Strangers on a Train (1951 Alfred Hitchcock)

Is Patricia Highsmith's gay sub-text in evidence here? Robert Walker could easily be read to be gay. In real life he suffered from his parents' divorce, then Jennifer Jones leaving him for Selznick; he died from an adverse reaction to drugs his psychiatrist gave him when pissed.

Hitch read Patricia Highsmith's debut novel on a train - appropriately enough - and he, Alma and Whitfield Cook quickly made it their own, making significant changes, one being to convert Bruno's repugnant alcoholic into a charming and covert gay. Raymond Chandler was brought in but tried to make every action explainable, drank too much and attempted to steer the script back to Highsmith's book. It ended unhappily and his script was ignored. Then a former Ben Hecht associate Czenzi Ormonde was brought in and she wrote the scenes that were played by Marion Lorne - dotty and yet almost as mad as her son. She and Barbara Keon finished the script.

If North by Northwest is a bad dream, this one's a nightmare. Are all Hitch's films dreams?

Absolutely wonderfully written and directed film features powerful performance by Robert Walker. I could happily watch it over and over again, for the way the camera is positioned alone.

Good cast also includes Farley Granger, Leo G Carroll, Patricia Hitchcock, Ruth Roman, Kasey Rogers (Granger's wife), Howard St John (detective) and Norma Varden (strangulee at dinner party).

Also notable for Robert Burks' incredible depth of focus photography - in the (brilliant) tennis match it feels like those balls are coming right at you. His cinematography was the only Oscar nomination - it was their first collaboration. It's also a film in which you need to pay attention to the background - loved this scene in the record store because the kid in the booth behind them keeps watching the couple argue:

And in the one above, Walker's trying to plan his murder while his father is threatening to have him committed in the background.

Amongst the many lauded sequences, the one where he stalks the girl at the fairground is in the 'pure cinema' silent movie mode; also a murder filmed as a seduction scene. Also loved the frank character played by Patricia Hitchcock and her relationship with Farley Granger.

Here black / white contrasts characters - pillar is naturally separating them:

And the jump cut straight from Granger descending the fire escape to him being in Bruno's parents's grounds is years ahead of Godard. And the merry-go-round scene, more 'pure cinema' - and the little boy who joins in the punch-up!

Q in lighter / drain scene: "Do it yourself, you over-privileged psychopath!"

A Warner Brothers production.

Here's a fascinating aside from 'Hitchock et L'Art; Coincidences Fatales' from the Pompidou 2001 exhibition:

Sunshine Cleaning (2008 Christine Jeffs)

Stuck in nowhere relationship with high school sweetheart Steve Zahn, failing Amy Adams starts to work cleaning up after messy deaths and enlists even more aimless sister Emily Blunt to help; the latter is struggling to process the suicide of her mum, and latches on to Mary Lynn Jajskub who's gone through something she thinks is similar.

They get it from their father Alan Arkin, who pursues one madcap entrepreneurial activity after another.

Jason Spevack is Adams' bright young son; Clifton Collins Jr a helpful friend.

Megan Holley is the writer..

The CB radio line to God is a fun touch.

The Major and the Minor (1942 Billy Wilder & co-scr)

The cadets are fun: Frankie Thomas (left), Raymond Roe (the tap dancer), Charles Smith (The Shop Around the Corner) and Billy Dawson (right, I guess):

And the local girls' school has had an outbreak of Veronica Lake:

Double Indemnity (1944 Billy Wilder & co-scr)

We stayed in the Billy Wilder lane and marvelled at our favourite Edward G Robinson performance.

It's a marvellous plot, by way of James M Cain, Raymond Chandler and Billy, but the perfect murder is, of course, imperfect (dying from falling off a train travelling 15 or 20 miles an hour).

"This is it, Walter. Straight down the line."

A Foreign Affair (1948 Billy Wilder & co-scr)

Quite a tough and sharp comedy, showing how the allied forces are coping with being in bombed out and fucked post-war Berlin. Wilder clearly had strong feelings about the city he used to work and live in and love, now he's in a more sarcastic mood; at one point suggesting that the boy who keeps drawing swastikas everywhere should go to the ovens.. yeah, but we don't do that. (Some of Billy's family ended up there.) And then to have the - well one of the - romantic leads to have been a consort of a Nazi and Hitler is - well, I see it as shocking - I wonder what people of the time thought? This is a most unusual, subversive work. It also has a strong scent of Ninotchka, which Billy co-wrote, in that the upright and moral American visitor (Jean Arthur) becomes absolutely overpowered by love, booze and the whole damn thing.

It's absolutely brilliantly built. Brackett and Wilder and (a little bit) Richard Breen based it on David Shaw's original story, adapted by Robert Harari. Starts with the visiting board from the US, there to make sure the soldiers are behaving moralistically. Jean Arthur sees immediately they're not. Meets John Lund, who seems like the embodiment of good, and comes from the same home state of Iowa. But it turns out he's a black market dealer and is romancing dodgy German nightclub singer Marlene Dietrich. Arthur starts pursuing Dietrich, suspecting she's seeing a high ranking officer and enlists Lund's help - I mean that's a beautiful set up right there. To get her off the scent, Lund begins to woo her.. and then starts to fall for her for real.

The famous filing cabinet scene is later replicated when he keeps picking up chairs to try to ward her off.

Millard Mitchell is one of many unknowns in the supporting cast playing the General who knows everything.

Great long takes - in the opening, for example, Arthur putting things away on the plane. Wonderful blocking - the way Dietrich does her routine with Lund looking on, taking his cigarette, ending up giving it to the piano player. (That song 'Black Market' apparently had to be quite diluted to get it past the censors.) Then the way it's replicated at the end with the murderous Nazi there and how it turns into chaos and we wonder who is dead. 

Beautifully (but unshowily) shot by Charles Lang, scored by Friedrich Hollander (who's playing the piano, would have known Dietrich as far back as The Blue Angel).

"Victory will be ours"

I thought it was one of Wilder's modern art pieces. It's an aerial map of bomb damage!

And while all this is going on, Billy is dating Audrey (they married June 30 1949), and getting understandably upset over the HUAC hearings.

Cameron thinks it's one of Billy's best films, and his most personal. Why we hadn't watched it in twelve years is a mystery. It was a bit of a flop.

Billy had wanted the Lund character to have been Jewish - which would have added an most interesting angle - but 'they chickened out'.

Trying - Season 5 (2026)

The older daughter is attempting to build a relationship with her biological mother to Esther Smith's nervousness. (I now find her really irritating.) Darren Boyd attempts / pretends to row the Atlantic. It's not really that funny.

Cold pizza for breakfast? Yummy!

I, Jack Wright (2025 Chris Lang)

Trevor Eve led us directly here. He's a multi-millionaire who's been murdered. His will provisions are somewhat outrageous - he leaves his wife Nikki Amuka-Bird (The Personal History of David Copperfield) nothing and his sons John Simm and Daniel Rigby only £10k each. Meanwhile grand-daughter Ruby Ashbourne Serkis gets control of the company and fifteen million pounds.

Each episode begins and ends with where they all are now. Simm, a struggling record producer is still alive; Rigby, the rather uncomfortable former CEO of the company, looks like a bearded recluse. Bird is in prison.

Rigby's horrible wife is Zoe Tapper; Gemma Jones is the first wife, with partner James Fleet. Bird is involved with a Parisian criminal (Jalil Lespert) and Serkis with both an American entrepreneur and a car mechanic (Percelle Ascott).

Harry Lloyd politely investigates with the help of Liz Kingsman. James Wilby is good as a barrister; Rakhee Thakrar is another.

6 x 45 for BBC. Essentially. it's an Agatha Christie whodunit written on a large Succession-type canvas. But in the end, it's Serkis who's arrested, but Bird who's in prison in the flash forwards, and the 'cliffhanger' ending is that Jones confesses she did it... 'To be continued'. I was quite disappointed.

Waking the Dead - series finale (2011)

Ed Whitmore writes us out on a high in Waterloo. Boyd is being sacked, decides he must solve the disappearance of the homeless teenage boys.

Sarah has to admit to Boyd that she denounced him to his superiors - but doesn't add that she then took it back. In fact it would have only taken her to deny the allegations she'd made for the whole thing to have disappeared. Oops! Maybe she's too principled.

We meet Assistant Chief Constable Paul McGann who knew the lads back in the day and almost apprehended the suspect - but we somehow knows something's off with him. And when he meets dodgy property investor David Bradley, Sarah knows something's up. But I didn't think he was going to kill her for Christ's sake. Rough justice is delivered, leaving Boyd's future very much up in the air.

Eve in interview said that the BBC were no longer going to be financing the show they way they had been and decided enough was enough.

We will miss them: Boyd whose interview technique is to shout six questions in a row; Eve who is always calm and fearless; Grace,  empathic and smart as a whip; Spence with his long suffering legwork and door crashing. Sarah - was she ever really right for the team? And those characters from the past, Amelia, who died, Frankie, who resigned, Stella, who, er, just didn't turn up for work one day...

Goodbye.

Under Waterloo Bridge. Whether that's Ed's only reference to the title I couldn't say

Best of Waking the Dead

Anger Management. The flamenco one. And Boyd in therapy. John Milne, Andy Hay

Final Cut. The Performance one. Stephen Davis.

Cold Fusion. Ed Whitmore. S. 5 finale. Spence pursued by assassin.

Sins. Declan Croghan. The beheaded prison governor.

Pietà. Declan Croghan, Bosnia-Serbia.

Conviction. Tim Prager. Government cover-up. Boyd almost blown up.

Waterloo, series finale. Ed Whitmore. What happened to the lost boys?

Waking the Dead - Season 9 (2011)

Ed Whitmore writes a fairly straightforward tale, Solidarity about a charismatic former soldier (Adam Rayner. Mistresses) who becomes a spokesman for the CND - seems back in the day Grace was peripherally involved in it all. The man's found dead. Is it an MI5 cover up or something more labyrinthine?

John McArdle, Frances Tomelty, Anna Chancellor, Jack Shepherd, Roger Ringrose.

And Tim Prager's Conviction (his only screenplay for the show) is about the disappearance of a man six years ago. Sarah (Eva Birthistle) chases up old contact Tom Goodman-Hill (almost the pantomime villain) to see if it's another government cover-up. Is it? It certainly involves a private security company under the control of the Kansas Chicken Co or something.

Prager had before this written two series of 55 Degrees North featuring Don Gilet as a detective in Newcastle (2004-5).

Don Warrington is the only familiar face.

Boyd is kidnapped and almost blown up; Sarah saves him. She also tells her superiors that Boyd is a good and stable boss after all, hopefully thus silencing the ticking bomb she had planted her earlier when she'd recommended he be kicked off.

Bollocks of 2026

It's sadly early to start this list (5 January) but unfortunately we have a contender already, Hunting Wives, some crap about a woman who finds herself in the gun packing heart of Texas Republicanism. The title indicates how crap it will be.

Can You Keep a Secret? Dawn French, Mark Heap 'comedy'.

The Lady. True story of Fergie's dresser-turned-murderer. Just wasn't engaging.

The Fortune. Terribly written crap with Eleanor Tomlinson, set in Hartlepool. She inherits from someone she doesn't know and behaves implausibly from the off. Channel 5 bollocks.

Benidorm is Murder. Retired detective John Hannah solves murders. More Channel 5 bollocks. Embarrassing.

Untitled (2000 Cameron Crowe & scr)

"Rock stars have kidnapped my son."

Now this two and a half hour film isn't a moment too long.

Also I thought Cameron did a lovely job of writing his mother, a forceful, unique and slightly crazy personality. Her talk to Russell when he gets her on the phone is one of many memorable scenes.

And the standout scene where he tells Penny that all her bullshit about the 'real world' is just covering up that she's surrounded by people who really don't care about her and that she's been sold for a crate of beer.

And the dedication to 'Joel Bernstein - your photographs inspired this movie'. A noted photographer of rock musicians, his gallery can be seen here. Includes this little number:

Cameron in uncool shirt, Neil Young on the right, 1974

But what's interesting is the viewpoint of Lester Bangs - 'rock music is all over'. It's 1973 and there's an argument that all the classic rock tracks had been written, and that two things happen - prog rock and huge stadium tours take over, the music business becomes run by money men who don't give a fuck about the music - personified in the movie by their new producer-to-be, played by Jimmy Fallon.

To understand how close it is to Cameron's own story it's helpful to read his memoir 'The Uncool'.

The Talented Mr Ripley (1999 Anthony Minghella & scr)

Mix a wildly charismatic Jude Law with lovely bits of southern Italy, sprinkle with the mysterious behaviour of Matt Damon, then dilute with two parts Gwyneth Paltrow. The gay undercurrent is a familiar thing from Patricia Highsmith. If Ripley hadn't been so completely rejected he may not have murdered.

The Talented Mr Murderer. That's what this film should have been called.

I like that Philip Seymour Hoffman is on to him from the off, sneers at him, thinks he's worthless. So he must be murdered. Half the time you're thinking 'Ripley! Just lie low!' I mean the bit where he strategically places the Cate Blanchett and Paltrow characters together in the Piazza Spagna you think 'Why complicate your own life more?'

(Yes. Rome is another reason to keep watching.)

But it just goes on too long. Where I think it should have ended is Ripley and Mr Greenleaf and the detective and Ripley getting away with everything - that would have been a great ending... only it's still been going too long by this point. In fact I'm starting to feel like I'm trapped in the film. And that am I Dickie Greenleaf? Instead we have to have this coda where Ripley's with the Jack Davenport character and there's obviously romance in the air but Blanchett turns up again and he feels he has to kill him... I mean where does the body go? Through the porthole? It's an annoying ending after two and a half hours.

So yeah - it's two thirds a great film.

Same collaborative team as The English Patient - Murch, Yared, Seale.

I was going to follow it with Breaking and Entering but by then I was Minghelled out.

Marley and Me (2008 David Frankel)

Lazy today - here's my review from 5 March 2017, repeated on 26 January 2020!

Written by Scott Frank (Out of Sight, Get Shorty, The Queen's Gambit) and Don Roos (Single White Female) from journalist John Grogan's autobiographical book (one of his Labradors is one of the Marleys).

There's a fantastic sequence with Owen Wilson voiceover about what day to day life was like as a journalist and owner of crazy dog. There must have been so much writing in that brief montage - I bet the screenplay was longer than usual.

Love the moment of revelation that Marley has sat with his sick son for nine hours without moving. 

Owen Wilson, Jennifer Aniston, Alan Arkin, Eric Dane, Kathleen Turner, Clarke Peters. Shot by Florian Ballhaus and edited by Mark Livolsi.

The English Patient (1996 Anthony Minghella & scr)

Yes, he also adapted Michael Ondaatje's novel (I know he sounds Dutch but actually he's Canadian) which also has a non-linear path. I find the way that Minghella / Murch have constructed the opening is absolutely artful - the huge close up figure painting, which only later we realise Kristin Scott Thomas has done, going in to the plane journey over the desert - the end of the film, in fact. It's a brilliantly sneaky story, well told over two hours 40.

Love the way Binoche does a kind of hopscotch step as she's running towards the candle trail. And that the Sikh is the senior officer.

The makeup is by Jim Henson's Creature Workshop!

For such a big film I find I've surprisingly little to say about it. John Seale operated his own camera; Remi Adefarasin shot the second unit.  It was filmed in Italy and Tunisia. It won nine Oscars, including Picture, Director, Editing and Sound (also led by Murch), and for Seale, Stuart Craig's art direction, Gabriel Yared's music and Ann Roth's costumes. And of course for La Binoche as Supporting Actress (also the BAFTA, Berlin Silver Bear.. but not the César - stupid French, always so perverse). And why supporting actress? She's higher billed than Thomas.

I'd forgotten both Thomas (nominated, lost to Frances McDormand in Fargo) and Colin Firth were in it. With Ralph Fiennes (nominated), Willem Dafoe, Naveen Andrews, Julian Wadham, Jurgen Prochnow.

It appears that the (brief) nudity wasn't edited to get a US release R rating - so things have let up a bit in that area, thankfully.

The Duchess of Duke Street - Season 2 (1977)

We were delighted to learn that season 2 has another 16 episodes; less delighted that Louisa's long lost brother Martin Shaw turns up for a job and begins to disrupt the entire staff; her mum is also taking the piss, outstaying her welcome at the hotel. Writer Julia Jones.

Then is Jeremy Paul's story, two undergraduates conspire to set up Louisa with their college professor Freddie Jones - he falls for her. Julian Fellowes is one of them!

A chauffeur inherits a fortune - £30,000. Louisa and his employer's nephew try and turn him into a gentleman - we know it isn't going to work. He is Kevin McNally.

In an unusual on location episode, Louisa travels to Charlie's bleak country pile, finds she's uninterested in her own daughter, who's something of a wild one, and that Margaret (Joanna David) is wasting away - turns out anorexia is the culprit but they have no idea what they're dealing with; she dies. Interesting to have this subject matter arising in 1977 - good for them. Maggie Wadey is the writer. Ian Cuthbertson and Liz Smith co-star.

T.P McKenna is a famous actor who seduces maid Holly de Jong (not to be confused with Upstairs Downstairs maid Jacqueline Tong) and Louisa sacks her without reference - the kiss of death. I think actually Merriman was responsible as it was normally his job to take up the actor's evening brandy. After a brief and unsuccessful flirtation with prostitution, a kindly policeman takes her back to the hotel and 'encourages' Louisa to change her mind. John Hawkesworth wrote it.

Music and Lyrics (2007 Marc Lawrence & scr)

A daft film well summarised in my last jotting: "In the climactic performance, Grant having managed to write the new song perfectly well all by himself, that fluttering sound you hear is the script flying out of the window." 

Mildred Pierce (1945 Michael Curtiz)

Fine film noir melodrama backed with great Max Steiner score (orchestrated by Friedhofer) and photographed with lots of lovely lighting detail by Ernie Haller.

Mildred really is a bitch - trying to frame Jack Carson for a murder she knows he didn't commit! She's also an idiot who doesn't realise her bitch cunt daughter is taking her for a ride.

The Criterion edition is a bit soft.

The Yellow Rolls Royce (1964 Anthony Asquith)

A trio of sad Terence Rattigan stories about love.

The 1920s. (Or is it? My previous jotting contends that the car is a 1930 model.) Foreign office minister (whose idea of a hard day's work is to sign a document) buys his wife Jeanne Moreau said vehicle but bitchy Moira Lister reveals to him what we all know - she's having an affair with his assistant Edmund Purdom. He catches them at it in the car at Ascot.

The telephone is for speaking to the driver - you idiot!

With Roland Culver, Michael Hordern, Lance Percival.

The 1930s. (This I can be more sure about - we see the Dinner at Eight poster so must be post-1933). Gangster George C Scott buys car in Italy to use on vacation with moll Shirley MacLaine and his sidekick Art Carney. She falls for photographer Alain Delon, but Carney makes her see that if she doesn't leave him the consequences will be ghastly. This is the most effective episode, Carney particularly good and a really sympathetic character.

Then in the 1940s wealthy socialite Ingrid Bergman gets involved with Yugoslavian partisan Omar Sharif and helps him in their fight against the Germans. But he ends up sending her back to safety. A shame, really, as she's a sort of Nancy Wake type and could easily have stayed fighting alongside them. With Joyce Grenfell.

It could be open to the debate, who's more gorgeous - Bergman or Delon?! As to whether or not he was dubbed, there's a confusing number of people on both sides, though I think I'd err on the side of - he wasn't.

All splendidly photographed on location in widescreen by Jack Hildyard. MGM.

Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie & co-scr)

With Ronald Bronstein.

Marty Supreme may be about an egocentric, egomaniacal  table tennis player, but it moves with such momentum - over two and a half hours - that you don't mind. Frankly I find the way he manages to get his win and be there for the birth of his baby to be not at all redemptive for his behaviour and end up not caring about him one way or the other. It's a good performance though from Timothée Chalamet, who was also a producer.

It's the journey that's the pull, the way he brazenly takes the Ritz suite, romances film star Gwyneth Paltrow (for no particular reason), gets involved with her millionaire husband, hides in rubbish, takes a bath which falls through the floor, inherits a dog and loses it, wins a hustle con then ignites a petrol station, gets to Japan.

Evocatively photographed by Darius Khondji. Didn't understand why a fifties movie used eighties pop music, nor why the sound mixing was in favour of music over dialogue. Safdie edited it with co-writer Bronstein.

Featuring an extremely eclectic cast. Odessa A'zion, Milton Rockwell, Abel Ferrara (dog owner), Luke Manley (fat son), Tyler, The Creator (taxi driver friend), Koto Kawaguchi, Penn Jillette, Sandra Bernhard.

Safdie has ejected his brother Benny, with whom he made Uncut Gems (with Bronstien again as co-writer).

Made me think a lot about Nowhere Special, a film in which hardly anything happens, yet is totally engaging and moving.