Pink String and Sealing Wax (1945)

The story of A BAD WOMAN…Who loved shamelessly…Who murdered ruthlessly… ! The Sutton family headed by sadistic and conventional middle class pharmacist father Mervyn Johns lead a stultifying and cruel Victorian existence;  innkeeper’s wife Googie Withers plots a way out of her nasty marriage by luring the oppressed younger Sutton (Gordon Jackson) into a friendship that will gain her access to his poisons and frame him for her husband’s murder while she carries on with her lover. This airless drama has much to recommend it in terms of setting – there are some rare scenes between gossiping women at the Oyster Bar – and performance, especially Withers, whose fabulous face and figure scream sex. However its emphasis on the unfortunate children of Johns, including an ambitious daughter who wants to make her way as a concert singer, somewhat dissolves the drama’s potential. It’s difficult to believe that Withers will give up as easily as she does – Johns simply doesn’t possess that kind of power outside the four walls of his home. Nonetheless, it was the wonderful Robert Hamer’s atmospheric debut and we love his films, don’t we?  It’s a fairly damning take on 1880s standards. Adapted from Roland Pertwee’s play by Diana Morgan. An Ealing production under Michael Balcon. And for trivia fans, yes, Roland was the father of Jon Pertwee, some people’s best ever Dr Who!

Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)

You would never know that this was an Ealing comedy – it is totally unsentimental. Louis D’Ascoyne Mazzini (Dennis Price) is in prison awaiting his execution when he puts pen to paper and recounts the reason for this turn of events. Born to a beautiful if rash aristocratic mother who ran off with an Italian opera singer, this orphaned young man is now working in a draper’s when his lady love Sibella (Joan Greenwood) marries a love rival. He sets out to dispatch the eight remaining members of the D’Ascoyne line to recuperate the title he feels is rightfully his. All of them – including the venerable Lady Agatha – are played by Alec Guinness. (He also played a ninth!). Louis marries the virtuous wife Edith (Valerie Hobson) of one of them. The range of their respective deaths is stunning. A sublime work of British cinema, adapted from Roy Horniman’s 1907 novel Israel Rank:  The Autobiography of a Criminal by John Dighton and the woefully underrated director Robert Hamer, whose masterpiece this is. Transgressive, ironic and subversive, and the ending is simply genius. Breathtaking black comedy for the ages. Perfection.

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)

Truncated and abbreviated to 125 minutes from its intended original 200+ minute running time it might well be, but there is much to love about this Billy Wilder-IAL Diamond screenplay adaptation of everyone’s favourite ‘tec. With two stories instead of the four plus a flashback (apparently available on Laserdisc – remember them?!), Robert Stephens is the intuitive one with Colin Blakely as Watson, whom he pretends to a forward Russian noblewoman is gay to get out of fathering her child. Then he is taken in – for a spell – by a German spy masquerading as a woman in peril (Genevieve Page) with a detour to Scotland where a Jules Verne-esque submersible, Trappist monks and dwarves at Loch Ness are involved in an elaborate scheme which even attracts the attention of Queen Victoria. Brother Mycroft shows up in the person of Christopher Lee. Warm, witty, compassionate and sad, with a beautiful sense of irony, this is the underrated but gorgeously charming film that inspired the current BBC show. Happy International Sherlock Holmes Day!

Man in the Attic (1953)

Ugly does as ugly is:  there’s a lesson here, folks, Beware ugly people and that means Jack Palance, an actor rather limited by his foreboding appearance. What he lacked in looks he made up in horrible intensity.  In this B-movie adaptation of Marie Belloc Lowndes’ fictionalised Ripper tale, The Lodger (already done by Hitchcock and John Brahm) he’s the self-proclaimed pathologist renting a room in London c1888 from Helen Harley (Frances Bavier),  whose niece, dance hall performer Lily Bonner (Constance Smith) responds to him and ignores warnings about his odd behaviour while all around her London looks for Jack. Hugo Fregonese directs an oft-told tale with surprising dexterity, the theatrical shows are well staged, it’s commandingly shot by Leo Tover, Palance goes off the rails as only he can and it’s great to see Smith, Ireland’s answer to Hedy Lamarr, giving her considerable all as the decent, naive Parisian veteran – surely a contradiction in terms. Adapted by Barré Lyndon and Robert Presnell Jr, edited by the marvellous Marjorie Fowler.

A Study in Terror (1965)

The poster says it all:  the great literary detective versus the notorious serial killer of women in this Sixties fantasy chiller set in Victorian London. Adapted by Derek Ford and Donald Ford from their story which takes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s characters played here by John Neville and Donald Houston, with John Fraser as the aristocratic lunatic terrorising the East End. Produced by those exploitation experts Tony Tenser and Michael Klinger, this could easily have slid into the realms of the lurid but thanks to the great handling by director James Hill, costumes by Motley, delicate cinematography by Desmond Dickinson and an elegant score by John Scott it skirts the edges of taste to produce a gripping, entertaining thriller. The theory presented here is perfectly viable but one that might be scotched by more recent findings (even director Bruce Robinson has spent a decade on this trail). Still, it’s always been fun to speculate about this most horrifying of murderers. The cast is fantastic and just look down the ensemble:  Barbara Windsor, Anthony Quayle, Robert Morley, Adrienne Corri, Judi Dench, Cecil Parker, Kay Walsh, and my beloved Frank Finlay! You had me at hello!

Corpse Bride (2005)

Aka Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride. With the season of spookiness upon us it’s time to look at this stop-motion animation, a reverie of marriage and death and multiple scary lairy characters. In a monochrome world shy sweet pianist Victor Van Dort (Johnny Depp) is about to marry Victoria (Emily Watson) by arrangement through socially ambitious parents when a branch from a tree drags him to the land of the dead where murdered Emily (Helena Bonham Carter) wants to marry HIM. She reunites him with his dead pet dog as the newly married man (albeit to a dead woman) descends to a paradoxical world of colour which is great fun but he needs to get back to reality to ensure Victoria isn’t ensnared in a marriage to villainous Barkis Bittern (Richard E. Grant) who is eventually revealed to be the fiance who murdered Emily! If it’s a little incoherent on the story level it’s fun to watch, with some star talent having fun – Enn Reitel as the maggot/conscience in Emily’s brain, Christopher Lee as Pastor Galswells, Joanna Lumley as Victoria’s mother and composer Danny Elfman as a one-eyed skeleton (modelled on Sammy Davis Jr.). It’s maybe too smooth for stop-motion (using a different camera than the one on Nightmare Before Christmas) but it’s always good to watch Burton’s macabre work at Halloween. Screenplay by John August, Caroline Thompson and Pamela Pettler based on characters created by Burton and Carlos Grangel.

Possession (2002)

To get ahead in academia you have to be pretty tough. My own supervisor told me, I know you’re after my job. And didn’t read a page of my work for three and a half years. And stayed in his job. Quelle surprise. (45% of doctoral candidates drop out because of this kind of sanctioned behaviour.) Well, Roland Michell (Aaron Eckhart) has been passed over for an academic post that went to Fergus Wolfe (Toby Stephens) and has to keep labouring under eccentric Irish Professor Blackadder (Tom Hickey) in search of anything relating to Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam),  the subject of an upcoming celebration and famous for a collection of poems dedicated to his wife (Holly Aird). Mostly Roland is cataloguing recipes. Ensconced in the London Library, however, he steals a couple of handwritten letters tucked in a book which he thinks are written to a lady poet, Christabel La Motte (Jennnifer Ehle). He follows his hunch to the acknowledged expert on her work, lecturer Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow) and despite her extreme misgivings, they visit her relatives, descendants of La Motte, and thence to France and Whitby, on the trail of what they find was a forbidden and adulterous romance. The stories are told in interweaving parallel, with a hint of French Lieutenant’s Woman about it all, but with added Lesbianism (La Motte has an inhouse painter, Lena Headey). Wolfe is assisting American literary bounty hunter Cropper (Trevor Eve) to get anything related to Ash and the mystery thickens and takes on a vicious patina with lives at risk. The story is wonderful even if Neil LaBute is probably the last director on earth you would expect to be handling it.  David Henry Hwang, Laura Jones and LaBute himself each did a draft screenplay. The acting is the problem. Paltrow is horribly stiff, Eckhart cannot pronounce her name correctly (it sounds like Mad) and the stories that emanated from the set about their intolerance of each other and lack of chemistry certainly dooms any reality about their performance. LaBute made Roland brash and American so we get a culture clash that’s underlined a few times in the dialogue. Ehle is rather an insipid player but the romance with Northam is convincing and tragic and the impact on the women in their lives is horribly realistic. AS Byatt’s novel was a great literary bestseller and if it doesn’t work in its entirety (the Gothic potential was clearly not realised in lighting, cinematography or design) it’s a pleasing narrative, occasionally very touching and mostly well told with some nice performances by Tom Hollander and Anna Massey in the supporting cast. Red buses. Books. Libraries. I’m there!

Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016)

I disliked the Tim Burton evocation of Alice in Wonderland so much I almost barfed;  this one, I guess I acclimatised to the concept after all these years, despite misgivings. Even if this doesn’t conform much to the story or the vision of Carroll, perhaps the autumnal hues don’t grate as much as the earlier film. Mia’s back with great big hair, Sacha Baron Cohen does a Werner Herzog impression as Time,we have an explanation for Helena Bonham Carter’s oversized head and Mr Depp lithps hith way through his Hatterisms. Actually, it’s quite good!

The Importance of Being Earnest (1952)

To speak frankly, I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people an opportunity of finding out each other’s characters before marriage. Which I think is never advisable. Valentine’s Day 1895, England. Circumstances compel Ernest (Michael Redgrave), whose real name is Jack Worthing, and Algernon Moncrieff (Michael Denison) to pretend to be someone that they are not.  My name is Ernest in town and Jack in the country. Jack has created a fictional brother to cope with life in the country while Algernon poses as Jack’s brother and uses the name Ernest to woo Jack’s pretty young ward, his adoptive cousin Cecily Cardew (Dorothy Tutin). Jack is in love with Algernon’s cousin Gwendolen Fairfax (Joan Greenwood) whose formidable mother Lady Bracknell (Edith Evans) is not amused. And before he can propose he has to sort out the matter of Cecily who shares with Gwendolen a devotion to the manly name of Ernest and they are both engaged to him … To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness… Straightforward presentation of Oscar Wilde’s classic parlour comedy of manners and mistaken identity, with the immortal Edith Evans giving a peerless rendition of Lady Bracknell. A handbag?! That line can never be delivered by anyone without reference to this performance. The penultimate scene, a face-off between Bracknell and the tutor Miss Prism (Margaret Rutherford) that yields the mystery of identity at the story’s heart, is utterly delectable.  I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on a train. Joan Greenwood was likewise born to play Gwendolen. This can’t be beaten for fidelity to the text, an extraordinary cast and exquisite timing. Virtually every elegant, hilarious line – an aphorism, a truism, a witticism – belongs in a book of quotations. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. Beautifully plush Victoriana adapted and directed by Anthony Asquith. All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his

The Innocents (1961)

It seems almost incidental to mention that this was adapted from a story (The Turn of the Screw) by the master, Henry James.  It is not usual to have a great film sourced from a work of genius. But that is the case here. From the overlit photography by Freddie Francis (which led to Deborah Kerr as the governess wearing shades between shots) to the palpable dread created by the deliberate pace and focus on fetish objects, we are haunted. The growing lasciviousness of little Miles, the occasional appearances of the perverse gardener (Peter Wyngarde), from the ghostly singing at the beginning to the awful cry at the conclusion, we are subliminally involved in this tone poem of horror. Produced and directed by Jack Clayton from a screenplay by Truman Capote, William Archibald and John Mortimer with a sublime, creepy score by Georges Auric. Happy Halloween.