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.

The Fishman of Alcatraz (1965)

D. Harry Paddock
B&W


After the success of 'The Birdman of Alcatraz' (and maybe even the lesser success of 'The Jazzman of Alcatraz') lots of Hollywood producers felt the need to make a movie with the suffix 'of Alcaraz'. After all it was the most famous prison in the world, in the news because it had recently shut down and so rather than just making A.N. Other prison film, an ALCATRAZ film made sound of commercial sense of the kind that makes dollar signs flash in the eyes of Hollywood producers and thin lines of drool to run from the corners of their greedy fat mouths. Most of these films though had ridiculously little to actually do with Alcatraz (as we'll see in the next entry), this one does though - and clearly even managed to film some scenes on the island. Not great scenes admittedly, not even memorable scenes, but enough for the film to yell out “Hey bozos! We actually fucking went there!”

I'll be honest, when I first saw the title 'The Fishman of Alcatraz' I seriously misjudged the film’s content. My obviously distressingly adolescent mind, crammed full of images of Spiderman and Batman, just imagined that Alcatraz was a really stupid place to send the captured superhero, Fishman. This is after all a prison surrounded by water and so would be a terrible location in which to hold the mighty Fishman. (Clearly my mind is full of cut-price versions of Aquaman). If one was to have Fishman in custody a prison far in land would be miles better. On Alcatraz, Fishman’s escape is inevitable.

However my super hero fantasies proved to be as unfounded and inaccurate as mermaids, mermen and that whole Atlantis myth, as this film turned out to be about a man who just really liked fish.

Following all the beats of the Burt Lancaster movie, here a doggery Elisha Cook jr is a convict who really likes fish and through correspondence courses and careful examination of his surroundings, becomes an expert on them. Therefore Alcatraz becomes his salvation, as he has lots of time to examine fish and even discovers a new breed. Set in the 1930s, there are cameos from an overweight and sweating Al Capone and a Machine Gun Kelly who ends his sentences with “rat-tat-tat” just so we know who he is. Cook looks old, but is still convincing as a small crook who got in above his head, and the whole is in many ways quite a sweet film. However whereas birds have beautiful plumage and a distinct look on screen, fish either swim away or just flop about. And after 90 minutes watching a kindly old man pursue this Piscean interest, if you haven’t flopped limp to your seat yourself, you’ll almost certainly have swum hurriedly away.

The Jazzman of Alcatraz (1962)

D. Quentin Hofstetter
B&W

White corporate America’s ability to either sanitise or remake everything in its own image always astounds me. Here we get a double jackpot, with a bleached and cleaned up version not just of the hardest nastiest prison in the United States; but much more than that, the absolute whitest version of jazz music human eyes and ears have ever had the misfortune to endure.

The altogether much too clean-cut and distinctly unblemished Robert Vaughan plays an incarcerated jazz musician. It’s hinted that he’s the victim of a miscarriage of justice and I can believe that, as a more honest, decent, grown up boy-scout boring, sickeningly saintly character one couldn’t possibly meet. Whilst enjoying a stint in Alcatraz he starts to write a piece in his head based on the sounds of life, laughter and love drifting across the bay from San Francisco. This isn’t a bad idea for a story, in the right hands those sounds of freedom would surely be both an inspiration and an exquisite torture. However the not bad idea at the centre is decidedly hamstrung by the fact that this is a film which wants to do nothing to upset middle America. And things which might upset middle America clearly include both jazz and Alcatraz.

I actually went to Alcatraz recently and if ever a film fails to capture the grim bleakness of it, it's ‘The Jazzman of Alcatraz’. There are moments when the director and designer seem to trying to make it look grim, but not wanting to scare off the punters means it mostly comes across as homely. It’s like a hotel that you would never want to stay in again, but still actually a three star hotel. There's a nice autumnal light to the cellblock, helpful and articulate fellow prisoners and guards who are not only courteous but actually encouraging. In fact the version in the film seems a great place to pursue an artistic endeavour, as a writer myself I almost wanted to check in there.

More alarmingly though, Robert Vaughan is the nicest, sweetest, most upstanding – non-drinking, non-smoking (absolutely no drugs!) – jazz musician to ever grace the silver screen. Even his prison uniform looks freshly starched and laundered each morning. Given the actual history of jazz music, he is painfully white and so his casting feels amazingly anachronistic in what is a contemporary film. Remember that unfortunate scene in ‘Back to the Future’ where Marty McFly inadvertently inspired Chuck Berry? Well imagine that cultural appropriation spread out to eighty three minutes of length and you have ‘The Jazzman of Alcatraz’.

Except not quite.

Vaughan broods about his quite nice cellblock playing jazzman (playing rather than being, it’s an important distinction), he stares moodily out while composing in his head, but what we get here is nowhere near ‘Johnny B Goode’. It's not really a surprise that after all the inspired looks and beauty struck words he uses to describe his opus, on unveiling it is so lacklustre and insipid that to describe it as elevator music would be far too kind.

Juan Wayne - Hollywood Superstar (2004)

D. Roberto Martinez (although, disappointingly, not the one who now manages Everton)
Colour


I like ‘Juan Wayne – Hollywood Superstar’, a film which exists in bright sunshine but also manages a harsh grittiness that Ken Loach would actually salivate over. It’s a film with dreams of Hollywood stardom (could that title scream ‘wannabe’ anymore?) but also has its fingers dirty with the drudgery of hard low paid work. It’s a film which very much positions itself as lying in the gutter and staring at the stars – although these aren’t the kind of stars you’d generally see from Griffith Observatory.
Part expose of the underclass that exists in the shadows of the bright lights in Beverly Hills; part satire of Hollywood and the fame hungry; part raucous sex comedy: the micro budget ‘Juan Wayne – Hollywood Superstar’ is not short of ambition, it has bags of ambition, sacks of ambition, bulging suitcases of ambition. Unfortunately that’s way too much ambition for such a small film and so it frequently overreaches. But then a film which has too many ideas is always more fun than a film meandering along on too few.


Juan works three jobs, one as a pool boy for a wealthy Hollywood producer who seems to be on the skids, one as a tour guide driving people to the outside of houses he can only dream of going into, and one as a barman in a gay club. His ability to juggle these jobs, the stoic way he accepts every insult and piece of shit that's thrown at him is the best of the film. Hector Gonzalez, who plays the lead, carries it off with a great deal of charm and panache, smiling a never dented grin even when clearly aware that he’s clinging onto the scabby underside of the Hollywood dream.

Less successful are the Hollywood satire sequences, with Juan going for auditions for crap looking acting roles and suffering embarrassing incidents in front of casting agents. I'm sure these scenes come from a real place, the kind of place where jobbing Hollywood actors sit around and discuss the sheer living hell of their existences, but really they're the kind of thing Joey on ‘Friends’ used to get up to every four weeks or so. We've seen it all before (and can see it again and again on Comedy Central, who make E4’s use of ‘Friends’ seem sparing) and really YOU CAN have too much of a good thing.

The worst though are the sections devoted to his illicit and snatched liaisons with the wife of the Hollywood producer whose career may very well be on the skids. If for whatever odd reason you wanted to see a bawdy low-stakes comedy with plenty of nearly being caught with the trousers down moments, then you've come to the right place. It’s tedious and disappointing in a film which elsewhere is so very much alive. But then I suppose even this is representative of Hollywood as a whole: there may just be a market for social expose, there sometimes is a market for satire, but sex most definitely sells.

Killer on Sunset Boulevard (1982)

D. Wayne Hopkin
Colour

Johnny Cash was a pious man. A Christian who put a lot of stake in his faith in God and recorded many gospel tracks – as well as, of all things, a Man in Black Christmas album. But there was also something sinister about Johnny Cash. You don’t bill yourself ‘The Man in Black’ if you want to be loved by everyone. Just as you don’t spend hours practicing a brooding sneer in front of the mirror as a teenager (we don’t think that look just arrived on his face, do we?) if you’re planning to make it as a happy-clappy, Christian entertainer. A faithful man Johnny Cash may have been, but he knew as sure as Alice Cooper knew, that darkness sells. That’s doubly true in films. You can go so far with being pious and Christian on a cinema screen, but you can do a hell of a lot more with sinister.

Even more than the other Monkees, Micky Dolenz clearly craved fame. If you think of the gurning comedy, or the mugging at camera while pretending to play the drums, then clearly this is a man desperate to be noticed. He stood out much more than Took or Nesmith, and made Davy Jones look like a blandly English ex-Coronation Street actor in comparison. There was in Dolenz, an all-round entertainer trying to get out, a counter- culture Sammy Davis Jr – but in reality all he really got to be was drummer in The Monkees.

Here Cash and Dolenz come together in ‘Killer on Sunset Boulevard’. Although, to be fair, it’s hardly a meeting brimming with the anticipation of a Newman/Redford, De Niro/Pacino or even Godzilla/ King Ghidorah.

It’s 1982 and neither of them is at the height of their careers (although Cash would later climb the summit again; Dolenz is no longer able to see it even with high powered binoculars). So it’s an odd combination in an odd film, but one which specifically plays to who they are. From the outside Johnny Cash and Micky Dolenz look odd casting, but on closer examination it’s difficult to think of anyone else playing these roles.

This is a movie which combines ‘The Valley of the Dolls’ with ‘Desperate Hours’. Dolenz is a Hollywood star, an actor and musician extraordinaire, one of the most famous people on the planet according to the oddly fawning news broadcast we see (even the E network would consider it a little uncritical). His character is clearly leading the life Micky Dolenz himself has always dreamt of. There’s a gorgeous wife and two daughters, but more importantly the adulation of the world – who could ask for more? Except, Dolenz also has a deranged fan. This fan takes the form of Johnny Cash, who on this bright sunny day invades Dolenz’s home and holds him and his family hostage. What follows is a tense siege where Dolenz gets more and more desperate for his and his family’s safety in the face of his totally implacable opponent.

I’ll be honest, this is not a great film. Dolenz in no way has the acting chops to pull this off, and comes over more a whining child in a playground rather than a husband and father strung out to the very end of his tether. But Cash is extraordinary, so still and dangerous, with eyes that have years of fear and hurt deep within. Cash – unlike a certain Sun Records colleague – is never thought to have made that much impression of a film, but here we have an embryonic Hannibal Lector and the template for a million other screen psychos to follow.

Malcolm on Wheels (1968)

D. Henry Schloss
B&W

There’s something much less intimidating about British bikers than their American counterparts. You see in films the American biker gangs, tearing up the American highways on their hogs, before tearing up American towns and then if they get the chance tearing up American womanhood. It’s all deliberately, unapologetically and provocatively intimidating; and because that image is so persuasive the belief becomes widespread that all American bikers are that way. Yet when you’re driving about the byways and highways of Blighty and you see British bikers, you don’t feel intimidated by them in the slightest. Even when there’s a group of them together, you can’t help thinking that they’re basically nice, if slightly oil-stained young men. No doubt they probably live at home with their mothers, they work as a bank clerk Monday to Friday and their favourite dinner is beef casserole. British bikers, even British bikers who dub themselves Hell’s Angels, just don’t have anywhere near the same air of menace about them.

This black & white British film seems to back up those prejudices. For the first half an hour the central character of Malcolm fits in exactly with what we imagine a British motorcyclist to be. Played by David Hemmings, still young, thin and cherubic, he does indeed live at home with his Mum (Beryl Reid), has what looks at first glance and incredibly boring job in an architect’s office and he has great trouble talking to pretty girls – be they the nice lass down the street, or the kind of sneering leather-clad good-time girl he sees when sitting by himself at biker stops. He is bland and inoffensive, a boy/man who just likes riding his motorcycle and doesn’t want to be a fuss to anyone. He is exactly what we all imagine British bikers to be.

But that’s before he takes a Stanley knife and slashes open the throat of the leader of the local biker gang.

What follows is a serial killer/chase film, where Malcolm rides around the country with good girl who just wants some dark thrills, Jane Asher, pinion behind him. In many ways this is your stereotypical 1960s dangerous bikers’ story, with our protagonist killing those who get in their way and always just about evading the police. But even with all the deaths and the violence, it manages to avoid the dark glamour of American biker movies. One really can’t picture Dennis Hopper sat down eating marmite sandwiches out of kitchen foil and moaning about how he wishes his mum would use mustard instead; just as you can’t imagine Peter Fonda having deeply inadequate sex with his young pouting lover, who just calmly tells him that it’s okay, they can practice when they get home.

This is a film about motorcyclists on the open road, about youthful rebellion; so it’s a film that steals tropes from an incredibly recognisable part of American culture, yet still manages to produce something so weirdly and bathetically British.

The Sound of Wedding Bells (1960)

D. Nigel Ramsbotham
B&W


‘The Sound of Wedding Bells’ is runt of the litter of Cliff Richard movies, and given what that litter looks like you can imagine that it’s a very malformed and feeble runt indeed. It’s the only one of Cliff’s movies to not be a musical, the only one that aims at proper drama and a movie that manages to be both tediously stilted and decidedly weird at the same time. Okay, there are two songs, but one of them is over the end credits and the film seems there to show off Cliff’s acting skills, or at least how far he has to go until he becomes a proper actor


Here Cliff is as a young lad in Northern English town who works in the factory and still lives with his widowed mother. So far so ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’, though don’t expect the brooding machismo of an Albert Finney (or for that matter, an Albert Steptoe). What’s truly interesting though is that Cliff’s character is named Harry Webber, which of course is only one syllable off his real name. So there’s almost a sense that Cliff is playing himself: the good and dutiful son who is dedicated to his career and his mother. He does seem happy with his lot at the start of the film, but soon a good-time girl arrives to throw off all the certainties of his world with just a casual glance over her beautiful shoulder.


This sweetheart is Jeanette Scott, a sexy blonde who wants to go to the bright lights of London. In her skin-tight white trousers and pink angora jumper she looks every inch the 1950’s American pin-up girl, and plays the role with appropriate American brassiness. Unfortunately that truly unsettles a film where she’s supposed to be all hot and wild for a far more frigid Cliff. Imagine the twenty-five year old Angelina Jolie trying to get it on with Sir John Gielgud and you have a good idea of their scenes together. But the script says there has to be sparks between them: so they meet, kiss, seem to fall in love (although interestingly those words are never used) and before they know it they’re engaged. As their relationship progresses it becomes clear that Cliff is going to have to decide whether to marry this fast woman follow her to a fast lifestyle in London. That would mean leaving his life, and most importantly his mother behind.


What’s interesting, for the accepted narrative that it was The Beatles who came along in 1962/1963 to blow Cliff away, is how neutered he was even a year before. Already his image is safe and dutiful and as far from a rock’n’roll child as it would be possible to be. The ending sees him separate from the gorgeous, yet wild fiancée, leaving her to head off to London by herself (where she’ll certainly meet a much more exciting man), while Cliff stays behind with his dear old mother. Yes there’s the possibility of romance with safe and conservative librarian, Una Stubbbs, but this is a film about a boy who loves his mother above all else. For a movie starring a rock’n’roller at the height of his fame that’s a decidedly odd note to end up on – and yet given how Cliff’s career and life has progressed – a really appropriate one.

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 Guest in Room 313 (1968)

D. Giles Malay
B&W


Here’s a genuine curio of a movie which intrigues me every time I see it. ‘The Guest in Room 313’ is a shadowy and obtuse film, one that aims for a narrow focus but also tries to be many things at once, and as a consequence so much remains wonderfully elusive within it. I don’t think there’s another movie quite like it.


The set up is thus: Laurence Harvey, putting that uniquely frigid style of his to good use (this is his best film outside of ‘The Manchurian Candidate’) is a burnt-out spy holed up in the room 313 of a Las Vegas hotel. (Hence the title, I guess.) Clearly something went awry on his last mission as Harvey has terror dreams even when awake; obviously he knows a lot of stuff he doesn’t want to know and it’s burning through his brain. But more than that, more than just being an ex-spy with a drink problem and mental health issues who has cut himself off from society, Harvey also believes that he’s a werewolf. And that belief takes hold even before young women start being murdered in Las Vegas at full moon.


This is a movie which drips with nervous sweat, which reeks of desperate paranoia. You almost suspect that the director and screenwriter and most of the crew made it while wearing little tinfoil hats to stop the government reading their minds. Harvey sits in the hotel room, he drinks whisky, he broods, he has panicked dreams that don’t seem to make any sense within the context of the film – but are undeniably compulsive and fit in totally with the feel of the film. Janet Leigh (another throwback to ‘The Manchurian Candidate’) is a hotel employee in a smart suit who officiously tries to deal with his needs, flirting with him and mothering him, and generally being far more attentive than any normal hotel employee. (Think of that description and then think of the usual impersonal personal service of hotel staff, your suspicions are immediately raised, aren’t they?) Jack Nicholson is another visitor, a fellow agent or perhaps Harvey’s handler, who speaks in bizarre, drawling riddles and makes each of his three scenes decidedly edgy in the way only Jack can. Then there’s Charlotte Rampling, sweet and affecting as a call girl Harvey calls in daylight and who might, just like everyone else, know a lot more than she seems. These are performances which seem to come full of secrets, and around the immobile centre of Harvey – who somehow lets his stiff stillness radiate insanity – they create a movie where you obviously can’t even trust the walls.


The atmosphere of paranoia builds and builds, and never lets up. The ending might be to some people a damp squib, but I find it gloriously and remorselessly unsettling. Yes, little is resolved, most is still left up in the air, but this is a film which wants you to walk away thinking that they really are out to get you.

The Story of Fire (1937)

D. Wilhelm Dieterle
B&W


In-between playing Louis Pasteur and Emile Zola, Paul Muni had time to appear in another 'historical' movie playing another 'historical' character. The veracity of this particular history is a lot more up in the air though, as here Muni is - for want of a better phrase – ‘that bloke who invented fire’. Yes, the 1930's favourite go-to actor for big and worthy roles, straps on some animal skins and a fake beard and pretends to be the man who first clocked the notion that if you rub two sticks together you might just get results. This is bizarre notion and one that should be a Eureka moment in a comedy sketch, rather than the basis of a whole movie; so to drag the story out the filmmakers make these particular cavemen the most verbose and articulate troglodytes this side of the Parthenon. As rather than grunting around in the dark, these cave dwellers make speeches with the passion and grace of Aristotle as they determine whether they should harness the destructive power of this new-fangled fire stuff.


We are with the Garl tribe (they may be more advanced than you’d expect your standard man, who’s just this moment evolved from chimps, but they still haven’t got around to pretty names) who are having troubles from a rival tribe called the Theraks. One night in a great storm a lightening-strike is witnessed and a tree bursts into flames. The power of this new phenomenon, which they swiftly call ‘fire’ - thus revealing themselves as the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons – is one desired to help them in their battle against the Theraks. But how to capture it? The young warrior leader takes the problem to their wise man (Muni), the one person likely to be able to work out how to create fire, but also the one most likely to see the ethical and moral dilemmas of doing so.


Basically ‘The Story of Fire’ is an unholy mess. Primitive caveman who are as eloquent and verbose as any faeces and Neanderthal-blood smeared Shakespearian king, trying to decide whether it’s right to harness one of the fundamentals of human existence. It plays like a Mel Brooks or Monty Python sketch that has been stretched to an abnormal length and unaccountably had all the jokes removed. (That’s until the final scene, when Muni stares at something round and brings his hand to his chin to ponder. The same man inventing fire and the wheel, truly he was the Edison of his day). The drama is so ridiculous and artificial and the speeches so over the top and pompous that it keeps you watching with a kind of hypnotic fascination as to how bad it can get. Muni and the other actors try their best, but it’s written on their furry faces that they know they’re beating a dead mammoth.


What I like about this film though is that it actually bloody exists. These were the days when biblical movies were still big business at the box office, so it’s truly fantastic to have this film out there, pushing the envelope and showing that even in the 1930s American cinema was thinking of other origin stories for man – even if the story they came up with was utterly preposterous.

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.

Mrs Davenport (1949)

D. Curtis Bernhardt
B&W


A great big melodramatic musical of the kind nobody makes anymore, or made that often even in the 1940s. A musical which isn’t about dancing in front of exotic sights, or sexy and exciting show folks singing warmly to each other; but instead ordinary people in a big house facing crises in their relationships. Even small stories can be made big if you give them the right attention, and this is a small story made epic and spectacular. It centres on a bored housewife, Olivia De Havilland, who is fed up of her travelling businessman husband, George Sanders, and so flirting with waif-like hunk up the street, Farley Granger. When Granger breaks his leg she seizes her chance for perhaps something more and moves him in with her to recuperate. But, maybe sensing something wrong, Sanders decides to take a sabbatical from work to return to the house full time and become a doting husband. The scene is set for high passion, jealousy, arguments, tears, swoons and finally revelation after revelation of crippling childhood secrets. It’s the stuff of high musical drama, of emotive songs in an over-wrought style. Except if you put ‘Mrs Davenport’ on with a view to tapping your feet along to some soaring tunes, then I should apologise now, as this isn’t actually a musical at all.


Why am I being mischievous? Why am I lying? Well, because if ever a film looks like it’s crying out to be a musical it’s ‘Mrs Davenport’. So many times throughout the film an emotional crescendo is reached, the score starts to swell, and one thinks this is it: we’re going to have a big heartfelt number. But frustratingly it never actually happens. Yet still the film, in its ever so earnest melodramatic pomp, keeps leading us to believe that a musical is going to break out. The last time I watched this movie, a friend of mine and I played a drinking game wherein you had to swig at every point you thought a song was going to happen. We both ended up so, so pissed. At first I thought it was the self-serious score leading the audience to feel like this, but actually the whole thing is staged as if it really is a musical. At the end of every argument, revelation, tearful reconciliation, the camera lingers that little bit too long on our leads’ faces with the result that you expect something else to happen. When it then cuts away to the next talky scene, it’s like something has been chopped out. As if some bitter projectionist who can’t hold a tune has made this film his own personal plaything.


De Havilland, as always, is lovely and radiant and wonderful (I will never hear a word said against Olivia De Havilland); Sanders knows how to deliver snide remarks and present a wounded yet carefree façade like no other actor; while Granger looks the part of sensitive young soul, even if – as always – he looks ridiculously gauche on camera. But for a simple human drama, set in a ramshackle old house, it’s incredibly bombastic and in love with its own seriousness and importance in a way it doesn’t need to be. I don’t know if Tennessee Williams ever saw ‘Mrs Davenport’, but even he’d have thought that the characters just need to shut the fuck up and get over themselves. However if Warner Bros had taken the time to throw in something an audience could sing, well perhaps Mrs Davenport would have lived longer in the cultural memory as the great, spectacular, camp classic it is crying out to be.

Privates Lives (2001)

D. Otto von De Mille
Colour

Two years after the disaster that was the final Sexy Goth Girls movie, Liddy D’Eath and Otto Van De Mille reteamed for this spin on Noel Coward’s ‘Private Lives’. It’s difficult to see from the outside what kept D’Eath and Van De Mille together, why one of them didn’t explore what other opportunities there were. There are rumours of an affair between the two, but it seems to have finished before they started making films. So far, so Woody Allen/Diane Keaten, but Keaten did at least go off and make ‘The Godfather’, Liddy D’Eath just stayed true to Von De Mille. This is surprising as whereas he is an adequate director, there’s something quite special about her screen presence. Not just her physicality, which is waif like, with blonde hair and big eyes and tattoos which suggest a tarnished angel, but also a genuine charisma that only Van De Mille seemed to want to capture. And that’s odd, as once again in a collaboration between the two we see Liddy D’Eath using a defibelator on the struggling material she has been given, going so far as to give it frantic life to life in a struggle to give it any kind of pulse. It must have been disconcerting for her to work so hard and still only get phone-calls from her weirdly named ex-boyfriend.


Before long the two of them would embark on another series of films which would match the best of the Sexy Goth Girls movies, but first there is this interesting, curiosity of a mis-step. A comedy of modern sexual manners, a bedroom farce which doesn’t get near achieving the right balance between bedroom and farce. Having married impetuously, Liddy and her new wan-faced husband (played by the void like, Jackson Wilson) find themselves on honeymoon in a remote desert hotel. But she is shocked to discover that in the next bedroom is not only her ex hot and heavy boyfriend (the big and brooding, Douglas Conifer) but his new bride, who happens to be her college lesbian lover (Jenny Picard). The stage is set for passion, jokes, recriminations, misunderstandings, fetching leather lingerie, laughter, tears, innuendo, broken hearts and more exploring of sexual confusion than even Noel Coward would ever have dreamed possible.


Let’s be clear, this isn’t porn. There are points when it looks like it’s just going to tip into porn, particularly when the women seem about to reignite their passion with a breathless, full-on session. The camera lingers and it feels as if the bass line is going to strike up and we should either be watching this in a darkened room alone, or in a cinema with lots of other shifty men. But it never quite tips over into porn, although nor does it really become anything else. The dialogue, as you’d expect from the man who made the ‘Sexy Goth Girls’ movies, is frequently very funny – but it’s hardly likely to reach the standards of Noel Coward. (I think that Coward would have enjoyed this film though, perhaps with martini in hand and a bemused, amused look on his face). However the dialogue never touches the emotions it needs to. And because in a set up like this the emotions need to be addressed, there are whole amateurish scenes with craply written dialogue just to get them out of the way. As such what we end up with is a drama which isn’t dramatic enough, a comedy which isn’t funny enough and a porno which isn’t pornographic enough. Liddy D’Eath doesn’t even look that gothic, for god’s sake. It’s an odd faltering stumble of a movie, although one massaged into some kind of decent shape by the charms of its leading lady, but better isn’t far away.

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 Carmarthen Circus of Curiosities (1994)

D. Marco Webber
Colour

So it’s five minutes past St David’s Day and so we really should take the opportunity to peek at a couple of Welsh movies, visit the land of my birth, the land of my fathers. It’s time to pin on a daffodil and type furiously whilst singing ‘Sospan Fach’ at an irritatingly high volume. Actually compared to the other corners of the British Isles, Welsh cinema exists in the kind of shallow pool that your average algae would move out of seeking somewhere more spacious. Whereas Scotland has some undoubted classics (‘Local Hero’, ‘Trainspotting’), Northern Ireland a whole series of films inspired by the troubles (most recently the hugely impressive ‘Good Vibrations’) and Ireland was given a grand cinema tradition by John Ford which it either embraces or pushes violently against – the Welsh shuffle nervously at the edges, occasionally lobbing something forward before scuttling back to hide behind the settee again.

 

Which makes the ambition of ‘The Carmarthen Circus of Curiosities’ all the more impressive. If you can imagine a magic-realist Mike Leigh movie, with a fantastically bright palate, dream sequences full of brilliantly crummy special effects, the occasional Welsh folk song, Catherine Zeta-Jones pouting in a tiny outfit, while Ruth Madoc sports a beard – then you have something approximating ‘The Carmarthen Circus of Curiosities’. This is a magical and ambitious movie, but also a provincially small Welsh film that thinks nothing of having whole scenes where characters just pass the time of day in almost incomprehensible Wenglish. It’s a day in a life of this extra special circus, which never travels anywhere, but has the world come to it. It’s the trials and tribulations of its performers, where nothing really happens beyond everyday moments of drama. It’s an odd film, which like laverbread is far from everybody’s tastes, but some people genuinely love.

 

We have Jonathan Pryce as the ringmaster, pattering away in a gorgeous singsong accent, and using force of personality to dominate the ring and the world around it. If you ever needed someone to lead a group of stilt-walkers into war, Pryce would be your man. There’s Owen Teale as the circus strongman who can lift any weight placed in front of him (including, as we see in montage, a double decker bus, a rather startled looking rhinoceros and a picnic table full of pensioners who don’t let such an occurrence interrupt their tea). The object of both their desires is Catherine Zeta-Jones. Words are not adequate to describe how ravishing la Zeta-Jones looks in this movie, dressed as she is mostly in a tiny black bikini, underneath a glittering almost sheer wisp of material – both of which seem to fluctuate in size and shape from scene to scene. To be honest it’s a ridiculously poorly written role which doesn’t require much more than pouting and smiling, and could no doubt have been played by a slightly more expressive than normal shop mannequin. It’s an odd use then for this future Oscar winner’s talents, although in the post ‘Darling Buds of May’ lull she was probably just happy to get the work. (Allegedly though, this is the first film in which Michael Douglas ever glimpsed her). Elsewhere we have Michael Sheen as the skinny stable boy, a very young Ruth Jones as his comically curvy squeeze and Antony Hopkins deigning to cameo for about for about twenty seven seconds as local gentry who is entranced by it all. While narrating the whole thing we have Ruth Madoc, in the only role I’ve ever seen her in outside of ‘Hi-De-Hi’, wearing the kind of luxurious and voluminous beard you could easily hide geese in.

 

If anything represented The Tafia in action, it’s this film. I think it’s marvellous, a real psychedelic treat. This is a motion picture I love dearly, but undeniably it’s an example of the Welsh film industry taking careful aim and shooting itself in the foot. As let’s be fair, it’s difficult to see where a large audience for such a film would come from. Yes it looks great, yes it is in parts brilliant – but soap opera mixed with Angela Carter, performed by a cast determined to exaggerate their Welsh accents to ludicrous effect, is not the kind of movie that will get them queuing around the block at the multiplex. I’m sure even at Cineworlds in Rhyl, Aberystwyth and – yes – Carmarthen, seats would have been very easy to come by.

 

The Scandalous Mrs Brooks (1947)

D. Robert Wise
Black & White


One of the joys of having studied English literature is that it gives you the skills to do perverse readings of texts. I remember in my student library there was a book which proved that ‘Alice In Wonderland’ was a rewriting of The Koran. The author had gone through Lewis Carroll’s classic line by line to prove categorically – and beyond doubt - that Alice’s adventures were a rewriting of that sacred text. Now obviously ‘Alice in Wonderland’ is not a reworking of ‘The Koran’, but you have to admire the gumption of the author for attempting it. Textually he had managed to make a convincing case, even though that case was palpable nonsense. It’s a great example of what mischievous things English students can pull off if they set their minds to it.


So what can I do with 1940s noir melodrama ‘The Scandalous Mrs Brooks’? A tale of the conniving and wily Rebecca Brooks and the trouble she gets herself into. Obviously this film is nothing to do with Rebekah Brooks – currently facing trial at the Old Bailey for what went on in Rupert Murdoch’s UK newspaper empire – but let’s just say, for fun and larks, that buried away there may be hints in this film as to her case.


For starters, the central character is played by Rita Hayworth, so even though we’re looking at black and white, we know that there’s a flame haired lioness at the centre. There’s the fact that a key part of the plot is driven by a conversation that Rebecca eavesdrops over an open telephone line. At her side is an ever supporting second husband (Paul Henreid, playing the role with his normal phenomenal lack of charisma) who when he realises the perfidy of his wife, does all he can to alter the evidence. And then there’s the ruthless investigator, Claude Rains, who Rebecca first tries to charm and then to bully and then stonewall completely. Okay, its set in the 1940s, in a large mansion and the main push factor is the inheritance of your actual gold mine, but there are good reasons why no UK TV channel has shown this in the last few months. Seeing a Rebecca Brooks wriggle and connive and scheme to get herself out of serious trouble, may make jurors stare a little more anxiously at the Rebekah Brooks they have in the dock.


But what could probably be the most damning moment (certainly for any cinephiles in the jury) is when the camera pans onto a photo of Rebecca’s late husband,, Mr Brooks. There he is, played in still image by Orson Welles. That’s right, she finds herself in this movie closely associated with the most famous/notorious media mogul in cinema – Charles Foster Kane himself. Okay, Orson Welles never spoke with an Australian accent, but it isn't too much of a mental leap from bullying and untouchable Kane to bullying and untouchable Murdoch. The way Orson is wrinkling his forehead even makes him look a little like Rupert (although a vastly more handsome version). So there you have it, lies and deception, eavesdropping and obfuscation, and – to top it all - close connections with legendary media moguls. There really are very good reasons why no TV channel has shown this film in the last few months.


Of course any woman would find herself flattered by a comparison to Rita Hayworth, but Rebekah should probably do her best to avoid this film for now. The ending ain’t pretty!

Blue Moon Over Soho (1977)

D. Jack Gold
Colour


I always want to like this film more. The three times now that I’ve seen it, I’ve always wished I could find a way to take this film more to my heart. After all, what’s not to like? We have David Hemmings (already distinctly portly after his sixties prime) running a pornography empire in Soho, and after he tries to help a young girl, finding himself being investigated by uptight cop, Albert Finney. Elsewhere we have Patrick MacNee (John Steed of all people) as a strip-show obsessed English gentleman, and Helen Mirren as a tabloid journalist who has more than a little interest in the seedier side of life. I look at that mixture, and say what’s not to love? Surely this should be one of my favourite films. Why then isn’t it?


The flaw can be described in two words “Robin Askwith”.


Not that Mr Askwith actually appears in this film – he’d be well and truly out of place in this esteemed cast – but ‘Blue Moon Over Soho’, for its all lofty and hard-hitting pretensions, bends a little too far towards the Robin Askwith school of British cinema. Askwith, for those of you lucky enough not to know (I almost feel like I’m robbing you of some of your innocence here) was the star of a series of sex comedies in the 1970s, all with the prefix “Confessions”. So we had ‘Confessions of a Driving Instructor’, ‘Confessions of a Window Cleaner’, ‘Confessions of a Neurosurgeon with a Focus on Peripheral Nerves’ (okay, one of those titles I may have made up). The films are a low grade spicy stew of Jack the Lads, bum & tits, a nice bit of crumpet and phwooaaarrr!!! If you’ve never seen a ‘Confessions’ film, but have seen a latter day ‘Carry On’ film then you’ll know pretty much what I’m talking about.


So the problem with ‘Blue Moon Over Soho’ is that it says it wants to hit hard but what it really wants to do is titillate. This tale of one man’s crumbling porn empire and the righteous cop out to get him, becomes an excuse for bouncing boobs and bums, of suspender clad thighs and attractive birds who just want it and want it now. There is no pubic hair, there is nothing that could be classed as penetration, but there is a school boy smuttiness that never lets up. The tone is established in the opening shot of a busty schoolgirl – who, if we’re honest here, must be at least thirty – slowly removing her gymslip. Of course this being Britain in the 1970s, there is a lot more cellulite and round bottoms than one would get if this film was made in California, but it’s still aiming to arouse rather than anger.


Of course the performances are great. If I had to watch an actor’s face as he gazes impassive at the exploitation of a young girl, then David Hemmings would be in my top ten. And he does some of his best work as a man who has his dormant conscience well and truly pricked. Finney is great as the driven and slightly mad copper, Macnee is deeply, but touchingly, weird as the dapper old pervert and Mirren does as much as she can in an underwritten role (and is, of course, given a topless scene). But one gets the impression that the film around them isn’t the one they signed up for, and the film that made it to the screen cries out for the reassuring presence of Robin Askwith.


‘Confessions of a Righteously Genteel Porn Baron’.

Wuthering Heights (1961)

D. Don Siegel
B&W


This is called learning from your mistakes. This is called poring over the smouldering wreckage of what went before, having the humility to admit that that particular journey was started with the brake wires cut and a rubber toy in place of the steering wheel, and then correcting those massive errors going forward. This is called not crashing the same car into the same wall all over again; or more appropriately this is called not just churning out any old crap for a cheap buck. This is the way things should have been.


Yes, Elvis in ‘Wuthering Heights’ is fantastic!


As an Elvis obsessed little boy who became an Elvis obsessed man, I take great pleasure in bringing these neglected gems of his much maligned film-work forward. And it gives me particular joy to polish up, buff until its gloriously shiny and then present this gem – with a wide soup-bowl shaped grin on my face – for your perusal. The last time Elvis tackled a classic, you might remember, it was ‘Hamlet’ and the results can be politely described as not good. There was Elvis in a doublet and hose, trying to master iambic pentameter with that Memphis drawl and singing whole soliloquies whilst ridiculous ghostly bongo players kept rhythm over his shoulder.


There is nothing so ludicrous on display here, this one is playing to Elvis’s strengths. I have no idea whether there was ever a plan to set this in Victorian Yorkshire, with Elvis giving us his best “Ecky thump, it be right perishing out moor”; but if there was, then it was thankfully scrapped. (Seeing Elvis trying to speak like Sean Bean is no more appetising than imagining Sean Bean quiffed up and trying to play Elvis.) Instead the action of this film is set in Wuthering Heights, a suburb of Nashville.


It’s a brilliant conceit. Here we have the cute as several dozen buttons Tuesday Weld as Cathy (the same year in which she met Elvis in the far less inspiring, and indeed wild, ‘Wild in The Country’), an aspiring and truly headstrong country and western singer who has got herself engaged to a Pat Boone-esque crooner, Edward Litton (played with appropriate lack of charisma by someone called Dave Fellows – quite, me neither), but who’s that smouldering his way back into town? Why it’s Elvis as Heathcliff , the boy she grew up with and the great romance of her life.


Even for a modern day version of the story, it’s one which deserves the description ‘inspired by’ rather than ‘adapted from’ Emily Bronte’s novel. Indeed it can be more accurately described as a musical remake of the Laurence Olivier/Merle Oberon version – as both films leave out the second and more interesting part of the book. But in the end fidelity doesn’t matter, as this is brilliant. Siegel (helming Elvis for the second rime) shoots for and gets a beautiful, noir soaked black & white; Elvis’s role requires little more than to just show up and be broody and soulful, and he does more of that with one look than most actors can manage in a career; and Weld is suitably intense and passionate, as well as utterly convincing as a lifelong object of desire. While if Fellows is as uninteresting as a sheep farmer in 1800’s Yorkshire, well he’s supposed to be.


Okay, if the film was perfect the songs would be a lot better – such numbers as ‘The Boy Heathcliff (Back in Town)’, ‘Don’t Run Away, Cathy’ and ‘It Ain’t the Wind That’s Wuthering;’ are never going to show up  on any Elvis ‘best of’, no matter how many volumes it stretches to. But then this is the rare thing, a musical where the music isn’t that important. No, ‘Wuthering Heights’ isn’t about the songs, it’s about sheer sex appeal, it’s about pouting and rebellious youth, it’s about giving up everything for passion, it’s about personifying cool – and in that regard it succeeds on every measure.

My Wife's Affair (1961)

Director: Randal MacDougall
Colour

Here’s a film which no doubt had the studio salivating at the dollar signs of controversy: the sex + the scandal = the sales. And yet, even before the swinging sixties really got going, it’s noticeable how little fuss ‘My Wife’s Affair’ caused. Yes, the catholic church condemned it, but back then the Catholic church condemned everything (even ‘Bambi’ was probably flagged up for notice), but the rest of the world carried on with its business as if nothing happened.

Wife Joan Collins comes home one evening and announces to her husband, George Peppard, that she wants an affair. They argue, make up, argue again, but she refuses to relent on her decision. She is bored and stifled by her marriage – she still loves George, but just wants some thrills. This then is a full-on assault on the idea of marriage and the 1961 American ideal of what womankind should be: no longer is she promising to obey, no longer is she promising to even be faithful. And for a while the film revels in the neon decadence of this. Joan’s life becomes one of singles’ bars, casual pick-ups and wild times with young and dangerous friends. Meanwhile George looks maudlin, sulkily drinks a bit too much whisky and eventually takes solace in the arms of an accommodating secretary, the supposedly dowdy Tuesday Weld. But of course even in a Hollywood studio film desperate to scandalise, the old orders can’t be completely shattered. By the end, as this is a film which in reality wants more to titillate than challenge, the order of the happy American couple and the happy American family are reset. Yes there’s a divorce, but Joan is a broken woman existing in whatever purgatory is reserved for wanton sluts, while George and Tuesday are happily married and living in domestic bliss expecting their first child. All is right in the moral universe again.

(It’s over fifty years later and such has been the change in values, that now the woman’s adventures would probably be a lot more graphic, including threesomes and lesbian trysts; while the dull, ditched, reliable husband consoled himself by having comic chats with his more raucous buddies. She may end up okay, but he’d definitely emerge something of a winner. Such is progress).

So a year after the Lady Chatterley trial, why didn’t ‘My Wife’s Affair’ start any fires? Probably because it never catches fire itself. Peppard is a block of finely sculptured ice throughout. I’m not sure what he’s aiming for in his performance, perhaps it’s a solid yet bruised masculinity (or perhaps it’s how good he’d look as an ornate wedding decoration), but it comes across as unyielding and frigid. Those blue eyes don’t look capable of being excited by passion or exciting anyone else, in fact they seem frozen to the point of rigor mortis. And that unyielding coldness is never going to be smouldered by Joan Collins' fitful sparks of sexuality, which like a damp match doesn't ignite no matter how many times it's struck against the side of the box. Collins is the poster girl for a certain type of English actress (see also Hurley, Liz), one with the beautiful face and gorgeous figure to be a sex symbol, and yet on screen she cannot actually radiate sex appeal. Here she poses, she pouts, she picks up and stares admiringly at a copy of Playboy at one point, and yet she never catches fire. What this film needs is a seductress, a siren – what it gets is an overly self-confident little girl who’s been allowed in her mother’s dressing up box. It’s no wonder she only made it big as a middle aged bitch, rather than a young sexpot – middle aged bitch suits her talents a lot more.

‘My Wife’s Affair’ should have scandalised at the time, but didn’t – and now just feels so dated and conservative. It’s a film that wants to be sexy, yet ends up staring at the viewer like a cold, damp fish with a miserable headache. 

The Crossing Guard (1965)

D. Michael De Roma             
Colour

‘The Crossing Guard’ has to be one of the most oddly, yet delightfully, casted films in the history of cinema. It’s a long film and one that’s so plodding and lost in the minutiae of life that it frequently seems static; sitting inert and unmoving in front of the viewer as if indulging in some kind of boringness staring contest to see who will lapse into a coma first. But what will keep you watching – what kept me watching anyway – is the sheer ludicrousness of the casting, the absolute perverseness of who is on the screen pretending to be boring and oh so ordinary.

In Montreal, a middle aged European crossing guard goes through his day. He arrives at work early and chats briefly with the owner of a café, then performs his job of helping children cross the road on their way to school. One would have thought that a few shots would have been enough to illustrate what a crossing guard does (or a lollypop man, if you’re in this neck of the woods), but this is a sequence that goes on for a seemingly endless ten minutes. And in that ten minutes there are no speeding cars or arguing parents, there are just children being helped calmly and efficiently across the road. The crossing guard finishes his shift and wanders through the parks of Montreal, whistling away and taking in the sights – both of interesting monuments and passing young ladies in short skirts. For lunch he goes to a different café, but has almost word for word the same conversation as he had with the original café owner earlier that day. His afternoon is spent killing time in a museum and chatting vague current events with a friendly newspaper vendor. He then heads back to the school and there’s another ten minute sequence of him doing his job, as if we’d somehow forgotten the tedium of the first sequence. At the end of the day he wipes his brow and heads home, where he has a brief spat with his stay at home wife, before making up over dinner and settling down to an evening together. The film concludes with him setting his alarm, ready to do the whole day all over again.

The actor playing the crossing guard? Step forward, Sir Noel Coward.

The actress playing his wife? Ah, Gina Lollobrigida.

Oh, the style and glamour these two names conjure. The jet-setting caper movie they should have made together (although, let’s be honest, I’m not sure I’d ever have bought them as a love match). Instead we get them as dowdy immigrants in this slice of new wave realism; living humdrum existences in washed out and faded downtown Montreal. Coward’s acting choices consist of little more than sad eyes and the occasional smile. The script requires Lollobrigida to be more firey as his Italian wife, but the sparks between them (very predictably) don’t fly.

The casting director clearly had a great sense of humour or had taken vast amounts of acid in the run up to this film. The audience is left wishing that the director, screenwriter and cinematographer had similarly developed one or procured the other before embarking on the project.