In Popular Culture there are some pairings that seemed doomed to fail should any entrepreneur/producer be foolish enough to gamble; Sinatra and Moog Synthesiser and Astaire and Rap spring to mind and personally I would supplement that brace with Douglas Sirk and Claudette Colbert. Colbert was born to play the sassy sophisticates created by Billy Wilder (Midnight, Arise, My Love) and Preston Sturges (Palm Beach Story) and is light years away from the schmaltz sentiment of Sirk yet here they are, yoked together, however improbably, in 1951, a time when good, strong, meaty roles were thin on the ground for Colbert. A very good friend of mine - who actually burned this film for me - is a great admirer of Sirk and he loved it but I must differ. The plot was old chapeau when Asterix was a toddler, the one about an assorted group of travellers forced together by circumstances - in this case a storm. Just to make it more improbable one of them, Ann Blyth, is a convicted murderess on her way to rendez-vous with the hangman in the a.m. The setting, so we're told, is Norfolk County, England, though for all the detail supplied it could just as well be Upper Sandusky or Kokomo. It seems that in Norfolk convicted murderesses travel in their own clothes by private car and escorted by only one man, also in plain clothes, rather than in a police van accompanied by uniformed officers. Presumably agreeing that there was no credibility left to strain Sirk and Colbert opted to crank up the improbability by having Colbert, a nun, no less, take one look at Blyth and decide she's innocent after which nothing will do but she must prove it and have Blyth set free (even more improbably, once Colbert has exposed the real murderer, Blyth IS turned free on the spot, no formalities such as a re-trial or an order from a judge, her escort merely leaves her to get on with her life. It's well made and there are people like Gladys Cooper and Ann Crawford along for the ride but it has to be seen to be believed.
Review of Thunder on the Hill
