Reviews

The writers of this silly 10-part series extracted a few of novelist Shirley Jackson's phrases from her superb novel "The Haunting of Hill House" and pasted them together with inane prose into a pointless mess of a screenplay. Anyone who has mastered the art of reading should read the novel instead of consuming time to watch this concoction. My sympathies to the actors who were forced to recite the lines in this drawn-out foolish parody of Jackson's masterpiece.

The Ealing Studios production `Scott of the Antarctic' is a work of art and an inspiration to human achievement. The film depicts the polar explorers of the Second Scott Antarctic Expedition (1910-1913). They are portrayed first as pygmies against the terrible backdrop of the ice continent, then as dauntless giants within the enclosed spaces of their fragile tents as they await their certain death.

The mood of the film is High Victorian, although strictly speaking the setting is Late Edwardian. Edward Adrian Wilson, the artist, played by Harold Warrender, is the quintessential gentleman naturalist. As the film begins, Wilson is shown in the summery garden of his tranquil country homestead in England, meticulously creating a scientific illustration of a mounted bat. At the end, when Wilson is among the few remaining explorers who face frozen death in their wind-whipped tent, his spirit drifts away to his English home.

The Victorian faith in mechanisms is brought forth by close up shots of distance-measuring wheels that are attached to the backs of clumsy man-drawn sledges, and by the heroic but flawed powered tractors that break down in the awful cold.

The film invites the viewer to arrive at his or her own conclusions about the character of Captain Scott. The film makes no judgments - it merely portrays Scott through the superb acting of John Mills.

`Scott of the Antarctic' is a timeless film about eternal values: human endeavor, achievement and triumph.

Every time I find myself driving on a lonely, densely wooded mountain road with precipitous drops just past the shoulder, I am reminded of the 1945 movie `Conflict', a film that I view every year or so. When I recently discovered that the story behind `Conflict' was named `The Pentacle', credited to Alfred Neumann and Robert Siodmak, I viewed `Conflict' again in order to determine the relationship between the film and the word `pentacle'. A `pentacle' is roughly defined as `a five-pointed star enclosed within a regular pentagon, and enclosing a smaller regular pentagon'. The pentacle is a favored symbol among devotees of the occult, but `Conflict' is not a movie about the occult. The pentacle symbol appears in `Conflict' as a visual motif, nagging the engineer Mason (Humphrey Bogart) with memories of his terrible deed. The first appearance in the film of a clearly identifiable pentacle is a technical drawing depicting a five-sided bridge foundation to be used in shale by Mason's construction company. Mason's imagination dreamily relates this drawing to a big pile of logs hiding the wreckage of an automobile in a mountain valley, the result of his grim obsession. Perhaps a `pentacle' of imaginary lines of mental force can be imagined by the movie's viewer as the engineer Mason (Humphrey Bogart) appears in the center of a tense human pentacle, the five vertices of which are the psychiatrist (Sydney Greenstreet), Mason's wife (Rose Hobart), the sister-in-law (Alexis Smith), the suitor (Charles Drake), and, finally, the police detectives. Changing the subject slightly, the terse dialog in `Conflict' always seemed to me to be very upper class English. I have often imagined the movie with a British cast of the period, with Mason perhaps played by Dirk Bogarde or Trevor Howard instead of Humphrey Bogart, the psychiatrist by Nigel Bruce instead of Sidney Greenstreet, and the police authorities cast as aloof Scotland Yard detectives instead of friendly American cops. However, the actual cast did just fine, in my opinion, with the result that I, for one, am an unreserved fan of `Conflict'!

"Captains of the Clouds", it has always seemed to me, is two distinct movies wrapped up into one. What begins as a crisp, light-hearted, colorful story about bush pilots in Canada suddenly transforms itself into a single-minded grim documentary about the Royal Canadian Air Force in the opening days of World War Two.

I don't suppose this abrupt transition from a light-hearted, peacetime human-interest story to an intense procedural war drama would have occurred if the War had not coincided with the production of the film.

James Cagney and Dennis Morgan, the male stars, were well cast for the peacetime opening acts and scenes of "Captains...". Both of them being fine actors, they were also well cast for the grim wartime sequences.

This is an odd and fascinating film that bears watching again and again.