Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

To start inventing you need something real first. Grenoble, France. In an isolated mountain chalet novelist Sandra Voyter (Sandra Huller) decides to reschedule her interview with a female literature student Zoe Solidor (Camille Rutherford) because her husband, university lecturer and aspiring author Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis) plays music loudly on a loop in their attic, disrupting the interview, making recording impossible. After the student drives away from the chalet, Samuel and Sandra’s visually impaired son, Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) takes a walk outside with his guide dog Snoop (Messi). When they return home, Daniel finds Samuel dead in the snow from an apparent fall. Sandra insists that the fall must have been accidental. Her old friend and lawyer Vincent Renzi (Swann Arlaud) suggests the possibility of suicide while Sandra recalls her husband’s attempt to overdose on aspirin six months earlier after going off antidepressants. After an investigation, Daniel’s conflicting accounts of what happened shortly before his father’s death, combined with the revelation that Samuel sustained a head wound before his body hit the ground and an audio recording of a fight by Samuel and Sandra the previous day, Sandra is indicted on charges of homicide. A year later, during the trial, Sandra’s defence team claims Samuel fell from the attic window and hit his head on a shed below; the prosecution suggests that Sandra hit him with a blunt object, pushing him from the second-floor balcony. During a courtroom argument with Samuel’s psychiatrist Jammal (Wajdi Mouawad) Sandra admits she resented Samuel due to his partial responsibility for the accident that led to Daniel’s impaired vision: he should have collected him from school but called a babysitter instead so he could stay home and writer. In the recorded fight, Samuel accuses Sandra of plagiarism, infidelity and exerting control over his life before their argument turns physically violent. The prosecution claims that all the violence came from Sandra but she points out that they’d been having conversations and disagreements that he’d recorded for six months as a substitute for writing and his transcriptions when presented by him were not accepted by a publisher in lieu of a novel … I don’t believe in the the notion of reciprocity in a couple. Written by the married couple Justine Triet & Arthur Harari (who appears as a literary critic) during the COVID lockdown, director Triet’s film sustains its mysterious premise right until the conclusion which may prove disappointing – perhaps a European take on the customary bittersweet Hollywood ending. it’s a Choose Your Own iteration of the murder procedural with flashes of Hitchcockian wit throughout. There is a re-enactment and a single flashback but the eccentric courtroom presentation is very different to the Anglo-Saxon convention with witnesses for the prosecution and defence talking over each other, a low threshold for evidence and an equally bizarre concept of the burden of proof (opinion-led, apparently). Sandra’s bisexuality and her affairs are brought up as a reason for her husband’s violent arguments with her, his use of anti-depressants rooted perhaps at her contempt for him when their young son was blinded because he should have been picking up from school, her relentless output still not sufficient to pay the bills while he is at home, renovating, homeschooling Daniel, having no time to write outside of his teaching job. At the heart of the story is a blame game between husband and wife – an accident that caused Daniel’s sight loss and a burning envy of a wife’s success whose latest plot is largely ‘borrowed’ from a passage in a novel Samuel abandoned, a writer wannabe now reduced to transcribing daily home life as a form of autofiction. As the USB recording from Samuel’s keyring is re-enacted he accuses Sandra of stealing his time and ‘imposing’ her worldview upon him despite his having forced the family to relocate to his hometown where she speaks English and the use of language becomes an issue in this French-German union where nuance, suggestion and meaning are potentially lost in translation – English is the no-man’s land resort of communication. Sometimes a couple is a kind of a chaos. The discursiveness masks the fact that it is their blind son and his dog who are the sole witnesses to the accident, spicing up the issue of court appearances and compounding the ambiguous nature of the crime and the lack of compelling evidence. Triet and Harari wrote this with Huller in mind (following an earlier collaboration) and she is a very modern heroine, word-smart, intellectually able, psychologically penetrating and completely at ease with herself to the point of lying easily. She is superb as this take no prisoners character, taking nonsense from nobody and while profoundly concerned with her son’s well-being she also boasts a terrifically charismatic nonchalance. Nevertheless, she is obviously unnerved by the courtroom experience in a language not her own. A sidebar to the exposition is the frank admission by Vincent that he has long thought highly of her. This is of course about writers and what happens when one half of a couple is more accomplished and successful than the other and how envy can eat like a cancer through a relationship. Samuel is destroyed by what he has done to his son, Sandra has dealt with it through adultery while also cheerfully churning out novels and doing translations on the side. She is pragmatic above all. Does Samuel commit suicide and are the recordings made in order to frame Sandra for his alleged murder? Maybe. Did he fall or was he pushed? Is the flashback from the visually impaired son true? Does Daniel lie? Why did he make a mistake in his first account? Rage does not exclude will! Guilt, jealousy, blame, language, meaning, all suffuse this tension-filled narrative which asks questions about how writers make their work and how much it plunders their private lives. How and why the story turns unexpectedly marks out the forensic narrative style. Rightly lauded, the exceptional screenplay was awarded at the Golden Globes, the BAFTAs and the Academy Awards among others and the film won Cannes’ Palme d’Or with the Palm Dog going to Messi! The first 9 minutes of the film are dominated by that appalling music which frankly would drive anyone to murder, if you want to know the truth. We won’t even name it such is its earworm potential for homicidal triggering. Gripping. A novel is not life! An author is not her characters! #700daysstraightofmondomovies! MM#4547

Recoil (1953)

Didn’t you once tell me a shock might kill her? When three robbers including Nicholas Conway (Kieron Moore) rob and murder her jeweller father Talbot (Ian Fleming) who is en route to the apartment of a wealthy client Farnborough (Martin Benson), Talbot’s daughter Jean (Elizabeth Sellars) arrives on the scene and gets a good look at Nicholas who has given her father the deadly blow. The police chase the men through London and the thieves’ car crashes and bursts into flames. Nicholas manages to get away and makes his way to his doctor brother Michael (Edward Underdown) who patches him up. He agrees to give him an alibi and conceal the situation from their mother without knowing what’s happened. When the police led by Inspector Trubridge (John Horsley) and Inspector Perkins (Robert Raglan) fail to get enough evidence to charge Nicholas, whose day job is in an insurance office, Jean resolves to get it herself. She takes up lodging with Michael and the men’s elderly mother (Ethel O’Shea) over his surgery. Then Nicholas sees her without realising who she is and Jean allows a relationship to progress to the point that he gives her a key to his flat while he continues his criminal ways and several robberies are carried out by his gang across London. However Farnborough wants his jewellery from the Talbot theft … If ever I see that man again I shall recognise him. Written and directed by the prolific and reliable John Gilling, this British B has some cool credentials with a score by Stanley Black and editing by Sid Hayers who would go on to make some decidedly nifty horrors (Night of the Eagle is a Mondo favourite). Sellars gives one of her best performances in the lead, swarthy Moore is an agreeable villain, a chancer with occasionally odd diction as if he’s a refugee from somewhere vaguely Eastern European, while Underdown is an entirely unlikely romantic anti-hero. He comments of his louche little brother, Nicholas is a more natural product of this miracle age. When Jean makes out with Nicholas they have some nicely cutting moments particularly when he thinks he’s about to conquer her: I’ve got a hunch about you. I’d like to get a glimpse of what’s under that armour plating – an iceberg or a volcano. Ooh er missus! Happily the screenplay is filled with these kinds of exchanges while the tension ramps up and the dressing-gowned gentleman crook gathers the thugs to get his booty back. O’Shea has a good supporting role as the concerned Irish mother of the Cain and Abel sons. Expressive Scotswoman Sellars was such an interesting performer, initially training in law but then switching to RADA and the theatre with terrific roles at the RSC and getting some decent parts in B movies like this plus a lead opposite Dirk Bogarde in the previous year’s The Gentle Gunman. The year after this she had roles in two big Hollywood productions, The Barefoot Contessa and Desiree and she had a terrific role in The Shiralee (1957). Later she would be reunited with Moore in The Day They Robbed The Bank of England (1960) and with the director in The Mummy’s Shroud (1967). She died in France at the great age of 98 in 2019. Moore coincidentally also lived in France where he died in 2007. What a well educated pair they were – Moore’s medical studies at University College Dublin were disrupted by his film career. Shot by Monty Berman around St Paul’s and Chelsea and at Alliance Studios in Twickenham with some quite thrilling tracking shots during the car chase. Watch out for Sam Kydd as a ticket collector. A thief can always tell a thief

The Life of David Gale (2003)

Rape. Murder. Death Row. Very intelligent guy. David Gale Kevin Spacey) is a former philosophy professor on death row in Texas. With only a few days until his execution, his lawyer negotiates a half-million dollar fee to tell his story to Bitsey Bloom (Kate Winslet), a journalist from a major news network. She has a reputation of keeping secrets and protecting her sources and has herself served a jail term for just such an infringement in defence of someone producing kiddie porn. With four days before his presumed execution Bitsey arrives at his prison and his lawyer Braxton Belyeu (Leon Rippy) diverts her intern Zack Slemmons (Gabriel Mann) and Gale tells her his story in a series of flashbacks: In 1994, Gale is a successful public intellectual and the head of the philosophy department at the University of Texas at Austin. He is an active member of DeathWatch, an advocacy group campaigning against capital punishment. At a graduation party, he encounters Berlin (Rhona Mitra) a graduate student who has been expelled from the school that afternoon and who earlier asked him to up her grades in exchange for sex. When Gale gets drunk, she seduces him and they have rough sex. She then falsely accuses Gale of rape. The next day, he loses a televised debate with the Governor of Texas when he is unable to name any innocent people executed during the governor’s term. Gale is arrested, but the charge is dropped when Berlin disappears. However, his marriage, career and reputation are all destroyed, his home is sold and he struggles with alcoholism after his wife Sharon (Elizabeth Gast) takes their little son Jamie (Noah Truesdale) with her to Spain and disallows contact. Constance Harraway (Laura Linney) a fellow DeathWatch activist is a close friend of Gale who consoles him after his life falls apart. However, Harraway is discovered raped and murdered, suffocated by a plastic bag taped over her head. An autopsy reveals Gale’s semen in her body and that she had been forced to swallow the key to the handcuffs, a torture technique known as the secure top method which Gale previously wrote about in a journal article. The physical evidence at the crime scene points to Gale, who is convicted of rape and murder and is sentenced to death. Now Bloom investigates the case in between her visits with Gale. Gale maintains his innocence, claiming he and Harraway had consensual sex the night before her murder. Bitsey comes to believe that the apparent evidence against Gale does not add up. She is tailed several times in her car by Dusty Wright (Matt Craven) an alleged one-time lover and colleague of Harraway, whom she suspects was the real killer and who has been trailing Bitsey and Zack. Wright slips evidence to Bloom that suggests Gale has been framed, implying that the actual murderer videotaped the crime. Bitsey pursues this lead until she finds a videotape revealing that Harraway, who was suffering from terminal leukaemia had committed an elaborate suicide made to look like murder. Wright is seen on the videotape, acting as her accomplice, implying that they framed Gale as part of a plan to discredit the death penalty by conspiring to execute an innocent person and in its aftermath ultimately releasing evidence of the actual circumstances. Once Bitsey and Zack find this evidence, only hours remain until Gale’s scheduled execution and they enlist Nico the Goth Girl (Melissa McCarthy) who now resides at Constance’s old home to restage her death … Name one innocent man that Texas has executed during my tenure. Urgency is inscribed from the first frame when Bitsey is running down a country road. After a series of flashbacks and contemporary interview scenes we rejoin that particular scene at 114 minutes in and the finale unspools. The screenplay by Charles Randolph resulted in a uniquely polarising critical reception for what transpired to be the late and lamented Alan Parker’s final production. Hate’s no fun if you keep it to her she just wanted to help other people avoid it. It’s a cunningly contrived drama, giving Gale a fully established private life and then turning his choices in a very different direction on the basis of one bad decision at a party with a sexpot which throws his life into disarray. You’re not here to save me, you’re here to save my son’s memory of his father. In this race against time narrative, the plot construction necessarily revolves Bitsey chasing her tail a little – we are to some degree in Silence of the Lambs territory when she talks to David in prison so that the ultimate manipulation of this conscientious journalist makes more sense in retrospect. Part of the dramatic problem is Winslet’s performance – it doesn’t ring entirely true: yes, she’s been carefully selected for the job of ‘saving’ David Gale on the basis of her fearsome reputation for journalistic ethics but somehow she doesn’t seem entirely serious in her profession as it’s presented here. Winslet overacts somewhat particularly in the more emotive setups. Where this should perhaps have engaged more with the idea of the role of journalists in promoting a point of view and the machinery of the news industry in shifting or controlling social perspective on crime and the death penalty becomes a more personalised tale about the lengths activists go to in order to make meaningful change – and in the State of Texas, which has a very high annual body count when it comes to Death Row. The final twist is probably a move too far in a film which thrives on every kind of sensation, good and bad. It is however very interesting on several levels, including performance. Ironically, in view of the criticism, this was allegedly inspired by a true story. Co-produced by Parker and Nicolas Cage. Let’s not throw a pity party and sit around reading Kafka

The Beekeeper (2024)

I’m the beekeeper. I protect the hive. Rural Massachusetts. Retired schoolteacher Eloise Parker (Phylicia Rashad) lives by herself on an isolated property but she has a tenant in her barn, Adam Clay (Jason Statham) who lives a quiet life as a beekeeper. Eloise falls for an online phishing scam and is robbed of over $2 million, the majority of which belongs to an educational charity she manages. Devastated, she dies by gunshot. Clay finds her body and is immediately arrested by FBI Agent Verona Parker (Emmy Raver-Lampman), Eloise’s daughter. After her mother’s death is ruled a suicide, Clay is released. Verona tells him the group that robbed Eloise has been on the FBI’s radar for a while but is difficult to track. Wanting justice for Eloise, Clay contacts the Beekeepers, a mysterious group, to find the scammers responsible. Clay receives an address for the scammers: a call centre run by Mickey Garnett (David Witts). Clay scares off the employees and destroys the building. Garnett informs his boss, technology executive Derek Danforth (Josh Hutcherson), who sends Garnett to kill Clay. A violent confrontation ensues where Clay kills Garnett’s men and severs Garnett’s fingers. Garnett calls Danforth while stopped at a bridge, informing him that Clay is a Beekeeper. Having followed Garnett, Clay drags him off the bridge with a truck to his death and warns Danforth that he is coming after him. Danforth informs former CIA director Wallace Westwyld (Jeremy Irons), who is currently running security for Danforth Enterprises at the request of Derek’s mother, Jessica, about Clay. Concerned, Wallace contacts the current CIA director Janet Harward (Minnie Driver) hoping to stope Clay. She contacts the Beekeepers and learns that Clay has retired from the organisation. The Beekeepers subsequently declare neutrality after Clay kills the current Beekeeper Anisette Landress (Megan Le) sent to kill him at a gas station. Meanwhile, Verona and her partner, Agent Matt Wiley (Bobby Naderi), figure that Clay will assault the Nine Star United Centre in Boston, which oversees all of Derek’s global scam call centers. After informing FBI Deputy Director Prigg (Don Gilet) that Clay is a Beekeeper, they are shocked to get all the support they ask for. Wallace coordinates a group of ex-special forces personnel, revealing to them that the Beekeepers are a highly skilled and dangerous secret human intelligence organisation tasked with protecting the United States, operating above and beyond governmental jurisdiction. To improve their chances at stopping Clay, Wallace orders the group to secure the inside of the Nine Star Building, while the FBI places their own SWAT team around the perimeter. Danforth’s decision to not evacuate the employees enables Clay to quickly defeat the FBI SWAT team and infiltrate the building. After wiping out all of Wallace’s ex-Special Forces group, Clay proceeds to interrogate the manager, who reveals that Danforth is his boss. Verona informs Prigg that Danforth runs both companies, which several US government agencies use. Verona also brings up the point that not only will Clay try to kill Derek but he may also kill Jessica (Jemma Redgrave), the president of the United States, due to her association with the scam … Beekeepers keep working until they die. The Stath is back! And he’s in pursuit of righteous vengeance in this entertaining and well motivated thriller albeit this probably has the highest body count since the last John Wick entry with added fingers for electronic passes. Was it Aristotle that said character is action?! Literal to the nth degree, we have someone acting out his nominatively determined hobby, and killing his honey bees is just the worst thing you could do to the masked one. I taught CIA software to hunt money and not terrorists. The opening sequence is clear and concise – then we’re brought into a world where a very unlikely character (a very different looking Hutcherson as Derek) turns out to be the son of someone very important indeed – and while Redgrave is clearly powerful the big reveal doesn’t happen until c74 minutes into the running time – at which point many, many people have rued their crossing the Beekeeper. I will never steal from the weak and the vulnerable again! Then the action unspools at a supposedly impenetrable venue followed by a party at a coastal estate where Clay has to contend with a comic book South African mercenary Lazarus (Taylor James) who got unlucky the last time he met a Beekeeper and has the prosthetic leg to prove it. Obviously, this has to be the ultimate encounter. Throughout there are gnomic nods on the one hand to bees (what else) but on the other to the offspring of US Presidents with winks at the ethics of campaign fundraising, a fun set of references in election year. And this will not dissuade anyone of the justifiable fear that technology is theft. At the end of the day Mr Clay disappears just like the man with Black Magic chocolates – or James Bond. What a guy! He’s absolutely fucking terrifying! Truly the strong mostly silent killing machine. The well-hewn screenplay is written by Kurt Wimmer with tongue firmly in cheek and directed by David Ayer with stunning cinematography from Gabriel Beristain. Sometimes when the hive is out of balance you have to replace the queen

Paul Temple’s Triumph (1950)

I am afraid you are going to have to take the evening off after all. Private detective Paul Temple (John Bentley) and his lovely wife Steve (Dinah Sheridan) are searching for the missing scientist Professor Hardwick (Andrew Leigh) behind a pioneering nuclear missile shield when their friend, his daughter Celia (Anne Hayes), appeals to them for help. When they find her dead at the family home they eventually find out it’s got something to do with a shadowy crime organisation known only by the initial Z. There are Teutonic boffins, petrol smugglers, snooping reporters and French singer Jacqueline Giraud (Jenny Mathot) armed with doped cigarettes distracting the Temples from cracking the case but time is running out and the bodies are piling up … Never should have sent it from Rangoon. The poor man’s British take on Nick and Nora Charles has a convoluted plot, so many bodies we couldn’t keep count and Sheridan dripping in full length furs. She also looks good with a gun. And great in trousers. She knows too much. It’s a rare film indeed that has a credit that reads, Cars by Aston-Martin and Lagonda. It’s an even rarer one whose turning point into the third act is The Radio Times! But, as the World Service broadcast Europe Today triggers catastrophic events that elicit little more than blithe cheeriness from our protagonists – even moments after finding the body of their good friend – this rattles on, damn it, whether we can keep up with developments or not. The late arrival of Peter Butterworth raises a smile in a story where virtually nobody is who they say they are and the villains really are ruthless people. The third in the popular series this B-movie entry was adapted by A. R. Rawlinson from the Francis Durbridge novel which was also a radio serial, News of Paul Temple , this works like a low rent James Bond episode with pertinent post-war references including rationing. Celebrity spotters might recognise Hayes (whose only feature credit this was) as the first wife of Peter Sellers. Produced by Ernest G. Roy and directed by Maclean Rogers at Nettlefold Studios with location shooting at Hillingdon, Northolt Airport, Walton-on-Thames, Beaulieu, Shepperton and East Horsley. What have you got in here – cast iron camisoles?

The Unseen (1945)

Aka Her Heart Was In Her Throat. You’re my enemy! I hate you! An old homeless woman is murdered after seeing a light through the basement window of abandoned 11 Crescent Drive. Young Barney Fielding (Richard Lyon) witnesses the incident from his window next door at number 10. Elizabeth Howard (Gail Russell) arrives at the house to be governess to Barney and his impressionable sister Ellen (Nona Griffith) but is met with aggression from the boy who is unusually attached to their former governess, Maxine. Round here we call it the commodore’s folly. Elizabeth’s room overlooks the garden of the eerie house next door, and she finds a watch that belonged to the murdered old woman in her dressing table. Over the next few weeks, Marian Tygarth (Isobel Elsom), a widow who owns shuttered-up 11 Crescent Drive, returns to put the house up for sale. Elizabeth suspects someone is gaining access to the cellars and confides in David Fielding (Joel McCrea), the children’s widowed and secretive father but he dismisses her concerns. She turns to Dr. Charles Evans (Herbert Marshall) a neighbour and family friend who advises her not to call the police as David shouldn’t like it: Ellen doesn’t know it yet but David was once suspected of murdering his wife. The last one was pretty too. Ellen tells Elizabeth that Barney is the one who lets the lurking man into the house at night, on Maxine’s orders. The next day, the employment agency tells Elizabeth they cannot send anyone over that day. However, a new maid arrives at the house and Elizabeth eventually realises she is Maxine (Phyllis Brooks). David tries to throw Maxine out of the house and shortly afterwards she is found murdered outside the empty house. David is nowhere to be found so the police to consider him the prime suspect … It had been barred, locked and shuttered for twelve years. Devised as a way to capitalise on tragic Russell’s success in The Uninvited, this has a great pedigree. Produced by John Houseman for Paramount and directed by that film’s Lewis Allen (it was his feature debut) and photographed in luminous monochromes by the legendary John F. Seitz, it was adapted by Hagar Wilde and Ken Englund from Ethel Lina White’s novel Midnight House aka Her Heart in her Throat, with the final screenplay by Wilde and the one and only Chandler (who had a rather indifferent screenwriting history as various tomes attest). Narrated by an uncredited Ray Collins, this is a terrifically atmospheric murder mystery. I did hope you’d be a little more motherly. With a debt to both Jane Eyre and The Turn of the Screw, it’s an example of the era’s popular trope of the child witness. It’s suspenseful and filled with character detail, situated in a wonderfully overstuffed house redolent of the Gothic cycle. The nascent romance between Russell and McCrea plays with diffidence then humour: I like your smile. I like the way your hair falls out of place. I even like the way you carve. Russell has a lot of colours to play and does them sympathetically. It’s fun to see Brooks in a nice role as Maxine. It’s her final screen credit. She started out as a model and then did a number of B movies and at one time was engaged to marry Cary Grant. Instead she married JFK’s Harvard roommate Torbert Macdonald and lived out her days on the East coast where Macdonald served as a Congressman for Massachusetts and she was a renowned society hostess. Interestingly, the children here play with Disney comics and a Dumbo toy and see a Popeye cartoon at the cinema, reflective of what was popular then – and now. Longtime Welles and then Hitchcock associate Norman Lloyd has an amusing role as Jasper Goodwin. Sadly the gifted crime writer White (who had written The Wheel Spins, the basis for The Lady Vanishes) didn’t live to see this adaptation of her novel. Nor would she see Forties classic, The Spiral Staircase (1946), based on Some Must Watch. She died aged 68 in 1944. You’re nothing like twenty-five

The Bricklayer (2023)

The days of the CIA treating Europe like the Wild West are over. After an assassination, to fight against supposedly dead formerly friendly foreign agent Victor Radek (Clifton Collins Jr.), junior CIA agent Kate Bannon (Nina Dobrev) and the agency’s director O’Malley (Tim Blake Nelson) decide to seek the help of a retired agent Steve Vail (Aaron Eckhart) off the books. O’Malley wants Vail to go to Greece with Kate to find Radek. Initially, Vail refuses to go on this mission. He reveals that he has moved on in his life and has become a bricklayer. But soon, a couple of shooters attack him and this makes him change his mind. Eventually, he reaches Kozani in Greece with Kate and meets his old army buddy Patricio (Oliver Trevena). With Patricio’s help, Kate and Vail put on disguises, get armed, and head to Thessaloniki where they check into a hotel. While Kate goes to take a shower, Vail sneaks out to rekindle some memories, related to Radek and his family. Later, he enters a fancy party and meets his old flame, Thessaloniki station chief Tye Delson (Ilfenesh Hadera). He tells her that O’Malley sent him to find Radek who is not dead as they thought. She warns him about Kostas. That night, Vail enters a pool party to meet Sten (Ori Pfeffer) and Crystal (Lili Rich) to know any details about Radek. Sten does not reveal anything. Instead, he threatens Vail, who takes it badly and fights Sten’s pawns. Luckily, Kate arrives there in time because she had put a tracker on him. I’m done with my country. Once in the car, she starts asking him about his history with Radek. Radek was performing assignments for them. He joined the CIA for asylum. But once his cover got blown, the Russians killed his family – so he responded with a killing rampage. As a result, the CIA asked Vail to track down Radek and neutralise him. We underestimated how vindictive the agency can be. Back in the US, the CIA receives a threat message from a person who wants to punish them for their wrongdoings. In exchange for not killing people, he expects a huge payment in Bitcoin. In Greece, Vail decides to follow Sten with Kate. They break into Sten’s house and look for any signs of his connection to Radek. Kate finds Greta Becker’s (Veronica Ferres) phone. Sten’s pawns enters the house. Vail and Kate fight back and escape after Vail kills him. Kate apologises that she froze during the fight. Vail asks her not to be so hard on herself. Patricio tells them where they can find the next target Alekos Melas (Michael Siripoloulos). They reach the location and see a peaceful political march turning into a street fight. Vail suddenly receives a call from Radek.  Now, the game is really on … I’m going to broadcast to the whole world what the CIA is doing in the shadows. Adapted from the Steve Vail novel in the series by Paul Lindsay (as Noah Boyd), this was originally intended as a Gerard Butler vehicle more than a decade ago. Now with 90s name director Renny Harlin at the helm its stars are more de nos jours in the sense that ridiculously good looking Eckhart brings a kind of Bogartian humour at least in the lines gifted him in the screenplay by Hanna Weg and Matt Johnson (and an uncredited Marc Moss). His dry worldweariness and arch sexism get turned around as you’d hope so it works well in the payoff department – a smart development in a rather hackneyed plot. However, the action really is action – down and dirty, no slomo SFX to beautify the violence. It’s bloody and horrible. Naturally our hero’s old friend is not a nice guy (not with a face like that, anyhow) but to humanise our hero not only does he have a cute little pooch he has a thing for Miles Davis and he doesn’t care who knows it: If you understood everything I said you’d be me. And when he’s asked why he chose to be a bricklayer, well, he’s away on a hack about the joys of form and function. You know where you are with a brick! Not to mention that a seasoned construction worker knows what to do with a tool. Dobrev is well positioned as the woman he has to work with and she gets some decent scenes challenging his preconceptions about women as well as a good portion of the action: they help to rescue eaach other. At the heart of this is betrayal – at every level. As a geopolitical action adventure starring the most exalted and maligned spy agency the world over this isn’t exactly breaking new ground but it’s a highly efficient genre outing. I can’t fight an enemy I don’t understand

The Lone Wolf Strikes (1940)

He travels fastest who travels alone. Michael Lanyard (Warren William) the retired and reformed gentleman crook known as the Lone Wolf, is pottering with his aquarium when his old friend, Stanley Young (Addison Richards) appears to enlist his aid in recovering a priceless pearl necklace that has been stolen from his murdered friend, Phillip Jordan. Young tells Lanyard that Jordan had found out that Binnie Weldon (Astrid Allwyn) who had been leading the old geezer on with her accomplice Jim Ryder (Alan Baxter) and they stole the pearls and replaced them with fakes. Lanyard agrees to switch the pearls back again and his long-serving butler and crafty assistant Jamison (Eric Blore) is more than relieved to return to a semblance of normality. However Lanyard is hampered in his task by the misguided meddling of Delia Jordan (Joan Perry) the murdered man’s daughter. Posing as foreign fence and old nemesis Emil Gorlick (Montagu Love), Lanyard gets the pearls from Binnie and Ryder but after he turns them over to Stanley, his old friend is found murdered and the pearls have gone missing. Stanley’s murder throws suspicion on Lanyard, and to clear himself of the crime, he must find both the murderers and the necklace. To accomplish this, Lanyard tricks the killers into believing that they have the fake pearls and Delia has the real ones. Much to Delia’s dismay, Lanyard’s trap nets her, suitor Ralph Bolton (Robert Wilcox) and Alberts (Harland Tucker) the man who hired Bolton to keep an eye on the pearls. After convincing Alberts that he has the genuine pearls, Lanyard leads the killers on a merry chase … I’m jolly well fed up of being a gentleman’s gentleman to a lot of sardines. A crime comedy series based on the characters created by Louis Joseph Vance is based on the one-time popular trope of the gentleman thief a la Raffles (created by E.W. Hornung in 1898, 19 years after the Lone Wolf emerged). The film adaptations were being made as early as 1917 and Warren William’s stint of nine films had commenced with the previous year’s entry, The Lone Wolf Spy Hunt. He had previously played a number of nasty businessmen in the pre-Code era as well as being the first screen incarnation of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason and the second Sam Spade in Satan Was a Lady, a version of The Maltese Falcon. I loathe fish! Part of the series’ great attractiveness is the presence of Blore, the butler of choice at the time, whose put downs are world class. It’s only when you’re immersed in your fish that you disappoint me, Sir. He would feature in eleven of the films overall, concluding with The Lone Wolf in London in 1947. With twist upon twist (who can keep up with who’s got what set of pearls?), fast moves, witty dialogue and delightful actors, it doesn’t hurt that the slyly original story is by that gifted scribe Dalton Trumbo, who would of course be blacklisted and deprived of Academy Awards won under the names of writers who fronted for him, as regaled in the biopic Trumbo. He wrote both Kitty Foyle and A Bill of Divorcement the same year but for RKO, whereas this was made at Columbia. The screenplay is by Harry Segall & Albert Duffy. In the meantime, this series went from strength to strength and a seriously ill William would eventually be replaced by Gerald Mohr in 1946 prior to his premature death from multiple myeloma in 1948. Sadly his wife died within a few months of his demise. The charming leading lady Perry married Columbia Studio boss Harry Cohn and her career as a supporting actress ceased in 1941 which is a real shame considering all she does here. Highly entertaining. Directed by Sidney Salkow. I’m such a changeable person. I plan on doing one thing and suddenly do another

Hypnotic (2023)

That park. That day. Texas. Austin Police Department detective Danny Rourke (Ben Affleck) regales his therapist with the story of the abduction of his seven-year-old daughter, Minnie (Ionie Olivia Nieves) which occurred three years ago and led to the dissolution of his marriage. Afterwards, he is picked up by his partner, Nicks (J.D. Pardo) who informs him they have received an anonymous tip that a safe deposit box will be robbed. While staking out the bank, they witness a mysterious man (William Fichtner) give instructions to civilians and fellow policemen who immediately follow his commands. Rourke suspects they are all in an elaborate heist and races to the targeted safe deposit box. Inside, he only finds a picture of Minnie with the message Find Lev Dellrayne written on it. The mysterious man escapes but Rourke is now convinced the heist has something to do with his daughter’s disappearance. A trace run by Nicks on the tip-off call leads Rourke to the address of fortune-teller Diana Cruz (Alice Braga). Cruz tells Rourke that the mysterious man from the bank is named ‘Lev Dellrayne’ and that he and Cruz are both the escaped ‘Hypnotics’: powerful hypnotists trained by a secretive government Division to control people’s minds. She also tells Rourke that he is mysteriously immune to her own mind control abilities. You cannot brute force a mind like yours. Dellrayne hypnotises Nicks into attacking Rourke and Cruz, forcing Cruz to kill him in self-defence. Now the two primary suspects in Nicks’ murder, Rourke and Cruz flee to Mexico. There, they learn from a former Division contact of Cruz’s Jeremiah (Jackie Earle Haley) that Dellrayne is searching for ‘Domino’ a weapon developed by the Division which was stolen and hidden by Dellrayne when he escaped. He erased his own mind. Dellrayne then wiped his own memory and left behind triggers that will prompt him to gradually recall Domino’s location and simultaneously increase his regained hypnotic power. Dellrayne uses his ability to control civilians to pursue Rourke and Cruz from the contact’s apartment and into the surrounding city. However, Rourke taps into his own (previously unknown and unacknowledged) hypnotic power to stop Dellrayne’s control of the civilians, allowing him and Cruz to escape. Rourke and Cruz next seek out River (Dayo Okeniyi), a reclusive Division hacker. He hacks into the Division database and learns that Rourke’s former wife, Vivian (Kelly Frye) was a member of the Division. Cruz and River figure Rourke must be another Hypnotic whose memory was wiped. Later that night, Rourke investigates River’s database on his own, learning that Minnie is actually the Domino: she is the daughter of two powerful hypnotics: Rourke and Vivian. And – Cruz is actually Vivian; Rourke’s memory of his wife’s face had been altered so that he believed ‘Cruz’ to be a stranger. Rourke then realises that all the events and locations seen up to this point have been hypnotic constructs created in a facility populated by Division agents that have simply acted out the roles of all the people he’s met up to this point. Vivian and Dellrayne’ explain that Minnie was born and raised within the Division but Rourke escaped with her to stop her from becoming their weapon. Rourke hid Minnie and then wiped his memory, so the Division has been repeatedly putting him through a constructed scenario to make him remember … Are you familiar with the concept of hypnotic constructs? Something of a flop on its US release, this Roberto Rodriguez film sits in the cinematic Venn universe where Philip K. Dick meets Christopher Nolan, albeit it is more logical and with a 50% running time of the latter’s usual output. Co-written by the director with Max Borenstein, there is a deal of not just mind- but actionbending, recalling the world of Inception, with an interesting twist in using Affleck (the world’s worst line reader, fact fans!) when he’s told by a guy raising his eyepatch to take a better look at him, There’s more to you than meets the eye. That applies not just within the story but within the Affleck star text and his granite persona is given a depth and range he’s not usually required to play. By the time the 13th construct is being enacted we’re up to speed along with him but he still has another card left in the deck. Like all disguised westerns this concludes with a shootout but it’s the who, why and how that make it pleasurable. It’s sharp and pleasingly complicated and at 94 minutes a painless exercise in freeform genre cinema. You brought this on yourself

The Green Cockatoo (1937)

A small town is the nation’s greatest tragedy. Eileen (Rene Ray) is an innocent young woman from a small town in Devon who arrives in London looking for work and after disembarking from her train walks into an ambush, in which a couple of gangsters (Bruce Seton and Julian Vedey) knife an accomplice Dave Connor (Robert Newton) who has cheated them. The wounded man staggers with her to a cheap hotel, where he dies after begging her to tell his brother at The Green Cockatoo club. Going there, she is followed by police and hides in an upstairs room. It is that of Jim Connor (John Mills), the brother of the dead man but he does not identify himself to the girl. When the police leave he escorts her out but is followed by the gangsters. In another knife fight he gets away and takes her to a safe house. The police turn up, this time to take him to the morgue to identify his brother. When they leave, the gangsters led by Dave’s nemesis Terrell (Charles Oliver) abduct the girl … There’s lots of different ways of putting things. With a screenplay by Ted Berkman from an original story and scenario by Graham Greene (with an uncredited contribution by Arthur Wimperis) this British pre-war noir boasts quirk, visual verve and not a little wit. From Eileen’s meet-cute on the train with a philosopher who warns her of looming disaster in London, to Jim’s way with words in an overwrought Yankee accent, this conventional genre outing strains to make an impression along the lines of the poetic realist work coming out of France at the time and then reverts to humour. The Sex Life of a Newt. I thought if he was a newt he wouldn’t have one. Maybe I was thinking of a neutral. Eileen’s putative involvement in Dave’s demise isn’t revealed until late in the day by which time Jim is hooked. I always thought London would be beautiful. There are a few intriguing shot setups, a funny cab driver and a decidedly low-minded butler Provero (Frank Atkinson) but it’s a little short on plot. Mills of course is always worth watching particularly as this low-rent British Cagney parlays his way through a song (Smoky Joe by William Kernell) while Ray is a decidedly odd duck to be framed as the Wrong Girl and Newton bows out too soon but anything with Greene is of interest to see how his screenwriting improved over the years from this first feature credit. Shot at Denham Studios, this was partly re-shot and re-edited and not released until 1940. There’s an exquisitely exciting score by Miklos Rozsa compensating for any gaps in the story. Directed by famed production designer William Cameron Menzies. This is where we stop. And this is where we start MM#4444