All Of Us Strangers (2023)

How do you cope? London, the present day. Lonely screenwriter Adam (Andrew Scott) is flirted with by his drunk tower block neighbour Harry (Paul Mescal), whom he rebuffs. He visits his unoccupied former childhood suburban home in Croydon and finds his parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy) there. They died in a car accident when he was twelve (Carter John Grout). Returning to his London flat, he reciprocates Harry’s interest and they have sex. Adam comes out as gay to his mother, who accepts him but reacts with concern. He has sex with Harry again, and then Harry describes his own feelings of distance from his family. Adam talks to his father during his next visit, who accepts him for who he is and tearfully reconciles with him over the bullying he faced as a child. Adam and Harry go clubbing and do ketamine together, causing Adam to imagine a long-term relationship with him, then black out and wake up in his parents’ house on Christmas. Unable to sleep, he gets in bed with them and tells his mother about how he was sent to stay with her mother after her death but they are interrupted by Harry appearing in bed with them. Adam wakes on a train and pursues Harry onto another, seeing a vision of his younger self screaming in the reflection of the window before waking in his bed, Harry having taken him home after he panicked while high. He tells Harry about how his father died instantly but his mother lingered for several days, though his grandmother kept him from seeing her, and how their deaths grew into a great terror of being alone. He decides to show Harry his parents but finds the house empty, though Harry catches a glimpse of them as Adam breaks a window to get in … I’m not a proper writer. I write scripts. Writer/director Andrew Haigh’s quasi-autobiographical exploration of his past is actually derived from a 1987 Japanese novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada previously adapted for the screen as The Discarnates (1988). The time-slip structure gives this fantasy a generic mode that fuses the present-day concerns of a man coming to terms with his past not just in terms of grief but of having grown up gay in the Eighties. Haigh integrates his own life into the story, even using his childhood home as a location so that this is imprinted with concerns that echo throughout his aesthetic process. Much of Adam’s frame of reference is provided by the band Frankie Goes to Hollywood: their sound and imagery pervade the story. A man preoccupied with the life of the mind and imagination, Adam’s ability to conjure his parents acts as a salve to all the questions that remain unanswered in his life and in the lives of his parents who get the opportunity to catch up with the son they would never see grow into his adult self. He explains to them that his loneliness is not due to his sexuality: things have changed in ways they could never have imagined. His father heard him crying at night but never hugged him. Now he can do so. Harry erupts into Adam’s life and with what gusto. That look of lust on Mescal as he first approaches Adam is something else – he surprises himself. And he rests his face on the door jamb with what – shock? Pleasure? It’s hard to tell. It’s exciting. The juxtaposition of life in the tower block with its Ballardian foreboding and alienation made solid alternates with the warmer cosy low-slung Eighties semi-dee where Adam reconciles himself to who he is with the backing of parents who are younger than he is now. Our boy’s back home. Elevators, windows, door and hallways, colour palettes and soft furnishings, these are the stuff of architecture but they have a telling effect on experience and perception. Scott offers a tour de force performance in a film that is audacious in its normality – as though this were possible, occupying two times simultaneously. This is real, Adam tells himself. In this realm we enter the idea cinematically that the mind plays tricks on a character in order to save himself from himself. But also, Everything is different now. The pressure of finally becoming disinhibited means Adam loses himself in Harry’s presence – which has unintended consequences for this man he barely knows (in every sense of that expression). This is sublime filmmaking, moving, intense, an exhilarating ride through emotions expressed through sheer craft. A modern masterpiece of love and loss that lingers long in the mind. I suppose we don’t get to decide when it’s over

Rich and Strange (1931)

Aka East of Shanghai. The best place for us is the gas oven. London couple, Fred Hill (Henry Kendall) and his wife Emily aka Em (Joan Barry), live a mundane middle-class existence. But that changes upon receipt of a letter informing them an uncle will advance them as much money as they need to enjoy themselves now rather than after his passing. So Fred quits his job and they both travel across the  English Channel to France. I couldn’t wear this – people will think we’re not married! After sampling Paris’s hot spots, they book passage on an ocean liner bound from Marseilles to the Far East. Fred gets seasick, leaving Em alone on board. To soak up time, she becomes acquainted with Commander Gordon (Percy Marmont), a dapper, popular bachelor. Later, upon his recovery, Fred is taken with a German princess (Betty Amann). As the voyage progresses, Fred and Em each spend more and more time with their new paramours, to the virtual exclusion of each other. By the time they arrive in Singapore, Fred and Em’s marriage is in a shambles. Em prepares to leave with Gordon for his home in Kuala Lumpur. However, before boarding the train, Gordon reveals that Fred’s princess is in fact a sham – a con artist who’s using him until his money runs out. Em now realises she can’t allow Fred to fall into this trap so she abandons Gordon to warn her husband. But it is too late. Fred discovers his ‘princess’ has just left for Rangoon, with £1000 of his money. Fred and Emily have only enough left to book passage home to England on a tramp steamer. Later, the ship is abandoned after a collision in the fog … Love is a very difficult thing. It makes everything very dangerous. Adapted by director Alfred Hitchcock’s wife and collaborator Alma Reville with Val Valentine from the novel Rich and Strange by Dale Collins, who apparently wrote a series of ‘sea romances’, this belongs firmly in middle of the British phase of the legendary filmmaker’s career before he made his sound breakthrough proper. The story might owe more to the fact that the Hitchcocks travelled to Paris for ‘essential research’ and fetched up in a brothel something that has never really been probed. Roughly one quarter of this comedy of marriage has dialogue so it’s still in the transition from the silent era replete with heavily made up performers and overacting. However there are some masterful shots by cinematographers Jack E. Cox and Charles Martin, particularly at the beginning, aside from the water tank situation and the ship’s set which was constructed in studio. There’s a deal of stock footage dressing up certain sequences and along with the lurches from drama, to melodrama, to comedy and back again, this is an uneven viewing experience. The travelogue aspect which incorporates fascinating footage from the Folies Bergeres (Em thinks they’ve pulled the curtain up before the performers got their clothes on), includes Paris, Port Said, the Suez Canal, Columbo and Singapore and inspires some fruitily amusing sub-titles in the silent fashion. The score by Adolph Hallis does a lot of heavy lifting and he would work again with Hitchcock on Number Seventeen the following year. Stage star Kendall makes for an adequate hero: his seasick scenes would make any bored wife run to the arms of Marmont, a star from the earlier era who would also appear for Hitchcock in Young and Innocent and The Secret Agent. Barry is strikingly beautiful, a beestung blonde teeming with sweetness and light. She had dubbed Anny Ondra in the earlier Hitchcock film Blackmail. She would make influential train thriller Rome Express the following year and sadly retired from films after 1933’s Mrs Dane’s Defence. She is now Henrietta, Dowager Duchess of Bedford. Elsie Randolph as the ‘spinster,’ a cruise ship cliche, is a hoot, particularly in the Egyptian market scenes. A regular stage partner of Jack Buchanan, she has the distinction of having acted twice for Hitchcock, forty years apart, since he hired her to play Gladys in Frenzy, the film that marked his return to British cinema, released in 1972! Kendall as the frustrated City office worker finally out of the ‘burbs gets some good scenes with Amann, especially when he’s trying to seduce her and they’re both in fancy dress – it really is a giggle watching him try to get to the bottom of her veils. She never really understood me. I was a bit too much for her. The German-American actress is exceptionally well cast as the femme fatale. The conclusion of course owes a lot to the play that inspired the title – The Tempest. Students of Hitchcock will have a hard time detecting the signature here as he grapples with the form of sound directing but the difficulties illustrate the issues arising from a setbound production (despite some clever production design) and the gap between those limitation and the freer comedy thriller which would become his metier in just a short while with his breakthrough, The Man Who Knew Too Much. The material and the performers for a great screwball comedy were here but it’s just not in the writing. Fascinating not least because it is judged Hitchcock’s great failure and marked the end of his dealings with British International Pictures. There’s only ever been you

Sabotage (1936)

Aka A Woman Alone/I Married a Murderer. You don’t need second sight in a case like this. A ring of foreign saboteurs is causing havoc in London with a series of explosive terrorist attacks. Karl Verloc (Oscar Homolka) is part of the group, but he maintains a cover as a cinema proprietor. His wife (Sylvia Sidney) is beginning to suspect something, though, and so is Scotland Yard undercover Detective Sgt. Ted Spencer (John Loder) who has been assigned to work at the shop next door to the cinema. What neither of them knows is that Verloc uses his wife’s little brother Stevie (Desmond Tester) to deliver the bombs in film canisters… You made London laugh. When one sets out to put the fear of death into people, it’s not helpful to make them laugh. We’re not comedians. Hitchcock always regretted having something major happen in this production – something he never permitted again because he felt it was a mistake, breaking the rules of suspense he was so careful to engineer the scaffolding of his narratives. Nonetheless this impressively constructed story of terror on the streets of London between the wars is hugely atmospheric with excellent effects, a great chase and a startling conclusion. Adapted (loosely) from Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel The Secret Agent (confusingly the title of another Hitchcock film the same year) this is updated by Charles Bennett and action takes place at Piccadilly Circus, Simpsons’ restaurant and other familiar locales including the cinema that is Verloc’s base which allows some meta comments about the viewing experience with the film within a film being Disney’s Who Killed Cock Robin? (one of the Silly Symphonies). The acting wasn’t all to Hitchcock’s taste however and he altered dialogue on set when he was forced to hire Loder instead of an ailing Robert Donat and the film probably suffers a little as a result but this is a tense, serious and exciting work. Shot by Bernard Knowles and edited by Charles Frend. Made at Gainsborough Studios and around London. They’re the people that you and I will never catch. It’s the men they employ that we’re after

Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964)

It’s you Myra it’s always been you. Put-upon asthmatic househusband Billy Savage (Richard Attenborough) is persuaded by his wife Myra (Kim Stanley) a mentally ill medium to kidnap the daughter (Judith Donner) of a wealthy London couple (Mark Eden and Nanette Newman) so that she can locate the victim and tout herself as a successful psychic. Billy collects the ransom in a cat and mouse chase around telephone kiosks and Tube stations in the vicinity of Piccadilly Circus.  The couple pretend to the girl that she’s in a hospital but as Myra begins to lose her grip on reality and believes her stillborn son Arthur is telling her to kill the child Billy decides he must do the decent thing … Splendidly taut adaptation of Mark McShane’s novel by writer/director Bryan Forbes which makes brilliant use of the London locations and exudes tension both through performance and shooting style with the cinematography by Gerry Turpin a particular standout. There are some marvellous sequences but the kidnapping alone with John Barry’s inventive and characterful score is indelible and some of the train scenes are hallucinatory. It’s a great pleasure to see Patrick Magee turn up as a policeman in the final scene.

The Passionate Friends (1949)

In which David Lean commences his passionate affair with le cinema du tourisme. This adaptation of HG Wells’ novel of adultery (of which he knew a little) is full of fabulous awkwardness between banker hubby Claude Rains and perpetually cross wife Ann Todd, who relives her early affair with pre-WW2 lover research scientist Trevor Howard – who turns up unexpectedly in their destination Alpine hotel one fine day after the war, where she awaits her husband’s arrival. His unfounded suspicions drive the old lovers back together and social homicide awaits them all in London… Adapted by Eric Ambler, Stanley Haynes and Lean himself, who did like a bit of Freud, this is a fine exploration of marital issues, decency and class, with an exceptional score by Richard Addinsell underlining the wracking feelings bedevilling the lovers and the betrayed. Rains is brilliant, undercutting the relegation of this to ‘woman’s picture’ and entering into something closer to finely tuned emotion. His upstaging of Todd after a romantic evening she has covered up by a supposed theatre trip is outstandingly tense;  his speech about German romanticism a chilling reminder of the times in which it was made. Todd isn’t up to communicating anything of real value despite the flashbacks she narrates but Howard reminds us of Brief Encounter and all those things that remain unsaid. The ending is quite shocking in many respects and brings it close to those Russian classics we love and admire but don’t really want to experience.

A Run for Your Money (1949)

This Ealing comedy falls into the less than classic category. Brothers Dai (Donald Houston) and Thomas (Meredith Edwards) are the Welshmen who win a newspapercompetition which takes  them on their first trip to London – for a rugby game at Twickenham, what else. It follows their misadventures around the capital when they miss meeting their contact, gardening columnist Whimple (Alec Guinness) and become separated. Dai becomes embroiled with con Moira Lister, Thomas spends his time getting plastered in the city’s pubs and finally meets someone he knows, Huw Price (Hugh Griffith) and they try to find Dai. Good to see the London of the era (there are some smart comments about the city after the war) and the shots by Douglas Slocombe in the Underground station are excellent – there’s a good scene with Griffith and a harp but it’s not enervating, mostly it’s mild, pleasing fun about country mice in the big city. What a lot of writers there were:  Guy Evans was responsible for the story, Richard Hughes, producer Leslie Norman (critic Barry’s dad), and director Charles Frend wrote the screenplay with additional dialogue by Diana Morgan.