I'm not sure we were in quite the right mood to experience the histrionics of Carole Lombard and John Barrymore, though they are both great in Ben Hecht / Charles MacArthur screenplay. Based on the play 'Napoleon of Broadway' by Charles Bruce Millholland.
With Roscoe Karns, Walter Connolly, Etienne Girardot (mad man).
Ms Lombard in an array of glamorous fashion:
Mr Barrymore's response:
German version of film fair zips along in story of Russian (Uno Henning) who has loved a French girl but they must flee to Paris. I can't tell you how unspeakable some of the men are in this, particularly the vile Fritz Rasp, who whilst embracing blind fiancee Brigitte Helm is also trying to seduce title heroine Edith Jéhanne. He's also boasted to a girl whose eye he has kissed (not a typo) - a sort of Louise Brooks protégée Hertha van Walther - that he's going to kill said fiancee for her money. There's an amusing scene with a diamond stealing parrot, and a wonderful little moment where the couple spy a just married bride... and she's crying.
The uncle is another monster who is absolutely overwhelmed by greed (another standout moment) and who suddenly decides to seduce his niece... For fuck's sake. The screenplay is by Rudolf Leonhardt and Ladislaus Vajda from Ilja Ehrenburg's novel.
Most interesting, though Bernd Thewes modern recreation of an old piano cue sheet leaves something to be desired. Good performances by and large. Sig Arno, best known to us from The Palm Beach Story, is funny as an investigator. With Hans Jaray, Vladimir Sokoloff, Eugen Jensen.
The agile camerawork is by Robert Lach and Fritz Arno Wagner (Nosferatu, Diary of a Lost Girl, Westfront 1918, The Threepenny Opera, M, The Testament of Dr Mabuse).
Greater Love. Dudi Appleton and Jim Keeble. Directed by Douglas Mackinnon, who has an annoying habit of putting something in the way of his subject and tracking the camera through it, like this:
The gang go to Afghanistan to retrieve a fallen soldier from a water project. Unfortunately they spend a lot of time in debate with others and each other about war vs crime, west vs. everyone else, personal morality, justice, chicken decomposition etc and it seems to be a showcase for polemical discussion rather than the exciting episode it could have been... Until the somehow not unexpected twist and shock ending.
Nikki: "Leo was as close to a father as I'll ever have."
David Caves, Brana Bajic, Sam Hazeldine, Joe Doyle.
We don't think Rob Jarvis killed his wife and even investigating detective Christine Bottomley isn't sure - but her dad Christopher Fulford puts the pressure on. Turns out a former policeman David Murray has been killing and cutting fingers off all over the place (literally). Nikki saves Jack's life with a clonk over the head. True Love Waits was written by the normally reliable Ed Whitmore, and Tracey Malone, but I wasn't sure what was going on half the time.
Then in Stephen Gallagher's The Legacy. Nikki gets involved with a politician who you know is going to be a wrongun (Ed Stoppard) whilst a nuclear train crash has been covered up. (Sorry - he was going to build low cost housing on land he knew was contaminated with uranium? Have I got that wrong?)
It's nicely photographed, anyway - by Jon Conroy - but really over-edited by Catherine Creed.
Change is right - there's no more Harry. Tom Ward had had enough. But, you know, he was our favourite character, so that's hard. Though we had just watched him in 96 episodes. So that should be enough really.
David Caves is Jack, the new Harry, who we meet in a boxing ring, and he's accompanied by his diminutive sidekick Liz Carr (Clarissa).
Death of a confectionary magnate is the rather cumbersome plot here. With Sharon Small, Louis Emerick, Anna Madeley, Derek Riddell. Timothy Prager wrote it, Anthony Byrne directed.
Then in Trust (Richard Davidson / Richard Clark) Jack bumps into former colleague / lover Amanda Drew who's investigating a double murder, which revolves around an anthrax plot involving Bryan Dick and Mark Bonnar. The ending is a bit shit. In a side story, Leo helps the mother of a deceased infant. With Adam James.
This - directed by Keith Boak - is the hardest watch of the series so far, as it deals with impressionable teenage schoolgirls being seduced through presents and flattery and drugs into becoming unwilling prostitutes for a gang of Pakistani men. And these girls don't seem stupid, but they all seem to come from unhappy home lives.
In fact it should be mandatory viewing in schools.
Begins with two bangs - Nikki witnesses a barefoot girl being run over and helps her; Harry's flat blows up!
Rather successful in that we see the miserable fate of one of the girls imprisoned and desperate to escape cross cut with how it all begins for another couple of girls.
Elyes Gabel is good as the charismatic gang leader, with Faraz Ayub, Ashwin Bolar and thankfully Tony Jayawardena as the slightly thick one who knows they are doing wrong and eventually comes to the rescue (also good; A Street Cat Named Bob). The girls are Emma Amos, Juliet Cowan, Chloe May.
A taciturn detective is Sam Troughton; Sanjeev Bhaskar also features.
To leaven the dark proceedings, Harry moves into Nikki's flat (though doesn't get much more sleep there!)
What is also quite disturbing that although we see all the gang being arrested, we're not convinced there will be enough evidence to convict them all. And this was some years before the Bradford grooming scandal, also.
When Audrey says she's aware of her responsibility and that's why she's come back; had she not been aware of it she may not have returned at all - I was wondering how many times Willie made her say it! Certainly you can see in the climactic press conference at the palace quite how good a director of actors he is.
Audrey would not have been known at all in Rome, which must have been liberating.
Caffe Rocca next to the Pantheon is no longer there. Via Margutta is near the Spanish Steps; Fellini lived there.
John Steinbeck 'Cain and Abel' story adapted by Paul Osborn - the irony being that the 'bad' character is the better one. Strong performance from James Dean, who was Oscar nominated after his death. With Raymond Massey, Julie Harris, Richard Davalos, Burl Ives, Jo Van Fleet and a young Lois Smith (pictured at bar with Dean below). And more ironies in that Dean and Harris make a better couple than her and his brother. And also that Dean is a better businessman than his father. And that he could have had a good relationship with his mother when the others couldn't.
Creatively photographed by Conrad Hall's mentor Ted McCord, using the widescreen well.
Editor Owen Marks is not afraid of the widescreen. Strong score from Leonard Rosenman
It was a Warner Bros film, designed by James Basevi and Malcolm Bert.
I wanted to see this as it was reportedly the only adaptation of a Ruth Rendall novel 'A Judgement in Stone' of which she approved. (Chabrol adapted it with Caroline Eliacheff). And it's quite shocking.
As usual we're in an isolated house in the country near a small village. (Are any Chabrols set in a city?) A slightly strange lady, Sandrine Bonnaire, is employed as a maid by Jacqueline Bisset to look after her husband (Jean-Pierre Cassel), step daughter (Virginie Ledoyen) and son (Valentin Merlet). The family are quite good to her, really, particularly the daughter, but her path crosses with wilful and rebellious post office worker Isabelle Huppert (a performance of some vigour) who you could argue leads her astray. But they both may have had darker secrets in their pasts. They have funny quirks. Bonnaire keeps saying 'I don't know' to something she should know, like 'Do you like your room?' Huppert seems slightly obsessed with washing her hands.
One interpretation is it's a film about class differences.
The ending - that the murders have accidentally been recorded on tape - is a real doozy, and actually plays out right through to the very end of the credits.
Quite high key lighting by Bernard Zitzermann, incisively edited by Monique Fardoulis.
Murder to opera - is this where Woody took inspiration from?
Bisset's mother was French but she had to learn the language. As far as I can tell she doesn't live in France.
It's quite stunning as well as shocking. Huppert was the only winner of its seven César nominations.
From the off, as Terry Thomas addresses the audience - the men in the audience, as the wives wouldn't want to see this picture and are at home in their kitchens - it's knowingly sending up the old-fashioned attitudes of the bachelors, and ends on a reassuring note - the man needs the woman. "Now's your chance - go in there and finish her off." George Axelrod's the writer, who preferred comedy, though let us not forget also adapted Richard Condon's 'The Manchurian Candidate' rather brilliantly in 1962. He had started writing for radio, then television, and his first play was a hit - 'The Seven Year Itch'. His next Broadway hit 'Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter' was completely changed for its film adaptation.
Lemmon's great as usual - a real one-off - but Terry-Thomas and Verna Lisi are strong in support.
And I would have to say if I was teaching how to score a movie, then this would be a really fun example. For it's not only Neal Hefti's themes that are interesting - there's one for the Brash Brannigan capers, one for Lemmon and Lisi canoodling, an Italian theme just for her, the funeral marches etc. - but it's also the way he arranges the themes as needed to really suit a particular scene or moment. The minute people started putting pop songs into movies, that fine art started to get lost - you rarely if ever get it now.
I was only thinking a couple of days before of Lemmon saying' You no speak-a de English" and I couldn't remember what film it was from!
Like though the credit 'A film by Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden' (she co-wrote and edited).
Yes, see here. Anthony Mackie is as good as Gosling and Epps.
Could have done with the occasional shot - the last one, for example - not being hand held.
Does Gosling say at one point that he's 'been over there' (the war)?
The music's by Broken Social Scene and it was filmed in Brooklyn.
Daniel Ellsberg was a political activist who published the Pentagon Papers in 1971 which revealed the Government's thinking over Vietnam.
Written by Andrew Davies, who has represented some of the trial itself - which now seems mad - including a Bishop who claims the book 'sanctifies' sex and a lecturer who describes it as 'Puritanical'. But what Davies has also done is to make up the jury - in particular a couple, who - perhaps because of the shared experience of the book - get it together. They are Rafe Spall and Louise Delamere, played older by Kenneth Cranham and Claire Bloom.
It's funny that the minute Spall goes down on his wife Alyson Coote, she realises he's been having an affair!
The courtroom stuff goes on a bit.
With Karl Johnson, Pip Torrens, David Tennant, Montserrat Lombard, Gerard Horan, Mary Healey.
Perhaps influenced by Don't Look Now, this uses water in a creepy way, as couple Emma Thompson and Adrian Dunbar on holiday in Scotland experience mysterious manifestations... yes it's got more in common with Roeg's film than I realised. Joanna Roth is the other woman, David Horovitch the landlord. Eleanor Bron the gnostic, Phyllida Law appropriately Thompson's mum.
They found the right location. It was quite engaging, thank you.
Stuart Wyld shot it and Peter Hayes cuts it all together sensibly.
The familiar name of Rebecca Eaton is there as Executive Producer for BBC / WGBH Boston.
Redhill. Ed Westmore. Andy Hay
Good start. Leo is lying to Janet (Jaye Griffiths), is off on his own drinking. Then finds a crashed car, then a women drops dead in his arms. Once the police and Nikki have arrived, they rashly enter a nearby house and find another victim - and a mysterious figure who runs away.
It links to corruption at Redhill prison where Leo Gregory makes an impression as a truly vile officer. With Juliet Aubrey, Gillian Kearney, Dorian Lough.
Leo behaves totally madly in this, at one point seeing Gregory with a gang with guns but doesn't tell the police (I guess because he realises they will have fled the coop - Westmore underwriting again).
Its conclusion is barely believable, but the next one, Fear, is absolutely mad, and comes over more like a horror film. I don't know what the normally great Appleton and Keeble had been smoking, but this is all about a girl who has dropped dead for no reason, and demonic possession. Yeah.
Good cast though with young Jodie Comer, Adrian Dunbar, Tamsin Outhwaite, Nina Sosanya, Mark Letheren, Tom Ellis (Miranda).
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Harry and Nikki had briefly met the participants in Domestic (Richard Davidson / Anthony Byrne) and find there's been a trio of murders in a family home. Neil Maskell is something of a suspect in a complicated and somehow distant tale of intrafamilial doodads. The suspect runs away again.
Then in Paradise Lost (Stephen Davis / Edward Bennett) a disturbed woman seems to be collecting bone parts at the behest of an imprisoned and violent murderer (James Cosmo, Karen Pirie, Nightsleeper. The Durrells). Frankly her son Tobi Bakare (in air conditioning red herring) seems a little odd too (Death in Paradise, Malpractice). And how does all this involve contentious pathologist Pookie Quesnel?
I think Davis is more interested in 'Paradise Lost' than any of us, which is fairly wearisome (perhaps he studied it at Uni or something). Q spots the significance of the old lady in church pretty much straight away.
Highlight: showdown between Nikki and murderer in otherwise bonkers tale.
Season 14 finale: The Prodigal. Michael Crompton. Director James Strong.
Basically, a shooting in the Dutch Embassy, police shot and killed, a boy gone missing. Naturally Harry finds the boy and is great with him - as he has always been since that one with the school kids and the death cloud (Season 8's Death by Water). It all fits devilishly together, even down to why a different pathologist (who Harry tutored) is called in.
With Matthew McNulty (After the Flood), Kate Ashfield, Lorcan Cranitch, Sarah Solemani, some Dutch people, Oliver Chris (Trying, Emma.)
Season 15. Death Has No Dominion. Ed Whitmore. Director Andy Hay.
Nikki's Dad has died and she can't process it. Because Leo and Harry have rowed, she is assigned to a murder which everyone assumes involves the mysterious 'Wraith', an attention-seeking madwoman, and into the path of obsessed detective Vincent Regan, who in a mirror story can't process his wife's death.
Without giving anything away, it's even more devilishly clever than the last one!
I loved the subtlety of the sequences where you think the fireman and his family are being stalked and only afterwards realise what has been going on (and only if you think about it) - a nice elusive story detail.
Harry is teamed up with pregnant detective Shelley Conn.
Not so much in the first one, First Casualty, by Oliver Brown and Michael Crompton, directed by Keith Boak. An army lieutenant is clearly showing signs of PTSD, Kieran Bew. Both he and his former colleague's girlfriend are found dead - is it murder? Army colleagues involved are David Ajala (Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue, Starred Up), Darren Morfitt (good as sergeant; he also appears in a Season 20 episode as a DCI!), Theo Barklem-Biggs (Rogue Heroes).
The suspect runs away again, twice...
But it's the next film, written by Dudi Appleton (who also directed) and Jim Keeble, Bloodlines, that really shakes the barley. In an arresting flash forward, Harry is seen running through the streets of Budapest covered in blood. It turns out he's out there to perform an autopsy that has already been cremated - the corrupt nature of the city coming through already; and to visit his new GF, rights campaigner Lili Bordán. There's a jokey feel to the early scenes -
Nikki: What is it, have you shagged everyone in London?
Harry (looking pointedly at her): Not quite.
Nikki: I think you like her, this Ava.. Eva.
Harry: Anna. Yes I do. I've only spent a couple of weekends with her, but yes I do like her. But I love you.
This jokey feel is maintained through to Budapest and even to a meeting with Anna's father, Julian Glover. But then Anna is murdered and Harry's seen the assailant, but in fleeing knowing he's become the No.1 suspect, and suddenly we're in The Third Man territory, where no one can be trusted, and Hitchcock's classic Wrong Man on the run. But then when at the end of episode one Harry is killed (and the look of terror on his face is fabulous) it's like the end of the world... To say more would be a spoiler, but it goes places you wouldn't expect at all.
The two writers talk about it here. "Sometimes, it seems, you don't give the audience what they want and they like you for it."
The film does for Hungary's tourist board what Finding Rachel did for Zambia.
Ferenc Elek plays a shabby former idealist, Kata Dobó a junkie prostitute, who both help Harry (both wonderful performances). Mike Kelly's the diplomat, Iván Kamarás the dodgy detective.
Some of its flash forward editing - by Katie Weiland - is in the Boydell Class. She's worked on high profile stuff like Slow Horses, GoT, Big Little Lies, Taboo and two more of these coming up. It was photographed by Tim Fleming.
Another Edward Small production, for Columbia, saddled with a solemn and redundant voiceover which keeps telling us things which are bleedin' obvious.
FBI agent Dennis O'Keefe teams up with Brit Louis Hayward to stop secret plans being leaked from top nuclear facility - how it's being done is the interesting denouement, but before that happens the couple are almost executed by the murderous gang - saved only by an emigré who has lost her family to Nazis and is willing to sacrifice all for her new Mother country yatter yatter. Raymond Burr is one of the nasties.
Shot in chiaroscuro by George Robinson, a routine Columbia B movie photographer. Written by George Bruce from Bertram Millhauser story. The title is better than the film.
A Guilty Mind. Timothy Prager. Director Sue Tully.
Three deaths in one night at hospital. Nikki in danger again - no wonder she's referred to a psychotherapist. This one almost ventures into horror film territory and is a little far fetched, though tense and enjoyable. Nikki's flat, round the corner from the Royal Albert Hall, looks rather amazing (and expensive). It's Queen Alexandra's House, SW7, used as female only student accommodation!
And I think it's nearby Onslow Square Gardens where the professor is shot.
The routinely horrible investigating detective is Mark Lewis Jones with Kelly Harrison. Arsher Ali is becoming a regular in the 'cutting room'. With Roy Marsden, Sinead Keenan and Sorcha Cusack.
Lost. Richard Davidson, director Anthony Byrne. Nutty archaeologist Mark Benton uncovers a body which isn't as old as he thinks. Links to the 'Ketamine killings' which Leo investigated back in the eighties, draws him back into world of victim Barbara Flynn and the now imprisoned murderer Sean Baker. Helps crystallise his thinking on adoption.
Tony Pitts (All Creatures, Giri/Haji, Peaky Blinders, Funny Cow, Red Riding) and Christine Tremarco (Adolescence, Clocking Off, The Responder) investigate.
Harry's old pal Charlie Creed-Miles, who funnily enough we earlier saw in (almost) debut in Press Gang, drops his son on him and disappears.
Didn't think too much of it when we last saw it 13 years ago; seems much better when reevaluated. Rex Harrison is funny from the off as conductor not wanting to believe anything bad about his wife, glamorous and younger Linda Darnell, but can't help accepting she's had an affair. Over the course of three classical music performances he imagines different outcomes to the news involving murder, forgiveness and accidental suicide. Then when he tries to recreate the murder he finds it's much harder than he's imagined in the funniest scene. "Number please."
Many trademark long takes, inspired use of sound effects, distinctive extreme close-ups. With many Sturges stock company in bit parts. Rudy Vallee, Lionel Stander, Barbara Lawrence, Kurt Kreuger, Edgar Kennedy, Al Bridge, Robert Greig etc.
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| "So simple a child can use it" |
