This Gun For Hire (1942 Frank Tuttle)

Who is Frank Tuttle? He started out directing in 1922, made a version of The Glass Key, funnily enough, in 1935, with George Raft, can't say I really know any of his films before or since this. His final film was Island of Lost Women in 1959 which looks as bad as it sounds. Anyway, he's done a good job here, with a screenplay from Albert Maltz and W.R. Burnett (Scarface, High Sierra, The Asphalt Jungle) loosely based on Graham Greene's 1936 'entertainment' 'A Gun For Sale'.

I wonder how long it took John Seitz to light this throwaway shot?

See here also. With Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, Laird Cregar, Robert Preston, Tully Marshall, Pamela Blake. A Paramount production.

Ladd's character isn't entirely dispassionate - he likes cats (but then kills one), gives the little girl her ball back, though she can clearly identify him, protects Lake... It's a good picture. made even better by the great John Seitz on camera.

Lake's hair had sparked a national craze from the year before and her appearance in I Wanted Wings. This film made an instant star out of Alan Ladd, and Paramount capitalised on this success be reteaming them immediately with The Glass Key.

The Suspect (1944 Robert Siodmak)

London, 1902. Charles Laughton's wife Rosalind Ivan (terrifying) is so horrible that their son Dean Harens leaves home. Feeling estranged, Laughton befriends a young woman, Ella Raines, and they begin to visit Chinese and Italian restaurants. (According to londonplanner.com, the first Chinese restaurant in London was opened in 1909, though The Gentleman's Journal notes that E. Pellici opened in 1900. Anyway, back to the film.) Ivan finds out and threatens to inform her and his employers, thus ruining both of them - what a horrible cow! So that leaves him only one option, an option we don't actually see him carry out...

The death leads to investigation by genial Scotland Yard detective Stanley Ridges, who in the film's best scene demonstrates how the murder could have taken place - this is first class film making. I'm not sure he could make the case stick, but just to be sure, Laughton marries the young woman because - well he wants to, but also so she can't testify.

Then Laughton's neighbour Henry Daniell blackmails him and so must be disposed of. Cue the scene where friends return from an aborted seaside trip and one of them thinks she's been touched by the dead body and Harens investigates under the sofa... and Laughton's look, thinking he's about to be exposed... so good... but the young man finds only a kitten. Great stuff.

Molly Lamont good as Daniell's battered wife.

A Universal film, screenwritten by Bertrand Millhauser, Arthur Horman having adapted James Ronald's novel. Frank Skinner scored, Paul Ivano is on camera.

I love this shot. Apart from the intimacy of it, it works simply because he's behind her. It wouldn't have been nearly as good if they were sat side by side

"Is it too revealing?"

Something about this image made me think of Black Forest gateau

The low angle and the near darkness makes this somewhat spooky

Laughton's wonderful. Both Wilder and Hitchcock revered him.

The Player (1992 Robert Altman)

A very clever film, written by Michael Tolkin and based on his own book. The pot shots at Hollywood, right from the opening eight minute single take onwards, are priceless.

Tim Robbins, Great Scacchi, Fred Ward, Peter Gallagher, Whoopi Goldberg, Brion James, Dean Stockwell, Richard E Grant, Sydney Pollack, Lyle Lovett, Jeremy Piven and lots of guest stars, including Jack Lemmon at piano and Harry Belafonte.

Excellent photography from Jean Lépine, who may have also been operating and focus pulling, as neither of these roles are credited. Good ambient score from Tom Newman. Oscar nominated editing by Geraldine Peroni, who also cut Short Cuts and other films for Altman. The apprentice editor is Dylan Tichenor, whose work we just glimpsed in The Town and is known for PTA films.

Look - Hitch gets a cameo and it's not even his film!

One of the movies referred to - Lonely Room - isn't real.

20th Century Women (2016 Mike Mills & scr)

And it's essentially autobiographical, according to Annette Bening, the story of Mike's mother and his relationship with her. In this version, the mother encourages other women - Greta Gerwig and Elle Fanning - to try to help him grow up - which they do. But it backfires, the boy is developing more emotional understanding than his mother.

With Lucas Jade Zumann and Billy Crudup. 

It's a 1950 Chevrolet Styleline De Luxe

One note is that though I liked Roger Neill's Eno-ish music I think it may act to slow down the film in certain sections; and it might have been a better idea to use some of the old time Woody Allen-ish numbers to counterpoint what we're seeing instead.

Photographed by Sean Porter, edited by Leslie Jones, production design Chris Jones.

Une Belle Fille Comme Moi (1972 François Truffaut & co-scr)

Something of a departure for Truffaut, a straight and rather broad comedy which may have been his stab at screwball - certainly the bookish sociologist André Dussolier could be the Cary Grant character in Bringing Up Baby - Bernadette Lafont is just as dangerous and destructive as Katherine Hepburn. Whilst constantly lying to him, Lafont relates her story of multiple affairs - with Charles Denner, Claude Brasseur, Guy Marchand and Philippe Léotard.

Memorable moments are racing car record to love-making, kid who won't show footage as it isn't yet edited, wise secretary Anne Kreis who knows exactly what's going on, husband being run over.

Does it work? It ends up being quite a good thriller with a twisty ending, but generally it's rather exhausting. And very French. It was based on the novel 'Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me' and Truffaut directed it for Columbia who owned the rights.

Pierre-William Glenn photographed it. 

It wasn't particularly successful at the box office.

3-4x10月 / Boiling Point (1990 Takeshi Kitano & scr)

The title is '3 - 4 x October' according to online sources, the final baseball score. 

Beat Takeshi's film is funnier than his first. A young man falls foul of the local Yakuza and sets out to take them out. Is, I think, essentially the plot. Which also involves a lousy baseball team and a visit to an out-of season Okinawa, where they encounter violent criminal Beat Takeshi, whose behaviour is somewhat outlandish, e.g. he orders his girlfriend to have sex with a colleague, then repeatedly hits her round the head as a punishment. This sequence also features a quite incredible flash forward montage - edited by Toshio Taniguchi.

Maybe the funniest moment is the group of jerks in a car who are haranguing our hero - who is Yurei Yanagi, by the way - and they crash into a parked car. Also the bunch of flowers which start firing. Or the kid who buys a new motorbike and crashes immediately.

Yuriko Ishida (the girlfriend), Gadarukunaru Taka, Dankan. Photographed by Katsumi Yanagijima.

This (I think) is comedian Dankan, which is why these two are genuinely laughing so much

The sea features again - it seems to be a recurrent image.

Back to Black (2024 Sam Taylor-Johnson)

Marisa Abela is good as Amy Winehouse and does a marvellous job of emulating her singing voice throughout. Lesly Manville is her beloved gran, Eddie Marsan her dad and Jack O'Connell her druggie boyfriend. Thankfully her final hours are left unspoken.

Unfortunately it is another of those up-then-down biopics, and it suffers perhaps too from being whitewashed.

Intriguing to hear the Shangri-Las 'Leader of the Pack' again, and the effect it (apparently) had on some of her ensuing music.

Photographed by Polly Morgan (A Quiet Place 2) and edited by Laurence Johnson and Martin Walsh.

La Haine (1995 Mathieu Kassovitz & scr)

Well, this was not what I was expecting, the humour, for example, and the terrific way it is filmed.

The day after a riot in the banlieues, sparked by the beating of an Arab in police custody. Three multi-racial friends, Vincent Cassel, Hubert Koundé and Saïd Taghmoui go into Paris to get some money and experience strange episodes in an art gallery, with an old man who was a prisoner in Siberia, a gang of skinheads and a deranged cokehead. But in the most telling and awful sequence, Saïd, who has remarked that 'the police here are so polite - he even called me sir' and Hubert are arrested (for doing nothing) and really nastily tortured (in an uninterrupted scene, which makes it worse). But still these two don't think all cops are bad, indeed are semi-buddies with one, who's also Arabic, but who features in the shocking ending.

The journey makes me thing of films like The Warriors and After Hours, the phrase 'The World Is Yours' is from some seminal American gangster picture and the discussion about cartoon characters sounds like it could be an homage to Stand By Me!

Really well photographed by Pierre Aïm - that shot where the camera drifts over the banlieue may well have been influenced by Soy Cuba.

Won Best Director at Cannes and Césars for Best Film and Editing (Kossovitz and Scott Stevenson).

その男、凶暴につき / Violent Cop (1989 Takeshi Kitano)

More straightforward then his later films - look who's become an expert already - and not written by the director but by Hisashi Nozawa, though certain directorial devices are already in play, such as the sequences where people are held in shot, motionless, for so long you think the DVD's frozen. As Takeshi took over the project from another director he did rewrite the script, but without credit. It was his debut feature.

Beat Takeshi plays an unorthodox Dirty Harry-type cop who won't play by the rules. Fantastic chase sequence where the pursued suddenly starts smashing the car in with a steel pipe - so Beat runs him over! Story involves murder of drug dealer - Beat is after both the psychotic killer and his boss, a kind of corporate criminal type. Ends with Beat's mentally challenged sister Maiko Kawakami being kidnapped - the kidnappers manage to end up killing  each other - Beat ends up also shooting his sister, who's become a junkie!

With Makoto Ashikawa as the new detective, Shiro Sano, Sei Hiraizumi. Music Diasaku Kume (including a version of a Satie piece), cinematographer Yasushi Sasakibara, editor Nobutake Kamiya.

There are some funny bits. for sure, though I can't remember what they were now.

Millions Like Us (1943 Frank Launder & Sidney Gilliat & scr)

Patricia Roc goes to work in a factory under supervisor Eric Portman. He and Anne Crawford make their way towards one another, as do Roc and young Gordon Jackson. The familiar roommate is Megs Jenkins. Also recognisable - Amy Veness from This Happy Breed. And that wasn't Kay Walsh as I thought, but it was Irene Handel as the landlady. 

Charters and Caldicott reappear from The Lady Vanishes to brief but comic effect.

No, not a Bedford but a Dennis Lancet

A decent, though slightly underwhelming film.

Christmas Holiday (1944 Robert Siodmak)

A stunningly mistitled film, rather loosely based on a novel of the same name by Somerset Maugham, adapted by 'Mr Flashback' Herman Mankiewicz.

On leave soldier Dean Harens wants to get to California to confront a girlfriend who has jilted him, but gets stuck in New Orleans. There he encounters pushy and dodgy journalist Richard Whorf (Juke Girl) who introduces him to nightclub singer Deanna Durbin, and she recounts her sorry story of relationship with gambler Gene Kelly.

Made with the skill I'm now beginning to fully realise as Siodmak, who moves his camera elegantly and is a master of mise en scene - for example, when we go in for the medium shot of Deanna's opening song, you can see behind her a girl in a party dress beckoning for fellow partygoers to follow her up the stairs. Crowd scenes like this seem to have a lot going on in them.

But this is kind of a crazy film and not altogether successful as we're none to sure whether Kelly is innocent or guilty until too late. Also it feels a bit padded with Cathedral and Concert scenes (obviously real footage into which the studio stuff is cut) - not uninteresting though. Gale Sondergaard is spooky as his mother, Gladys George is the nightclub owner.

Photographed well by Elwood Bredell, who also did a good job in Siodmak's Phantom Lady, and editor Ted Kent had worked with him before too. Music by Hans Salter, with good use also of Wagner's 'Tristan and Isolde'. Universal.

I've been thinking about how tall the 4x3 ratio is, which may seem an odd thing to say, but it's nevertheless true.

The Farmer's Daughter (1947 H.C. Potter)

Loretta Young won the Oscar for her portrayal of a clear-thinking Swedish girl who works for politician Joseph Cotten and ends up running against him for Senator! Film begins when she's given a lift to Capitol City by sleazoid Rhys Williams, who - drunkenly - crashes his car... and she ends up paying for the damage? Che cazzo? Stupid woman.

Anyway to make ends meet she works for Charles Bickford, who's head of household for Cotten and mother Ethel Barrymore. "If you can work for Bickford you can work for anyone", is the allegation made, though he doesn't seem particularly hard to work for. It's another good performance from him; we last saw him in the Mitchum medical picture Not As A Stranger  but he can also play exceedingly nasty, viz. Fallen Angel. He was Oscar nominated. And Barrymore's predictably good too.

The Swedish brothers come in to the fore in a knockabout ending. An enjoyable picture.

Written by Allen Rivkin and Laura Kerr, suggested by a play by Juhni Tervataa aka Hella Wuolijoki which had been bought by Selznick originally as a vehicle for Bergman. Music by Leigh Harline, shilfully photographed by Milton Krasner, produced by Dore Schary for RKO.

The Tower 3: Gallowstree Road (2024 Patrick Harbinson)

Just a short season this time - four episodes. In very topical storyline a youth is stabbed to death and retaliations take place. Gemma Whelan and Tahira Sharif investigate and discover they're treading on an undercover operation led by bearded Emmett Scanlan in which the charismatic Jimmy Akingbola is undercover as a dreadlocked dealer. Lamar Waves is the kid who starts all this. Ella Smith is the useful no nonsense DS.

Best moment - Akingbola seized by Bulgarians, takes one of their guns off one of them and insists he give him his shoes. He was in the first series of Kate & Koji with Brenda Blethyn.

"Give me your shoes!"

Features some alarming idiocy, such as when the murder suspect claims he wants to go to the toilet and escapes, which we know he will, or when Akingbola breaks cover at the end. So we'll have a quick shout at the writers over those things, though it's a suspenseful tale, featuring largely annoying people.

Rachel and the Stranger (1948 Norman Foster)

William Holden is a widower who buys a new wife, Loretta Young - his son Gary Gray (also in the Lassie film The Painted Hills) takes an immediate dislike for her. And so it goes, he treating her like a servant... until friend Bob Mitchum turns up and starts to treat her like the lady she is, and before long they're erotically singing duets over her spinet. The boys start to squabble, and she becomes a crack shot, which is useful when the Shawnee attack the block with cries of "Get art of my pub!!" You can guess the end.

Quite fun. An RKO picture, scored by Roy Webb, photographed by Maury Gertsman. Written by Waldo Salt from the story by Howard Fast. Filmed in Oregon.