Challengers (2024)

You’ve never seen her, man. She’s in another league. 2019: married tennis power couple former player Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) and currently injured star Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) have a young daughter Lily (AJ Lister) who likes to stay in hotels. Under Tashi’s coaching, Art has become a top pro. He is one US Open title away from a Career Grand Slam but he is struggling to regain his form after an injury. Hoping to return him to form, Tashi enters Art as a wild card in a Challenger event in New Rochelle, New York to boost his confidence by beating lower-level opponents. His former best friend Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) and Tashi’s ex-boyfriend is now an unknown player living out of his car, scraping by on the winnings from the lower circuit and also enters the New Rochelle event. 2006: high schoolers and childhood best friends Patrick and Art win the junior doubles title at the US Open. Afterwards, they watch Tashi a highly lauded young tennis prospect make mince meat of the opposition on court. Then they meet her at a party later that night. Usually their attractions are separate but Tashi is the first person to whom Patrick and Art are both attracted. The three make out in a motel room but stop short of having sex. With the two boys playing each other the next day, Tashi says she will give her phone number to whichever of them wins. Patrick wins the match and later signals to Art that he had sex with Tashi by placing the ball in the neck of the racket prior to serving – a tic of Art’s. Tashi and Art go on to play college tennis at Stanford University, while Patrick turns professional and begins a long distance relationship with Tashi. A jealous Art questions Tashi about whether Patrick loves her, and Patrick, recognising Art’s jealously, playfully reassures him of his and Tashi’s connection. Patrick and Tashi fight when she gives him unsolicited tennis advice and he says he views her as a peer, not his coach. In the next match which Art watches without Patrick, Tashi suffers a severe knee injury. Patrick returns to comfort Tashi but she demands he leave, with Art taking her side. Art aids Tashi in her recovery but she is unsuccessful in resuming her tennis career. I want you to join my team because I want to win. A few years later Tashi reconnects with Art and becomes his coach and the two begin a romantic relationship. He reveals that he and Patrick have not talked since Tashi’s injury. In 2011, Tashi and Art are now engaged and Art’s career is on the up. Tashi and Patrick run into each other at the Atlanta Open and have a one night stand, which Art secretly notices. 2019: Starting at opposite ends of the seeding, Art and Patrick advance through the brackets at New Rochelle until they find themselves facing each other in the tournament’s final match. In a sauna the day before the match, Patrick attempts to reconnect with Art but Art rejects Patrick by saying his career is over and he, Art, will be remembered. Patrick secretly asks Tashi to be his coach and lead him to one last winning season, sensing she is unhappy with Art and that Art is tired of playing but she rejects him … Which one is which? Take three highly charismatic young actors, place them in competition with each other sexually and professionally, complicate things with a love triangle and the monotony and sacrifice of life as sportsmen and women and you have the ingredients for a cracking drama. Director Luca Guadagnino returns with a tennis story – a surprising fact particularly given that there haven’t been any good ones but the screenplay from Justin Kuritzkes is multi-faceted. Not just a sports film but a romance, a thriller and a portrait of generalised anxiety erupting from having to sustain a career, creating monetising opportunities from every win, enduring pain, dealing with catastrophic injury, burnout, a friendship contained within the rise and fall narrative that all sportspeople experience over time and driven characters playing at marriage. Using the New Rochelle Challenger event as a framing device intensifies the pressures of the relationship past and present – we see where they are now and how they got there with the catalysing event an almost-threesome that prefigures everything else in their destiny. And as Tashi explains, Tennis is a relationship. What an impressive cast. Faist is the dazzling actor who was by far the best thing about Spielberg’s West Side Story remake – awards should have come his way but the film fell foul of COVID lockdown release schedules just as this one was delayed from Fall 2023 due to the SAG-AFTRA strike. Here he’s the walking wounded and he plays tender and vulnerable so well. O’Connor is the talented Brit who has created so many great performances and powers his way through this with a life in freefall and a smirking swagger, never fully out of love with Tashi. Zendaya is finally being allowed to act nearer her age (27 at time of release) and is so famous she’s currently on the covers of both UK and US Vogue, such is her pull for advertisers and the youth audience, a combination of Euphoria and Spider-Man fans with a monster sci-fi epic under her belt following Dune 2. Watching the guys watch her on court at the 2006 US Open and later at a party, open-mouthed and lustful like heat-seeking missiles, is highly amusing and sets up the relationship’s eventual complexities with her at the fulcrum, literally calling the shots. Aren’t you everybody’s type? It also sets in motion the director’s familiar focus – young people and their romantic travails – although we know the starting point is the end point, or thereabouts, which is a little like watching Titanic and knowing the outcome but now we get to invest in the characters as they encounter each other 13 years later with everything that has gone on since that first fateful encounter. You typically fall apart in the second round. As the guys get reacquainted with their game and Tashi is turned off Art because his game is off and she lives through him, Patrick sees his chance to upset the applecart, pointing up the performative aspect of all their public lives. Thus the scene is set for Round Two in their lives, rivalries intact. It’s about winning. And I do. A lot. For a sports movie love triangle this fun and sexy we have to go back in time to 1977 and Semi-Tough with Burt and Kris and Jill. That was smart and screwball-y too but set in the world of football. How are you going to look at me if I still can’t beat Patrick Zweig? This is tense and exhilarating and wonderfully played by a cast that is exceptionally well matched and hot for each other. Love all? Not quite. But this is a smash, with a zippy score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Who wouldn’t love you? MM#4545

The Lesson (2023)

Good writers have the sense to borrow from their elders. Great writers steal! Liam Sommers (Daryl McCormack) is an aspiring ambitious young writer and Oxford English grad whiling away his twenties tutoring potential Oxbridge entrants for their exams. He eagerly accepts a position at the family estate of his idol, renowned author JM Sinclair (Richard E. Grant) who hasn’t published since the tragic death of his older son. Liam is tutoring his seventeen-year old son Bertie (Stephen McMillan) under the watchful eye of his French mother, sculptress and art curator Helene (Julie Delpy). JM is cold to Liam whereas Helene checks up on her son each day. Liam manages to help JM with a computer problem when the novelist can’t print something out. Liam wonders about a second server in another location in the house. Helene asks Liam about his writing – and reminds him he included his dissertation subject on his CV – JM Sinclair. His technological nous is such that Sinclair eventually offers him to swap novels. Liam compliments his idol’s work but says the ending feels like a different writer whereas JM destroys Liam’s efforts with cutting comments. Then Liam finds a file that illustrates that he is ensnared in a web of family secrets, resentment, and retribution … We don’t talk of his work, we don’t talk of Felix. Follow those rules and you should be fine. A working class wannabe is invited into a wealthy household and eventually his presence apparently destroys the power base and he is handed the keys of the kingdom. The head of household is played by Richard E. Grant. Sounds like Saltburn? Yes, and any or all iterations of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley. In this case Grant is a revered novelist and the tutor for his truculent son has written his dissertation on him and has ambitions to write novels himself. And it appears that Delpy’s Helene is a real femme fatale as the story unravels. So we might call this Slowburn. In fact, it is a very clever wonderfully constructed mystery thriller focused on writerliness and authorship with death as its beating heart. Quite who might be teaching whom, and what the lesson is, changes with each of the three acts and there’s a great payoff (in fact, there’s more than one). Everyone’s intentions are concealed, nature and water are utilised symbolically to plunder the psychological text and the central motif – the rhododendron – is key to the family secret which spills out to engulf Liam, the visitor with ulterior motives. He is played by Irish actor McCormack, whose subtle ingratiating into this warped family picture is not necessary because for quite some time he’s the only person here who has no idea why he’s really been hired. As he adds to the Post-Its for his next novel trusted butler Ellis (Crispin Letts) takes note because the references are entirely parasitic, reminding us that this plot has been used before with Jean-Paul Belmondo in The Spider’s Web and Terence Stamp in Theorem, throroughoing murderous black comedies about the bourgeoisie eating itself. However, integrating the writing experience into this social analysis, the suicide of an older son and a wife’s intricate plan to get revenge while saving her younger son from the same fate, add an entirely new dimension to the premise by debut screenwriter Adam MacKeith. The scheme is brilliantly exposed, with even clever clogs Liam not anticipating the conclusion. You’re not the first. Grant is scarily good as the dinner table bully mercilessly exploiting his older son’s death in private while a chilly Delpy’s character has secrets in abundance. Beautifully shot by cinematographer Anna Patarakina at Haddon House in Derbyshire with a sharp score by Isobel Waller-Bridge to match the shrewd and finely etched performances, this is a marvellous watch, a modern British noir, with an appropriate reminder of an old school screen villainess in the film Grant’s vicious Sinclair watches in his cinema, another element of planting that pays off properly in a knowing thriller. Directed by first-timer Alice Troughton. What makes an ending?

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

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

Angel Heart (1987)

It’s funny, I’ve a feeling I’ve met you before. New York City, 1955. Private investigator Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke) is contacted by a man named Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro) to track down John Liebling, a pre-war crooner known professionally as ‘Johnny Favorite’ who suffered severe neurological trauma, resulting from injuries received in World War 2. Favorite’s incapacity disrupted some kind of contract with Cyphre regarding collateral for his investment in his career and Cyphre believes a private mental hospital in Poughkeepsie where Favorite was receiving radical psychiatric treatment for shell shock has falsified records. At the hospital, Harry discovers the records showing Favorite’s transfer were falsified by a physician named Albert Fowler (Michael Higgins). After Harry breaks into his home, Fowler admits that years ago he was bribed by a man and woman so that the two could abscond with the disfigured Favorite, his face wrapped in bandages, driving him away from the hospital. Believing that Fowler knows more than he’s saying, Harry locks him in his bedroom, forcing him to suffer withdrawal from a morphine addiction. The next morning, he returns to the house to find that the doctor has apparently shot himself. Harry tries to break his contract with Cyphre but agrees to continue the search when Cyphre offers him $5,000. He discovers that Favorite had a wealthy fiancée named Margaret Krusemark but had also begun a secret affair with a woman named Evangeline Proudfoot. Harry travels to New Orleans and meets with Margaret (Charlotte Rampling), who tells him Favorite is dead, or at least dead to her. Evangeline died years before but is survived by her 17-year-old daughter, Epiphany Proudfoot (Lisa Bonet) who was conceived during her mother’s affair with Favorite and is herself the mother of a toddler. When Epiphany is reluctant to speak, Harry tracks down Toots Sweet (Brownie McGhee) a guitarist and former Favorite bandmate. After Harry uses force to try to extract details of Favorite’s last known whereabouts, Toots refers him back to Margaret. The following morning, police detectives inform Harry that Toots has been murdered. Harry returns to Margaret’s home and finds her murdered, her heart removed with a ceremonial knife. He is later attacked by enforcers of Ethan Krusemark – Margaret’s father, a powerful denizen of Louisiana – who order him to leave town. At his hotel, Harry finds Epiphany. He invites her into his room, where they have sex during which Harry has visions of blood dripping from the ceiling and splashing around the room. He later confronts Krusemark (Stocker Fontelieu) who reveals that he and Margaret were the ones who took Favorite from the hospital. Favorite was actually a powerful occultist who sold his soul in exchange for stardom. He got his stardom but then sought to renege on the bargain. To do so, Favorite kidnapped a young soldier who was of the exact same age as Favorite and strongly resembling him from Times Square and performed a Satanic ritual on the boy, murdering him and eating his still-beating heart in order to steal his soul. Favorite planned to assume the identity of the murdered soldier but was drafted and then injured overseas. Suffering severe facial trauma and amnesia, Favorite was sent to the hospital for treatment. After Krusemark and his daughter took him from the hospital, they left him at Times Square on New Year’s Eve 1943 (the date on the falsified hospital records). While hearing Krusemark’s story, Harry runs into the bathroom, vomits and continually asks the identity of the soldier… Secret love should stay secret. Written and directed by Alan Parker, this atmospheric adaptation of William Hjortsberg’s 1978 novel Falling Angel is overripe with symbols and intimations of evil, the power of association and issues of identity. Of course the major twist is pretty obvious and there is a weakness in Parker’s screenplay (which alters the novel somewhat) with the revelations arising not from any kind of believable detective work but just happening following Harry’s attending at different destinations rather than the nuts and bolts of storytelling which gives the plot away much too early. For a film so evidently committed to shock value it doesn’t indulge in anything deeper about the propensity of people toward evil and seems content to float on the surface of effects which is disappointing given the potential of the setting. De Niro’s main contribution to the unravelling is to have well manicured nails and Johnny Favorite’s alleged stardom remains something of a McGuffin. Beautiful as this looks and sounds, with Rourke at his most appealing, this had censorship issues due to the nature of his sexual interaction with Bonet, the young star of TV’s Cosby Show and the final twist could only surprise Harry himself. I know who I am!

Hammer the Toff (1952)

They weren’t shooting at me. I think they were shooting at you. On the train to the seaside resort of Brighthaven, Richard Rollinson (John Bentley) is sharing a carriage with an attractive young lady called Susan Lancaster (Patricia Dainton). The journey is rudely interrupted when the window of the carriage is shattered by a barrage of bullets. Richard learns from the shaken Susan that she is on her way to join an uncle on holiday and offers to escort her safely to her hotel. They find out that her uncle has disappeared but has left Susan a package. Later, Rollinson happens to overhear a pair of shady characters discussing how to kidnap Susan. She explains to him that her uncle is a scientist who has developed a secret formula which sinister actors are keen to get their hands on. They have been receiving menacing threats hence their flight to Brighthaven. Rollinson consults his old colleague Inspector Grice (Valentine Dyall) of Scotland Yard, who tells him that the evidence is pointing in the direction of a particular man as being responsible for the abduction. Honour among thieves, you know. And I am a thief. Using his friends and contacts in the East End including Bert Ebbutt (Wally Patch) and Jolly (Roddy Hughes), Rollinson investigates, only to be surprised by his findings upon meeting Linnett (John Robinson), the man the coppers are tracking. The idea of a Robin Hood one moment and a murderer the next just doesn’t make sense. Then Susan is kidnapped and all bets are off … All crooks and all crookery concern me. Adapted by John Creasey from his own novel, this British B capitalises on the cut and thrust of a supposed aristo versus the criminal class, a bit of amusing contrasting lingo to dress up a careworn scenario, with a touch of seduction thrown in on the side to make the most of Bentley’s attractive persona and looks. Charming Dainton supplies great spark to the banter with sleuth Bentley but really only punctuates the story. She features at the beginning with the meet cute on the train, forces issues in the middle and at the conclusion, following the inevitable rescue and face-off with the truly vicious enemy who’s framing a Robin Hood-like villain: that character brings real menace to proceedings. The sequel to Salute the Toff, also shot in Summer 1951, with the same director and most of the same cast, it moves at a sprightly pace and it’s a great opportunity to see Bentley in his prime. He spent his latter years married to Meg Richardson (played by Noele Gordon) on legendary TV soap Crossroads (1964-1988). Watch out for Charles Hawtrey as a cashier. Directed by the prolific Maclean Rogers. I am the Hammer #4343 Mondomovies

The Third Alibi (1961)

She’s changed since she got her divorce. Composer Norman Martell (Laurence Payne) is in the middle of writing a musical. He’s having an affair with his wife Helen’s (Patricia Dainton) divorced half-sister, Peggy (Jane Griffiths) and driving her home from a party accidentally knocks a man down and drives away despite Peggy attempting to get him to stop and help. Helen discovers that she has a terminal heart condition and begs Dr Murdoch (Edward Underdown) not to tell her husband. Martell is in the middle of writing a musical and is up to his neck in rehearsals. Peggy repeatedly asks him to obtain a divorce and marry her and he finally agrees when she tells him she’s pregnant. It’s just one of those things that can happen to any married couple. He finally asks Helen, who refuses his request out of sibling rivalry, saying that their parents had always made her give way to Peggy’s demands but this is one time she will not give in. She suggests that the child’s father may well be someone else. Martell can’t just leave Helen, as she manages his royalty income and runs his life. Instead, he plots her murder with Peggy, intending to use the tape recorder he uses in his composing to establish an alibi as well as relying on the man on the caravan on the hill who watches his home constantly. Peggy meanwhile will go to the local cinema and make a fuss so that they remember her there. Helen, however, has decided to allow the divorce, and goes to tell her sister but when she goes to Peggy’s home, Heather Cottage, she sees Martell’s car and overhears their plans and uses them to devise a murder plan herself … What’s happening to us? Adapted from Pip Baker and Jane Baker’s play A Moment of Blindness by regular collaborators producer Maurice J. Wilson and director Montgomery Tully, this delves into the nitty gritty of a functional marriage and the demands of a mistress. When Martell viciously snipes at Helen, he snarls, When did you last talk of something that was really important? Then he takes off to her half-sister’s suburban bungalow, emphasising the seedy reality of middle class adultery. Who does she think she is, the Queen of Sheba, Peggy says of her sister. The confrontation between the sisters is well managed – years of resentment come pouring out: Now you’ll have to find someone else to father your child. After the murder the area’s gossipy earwigging phone operator Miss Potter (Lucy Griffiths) describes the traffic of men into Peggy’s home: She didn’t have many lonely evenings. The ultimate irony of the piece as the two murder plots unravel and Superintendent Ross (John Arnatt) unwinds a pair of perfect plots is beautifully revealed with a delicious climax. There’s a striking performance by Cleo Laine as one of the musical’s performers, singing Now and Then which offers appropriate commentary on the adulterous action. This is snappily paced and photographed (by James Harvey), with phonecalls and doorbells regularly punctuating the tightly controlled action and Don Banks’ score jazzing up the licentiousness. A very tasty British B. There’s no such thing as a small risk

Always a Bride (1953)

To a hotel like ours, a beautiful charming guest is always an asset. Brits abroad, Clare Hemsley (Peggy Cummins) and her father Victor (Ronald Squire) are masters of an unusual con. Together, they visit upscale areas around the South of France and pose as newlyweds, gaining the locals’ trust. She would prefer a more sedate lifestyle in the suburbs. Arriving in Monte Carlo they practise a well-established routine in their posh hotel where they’ve booked the Honeymoon Suite. Then Victor ‘vanishes’ with Clare’s inheritance. Like clockwork, wealthy residents gather around and hand out their own money to help poor Clare, who intends to regroup with Victor in Nice to split the loot. The scheme is flawless – until Clare falls for Terence Winch (Terence Morgan), a government finance inspector, who tracks her down just as Victor and his old mate pickpocket Teddy (Geoffrey Sumner) try to sell their latest place of residence the famous Hotel Negresco to wealthy Cockney Dutton (James Hayter) staying on his yacht in the harbour … When I’m with a woman who hasn’t yet reached her prime I pretend to know everything. When I’m with a woman who’s reached her prime I pretend to know nothing. This father-daughter act is persuasive and funny, so when handsome Revenue inspector Morgan rocks up at a time when the limit on British spending outside the country is £40 and then falls for the crookedest girl around it proves a neat twist on the romcom formula. This is a game in which I hold all the cards. The invariable double-double-double cross when it happens is a thing of joy. There’s clever writing by Peter Jones and the director Ralph Smart and a lot of cheeky lines. Squire is in his element as the gruff old trickster and Marie Lohr is impressive as the unlikely Dowager in the gang while David Hurst has fun as Beckstein, a drunken chef. And was there ever a more sweetly ingratiating grifter than lovely Cummins? Morgan is turned – the ultimate twist – as he decides she really is the girl for him. There’s a jaunty score by Benjamin Frankel. This is a terrific portrait of the post-war Riviera, shame it was made in black and white. Utterly charming. Underneath this veneer of respectability is a man who’ll stop at nothing to get what he wants

Trent’s Last Case (1952)

 

The crowd is very friendly. English newsman Philip Trent (Michael Wilding) wants to retire and carry on with his art but he is lured back to the fray and reckons American business tycoon Sigsbee Manerson’s (Orson Welles) suicide was murder and that his widow Margaret’s (Margaret Lockwood) lover John Marlowe (John McCallum) did it but a series of interviews yield a very different perspective … Never cultivate a luxury until you can afford to support it as a habit. The third version of the 1913 E.C Bentley murder mystery adapted here by Pamela Bower is a stop-start affair with three flashbacks giving us the story as it might have been, a la Rashomon or even Stage Fright (which also starred Wilding) but there’s so much repetitive staging it might be twenty-three. Producer/director Herbert Wilcox had made a star of his wife Anna Neagle and for reasons one suspects might be nefarious gave her box office rival Lockwood her comeback here after two years away and tied her to a contract that ended her screen career. Hmm. One staid hour in finally sees the appearance of Welles (in the style of The Third Man) or more properly his huge prosthetic proboscis and the brows which enter the room ahead of him, then the plot really unfurls and it’s not as straightforward as the outline suggests. Kenneth Williams gives his best Welsh accent in the witness box, Sam Kydd shows up as a policeman and there’s an opportunity to see the acclaimed pianist Eileen Joyce perform in the concert sequence. For the second time the Manderson case is closed

Witness for the Prosecution (1957)

Wilfrid the Fox! That’s what they call him, and that’s what he is! When Leonard Vole (Tyrone Power) approaches ailing veteran London barrister Sir Wilfrid Roberts (Charles Laughton) to defend him on a charge of murdering a wealthy widow who was enamored of him, going so far as to make him the main beneficiary of her will. Strong circumstantial evidence all points to Vole as the killer. Sir Wilfrid’s nurse Miss Plimsoll (Elsa Lanchester) objects on the grounds of her client’s ill health. Vole’s former wife Christine Helm (Marlene Dietrich) a German refugee provides an alibi for him. But then she turns up in court to testify against him and Sir Wilfrid is contacted by a mysterious woman, who (for a fee) provides him with letters written by Christine to a mysterious lover named Max  …  I am constantly surprised that women’s hats do not provoke more murders. Adapted from Agatha Christie’s 1953 stage play (based on her 1925 short story) by Larry Marcus with the screenplay by Harry Kurnitz (who had written whodunnits pseudonymously) and director Billy Wilder, who chose this project because he so admired its construction. Essentially, this is his Hitchcock film, a brilliantly made comic suspenser with rat-a-tat dialogue to die for and what an ending! And what stars! In a film which hugely improved on Christie’s characterisation, Dietrich smothers the screen with charisma in both her (dis)guises while Power is superb as the smooth charmer he made his own. Lanchester is gifted as many good lines as anyone in the cast including,  Personally, I think the government should do something about those foreign wives. Like an embargo. How else can we take care of our own surplus. Don’t you agree Sir Wilfrid? Her real-life husband of course plays the wily lawyer and he is magnificent: his expressions and business are masterful. There are some welcome familiar faces – John Williams (a Hitchcock regular), Henry Daniell and Una O’Connor, the only original member of the Broadway cast to reprise her role. Beautifully staged and paced, shot by Russell Harlan on sets by Alexandre Trauner with Dietrich costumed by Edith Head, this breathtaking entertainment is a classic film, an object lesson in adaptation with wit and ingenuity to spare. Both Dietrich and Power sing I May Never Go Home Anymore (uncredited) and this is his last completed film. But this is England, where I thought you never arrest, let alone convict, people for crimes they have not committed