Reviews

Although a number of reviews mention the wonderful visual quality of this film, they credit it, if they give any credit at all, to the director or the studio, a symptom, I suppose of the "auteur" approach to film criticism prevalent today.

The credit rightly belongs to cameraman Lee Garmes, who was brilliant at producing images with a romantic lyrical quality, especially when shooting people among foliage.

His work in this field is quite distinctive. Check out another of his masterpieces, "Zoo in Budapest" (1933), if you can find a copy.

This is a straightforward adaptation of Ibsen's stage play, wisely making no attempt to "open out" the action with external scenes, or to "modernise" the action. Its only failure in this respect is having Oswald kiss his mother full on the lips, not once but twice. This hint of Oedipal incest is NOT a part of Ibsen's play.

Dench and Gambon are both excellent, but Freddie Jones steals every scene he is in. Branagh, alas, overacts tiresomely, seemingly believing that he can add dramatic impact to Ibsen's dialogue by shouting it. He is wrong.

. . . how much better it would have been had it been made by Paramount, had starred Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier, and had been directed by Lubitsch or Mamoulian. This British effort makes a stab at the genre, but lacks the necessary vivacity. It is almost as if they were afraid of being saucy, when sauciness was the very essence of the piece. Some of the blame must lie with the casting of the male lead. Victor Varconi is too stolid (one might almost say stodgy) for a role which would have been better played with an air of sans souci. An extended marionette scene is so out of place as to suggest padding, when this sort of plot needs to proceed at a romping pace.

This film is much better than its lurid title and publicity suggest.

For one thing, it has a legitimate, though somewhat conventional, dramatic structure a la "Petrified Forest" et al: a small group of people, some with pre-existing personal problems, are confined in one location, when the incursion of a "deus ex machina" puts their problems into a new perspective.

For another, it is shot in beautifully lucid black and white. Jack Cox's work here merits comparison with Gregg Toland. The night scenes in particular are skilfully lit, in which respect it puts to shame most latter day colour films.

In the 1930s English film studios produced a number of sparkling musical comedies, using established stage performers such as Lupino Lane, Jessie Matthews, and Jack Buchanan. Meanwhile Hollywood (particularly Warners and MGM) was working the backstage musical to exhaustion, including the "Broadway to Hollywood" theme of family acts broken up by the ambitions of a talented member, while Fox explored the introduction of serious music into in its popular Durbin films. The early 1940s saw the dying throes of these sub-genres. The 1950s were the golden years of Hollywood musicals, with MGM in particular producing a stream of classic musicals, some of them based on successful operettas, others being film adaptations of the naturalistic type of musical introduced to theatres in the previous decade by authors such as Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Given this history, it is hard to imagine what madness seized Ealing Studios in 1957 in trying to ape the Hollywood musicals of 20 years earlier. Did they perhaps think that filming in colour would make all the difference? If so, they were mistaken. For us Britons, this film is squirmingly embarrassing. "Champagne Charlie" (1944), "Trottie True" (1949), and "Cardboard Cavalier" (1949) had also failed to impress as film musicals, but at least they tried to create a genuinely British style. "Davy" attempts to jump on a strictly American bandwagon which had long since pulled out.

The chief interest in the film for us now is seeing early appearances of Bill Owen, Joan Sims, Kenneth Connor, Liz Fraser, and Bernard Cribbens, all of whom would become well known and loved, and feature in a number of "Carry On" films.

If a film was described as "made by 20th Century Fox, featuring Vivian Blaine, Carmen Miranda, Phil Silvers, Harry James, and Perry Como," you might reasonably expect the sort of bright, brash, and breezy Technicolor musical of which TCF were the masters during the 1940s.

If a film was described as "a black and white political satire about an upright young man duped into standing for office only to find that he was intended to front for a gang of corrupt politicos," you might reasonably expect the sort of film of which Frank Capra was master, perhaps starring James Stewart and Jean Arthur.

It is unlikely that you would envisage one film to fit both descriptions, but "If I'm Lucky" does just that. Perhaps we shall never know what prompted TCF to produce this unlikely hybrid, but surprisingly it works quite well. The musical numbers are neatly integrated into the plot, Phil Silvers' usual over-exuberance is kept in check, one misses Technicolor only during Carmen Miranda's numbers, and the political shenanigans are carried mainly by Edgar Buchanan, Reed Hadley, and other supporting players, thankfully making little demand on Perry Como's acting abilities.

This is not a particularly good movie, but nor is it a bad one, and it is sufficiently unusual to warrant attention.

This is an ill-advised and poorly executed revival of an out-dated type of comedy. Although purporting to be set in contemporary times (i.e. 1954), the nature of the plot and the style of its exposition are redolent of films made twenty years earlier, a feeling reinforced by the inclusion in the cast of those two old stalwarts of 1930s comedy, Jack Hulbert and Cicely Courtneidge.

The central plot is a murder mystery of the artificial Agatha Christie type, the contrived solution to which is expounded in dialogue so swiftly in the closing minutes of the film that after its test screening, one baffled viewer's notes read, "Who murdered who? And why?" The comedy is provided by Hulbert and Courtneidge individually, rather than in tandem, and consists of an embarrassing reprise of their well-worn bits of shtick. Courtneidge does not launch into her "two dozen double damask dinner napkins" routine, but one would hardly be surprised if she did.

Diana Dors is her usual beautiful self, but is ill-matched with Patrick Holt as her husband. The actress Ida Patlanski listed in the cast is also known as Pat Terry-Thomas, the wife of Terry-Thomas the English comic actor, whose dog Archie plays the role of Archie in this film.

The film has been restored and issued on DVD by the British Film Institute, together with production details which reveal that the final version of the film was influenced by the script writer, the head of the commissioning company, the producer, the director, one of the actors (Hulbert), and the British film censor, which perhaps explains its lack of cohesion.

Three years earlier, RKO had issued a comedy thriller, "Behave Yourself!" which too was about a young married couple becoming inadvertently embroiled in crime, in which too the wife's name was Kate and the dog's name was Archie. One wonders if the screen writer of "Miss Tulip" had seen that film and had residual memories of it. If so, it is a pity that he had not also remembered that the American film was not a mystery, the precise roles of all the miscreants being spelled out in the opening credits, leaving room for a great deal of comic action with far more entertaining results.

. . . that says "Any film written, produced and directed by one person will be a stinker." This film is no exception.

It is not science fiction but science rubbish. The Van Allen belt catching fire is as likely as the force of gravity going rusty. The "world famous scientist" admiral makes his crucial calculations on a slide rule. When he asks the captain "Just exactly where are we?", the captain turns to a map of the world, jabs his finger at the South Atlantic Ocean and says "We're right here, Sir." The conventional submarine chasing them EXplodes because it has gone too deep. When the captain orders the engine room "All stop," the sub comes to a dead halt. And so on, ad nauseam.

It would be funny were it not for the truly frightening message that underlies the plot, namely that in any global crisis a US commander may take it upon himself to "save the world," and his chosen solution will be to nuke the problem. Half a century later we still hover on the brink of that precipice today.

This film features a racy plot and crackling dialogue. The two principal characters, Sir Duncan Craggs and his Franco-Russian wife Louise, have a free-wheeling morality in respect of extra-marital affairs, each fully cognisant of the other's infidelities, but tempering reproach with civilised restraint, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of a Lubitsch sex comedy.

Their upper-class hijinks spill over from the West End of town houses and night clubs to a Limehouse Chinese laundry which acts as a front for a disreputable doss-house, with suggestions that it might be an opium den and a haunt of prostitutes. The film neatly contrasts the two milieus by a change of visual style, with the seedy locales shot in murky soft focus.

Yvonne Arnaud is delicious as Craggs' wife Louise, fracturing the English language with every sentence she utters. Stella Moya, as a beautiful Chinese girl, has little to do, but is suitably alluring. Robertson Hare's role is smaller than those of the other three leads, and he is well matched by Norma Varden as his domineering wife. (He does, however, get to lose his trousers at one point, a trademark feature of his.) A young Graham Moffatt, in an early role before joining the Will Hay team, makes the most of his single scene. The actresses playing the shop girls and secretaries in the early part of the film are all unbilled, undeservedly so.

The adaptation of the Aldwych farces to the screen was not always successful, but it is hard to fault this one.

This film is an unstructured ragbag which is not a musical, nor a romantic comedy, nor a spy thriller, nor a war movie, nor a spoof, nor a slapstick comedy, although it does try to be all of these, mostly sequentially but sometimes, Lord help us, simultaneously. Miss Andrews' acting abilities are untaxed by the weak script, and she spends much of the overlong time of the film singing songs which would not be out of place in "Mary Poppins." The aerial sequences are obviously expensive but unexciting. The film is a work which shrieks self-indulgence and lack of discipline, which, alas, is so often the case when the credits read "Produced, written, AND directed by . . ."

The Hollywood treatment of the problems of returning servicemen after World War 2 took many forms - sob stories, psychological dramas, films noirs, even musicals - but this film is unusual, perhaps even unique, in giving them an irreverent screwball slant. The script sparkles with wise-cracking dialogue, and the action proceeds headlong in unpredictable directions. It is the sort of movie that the phrase "never a dull moment" was coined for. The two leads did full justice to their parts, but they lacked the star status to impress the critics. If Claudette Colbert and Cary Grant had been cast, or Jean Arthur and Jimmy Stewart, they could have performed no better, but this film would now be assured of its place in the annals of screwball comedy instead of being neglected and almost forgotten. Luckily it is not lost. It is available on DVD in eminently watchable condition, albeit without the full restoration that it deserves.

This tautly constructed little movie should serve as a model for those modern film authors who cannot unfold the simplest story line in less than two hours.

The movie opens with Mary Kirk being led from her cell to walk to the death chamber. She leaves a letter for Charles Finch, a psychologist and criminologist. In it she has outlined the events which led to her situation. We then see Finch reading the letter to a small group of reporters, supplementing it with an account of his own involvement in the affair. His first person narrative alternates with flashback depiction of the events. Half way into the movie he has reached the point at which Mary was convicted and sentenced to death. The next 20 minutes cover his subsequent efforts to find the evidence which will clear her. He still has not succeeded by the time we have caught up to the opening of the movie and see Mary finish her walk to the electric chair. The remaining few minutes are a desperate race against the clock played more or less in real time.

The movie does not waste an inch of film. Every scene conveys information and advances the action, with smooth and skillful links. Particularly effective is the way in which the character of Mary's younger sister, Suzy, is handled. Her appearances are almost always incidental to the main action, but as the movie progresses it becomes clear that she is somehow central to the solution.

The nature of the plot means that the title character plays a passive rather than an active role. Jean Parker is persuasive in the part, wisely forgoing the opportunities for melodramatics. Marcia Mae Jones' porcelain-doll prettiness frequently led to her being cast as a vain and foolish little madam, and her role here as Suzy suits her talents. Lionel Atwill makes a convincing sleuth, neatly conveying a blend of scientific detachment, humanitarian concern, and an occasional twinkle of humour.

Anybody who thinks that "first class B movie" is an oxymoron should study this film and learn better.

Marion Talley was a star of the NY Metropolitan Opera. In this, her only film, she plays the sort of role which would soon become associated with Deanna Durbin, 15 years her junior. The leading man is Michael Bartlett, an operatic tenor not dissimilar to Allan Jones in voice, appearance, and style. Like Durbin and Jones, they present serious vocal music in a pleasantly popular format.

A light-hearted mood is sustained by a supporting cast of reliable comic actors including Nigel Bruce as a bumbling voice coach, Josephine Whittell as his tone deaf pupil, Luis Alberni as an excitable composer/conductor, and Walter Catlett as an over enthusiastic impresario. Ben Blue provides the physical comedy.

For the first 45 minutes the film romps along at a merry pace, in a style reminiscent of "Love Me Tonight" (even down to a hunting scene in which the hero saves the quarry from the hounds). Then the family decides to "put the show on right here." They demolish the barn to furnish seating for the audience, planning to stage the show on the porch, and one begins to hope that this might be an intentional parody of the sub-genre that Mickey and Judy would later make their own. Alas, all originality ends there, and the last half hour of the film drags as we are regaled with large parts of the performance. There are romantic duets by the two leads, a crinoline-clad corps de ballet led by an undistinguished prima ballerina, a comical pas de deux by Ben Blue with an uncredited partner, and the Hal Johnson Choir led by Clarence Muse accompanying an incongruous tap-dance by Eunice Healy in a costume surely intended for Daisy Mae in Li'l Abner. (In the 1930 Broadway production of "Girl Crazy" Miss Healy had been billed 6th in a cast which listed Ethel Merman and Ginger Rogers in 13th and 17th positions. After appearing in three Hollywood movies she returned to the musical stage, as a performer and later as a producer.) The unbelievably lavish production is greatly aided by the fact that the lawn between the old barn and the porch transforms itself effortlessly into a rotating stage with a mirror surface. No explanation is offered for this miracle, but when the company proposes to go on the road despite having no theatres to play in, their manager explains that "there's a house like this outside every city from Richmond to Memphis."

In 1936 Hollywood was still experimenting with formulae for musical films. Warner Brothers favoured backstage plots, RKO provided escapist musical comedies for Astaire and Rogers, while Paramount and MGM presented regular musical revues in their "Big Broadcast" and "Broadway Melody" series. It would have been better if Republic had stuck to a single style for this film, preferably the one they started with. Instead they hedged their bets by trying a bit of everything, with unfortunate results. Still, the first hour of the film is worth the viewing.

This outdoor action B movie from the Pine-Thomas stable has an unexpected ingredient – humour. The manly deeds of our stalwart hero are neatly laced with the misadventures of a group of Runyonesque hoodlums.

Russ Evans (Richard Arlen), to whom flying a plane comes as naturally as shinning up a giant fir tree, is invalided out of the army and sets about rescuing young war widow Elaine Graham (Mary Beth Hughes, B movies' answer to Shelley Winters) from the machinations of an unscrupulous business man seeking to fleece her of the logging interest she inherited. To make ends meet she is singing in a night club managed by Smacksie Golden (Sheldon Leonard, in a delightful send-up of his usual gangster roles) with the ineffectual assistance of his sidekick "Squirrel" (George E Stone). Lil Boggs (played by June Havoc in a performance worthy of Joan Blondell and Lucille Ball combined) is both Smacksie's long-suffering girlfriend and Elaine's cynical wise-cracking confidante. When Russ whisks Elaine off to fell trees, the others follow, leaving their natural night club habitat to work in a logging camp in the great outdoors, motivated by a heady blend of self-interest, patriotism, and sentimentality.

This is an under-rated film, ignored or dismissed as vapid by most film cataloguers. It is a quite superior B movie, with a talented cast and a witty script adding extra value to the standard outdoor action on which the producers' reputation was based.

Do not be misled by the title "Machine Gun Mama." This is NOT a thriller dealing with the exploits of a small gang like Ma Barker's, as suggested in the "Big Book of B Movies" by Robin Cross (who clearly had not seen the film). If this movie had been made by Paramount they would have called it "The Road to Mexico" and cast Hope, Crosby, and Lamour. Unfortunately the recipe never quite worked when other studios tried it, and it does not work here.

Much of the blame in this instance lies with the miscasting of Wallace Ford, who gives us stolid worthiness in a part which calls for debonair insouciance. His sidekick, played by El Brendel, is the sort of comical Swede already out-dated by 1944. Armida makes a delightful female lead, out-spitfiring Lupe Velez in a tempestuous sequence which gives the film its title, and astonishingly reminiscent of Kathryn Grayson both visually and vocally in her two musical numbers. All three are often upstaged by Luis Alberni as an excitable Latin type, and occasionally even by an elephant and an unseen flea of outstanding beauty (which may give you an inkling of the credibility level of the plot).

Even so, the film remains a decent light-hearted frolic, suitable for a wet afternoon when something intellectually undemanding is called for.

This film is much better than the quaint oddity which one might expect.

Directorially it is a masterpiece of economical story-telling. In its 12 minutes there are only 28 scenes, each of which is a single continuous take. In 27 of them the camera is static - no zooms, no tracking shots, no cuts to close-up, etc. In only one scene does the camera pan, and that is to follow the charging cavalry. The shot is made all the more effective by the absence of camera movement elsewhere.

More than half a century before the Tony Richardson 1968 film, the writer of this version came up with the idea of establishing a cosy domestic relationship between Captains Nolan and Morris at home in Britain before their Crimean service. This is not an obvious idea, and is not based on any contemporary account. One wonders if Richardson saw this film before making his own.

The action sequences are lavishly staged. It is said that 800 troopers of the US Cavalry took part, and there are scenes in which that many appear to be engaged at once.

The film is available as an extra on the DVD of the British Film Institute edition of the 1968 movie. The visual quality of the film is very good for its age - an excellent job of restoration. It is scratched, but not at all faded.

The setting of this film suggests that it will be similar to the escapist fare which Montez starred in at Universal. She plays the man-hungry Queen Antinea of Atlantis, which is located inside a mountain in the Sahara Desert, into which two officers of the French Foreign Legion stumble. Within this setting, however, the story played out is not an action adventure, but psychological melodrama, involving a femme fatale, obsession, deception, jealousy, murder, guilt, repentance, and fatalism.

There are many noirish resonances: the monochrome photography of the claustrophobic torchlit chambers of the underground kingdom, the obsession of St. Avit (Jean-Pierre Aumont, Montez' real life husband) for the queen, the amoral cynicism of the court librarian Blades (Henry Daniell), and the alienation of all the characters. The nearest thing to normality is the Legion outpost. The film ends with a strong suggestion that nothing has been resolved and that the same sequence of events is about to be replayed.

This was Tallas' first film as director. He had previously been an editor, and indeed edited this film as well as directing, but the film's producer, Seymour Nebenzal, probably had more influence over the mood of the piece. Two years earlier he had produced "The Chase" (which also ended with the suggestion that it was all about to start again), and three years later produced "M" - clearly a man with a taste for the noir. The two uncredited directors also have noir credentials. Arthur Ripley had directed "The Chase" for Nebenzal, and John Brahm had directed "The Locket."

The film suffers from somewhat disjointed narrative flow in parts, although this may be due to damage to the surviving copies. Whatever its faults, it is better than many reviews suggest, and is surely the weirdest amalgam of exotic "eastern" and film noir that you will ever meet.