

I’m guessing a happy ending then?
Kind of, Groucho gets the girl, but the fact that she’s still sneering means that she no doubt has other plans for him.

You’ve convinced me. I’ll have to check it out.
My work here is done!

Gransel & Hetel (1958)

D. Jago Mirelles
B&W

Much like ‘The Third Man’, a film in which Orson Welles only really makes a brief appearance, but which looks from every lop-sided camera-shot and stark black and white image like your actual Orson Welles movie; this is another film in which Welles does little more than cameo, but which seems like Orson Welles directing at his most menacing. Of course ‘Gransel & Hetel’ is a lot more obscure and nowhere near as good as ‘The Third Man’ (that’s fine though, it’s hardly a badge of shame to be less good than ‘The Third Man’), but one which in its Grimm Brothers gothic stands out as being possibly the most Welles films the great Orson never directed.

A boy named Gransel and a girl named Hetel wander too far into the woods one day where they meet a wicked witch who makes no secret of the fact she’d like to eat them. Actually this is one damned scary witch. Imagine the bleached face of a worm with the razor-like teeth of a tiger shark, then picture that looming out of black & white darkness and we have here the kind of evil queen Alvy Singer is never ever going to fall in love with. The plucky kids make their escape, but are trapped in the increasingly dark wood with their would-be devourer in pursuit. A terrified elf tells them that the only way they can save themselves is to head to the ogre’s castle at the centre of the woods.

The ogre is, of course, Orson Welles, shot constantly from low angles to make him look twice as big and three times as menacing. He looms into frame, dominates it, his big and bushy beard seems to jut right out of the screen, he laughs twice as loud as any other sound in the film. Of course this opens up a lot of fat jokes at poor Orson’s expense (he after all looks more likely to eat the kids than the scrawny witch), but I’m going to (mostly) rise above that and just say how great his performance is: ‘The Wizard of Oz’ played not as a kindly charlatan, but as a malevolent and changeable monster who can help you on a whim, but easily destroy you too.

(It amuses me to do this film right next to Peter Sellers in ‘Mr Hargreaves’, as part of the reason production on the original ‘Casino Royale’ went so badly awry was the spectacular falling out between the two men. In these films each seems to be playing versions of their public personas. Sellers is outwardly affable and witty, but underneath something distinctly more unpleasant; while Welles is a quixotic, occasionally charming, walking appetite. If I had to pick, I think I’d rather have an evening out with Orson.)

Like an earlier, less well-formed ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’, this is a movie which takes European fairy tales and decides not to downplay the horror elements Disney-style, but instead ramp them up so each of the ogres, witches and fairies is screaming at you. What we have is an Orson Welles’s children’s film – one that’s a compendium of creepy old books, scary backdrops, horrible monsters with horrible appetites, and a sense of doom that doesn’t really let up.

Mr Hargreaves (1959)

D. John Guillermin
B&W


If ‘Mr Hargreaves’ was green-lit today, it would be as “’Lucky Jim’ meets ‘The Manchurian Candidate’”. Whether that’d work as a pitch today I don’t know, it does rather assume that your average film executive is not only savvy enough to have come across Kingsley Amis, but also capable of dismissing warnings that he isn’t a big draw with the 18-25 demographic. I’m glad though that in 1959 Kingsley was a big enough name to get it into production. ‘Lucky Jim’ is clearly hard-wired into its DNA, right there to the smudges on its fingers. To be fair, ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ was still a couple of years from reaching the box office (the book had been written however); but the fact that Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury were still waiting and playing solitaire doesn’t matter. Few places knew as much about cold war paranoia as Great Britain and it’s with sweaty, nervous and anxious palms that the Brits go to the well here.

In an unnamed provincial university a lecturer arrives, he is very polite and ingratiating, but there’s just something not right about him. Gradually fellow faculty members and students become suspicious and after some snooping evidence emerges suggesting that he is in fact a Soviet spy, there to assassinate the Prime Minister on an upcoming visit.

This is a cracklingly tense movie, all shot in the small poky rooms of a regional English town – but those box-like, cell-like spaces edited together to be edgy and claustrophobic. But what really makes this film great is the identity of the mysterious, suspicious professor, as we have here Peter Sellers at the height of his powers.

Still in his chubby phase and not quite as old as his character should be, Sellers excels at creating a great blankness. He later joked that he was all mask, that there had been a real him but he’d had it removed. This is the film which shows that aspect more than any other, presenting a character who is all façade, a moral nothingness hidden by good manners. Yes Mr Hargreaves is polite, yes he’s outwardly pleasant, yes he’s obsequious – but there’s always something absent behind his eyes. It’s a performance of great skill: creating a man who seems to be an inoffensive two dimensional human being, then slowly revealing a moral void underneath.

(Later on, when he was lost to broad comedies, did Sellers not look back and think how brilliant he once was and that he should try and make movies like this again?)

Richard Todd and Janette Scott (as fellow lecturer and student respectively) are the team which work together to expose him, and they’re both perfectly serviceable in their stock roles. But in the background we have Beryl Reid as a soused French professor who seems barely able to speak French; Bill Kerr as the sports mad, loutish, Aussie poetry professor; and William Hartnell looking old and smiling genially as the professor of a subject so ancient it’s been forgotten. It ensures that there’s some colour and comedy in the staffroom in what would otherwise be a very serious, taut and paranoid black & white film.

At the forefront though is Sellers, taking on the kind of role money, fame and madness would soon snatch him away from, and if you’ve ever seen ‘The Party’ or ‘After the Fox’ you’ll know what a damned, crying shame that was.

The Story of Jean Carter (1957)

D. John W. Harries
Colour


Whenever one is trying to give a harrowing story a sense of gloss, a sign that the redemptive arc will swing into action at some point, the focus should be soft. A Hollywood actress may die of cancer on the big screen, but there’s no way the audience can actually be shown the ravages of the big C. A starlet may find herself on junk in this year’s weepie, but she’ll be a still sexy junkie. And your Oscar winner to be may succumb to consumption in the period epic, but she’ll still look lovely. That’s fine, it’s understandable. This is the dream factory after all, the selling of a fantasy, and fantasies should be pleasant.


It does mean though that as the years move on and films become (somewhat) more accepting of the realities of life, then those movies shot in soft focus in the fifties/sixties now look fluffy dreams of the imagination, like ‘The Wizard of Oz’ with a brain tumour.


Here we get Marilyn Monroe at the eponymous Jean Carter. Outwardly happy, with a doting husband (Richard Widmark) and a young son, Jean is having problems. A back ache from a childhood injury means she is popping too many pills; a supportive network of friends allows her to palm off her son so she can drink to hide her misery; she is compulsively stealing from local stores; and what’s more she is considering an affair with her handsome young neighbour, George Peppard. It’s hard being Jean Carter. Eventually the dam bursts and she has a wild breakdown, ending up in a sanatorium. There are tears and cries for forgiveness, but eventually her addictions are taken in hand, her would-be lover is revealed to be a cad and her husband forgives her, leading to a happy family hug.


So, what’s interesting about this film? What differentiates it from other sub-Douglas Sirk knock offs? Well, the direction is workmanlike and most of the actors are clearly thinking of nothing but their paycheques. Widmark phones in his performance from a whole other state or maybe even a different country, to be fair though, his entire character is pitched on the wide spectrum between ‘supportive’ and ‘reliable’, so it’s not like he has much to work with. Peppard fails to smoulder in a role which calls for youthful sexuality. Yes he has a certain cock-suredness, but he seems totally in love with himself. It’s very odd for a man to appear in love scenes with Marilyn Monroe and look like he’d rather engage in a bout of onanism with someone he really fancies.


No, the reason to check out this film the next time it appears on Channel 4 on a wet Wednesday afternoon is the leading lady, as Marilyn Monroe is surprisingly good as the drunken, pill-popping, kleptomaniac, depressive, would-be adulterer. Okay, she is never allowed to look particularly bad, or particularly drunk, or particularly smashed out of her gord on pills – but her eyes do capture the sadness of her character. There’s an element that she is still Marilyn Monroe, but to use a hackneyed phrase, it’s a Marilyn Monroe we haven’t seen before – wearing stolen garments which will be returned to the stores by the end.

The Invisible Man (1955)

D. Ralph Smart
B&W


There’s a reason why the Claude Rains/James Whale version is the best known of 'The Invisible Man' movies. There’s the spooky tavern, the screaming maid,. Raines’s magnificently sinister voice, a scarf dancing around by itself. It just feels so much like what Wells’s versions of The Invisible Man should be. In the eighty years since it was made (Eighty?! My doesn’t time fly!) Kevin Bacon, Chevy Chase and David MaCallum have had a stab at it but with less visible success (pun intended). Perhaps the most out there and uncanonical of these versions though is when Kenneth Moore donned the white bandages. It’s called ‘The Invisible Man’ and says it’s based on the novel by H.G. Wells, but if you’d resurrected Wells in 1955 and bought him popcorn at a showing, he’d have stared at the screen racking his brains as to whether he ever dreamed of such a thing. As this Invisible Man is invisible, but going places Wells never imagined. But even though the film is now pretty much forgotten you can surely see roots from this to 'Doctor Who', 'The Avengers', Alan Moore and the more outré parts of the James Bond films.


Ladies and Gentleman, I give you Michael Griffin, invisible man and roguish British secret agent.


Yes, those of you who’ve read the book or seen Claude Rains, may be surprised that someone so clearly insane could pass the rigorous examinations set by MI6. Surely he would have failed on personality type in eight or nine different ways. Also, wouldn’t a man so clearly self-absorbed not care too much about the nation state in the battle against the Russians? It’s true that his behaviour is a bit extreme at times, and there are moments when his colleagues and controllers look at him (or look at the space around where they imagine he might be) aghast. But then I guess actually having an invisible man on your side makes the difficulties of employing an invisible man worthwhile.


(Part of the problem with making ‘The Invisible Man’ is attracting a top name actor to it, after all why would your self-righteous A-lister want to do a role where he is never actually seen? This version gets around this though by giving Moore a perfectly fitting mask of his own face.  Bacon and McCallum (and Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible) also use such masks. But the question has to be asked, where would one get such an item? Masks are there to hide behind, so what company sees the market in making a mask that looks exactly like the person who is wearing it? Is there really much business in that type of thing? Even more than the idea of invisible men, this seems weird to me.)


After an opening mission which goes wrong (Griffin impetuously steals the wrong briefcase), his controller Leo G. Carroll (rehearsing for both ‘North by Northwest’ and ‘The Man from Uncle’) sends this invisible man on a mission to tail glamorous Russian spy, Jane Russell. The divine Ms Russell is clearly slumming it in British movies, but using it as an opportunity to cultivate an absurd East German accent which just gets magnificently broader and broader as the film goes on. Initially he is clandestine in the way only an invisible man can be, but before long he is putting on his human mask and wining and dining this ultra-glamorous Russian agent until she comes across to the British and right side. It’s then that she reveals her big secret, that the Russians have placed three giant robots in London which they are going to use to destabilise the capital. The stage is set for the incredibly giddy sight of the invisible man taking on huge metal men in London town.


Okay, the effects really do start to fall apart when the large men in robot suits go on the rampage. And more than once the strings are visible when the invisible man starts moving stuff around. But, in the ideas of it, in the concept, in the science fiction of stuff happening in grimy London we have both ‘Doctor Who’ and ‘The Avengers’. In the glamorous female prey and derring-do of the spy who breaks the rules, we have James Bond. And in the invisible man doing things H.G. Wells never imagined we have ‘The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ (as well as Ralph Smart’s own equally forgotten 1950s TV show ‘The Invisible Man’ which this was a springboard for). It’s far from perfect, but this is a movie we should hail!

The Final Man on the Run (1959)

D. Frank Howard
B&W


I truly love creaky old British Science Fiction. It’s not just that being a ‘Doctor Who’ fan means that dodgy monsters in grainy black and white comes somewhat with the territory, it’s that alien invasion always feels a lot more poky and provincial in England. In America there are wide open spaces, the world that is being invaded seems so wonderful and worth taking. It’s not like that in Britain. Maybe if – like ‘The Children of The Damned’ – these aliens are choosing to invade the Home Counties you can perhaps see where they’re coming from, but grim and grimy London? Seriously, alien invaders, what’s wrong with your planet that you’d want to come somewhere that still uses powdered egg?


The oddly titled ‘The Final Man on the Run’ is cheap and British and essentially a rip off of ‘The Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ – only with the twist that instead of a quiet and prosperous America town being stolen, it is the seedy environs and backstreets of Soho. This makes it a very interesting set-up, as the aliens are replacing people who are already scary anyway. These aren’t schoolteachers and policemen who are being replicated, but spivs, small time crooks and all round scum. The only one who realises what’s happening is a down on his luck boxer, with a dodgy record himself, but no one will listen to him as nobody really cares for these people anyway – and so the contagion spreads.


This film, despite its cheapness and the rip off of the premise, should be better remembered – not least as one of the early starring roles for Sean Connery.  (There’s also a pre Doctor Who William Hartnell as a tobacconist who is one of the first to be taken. It’s a great moment when Connery peers into his face and sees not a single ounce of emotion). And Connery does well as the boxer in totally over his head. There’s a path to his performance, a joy in seeing the character question more and more before frustration truly overwhelms him. Although unlike Kevin McCarthy in the American version, Connery can never make himself look totally helpless. Even in the bleak conclusion, one gets the impression that this Glaswegian Terry Malloy, will still find a way to save the world.


It’s a tense ride which understands just how scary shadows are, although it feels too rushed at 72 minutes. Much like ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, which can be interpreted as either anti-communist or anti-witch-hunts, I suppose there are two possible readings here also. Either the film is saying that the salt of the Earth (no matter how coarse a grain) are the most crucial people of all and once we lose them we lose everything; or else this is a bunch of middle class film makers sneering from their pipes and slippers and thinking that the working classes are so common and brutish they are all pretty much aliens anyway, aren’t they?


So perhaps pour yourself a sherry and let the alien takeover begin!

The Tall Tower (1958)

D. Otto Preminger
B&W


There are so few ideas in the world that it’s unsurprising some overlap. It’s unsurprising that some films look basically the same as later much more famous films, almost as if the latter was an unofficial remake. We shouldn’t be suspicious though, we shouldn’t accuse – some films just fade from the collective memory, while others crash down on bloodied feet before smirking laconically to ensure you can never forget them.


As I’ve said before, this blog is for the neglected orphans of cinema.


See if this scenario sounds familiar: a New York detective calls into a tower block and finds himself caught in a battle of wills with suave European criminal who has taken hostages as he and his gang attempt to rob a vault in the basement.


Ah, I can see you nodding now. It’s ‘Die Hard’, isn’t it? That great classic of macho blockbuster cinema. We’ve all seen ‘Die Hard’. In fact my dad insists on watching it every single Christmas Eve. But imagine it’s ‘Die Hard’ in black & White, ‘Die Hard’ without explosions, ‘Die Hard’ with James Stewart as the cop and George Sanders as the criminal – and then you realise you’re actually watching ‘The Tall Tower’.


The difference between films of the 40s/50s/60s, where Hitchcock was the biggest and most mischievous boy in the sandpit, and the later blockbusting age is largely a matter of volume. Whereas it was the case that entertainment was provided by the taut dragged out tension and some truly startling moments, it became the norm for thrills to come by the way of bigger and bigger things blowing up. Indie films are understated, low budget horror can be understated (although more often is just tediously crap); but if you want a big tent-pole film with a major Hollywood star, then you want to rank up the volume and make things go ‘Bang!’ Now in terms of quality ‘Die Hard’ is one of the absolute best examples of this loud things go ‘Bang!’ genre (for the flip-side of the coin, see the ‘Transformers’ films), but it’s still a film where things go ‘Bang’. And the fact that it’s so loud and exciting and thrilling and there are loads of ‘bang-bang-bang’ explosions, makes the really subdued and understated style of ‘The Tall Tower’ look weirdly unthrilling.


No doubt an Alfred Hitchcock would have ramped up the suspense with this material, but Preminger has chosen his theme here as sweat. As the film progresses and the situation becomes more and more dangerous, Stewart is almost having flop sweats. He is dripping. Seriously, he looks quite unwell and one keeps expecting a kindly nurse to wander into shot and plug a drip into his arm. Sanders, on the other hand, prefers to glisten. Even at his most menacing, most in control (and with that voice, he was born to play sinister control), there’s still a sheen of moisture on his brow to illustrate the danger of the situation. Even suave European crooks feel nervous.


But the odd thing is that sense of danger is never as keen as it should be. This is a film which moves at a glacial pace, one which doesn’t so much draw out the tension as strap it to a rack and slowly and idly turn the handle, before popping off to have tea and biscuits. It’s a film which for a modern audience, having seen ‘Die Hard’, lacks much in the way of real urgency and thrills. Although that’s maybe unfair to modern audiences; if you compare it to a ‘Rear Window’ or a ‘North or Northwest’, then this film seems weirdly unengaging. It’s a movie which is happier staring in at the classy actors, than giving momentum to its plot. Indeed (SPOILER ALERT) it doesn’t even hint at things going ‘Bang’. As a sign of how understated and subdued it is, the villain isn’t even killed at the end. He is merely shot in the stomach and taken into custody. Job well done for the NYPD.


And yet for all its slowness and lack of drama, I would still prefer to watch this rather than something like ‘Transformers’. Obviously ‘Die Hard’ is miles better, but despite that we clearly lost something when we decided that things going ‘Bang’ was the be all and end all.

Liberace!!! (1955)

D. George Sidney
Colour

One of the three Robert Mitchum/Jane Russell musicals made by Columbia in the 1950s, but the one that really demands to be taken as a screaming camp classic. A biopic (although I’m aware that’s totally the wrong word) of ‘Lee’ Liberace and Tallulah: “the woman he loved and lost”.

Cole Porter also had a film made in his lifetime where he was portrayed as heterosexual and Hollywood conventional, but then while Cole Porter’s tunes were known, there was no real public persona. Liberace was a whole other matter. When this film was made Liberace was a very public presence, his TV show was still on air and he was a favourite of magazines. Later that year he would make his own film debut (also in a heterosexual role) in ‘Sincerely Yours’. It’s therefore particularly bizarre to watch him impersonated (again that’s totally the wrong word) by Robert Mitchum – a man who had his own very public, and truly different, persona. The results, as you can well imagine, are hilarious.

Mitchum makes no effort to pretend to be Liberace, merely adopting the coiffered hairstyle and the sparkly jackets, but giving no hint of anything which could be summed up as “deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love” – a description of Liberace which appeared this very same year (although he did sue). This Liberace is a young man with a gift for the piano, who works his way up through the clubs, always dedicated to his craft. The ladies like him, but he’s shy and so just concentrates on tickling the ivories. Then one day he meets Tallulah, a chanteuse who blows him away. They begin a torrid affair which throws passion into both of their acts. Eventually though they can take it no longer and tearfully part, Liberace moving on to dedicate his life to his fans.

What we have then is utter fiction, and if the film was about a made up character named Ken Kiperace, one that would be utterly forgettable. However the lights, the glamour, the candelabras and the fact that this is supposed to be about the Liberace, just makes the whole thing a riot. Mitchum doesn’t even pretend to play the piano and just sings in his normal drawling tone. He obviously knows this is nonsense and so has determined to just get through it and pick up his pay cheque – which one imagines must have been sizeable. Russell however (in what is, to be fair, a completely fictional role) is a thirty foot high sex goddess, dancing and swinging her hips and showing her legs at every opportunity. Rarely did she sizzle more radiantly on the screen and – even with him being particularly languid and laid-back (to the point you wonder what kind of cigarettes he’s actually smoking) – the sparks are luminous in this Mitchum/Russell combination. It’s great viewing, all that heat and passion and lust, and then you remember this film is supposedly about Liberace.

Really, do such song titles as: “You’re the Woman for Me”; “Married in the Morning, Divorced by Noon”; and “The Best Looking Girl in Kansas” really have a place in a film purportedly about Lee Liberace?

I think, on balance, probably not.

Obviously it suffers in comparison to Michael Douglas in ‘Behind the Candelabra’, and is based on fact in the same way that ‘Star Wars’ is based on fact; but on its own giddy, eye popping terms, it’s a real treat.

The Man from Over the Pond (1958)

D, Charles Crichton
Colour

Let’s be honest, there are a lot of John Wayne films. Flicking around the TV over the last bank holiday weekend, I glimpsed him constructing a bridge, running a circus and indulging in a saloon fight alongside Stewart Granger. (Saloon fights, much like death on Ingmar Bergman films, are thematically important in John Wayne’s oeuvre). All those films I skipped past, but if ‘The Man from Over the Pond’ shows up on BBC2 on a wet Sunday afternoon, please do give it the time of day.

 

John Wayne plays a former conman trying to make a new start for himself in Victorian England. Without a doubt it’s lack of reputation has to do with its similarity to the much better ‘The Quiet Man’ (and possibly because the other John Wayne in England film people recall is the substantially more violent ‘Brannigan’), but for anyone British – or who has immersed themselves in British culture – then this is a giddily surreal film. A sweet and charming English comedy with a honking great American star in the middle

 

There’s John Wayne bickering friendly with his landlady, Thora Hird; there’s him being stood a drink in the pub by Peter Sellers, before stopping to chat with a tiny Arthur Askey; here he’s playing poker with Sid James, Kenneth Connor and (briefly) Bernard Bresslaw; before romancing singer with a bad reputation, Diana Dors, who’s best friend is Joan Sims; he enjoys a  running joke with exasperated tobacconist Tony Hancock; is measured for a suit by the over the top camp pairing of Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtry; and  – in perhaps one of the most remarkable images ever committed to celluloid – he is dragged onto stage to sing and dance next to a ukulele playing George Formby.

 

It’s like a whistle-stop tour of 1950’s light entertainment, with John Wayne as your guide.

 

And that’s what I truly love about this film, all these people are not altering their act to fit into a John Wayne movie, they are doing what they do and John Wayne seems to be having a ball watching them do it. Indeed there’s a grin on his face (a slightly befuddled one, but a definite beam) when he finds himself with the over the top, swishingly unabashed, Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtry. A scene which may hold the record for the most single, double and triple entendres ever crammed into four minutes. While elsewhere there’s a real chemistry between him and Thora Hird, a warmth and bright eyed affection which maybe suggests they played together as children or flirted as teens. I’m not joking, the sparks almost seems sexual at points and one can’t help thinking that if Thora had been just that little bit better looking they could have made one of those great, sizzling on-screen partnerships. She could have replaced Janet Leigh as the love interest in ‘Jet Pilot’, or Sophia Loren in ‘Legend of the Lost’; alternatively Wayne could have wound down his career playing Wesley in ‘Last of the Summer Wine’.

What’s truly remarkable about ‘The Man From Over the Pond is that it’s taken me six paragraphs to mention that Alec Guinness is in it, playing the mark who Wayne eventually forms a friendship with. But then compared to everything else, the pairing of Alec Guinness and John Wayne is made to feel a bit run of the mill. The rest of the film is so colourful and incongruous, a bizarrely and magnificently enjoyable romp – especially in the scene where George Formby forces Wayne to speak “like a cockney does”. A watching Dick Van Dyke would have scoffed that if the chance ever arrived, he’d do a far better job.