The Apartment (1960 Billy Wilder)

There is a different - albeit shorter - version of this film. Fran is recovering in Baxter's apartment. He says to her "Look - Sheldrake doesn't care about you. He hasn't wanted to see you, or do anything for you. He's not going to leave his wife. I don't even know what you see in him - he's humourless, bland, incapable of love. Whereas I am nuts about you - always have been. I think you're the greatest gal in the world. I love you Miss K - Fran. I'm loyal, kind, hard-working. I'd always put you first. What do you say? Will you love me?"

Why doesn't he? Because, somehow, he can see that Fran is unnaturally in love - she doesn't really like the guy but can't help it. Which, I mean, does happen, girls falling for the wrong guy. Happens all the time. For all sorts of reasons. And maybe that's why he doesn't say anything - because he knows she has to come to him for it to work. Which, I mean, does show real emotional understanding.

A real emotional understanding that comes from the minds of Mr. Wilder and Mr. Diamond.

And also, maybe the reason he doesn't say anything, keeps weirdly sticking up for Sheldrake, is that he isn't yet a mensch.

So I think we'll settle with the version of the film as is.

Notes: I don't know what this wall painting is, and nor does Google Search. Who cares? It's anaemic crap.

Edie Adams is the poisonous Miss Olsen. No, not 'poisonous'. Disappointed.

Here's three examples of Joe LaShelle's fabulous, Oscar-nominated lighting. The first reminds me of a similar black / white shot from The Fortune Cookie.

And these two shots are consecutive in the same scene, but notice how differently they are lit. MacLaine looks like she is genuinely being lit from the table lamp in the first, but it's a completely different lighting composition for the second:

(He lost to Freddie Francis for Sons and Lovers.)

I don't think Cameron Crowe ever interviewed Jack Lemmon, unfortunately, but here's a good piece about why Cameron loves The Apartment. Boy, is he a good writer. I just read his piece on Jerry Maguire for Rolling Stone #750/751, including his and Cruise's memorable encounter with Wilder. It's just fantastic.

The File on Thelma Jordan (1949 Robert Siodmak)

So we complete our double bill of Rear Window co-stars as Wendell Corey drunkenly stumbles into the scheming life of femme fatale Barbara Stanwyck and ends up losing his family and livelihood. It's a neat tale, written by Ketti Frings and Marty Holland (with no doubt input from Siodmak) in which assistant DA Corey finds himself having to prosecute Stanwyck for her aunt's murder, knowing he was at the scene of the crime. It isn't quite as cinematic as Siodmak's other great films of this era, but has plenty going on, e.g. Corey can't stand his wife's father, and vice versa. Shocking ending also.

George Barnes behind the camera manages to conjure up his usual textures. The music's by Victor Young.

Paul Kelly is the understanding DA, Corey's wife is that Joan Tetzel again. Richard Rober is the bad guy. It's another Paramount picture, produced by Hal B. Wallis. The Blu-Ray (from Spain) was still fuzzy but definitely better than our previous copy despite still being somewhat noisy.

The scene where Stanwyck's being interrogated by Corey's boss while he is present is so similar to Double Indemnity's interrogation of Stanwyck by Edward G as MacMurray listens.

The Country Girl (1954 George Seaton & scr)

A rather wordy adaptation of a play by Clifford Odets, which - because of Bing Crosby - we get some irritating songs too many (which I would have cut - they don't further the action). Eventually we get to the nub of things, so the last act is good drama. The adaptation is by the director. I read in 'The Paramount Story' that the play-within-a-play was changed to a musical to suit Bing - told you. William Holden and Grace Kelly - winning her Oscar in a performance far removed from the same year's Rear Window - are both given plenty to gnash at. Crosby's good too in a most unusual role for him.

Victor Young wrote the music, which was not one of the over-enthused Academy's nominations - the picture also won best screenplay and John Warren's cinematography (who?) was another nominee.

Rear Window (1954 Alfred Hitchcock)

 Sixteen things we have observed about Rear Window over the years.

1. Right at the beginning, the pan around the apartments, a flash bulb goes off in one. I guess to foreshadow the ending.

2. Q once observed that Stewart / Jeff doesn't take a single photo. (In fact he does take one, offscreen, so we can see the different heights of the roses.) But this is really funny. Imagine if he had, throughout, he would have had Thorwald with the knives, with the wedding ring, assaulting Lisa in his apartment.. and best of all, the killer approaching him with intent to kill. Now what a great bit of photo journalism that would have made! Did the Hitchcocks miss this, or did they do it deliberately?

3. The apartment dwellers of course represent the various stages of relationships, but is Jeff also thinking there might Lisa and I end up - just happily married, old and still together.. or murdering each other... And the final sting of the newly-weds - "Why didn't you tell me you lost your job two months ago?" The honeymoon's over...

4. Jeff's paining is a Matisse, Still Life with Asphodels, 1902. How did he happen to own that?

5. It's one of Hitch's least gruesome films - we don't see the murder nor a drop of blood.

6. The sound design is wonderfully clever. Note during the slow motion kiss that all the background sound goes out. Also how when Lisa announces herself, there' a car horn after each name.

7. The effect of the naturally occurring soundtrack - so when Lisa is in Thorwald's flat, it's one of the tensest moments - but the background music is jolly - same effect as Lean's This Happy Breed scene.

8. Hitch's appearance as the winder of a clock is marvellously appropriate. 

9. It has some of the best camera operating (William Schurr) and focus pulling ever, for example when we're on binoculars view of Miss Loneyhearts in the cafe and Thorwald comes into view and BANG! the super sharp focus is on him magically (and even better - that amazing pan from the dog to Stewart, perfectly in focus.) the focus puller is uncredited.

10. The scene where Lisa keeps talking over Jeff is very realistic feeling.

11. The ending - where Jeff and Thorwald are grappling near the window, is a wonderfully executed moment of panic and real danger. But why does Hitch speed up some of the exterior action? To make it more dramatic. I have to say it looks a bit silly. (I'm allowed one carp.)

12. It's a wonderful - and wonderfully planned out - set, designed by Joseph MacMillan Johnson.

13. This wonderful mirror image, as both Lisa and Miss Loneyhearts are distracted by the music:

14. Scotty's watch is a 1940s Tissot, quite cool but affordable, even now:

15. We love the way everyone just lets themselves into Stewart's apartment without knocking, even the detective - this is obviously a very deliberate point as finally, it's the murderer who lets himself in - he's just copying everyone else.

16. And finally - what the hell's this object in the background? Jeff's travelled the world so it could be from anywhere. Is it a leprechaun?.

Victor / Victoria (1982 Blake Edwards & co-scr)

Quite promising beginning. Paris, 1934. Starving singer Julie Andrews realises - with help of Robert Preston - that she can have more success pretending to be a drag act, though frankly, her appearance as a 'man' would fool no one. And of course she doesn't fool nightclub owner James Garner, and the romantic intrigues begin. So far, so good, though at this point I haven't laughed once, but by the time we had fast forwarded the third painful musical number, and realised there was still 45 minutes to go, we abandoned ship. You have to be a confident writer to write a two hour fifteen minute comedy, like Wilder and Diamond.

With Dick Bush on camera, Ralph Winters editing and Henry Mancini providing music, it was a shame it wasn't better. Made at Pinewood, "a lovely little studio outside London... one of the assistants  came up to me on the set and asked, 'Would it worry you that Julie lights the cigar twice in the same scene?' 'Worry me?' I exclaimed. 'It would devastate me!' I raced up to the cutting room like a jackrabbit, wound the reel down, put the scene into the Moviola, and took a look. There I saw Julie lighting the cigar twice in the same scene. What made me laugh is that I had already viewed the scene cut this way and had even showed it to Blake. Neither of us noticed the miscut! Academy Award winner? Hmmmmm." (Ralph Winters, 'Some Cutting Remarks'.)

A Warm December (1973 Sidney Poitier)

Like Walk Softly Stranger, it begins in a way in which we're thinking, 'Is this a spy thriller?' Sidney Poitier is on holiday in London with his daughter Yvette Curtis, bumps into mischievous looking Ester Anderson, who's clearly being tailed by different people. And they become entangled. But it turns out she's a diplomat's niece with sickle cell anaemia which will kill her. (Treatment of the condition has much improved since the film was made and life expectancies are longer, but it is true that it is a Black people's disease.) 

The three leads are good. Anderson's and Curtis's careers ended soon after.

So some slightly unwise thrillery bits and music, but underneath a decent story, particularly when the woman and girl bond. Also has some nice subtext about Africa, its heritage and music, and interesting London locations. Less effective is a subplot about Poitier's cross country motorcycling hobby, which I thought might be in there as it was a personal interest of the actor, but it turns out he was doubled. I would have simplified that side of things as the racing scenes are boring.

We saw a cropped print of Paul Beeson's 1.85:1 images. Edited by Pembroke J Herring (Groundhog Day, Out of Africa) and Peter Pitt (no doubt the mandated British editor, or assembly editor).

Lawrence Roman wrote it as an original screenplay.

The music wins no prizes for subtlety and the whole thing may have got financed because of the huge success of Love Story.

Walk Softly, Stranger (1950 Robert Stevenson)

Begins weirdly when Joseph Cotten arrives at a small town, knocks up old lady Spring Byington supposedly to look at the house he ran away from, ends up her lodger. Meets wheelchair-bound Alida Valli and claims he fell in love with her as a schoolkid.

But then he goes to help former crony Paul Stewart hold up a gambling joint...

So a satisfying romantic thriller about a man who's trying to go straight. Cotten has the talent to make much of this ambivalent role and Valli is touching. Also has great characters in the shape of her maid Esther Dale and his gambling boss John McIntyre.

Score by Frederick Hollander, Harry Wild on camera, for RKO (a Dore Scary production).

'Alida' as she's again billed here (after The Third Man) went back to working in Europe after this.

The Serial Killer's Wife (2023)

Who commission this bollocks? I did say I supposed the audience is like us, knowing it's bollocks, chanting "Why doesn't she call the police?" and all the other leisurely tropes of this sort of thriller Whodunit. A Channel 5 four parter that's so crap, we accidentally missed episode 2 and it really didn't matter. The final look into camera is screamingly bad. The sex scenes are unnecessary and pervy.

It was based on a novel by Alice Hunter.

Annabel Scholey, Jack Farthing, Luke Treadaway, Angela Griffin, Julie Graham, Morgana Robinson.

The Killing (1956 Stanley Kubrick & scr)

Maltin's film guide had already warned everyone about its "major flaw: the Dragnet-style narration", which is really awful - why did they do that? The film would have worked just as well without it - better. And similarly - jettison the "two hours earlier" stuff and just show the build up and execution of the (admittedly brilliant) robbery in chronological order.

Another carp - we see the horses at the start gate footage too many times. Was interested to see though a poster for a 'Burlesque' show in which Lenny Bruce was billed!

From the novel 'Clean Break' by Lionel White, adapted by Kubrick with dialogue by Jim Thompson, does emerge an exciting and downbeat tale with a surprisingly high murder and bloodshed rating - memorable moment where Cook fights back but realises all his accomplices have been killed. Windsor is a terrific femme fatale who causes everything to fall apart, and the ending at the airport is brilliant. She is just so horrible - film noir's most poisonous wife.

A colourful gallery of characters is populated by: Sterling Hayden, Coleen Gray, Vince Edwards (Windsor's boyfriend), Jay C. Flippen, Ted de Corsia, Marie Windsor, Elisha Cook, Joe Sawyer, Timothy Carey (the hired horse shooter), James Edwards (parking guy, The Manchurian Candidate, Coogan's Bluff), Kola Kwariani (wrestler).

Lovely photography from Lucien Ballard.

Fly Away Home (1996 Carroll Ballard)

Like the same director's The Black Stallion, a beautifully photographed film about young people connecting with nature; here a disaffected teenager and her relationship with fifteen wild geese she has rescued. Prompts many cries of "How did they do that??"

The film is broadly based on the autobiography of Bill Lishman 'Father Goose', a sculptor and inventor who pioneered ultra light aviation and actually did lead a flight of geese with an aircraft. Most of the geese stuff in this film is real, managed by Bill and his son Geordie (obviously the flight through Baltimore is CGI). Ballard seems like a no nonsense character, see Bobbie Wygant interview: "How did you get the geese to interact with the humans." Ballard: "Shot a ton of film. Some of it worked, some didn't". Reminds me of a John Ford interview.

Never Cry Wolf (1983) also looks good, Duma (2005) is about a boy and his cheetah.

Jeff Daniels and Anna Paquin are both on fine form as the sculptor / aviator and his daughter. With Dana Delany, Terry Kinney, Holter Graham. Photographed by Caleb Deschanel in Canada, edited by Nicholas Smith, screenplay by Robert Rodat (Saving Private Ryan) and Vince McEwin.

Otley (1968 Dick Clement)

 Again, seems well enough reviewed in 2021:

We saw Clement and Ian La Fresnais interviewed - this didn't come up, but their love of football surely did (it crops up here). Their screenplay - based on a novel by Martin Waddell - is conspicuous for their wit, viz. "He's either dead or terribly well - I can't remember which". And "I think Marbella's marvellous." "Yes, but isn't one liable to bump into one's hairdresser?"

Tom Courtenay is the dodgy dealer who gets mixed up in murder and espionage. With Romy Schneider (representing Fashionably Foreign Female casting), Alan Badel, James Villiers, Leonard Rossiter in a great role as a pragmatic assassin, utterly believable, James Bolam & Fiona Lewis (Otley's ex who still has a thing for him), Freddie Jones, Edward Hardwicke & Emma Thompson - I mean Phyllida Law, but the resemblance in appearance and voice is striking - and Geoffrey Bayldon. Full of great one liners, and touches like the copper forgetting to shut the cell door.

I was maybe getting the feeling in the last third that is was one chase too many, but overall, great fun, and interesting London locations - Q correctly identified Bowater House - it's a world I was in, at that time, and could sort of feel it, magnified by having seen it when young, at the cinema, initially, then on TV (23 May 1976). Long opening take is Portobello Road.

Cinematographer Austin Dempster (it looked like it was in 4x3, turns out it isn't - open matte?), music Stanley Myers, editor Richard Best, for Columbia. But the US-backed British films were beginning to flop, films like Isadora, The Wrong Box, Our Mother's House, The Bliss of Mrs Blossom, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Accident and Performance, and the money stopped coming in. The remaining talent (people like Peter Yates. John Schlesinger and John Boorman) went where the money was, and the British film industry all but collapsed. (Well explored in Alexander Walker's 'Hollywood England'.)

Today we saw the Blu-Ray re-release, in 16x9, in which noticed posters for 'Zeta' photo magazine and just a glimpse of a familiar looking poster, which turned out to be The Charge of the Light Brigade!

The Critic (2023 Anand Tucker)

We know the name from Shopgirl, And When Did You Last See Your Father? and Leap Year, films of a questionable reputation. And this one obviously had problems as it sat around for a year before finally being released straight to video. We though enjoyed Patrick Marber's adaptation of Anthony Quinn's novel in which hideous theatre critic Ian McKellan gets himself sacked, then manipulates actress Gemma Arterton into sleeping with the newspaper's editor Mark Strong so he can blackmail him into getting his job back. We liked that he got his comeuppance but would have preferred it had it not been at the cost of the actress's life (I sense this is where the film loses its audience). So perhaps the story or adaptation wasn't as satisfying as it might have been, particularly as McKellan asks for all the trouble he gets.

Shot by David Higgs and then looks like it had been through some kind of muddy colour timing process, making it look like Arterton has a moustache in many scenes. Tucker unwisely shoots some of the ugliest close ups I've seen. So points off there also.

Good cast includes Claire Skinner again, Alfred Enoch, Ben Barnes, Romola Garai, Ron Cook, Lesley Manville.

The Narrow Margin (1952 Richard Fleischer)

No one seemed familiar to us in taut (and short) train thriller (not really a noir), cunningly written by Martin Goldsmith and Jack Leonard and adapted by Earl Fenton. Charles McGraw and Don Beddoe are the detectives entrusted with looking after gangster's wife Marie Windsor - David Clarke, Peter Virgo and Peter Brocco (who made an impression) are out to get them, Paul Maxey the big guy, and Jacqueline White and her son Gordon Gebert (Holiday Affair) are the innocent bystanders.

No music. Lit well by George Diskant. Features some eye-catching stuff, like a tough fight in a train compartment long before From Russia with Love and a thrilling finale. 

That was my review from November 2015. I love that it lies! Still really good even when you remember the plot. RKO.

Marie Windsor, something of a B movie queen, also in The Killing

What's Up Doc? (1972 Peter Bogdanovich)

Do people realise just how smoothly and skilfully this film is made? It's heart is of course in Hawks - not just Bringing Up Baby (the way she calls him 'Steve' is for example straight out of To Have and Have Not) but also references sources as diverse as silent movies (firemen as Keystone Cops) and Billy Wilder (use of Larabie name for one thing is no coincidence).

Streisand and O'Neal are wonderfully watchable and there's the treat of an Austin Pendleton for those in the know.

Also, you don't realise quite how wonderfully Laszlo Kovacs has filmed it (which, I think, is one of his distinctive - or rather, indistinctive - trademarks).

Roger Corman told Peter to recut his own sequences from The Wild Angels if he thought he could do better. Peter said "Well I don't know how to cut" and Roger said "Go down and see Dennis - he'll show you how you do it". We assume this must have been Dennis Jakob, who is credited as the editor of the film. Then after Targets and The Last Picture Show Peter was still reluctant to let anyone else cut his film, so he marked it with S and C so Verna Fields knew where to 'Start' and 'Cut'.

Boxing Day (2021 Aml Ameen & co-scr)

Something of a one man show then as Aml also stars as a writer who returns to London with his American fiancee (Aja Naomi King) to face problems with extended family and ex. What nice, huge houses everyone has!

Quite a lot of characters, played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Leigh-Anne Pinnock, Tamara Lawrance, Stephen Dillane, Sheyi Cole, Robbie Gee, Samson Kayo, Lisa Davina Phillip, Claire Skinner.

Showdown between King and Pinnock over dominos is memorable.

David Pimm shot it. We thought it might have been the Goring Hotel but it was actually The Haymarket.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004 Alfonso Cuaron)

Producer David Heyman had seen Y Tu Mama Tambien and from that thought Cuaron would bring a modern sensibility of the third Harry Potter film. Which is surprising, I assumed it had been on the back of A Little Princess (which to be fair Heyman also adored). Cuaron was a stranger to the world of Harry Potter but brought to the kids a more complex feel of growing into teenagers, dressing them more casually and in more muted colours, and creating a darker world, well evidenced in the attack on the train. I noticed it's not just clocks that figure heavily but circles, from the frequent use of iris dissolves to bring us in and out of scenes to the pattern of descending Dementors, for which he referenced Hitchcock's British films and a sense of apprehension.

He says he worked closely with Kloves pruning down the book and cast aside anything that wasn't connected to the main theme, but unfortunately neglects to mention what that main theme was. I@d guess it's fear, experiencing it and facing it. And time.

I am reminded that Alfonso's Disclaimer is available on Apple TV.

Alfonso said the key to working with the kids was never to patronize them. Though I have to say Ms. Watson does look a little sarcastic in these great on location stills.

Gavin and Stacey: the Finale (2024 Ruth Jones, James Cordon)

So we say goodbye for the last time to Matthew Horne, Joanna Page, Ruth Jones, James Cordon, Larry Lamb, Alison Steadman, Rob Brydon, Melanie Walters, Julia Davis and Adrian Scarborough. Laura Aikman is the unsuitable fiancee (she was in Archie, playing Dyan Cannon, and Scrapper).

It ends as it should do.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005 Shane Black & scr)

"Check out Doris and Lucinda over there" sounds like the kind of line you'd hear in a cop thriller from 1969.

And on the girls who end up in Hollywood: "If you shook the east coast and the good girls hung on".

Everyone involved must have loved reading the screenplay, "Get the finger, kill the dog, get out of there."

And - the derringer down the pants - The Guard.

Love Actually (2003 Richard Curtis & scr)

I think I would have suggested removing the Laura Linney story and probably the Alan Rickman one and perhaps rewriting the Kris Marshall one. Some of it is damn stupid. I'm not sure there's much wrong with the acting - it's a fabulous cast generally - just the writing.

Great Expectations (1946 David Lean)

I don't know why we'd left it so long.

Some of the brilliant cinema is actually all in the source novel (I think - it's been even longer since I read it) - thus all the sounds Pip thinks he hears as he's heading for the grave are actually in the book: adapters of novels please note. And also, the narration, sometimes so simple: "The next week..."

But not all, the moment where the two dinghies collide with the packet steamer is wonderfully dynamic.

Tales From the Crypt (1972 Freddie Francis)

 Ghost story anthology makes you realise just how great Dead of Night is. Enjoyable enough though, especially sting-in-tail Christmas opening as Joan Collins tries to clear up after murdering her husband. 

Beautiful sympathetic performance from Peter Cushing, whose beloved wife Violet has died in January 1971, and he was no doubt tapping into his grief.

And Nigel Patrick is an abusive director of a home for the blind, who take their revenge.

Written by Milton Subotsky, rather overlit by Norman Warwick. Also with Ralph Richardson, Ian Hendry, Richard Greene, Barbara Murray, Patrick Magee.