Film review

  • Green for Danger

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sidney Gilliat (1946)

    In his youth Martin Scorsese had ideas of becoming a priest; in old age his tastes in cinema are acquiring the status of holy writ.  BFI is running a ‘Martin Scorsese Selects Hidden Gems of the British Cinema’ season.  It’s true that Green for Danger, part of that programme, was screening in the smallish NFT2 but I was surprised to be part of a full house, even so:  I can’t believe Sidney Gilliat’s hospital whodunnit would have been so popular without Scorsese’s authoritative recommendation.  The film doesn’t quite qualify as either ‘hidden’ (it seems to crop up on television from time to time) or a ‘gem’.  Although it’s briskly entertaining, I didn’t, on this occasion anyway, find Green for Danger the absorbing thriller I thought I recalled.

    Gilliatt and Claud Gurney’s screenplay is adapted from a 1944 detective novel of the same name by Christianna Brand.  The story, set in Kent, is contemporary.  A postman injured in a German doodle-bug explosion is rushed to the local hospital for treatment.  On the operating table, he unexpectedly dies under anaesthetic.  A few hours later, the nursing sister present in the operating theatre reveals very publicly that the patient’s death wasn’t an accident; shortly afterwards, she is murdered.  Inspector Cockrill of the Kent County Police (who features in several of Brand’s novels) arrives to investigate.  Through the inspector’s voiceover narration, Sidney Gilliat succinctly sets up the story and its timeframe.  As the camera moves round the operating theatre, Cockrill (Alastair Sim) introduces each of the medical staff there:  the surgeon, Mr Eden (Leo Genn);  Nurses Linley (Sally Gray), Sanson (Rosamund John) and Woods (Megs Jenkins); Sister Bates (Judy Campbell); and anaesthetist Dr Barnes (Trevor Howard).  Postman Higgins (Moore Marriott) is brought to the hospital on August the 17th, 1944.  After running through the six staff in the theatre, Cockrill notes that ‘by August the 22nd two of these people would be dead and one of them a murderer’.

    Alastair Sim’s casting is a mixed blessing.  Cockrill’s voiceover frames the film and Sim’s familiar presence governs it.  The inspector’s penchant for drolly gnomic remarks is occasionally interrupted by misapprehensions, minor and major, that turn him sheepish; Green for Danger sometimes seems to be lampooning the idea of the omniscient sleuth.  Sim’s ability to switch effortlessly between comic eccentricity and real urgency is impressive but his screen persona’s humorous core also hints at the film’s jocose, isn’t-this-fun aspect.  The film is often fun but you may resent being told that repeatedly.  Besides, Green for Danger tends to stay ‘light’ only because it doesn’t always follow through its serious elements.  The theatre sister’s shock news that Higgins didn’t die of natural causes reduces a staff social to silence but not for long:  the music and dancing have resumed by the time distraught Marion Bates has fled from the gathering out into the night and her own death (by scalpel).  The revelation that Nurse Woods’s twin sister is a collaborator, broadcasting from Nazi Germany, is, for all its significance in the plot, quickly forgotten about in terms of its influence on the characters’ relationships.

    Trevor Howard’s romantic, brittle ‘Barney’ – Nurse Linley has broken off her engagement to him – gives proceedings much-needed substance.  The female performances, despite some melodramatic opportunities, aren’t up to much, except for that of thoroughly dependable Megs Jenkins.  For this viewer, one of the most interesting things about seeing the film again was discovering that I’d misremembered the identity of the culprit – I think because I always find Leo Genn sinister and, as the super-suave Eden, repellent, too.  Christianna Brand’s and the film’s title is intriguing even though, once you know the green refers to colour-coding on the gas canisters used by anaesthetists, it also gives some of the game away.

    8 September 2024

  • Hi, Mom!

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Brian De Palma (1970)

    This wasn’t quite Robert De Niro’s first film or even the first time he had played the character of Jon Rubin.  In Brian De Palma’s previous picture, Greetings (1968), Jon and two other young American men were trying to avoid the Vietnam War draft:  each episode of the movie concentrated on one of this trio of friends.  In Hi, Mom!, though, De Niro is the sole lead – so much the lead that his name appears before the film’s name in the opening titles.  This order of priority is deserved.  Hi, Mom! is often witty and enjoyable.  Twenty-six-year-old De Niro’s talent and versatility are elating.

    In Greetings Jon Rubin was a peeping Tom and an aspiring film-maker, and he’s still both things at the start of Hi, Mom!  His attempts to dodge the draft failed:  he’s now a Vietnam veteran, back in New York (anticipating De Niro’s Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver by a few years).  Like Greetings, Hi, Mom! – with a screenplay by De Palma, developed from a story he devised with Charles Hirsch, the film’s producer – is a satirical black comedy.  The chief target is probably American race relations although they take time to emerge as such.  For the first forty or so of its eighty-seven minutes Hi, Mom! feels like a string of sketches, just about held together by the protagonist’s voyeuristic antics and their consequences.  Following a prologue in which Jon, heard but hardly seen, is shown a scuzzy apartment by an even scuzzier landlord (Charles Durning), he’s hired by small-time producer Joe Banner (Allen Garfield) to make a pornographic movie.  Jon spies on Judy Bishop (Jennifer Salt), his neighbour opposite.  He likes the look of Judy enough to seduce her, putting himself into the porn film in the process.  He positions a camera in his apartment window to record their sex together; the camera tilts, the results are hopeless and Banner fires Jon.

    While this is going on, there are a couple of sequences involving Gerrit Wood (Gerrit Graham) and his avant-garde theatre group, who are developing a piece called ‘Be Black, Baby’.  Once he falls out with Banner, Jon joins Gerrit’s group.  The first performance of ‘Be Black, Baby’ involves African Americans in the cast wearing whiteface, and terrorising members of the liberal white audience.  The latter, insulted and threatened, are forced to wear blackface and eat soul food.  When they try and fail to escape the show, one of the white women is sexually assaulted by two of the Black actors.  Jon, playing an NYPD officer, then arrives to arrest the white folk, claiming that they’re Black.  After the performance the theatre-goers, including the rape victim, enthuse about ‘Be Black, Baby’, telling a TV reporter that the show really made them think and they’ll be recommending it to their friends.

    Jon gets a job as an insurance salesman and marries Judy.  She’s pregnant with their first child when her husband plants a bomb in their apartment building.  He watches the huge explosion from the street outside.  A group of people are interviewed beside the rubble on TV news.  A psychiatrist, midway through telling the interviewer the perpetrator was likely someone who ‘cracked under the pressures of our intensely materialistic society’, is interrupted by Jon, introducing himself as a Vietnam vet and a demolition expert.  He commends the professional job that’s been done on the apartment block but rails, with plenty of (bleeped out) expletives, against the squalor of the country that he and soldiers like him have returned to.  The TV interviewer asks Jon if there’s anything he’d like to add in conclusion.  He turns to camera, grins and delivers the film’s last two words, which are also its title.

    The small ad that Jon answers for actors to play police officers in ‘Be Black, Baby’ stipulates impro skills.  These are definitely a job requirement for De Palma’s cast, too.  The improvisations in Hi, Mom! are strong until they start to get a bit relentless, reminding you that, in order to work up rhythm and tension, impro tends to rely too much on engineered disputes between characters:  Jon’s visit to a pharmacy, where the pharmacist (Peter Maloney) launches into a pedantic explanation of the difference between contraceptives and prophylactics, sticks out as an example of this.  De Niro is chameleonic, though; whatever he does is fresh, and often very funny, with Jon’s ‘courtship’ of Judy a special highlight.  De Niro isn’t the only top-drawer performer in the cast:  that superb character actor Charles Durning gets the film off to a flying start.  (As if to confirm its indie credentials, Durning is misnamed as ‘Durnham’ in the cast list.)  Hi, Mom! actually works better as a series of comic turns than as more sustained satire.  The ‘Be Black, Baby’ horrors go on for too long; it’s as well the eventual punchline, when the hapless white audience raves about the experience, is so good – and restores the shameless comic tone.  The parodies of TV, including the NIT (National Intellectual Television) network’s coverage of Gerrit’s play and its themes, are consistently excellent.

    Within a few years, Brian De Palma was developing a reputation as a Hitchcock hommagiste:  Obsession (1976) was inspired by Vertigo (1958) and Dressed to Kill (1980) by Psycho (1960).  Hi, Mom!, in which Jon Rubin’s voyeurism evokes Rear Window (1954), is proof that the Hitchcock influence was there even before De Palma moved into mainstream Hollywood.  I don’t think I’ve seen Obsession (if I have, I’ve forgotten it) but I prefer this early effort to the more sophisticated Dressed to Kill.  Hi, Mom!, although chaotic compared with Rear Window, is, like that Hitchcock classic, highly inventive fun.

    6 September 2024

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