Monthly Archives: July 2025

  • Marry Me

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Terence Fisher (1949)

    BFI’s latest ‘Projecting the Archive’ offering, as curator Jo Botting explained, was a matter of unfinished business.  She had planned to show Marry Me to mark the centenary of the birth of Lewis Gilbert, best known as the director of Alfie (1966), Educating Rita (1983) and three James Bonds but also the co-writer (with Denis Waldock) of this Terence Fisher romantic comedy.  Gilbert was born in March 1920; the screening of Marry Me was scheduled on the very day that BFI closed for business in the first Covid lockdown.  Jo Botting had exhumed the film to mark another anniversary:  it was shown exactly twenty-five years on from the death of one of Marry Me‘s leads, David Tomlinson.

    Miles Jupp played Tomlinson in the theatre in 2019 in The Life I Lead, James Kettle’s stage biography of the actor.  The pair’s introduction to the screening was naturally Tomlinson-centric but Jupp and Kettle were an entertaining, informative double act.  The Disney hits – Mary Poppins (1964) especially but The Love Bug (1968) and Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) too – earned David Tomlinson much bigger bucks than anything he’d been used to in British cinema.  He made his last film in 1980.  Miles Jupp noted that, in the last two decades of his life, the only acting Tomlinson did was on the telephone, doing an impression of his own agent and turning down any role offered.

    Introductions over, the Gainsborough Pictures titles came up, Marry Me got underway and an enjoyable evening ground to a halt.  Tomlinson plays the anchor character, David Haig, a journalist in London, whose editor (George Merritt) gives him an undercover assignment, investigating what lies behind the lonelyhearts ads in the weekly newsletter produced by a London marriage bureau.  (The bureau is run by two spinster sisters (Jean Cadell and Mary Jerrold).)  The journalist poses as a client looking for love; in due course, bachelor David comes to see that’s what he really is.  After a false start with Miss Beamish (Alison Leggatt – so a shame that Miss Beamish is unsuitable), David hits it off with Doris Pearson (Carol Marsh), the marriage bureau’s second choice for him.  They’re both, though, pretending to be something they’re not – Doris that she moves in high society circles, David that he’s an Australian sheep farmer.

    There’s plenty more dissimulation going on elsewhere in the story (one instance of this, oddly enough, almost anticipates David Tomlinson’s later-life impressions of his agent).  Martin Roberts (Patrick Holt) admits to being a ‘country bumpkin’ but not, at first anyway, to being the vicar of a rural parish church; Martin is partnered with Pat Cooper (Susan Shaw), who claims she has an office job to disguise the scandalous truth that she’s a dance-hall hostess, until her flatmate and work colleague Brenda Delamere (Brenda Bruce) inadvertently gives Pat away.  Saunders (Denis O’Dea), valet to misogynist cynic Sir Gordon Blake (Guy Middleton), answers the telephone to his master’s prospective soulmate, schoolteacher Enid Lawson (Nora Swinburne):  impersonating Sir Gordon, Saunders sets in motion a mistaken identity comedy.  In a supposedly dramatic counterweight, a Frenchwoman whose visa is about to expire needs a husband in order to stay in Britain:  Marcelle Duclos (Zena Marshall) offers £500 to Andrew Scott (Derek Bond), who needs cash but doesn’t think he wants romance; Marcelle doesn’t mention that her old flame, Louis Renier (Anthony Nevile), is a convicted murderer and thief, who has recently escaped from prison and followed her to London.

    You can probably guess what happens next and eventually in all four stories.  There’s nothing surprising or inventive in the film, which relies on and keeps tiresomely stressing an assortment of national stereotypes.  You notice the cast members who would thrive as strong character actors in the decades ahead – particularly Brenda Bruce and Joan Hickson (in a very brief appearance as Doris Pearson’s mother).  David Tomlinson is clearly already on the way to perfecting the English type he came to embody (it’s no accident that David Haig doesn’t even bother trying an Australian accent) – his aptitude for humorous exasperation is much in evidence.  None of the actors is bad but the script and direction are dire.  Marry Me isn’t a fitting tribute to Tomlinson, Lewis Gilbert or anyone else involved.

    Another ‘Projecting the Archive’, another forgotten British film that alas deserves to stay that way.  One other point worth noting, though.  This BFI slot tends towards kneejerk nostalgia – but whose nostalgia?  Rather few members of the NFT1 audience could have been old enough to see the picture on its original release or remember it with affection.  I wondered if some of the titters heard throughout the screening had a polite, slightly condescending edge to them – as if to say, ‘Well, yes, I suppose people found this amusing back in 1949’.  Not that many people, though.  If Wikipedia is to be believed, Marry Me ‘was a box office flop, recording a loss of £67,600’ – which was-a-lot-of-money-in-those-days.

    24 June 2025

  • Stray Dog

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Nora inu

    Akira Kurosawa  (1949)

    The opening credits appear over close-ups of a dog’s head, mostly alternating shots of the two sides of its face.  Later in this Tokyo-noir, one of the main detectives talks of how a stray dog can turn into a mad dog.  He means human criminals, not canines, but the creature at the start could pass as either stray or mad.  What’s certain is that it’s also a hot dog – tongue out, panting.  This too sets the scene economically:  the film’s action takes place during a heat wave.  (‘It was a stifling day,’ announces an opening voiceover:  it so happened I saw Stray Dog on television at my friends’ home in York, at the end of an unusually hot day there, too.)  Murakami (Toshiro Mifune), recently promoted to the rank of detective in the Tokyo police homicide unit, is travelling on a sweltering, jam-packed bus when he realises a pickpocket has swiped his police pistol – a theft that sets in motion Kurosawa’s crime drama (which he wrote with Ryūzō Kikushima), released in Japanese cinemas just a year before Rashomon.

    Stray Dog has several fascinations.  Although he shot it largely at a rented studio, Kurosawa creates a vivid physical impression of Tokyo during the post-war American occupation of Japan.  The plotting and occasional bits of dialogue also reflect the despondent national mood in the aftermath to World War II defeat.  Set pieces – a club sequence focusing on the showgirls performing there, a baseball game in a huge stadium with a crowd to match – are doubly impressive:  absorbing per se and at the same time relevant to the central investigation, by Murakami and Satō (Takashi Shimura), the older, much more experienced officer with whom he’s partnered, of the gun’s disappearance and its consequences.  The detectives learn that Tachibana aka Honda (Reizaburô Yamamoto), a gun dealer of interest to them, is a baseball fan.  A series of what are – compared with the film’s prevailing mood – almost light-hearted announcements on the stadium’s public address system, ends with a call for ‘Mr Tachibana’ to report to a location in the bowels of the arena, where Satō and Murakami take him into custody.

    At the time Murakami’s Colt pistol is stolen, it contains seven unused bullets.  Kurosawa’s countdown narrative sees to it that every bullet matters and leads to a conclusive woodland showdown between Murakami and the man who comes into possession of the gun.  This is Yusa (Isao Kimura), a bitterly disillusioned war veteran now involved with a yakuza gang – and the stray dog liable to turn rabid.   With three bullets left, he shoots Murakami in the arm but misses his target with the last two.  The two men wrestle on the ground; when Murakami, despite his injury, gains the upper hand, Yusa emits alarming baying sounds.  He’s the standout last leg in a relay of keening – preceded by the mother (Eiko Miyoshi) of Yusa’s showgirl lover, Harumi (Keiko Awaji); by the distraught husband (a seemingly uncredited though powerful cameo) of a woman killed by one of the gun’s bullets in a robbery at their home; and by Murakami himself, when Satō, the recipient of two more bullets, lies badly wounded in hospital.

    According to Wikipedia, Kurosawa’s opinion of Stray Dog changed over the years.  He was enthusiastic about it in his 1982 autobiography but had previously gone on record as describing the film as ‘too technical’, as containing ‘all that technique and not one real thought …’   Although that seems harsh, you can see what Kurosawa meant.  I struggled to engage with the story, thanks to the deliberate plotting and what came to feel like a surfeit of moments supplying artful contrasts with the main action.  These continue right through to the climax:  a woman playing a ‘sublime’ Mozart piano piece in a room whose open window overlooks the wood where Murakami and Yusa are fighting it out; and, as their struggle ends, a crocodile of singing schoolchildren processing nearby.

    It isn’t Kurosawa’s fault that the contrasting cop partnership – handsome, impulsive newcomer and ordinary-looking, seen-it-all veteran – has become so familiar since this film was made.  Besides, the actors concerned make an excellent team.  Toshiro Mifune, still in his twenties at the time, sustains Murakami’s nervy anxiety at a remarkably high energy level (especially given the heat).   As the phlegmatic Satō, Takashi Yamura – who would go on to play the protagonist of Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952) so memorably – gives, as well as confidence to his younger colleague, a human grounding to the film as a whole.  The episode in which Murakami has an evening meal at Satō’s home and meets his wife (Kazuko Motahashi) and children, isn’t at all typical of Stray Dog but it’s very welcome.

    20 June 2025

     

Posts navigation