Daily Archives: Thursday, January 28, 2016

  • Dead of Night

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, Robert Hamer (1945)

    This famous portmanteau horror film is a great favourite of mine.  Watching it again yesterday, I wondered (again) what it would amount to without the fifth and last of the supernatural stories that are threaded into the main narrative.  Once you’ve seen Dead and Night, the knowledge that the tale of the schizoid ventriloquist Maxwell Frere and his dummy Hugo Fitch is coming lends tension to everything that precedes it.  Michael Redgrave’s empathetic, fearless portrait of Frere is a great piece of screen acting:  he creates an unforgettable dynamic between the ventriloquist and the puppet who’s the one in charge of their relationship.  Alberto Cavalcanti ensures there’s danger in the air from the moment we first hear Hugo speak in a Paris night club, where Frere and he are performing.  The club hostess, played by Elisabeth Welch, sings an easy, lilting number (‘The Hullalooba’) while the seeds of the plot are sown in Frere’s dressing room conversation with the rival ventriloquist Sylvester Kee (Hartley Power), whom Frere is paranoiacally convinced is trying to steal Hugo.  The final sequence of the story – in a prison cell, where Frere has set about his alter ego so violently that the dummy’s face is reduced to sawdust but Hugo’s voice emerges from Frere’s throat loud and clear – must have inspired the ending of Psycho.

    I was scared stiff by Dead of Night when I first saw it as a child – I’d guess I was nine or ten.  I think I was scared on two levels:  first, by Hugo the dummy’s coming to life and growing closer to lifesize in the climax to Walter Craig’s nightmare; second, by the film’s closing moments, when Craig (Mervyn Johns) wakes from his recurring dream only for it to start up again in what seems to be real life.   I always manage to forget between viewings (I must have seen the film half a dozen times now) that the architect Craig’s dream is so salient in the narrative, that shortly after he arrives at Pilgrim’s Farm in the Kent countryside, he informs Eliot Foley (Roland Culver), the man who invited him there, that he knows the house, Foley, his mother (Mary Merrall) and the guests sitting with them in the parlour – and what will happen later on.   Those guests include the emphatically Teutonic Dr van Straaten (Frederick Valk), who’s required to give rational, psychoanalytical explanations for the startling stories recounted by Hugh Grainger (Anthony Baird), Sally O’Hara (Sally Ann Howes), Joan Cortland (Googie Withers) and Foley himself.   The ventriloquist’s dummy story is Dr van Straaten’s own contribution.    Things I notice now about Dead of Night that I obviously didn’t as a child include how the brisk, emotionally constricted playing of most of the Pilgrim’s Farm company is disorienting in itself.  Their posh matter-of-factness actually throws into relief the unsettling nature of the tales they tell.

    Those tales are of highly variable quality.  The opening hearse story told by Grainger is directed, like the linking narrative, by Basil Dearden, with a sure touch and deft tempo.  The invasion of horror into a real life of reassuring familiarity is powerful  – epitomised by the presence of Miles Malleson as the hearse driver/bus conductor who cheerfully tells Grainger there’s ‘Room for one more inside’ the vehicles in question.   The second story, and the first of the two Cavalcanti episodes, takes place at a children’s Christmas party.  It’s atmospherically strong but dramatically stilted – and oddly uses the real murder of Francis Kent (now well known to a new generation, thanks to Kate Summerscale’s 2008 book The Suspicions of Mr Whicher) in an otherwise fictional setting.  The surreality of the Christmas party is achieved largely (and, I assume, uinintentionally) by the fact that the children at the party all look about twenty-three, including Sally Ann Howes, who was only fifteen at the time.   (Michael Allan, who plays her friend Jimmy, was five years older.)  The haunted mirror story, which comes next, is strong:  tightly directed by Robert Hamer, it allows Googie Withers to go beyond her ladylike sophistication in the Pilgrim’s Farm gathering.  Her character is a young newlywed whose husband (Ralph Michael), when he looks in the mirror that she bought him, sees reflected in it a room in which, it transpires, a jealous husband once killed his wife.  The supposedly comical golfing story, reuniting Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne and directed by Charles Crichton, is by far the weakest episode, with its leaden jokes and tedious trick photography of a possessed golf ball.  But it’s well placed in the sequence – its flaccidness leaves you relatively unprepared for the tremendous Redgrave and Cavalcanti show that follows.    The writers, some of them uncredited, included John Baines, E F Benson, T E B Clarke, Angus MacPahil and H G Wells (who was responsible for the golfing segment, according to IMDB!)   The highly effective score is by Georges Auric.

    26 December 2011

  • Days of Wine and Roses

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Blake Edwards (1962)

    When PR man Joe Clay (Jack Lemmon) meets boss’s secretary Kirsten Arnesen (Lee Remick), they get off on the wrong foot.  She’s coolly dismissive when he tries to make amends.  These opening hostilities might be the starting point for a romantic comedy; instead, they’re the prelude to a torturous ‘social issue’ picture, a clumsy jeremiad about the perils of alcohol.   J P Miller adapted his own 1958 Playhouse 90 teleplay (with Cliff Robertson and Piper Laurie in the leads) and the construction is mechanical.   Kirsten’s switch from standoffishness to accepting Joe’s dinner invitation is sudden and unexplained – beyond the fact that Miller needs it to happen in short order.  Joe is baffled by Kirsten’s contempt, as she stands with her back to him in an elevator:  it’s a credit to Lee Remick that her face shows signs that Kirsten is more interested in Joe than he thinks.  Remick’s character is particularly ill served by Miller’s writing, which pushes Kirsten towards her alcoholic fate in easy, unconvincing stages.  When she first meets Joe, Kirsten doesn’t drink although she’s what would now be called a chocoholic.  He first tempts her with a Brandy Alexander.  Once they’re married and she’s at home with their baby daughter, Joe encourages Kirsten to have a drink or two in the evening before he comes in – so that she won’t notice so much that he’s been doing overtime at the bar.  The script requires that she succumb without a murmur of resistance, even though Remick in her early scenes suggests a believably self-possessed young woman, ready to speak her mind and argue for what she believes in.  Before long, Kirsten is drinking during the day too and manages to set the couple’s apartment on fire.

    Blake Edwards’ direction has the same strengths and weaknesses as in the previous year’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s but George Axelrod’s screenplay supplies many more bits than Miller’s which play to the strengths.  Edwards is less than imaginative with visual jokes, like the decapitation of tulip heads by a closing elevator door, and crude when he’s staging a comedy set piece.  There’s an overdone sequence in which Joe sprays insecticide over Kirsten’s apartment – driving the cockroaches centrifugally to the rest of the building and bringing all the other human tenants out of the woodwork in clamorous protest.  (The only consolation of the increasing gloom of Days of Wine and Roses is that the supposedly funny bits dry up.)  Edwards again shows skill in handling the early scenes between the two main characters (once they’ve started to like each other).  These nuanced exchanges have a real emotional current even if it’s easier to understand what Joe sees in Kirsten than vice versa.  Still, Jack Lemmon works so hard at his performance that, every once in a while, he seems to have to stop to draw breath; in these moments Lemmon/Joe’s exhaustion is rather endearing.   Not for the first time, Jack Lemmon brought to mind Pauline Kael’s description of Miranda Richardson’s acting in Dance With a Stranger:  it ‘took a lot of technique, and you see it all’.  Unless you’re prepared to accept it as genetic (we’re told Joe’s parents are a showbiz act in Las Vegas), there’s no real justification for the theatrical busyness of Lemmon’s playing.  He certainly works up a gnawing, hectic pressure but his turns tell us more about the actor’s resources than about the man he’s interpreting.  (Even at this level, Lemmon is occasionally overeager – for example, he anticipates the slap on the face that Kirsten gives Joe in the elevator:  the reaction comes before the blow has landed.)

    Although Days of Wine and Roses is set in San Francisco rather than New York, it’s interesting to watch a film based in the world of advertising/PR that’s not only contemporary with the Mad Men era but was actually made during the early 1960s.  The hard drinking in Mad Men is more remarkable than it is here because Don Draper et al, while they might appear to be alcoholics in terms of dependency, can function perfectly well – indeed prosper – in their professional lives.   Kirsten’s father (Charles Bickford, who also played the role on TV, and is good when he’s not required to be melodramatic) runs a gardening business in San Mateo.   The atmosphere there is clean and good, a million miles away from the clouds of alcohol fumes that pervade the big city.  On their first serious attempt to cure their drinking problem (and after Joe has lost yet another job), the couple go to work at the father’s place.  They fall off the wagon spectacularly one night; in case we weren’t finding things overwrought enough, it happens during a thunderstorm.  The way things happen, the descent into alcoholism appears to be principally a means of scaling ever greater histrionic heights.   Joe goes frantically searching for bottles of scotch that he hid in his father-in-law’s greenhouse and, in his violent frustration, starts dismembering potted plants.  Sally found this vandalism particularly upsetting but the whole sequence is so preconceived as one for Lemmon to knock us dead with that I found it hollow and unmoving.

    The next scene Joe’s in cold turkey and a straitjacket.   He and Kirsten pass through received ideas of what alcoholism comprises as if the script were a checklist.  When Joe wants to try Alcoholics Anonymous, in-denial Kirsten declares, ‘I am not an alcoholic!’  For what feels like a long stretch, Days of Wine and Roses turns into an extended commercial for AA, with Jack Klugman as Joe’s mentor Jim, a reformed alcoholic who is now evidently addicted to soundbites about how to beat the demon drink.  It’s one of the few funny moments in the film when Klugman’s Jim begins a sentence, ‘At the risk of sounding preachy … ‘, although, to be fair, it’s one of Jack Lemmon’s best when, in spite of the relentless build-up, he reads the line ‘My name is Joe Clay and I’m an alcoholic’ in a fresh, surprising way.

    One good scene – an illustration of the only interesting aspect of the way in which the couple’s relationship is treated – comes when Joe goes to the motel the absconded Kirsten has booked into and where she lies blotto in her room.  This bit is dramatically effective because it’s Remick who’s doing the vigorous acting while Lemmon is reacting relatively quietly but there’s a strong idea at work here too:  Joe gives in and joins Kirsten in a drink because he loves her and knows they’ll feel closer if they’re both drinking.  It’s a pity that, as soon as he’s back on the bottle, Joe is again immediately and melodramatically inebriated.  He desperately breaks into, and stumbles as he tries to escape from, a nearby liquor store.  The pointlessly vindictive proprietor jeeringly pours a bottle of scotch over Joe’s head.  Then it’s back to another cold turkey session.

    Given the predictability of the piece, it’s surprising that Joe doesn’t have an outburst of remorse about getting Kirsten started on the road to ruin, less surprising that Edwards and Miller are very sketchy in describing the effect of what happens to the marriage on the couple’s daughter Debbie (Blake Edwards’ daughter, Jennifer).   It’s no surprise at all that the script contains such choice offerings as, ‘You and I were a couple of drunks on a sea of booze.  And the boat sank’.  There’s some strikingly wooden acting in smaller roles – especially Alan Hewitt as one of Joe’s bosses.   The film’s title is taken from a poem by Ernest Dowson, which book-reading Kirsten quotes early on in the story[1].   The theme song of the same name, by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, repeated the pair’s Oscar success of the previous year, if not the memorability of its predecessor, ‘Moon River’.

    27 January 2011

    [1]  ‘They are not long, the days of wine and roses:

    Out of a misty dream

    Our path emerges for a while, then closes

    Within a dream.’

     

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