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

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

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!

Sammy Going South (1963)

Aka A Boy Ten Feet Tall. We’re not going south. Port Said, Egypt during the 1956 Suez Crisis. Ten-year old English boy Sammy Hartland (Fergus McClelland) lives with his ex-pat parents. When they are killed in a bombing while Sammy is playing by the canal, he flees the city in the ensuing panic. He sets out to reach his only living relative, Aunt Jane (Zena Walker) his mother’s sister whom he has never met and who lives 5,000 miles to the south in Durban, South Africa, the other end of the continent. Along his journey Sammy encounters a colourful array of characters. His first guide is an Arab peddler (Zia Mohyeddin) who takes him over the mountains and dies in a freak accident when a stone explodes in a fire and ruins his eyes. Sammy is then rescued in Luxor by wealthy tourist Gloria van Imhoff (Constance Cummings) who pays Spyros Dracandopoulos (Paul Stassino) to find him when Sammy runs off and takes a ferry along the Nile. He encounters a gruff old hunter and diamond smuggler, Cocky Wainwright (Edward G. Robinson) whose life is subsequently saved by the boy after Sammy shoots dead a leopard the old man is hunting. The news is out that the boy is missing and being sought. When the police search for Sammy, he pretends he never wanted him for anything except the money being offered as a reward for finding him. Then they arrest the old man, who has been a fugitive for years … Jumpin’ Jehosophat, don’t you think I’ve got eyes in my head?! Perhaps it’s a moot point as to whether director Alexander Mackendrick can be classed an auteur given the variability of his output and this is probably categorised at the lesser end of his films which included the masterpieces Sweet Smell of Success and The Ladykillers. This portrait of childhood is tough yet engaging, somewhere in the sphere of the later A High Wind in Jamaica yet very much moving to its own beat. This boy is tough, wary, diffident, trusting, smart, scared and engaging and newcomer McClelland is given a lot to do with a cast of different characters, most of whom appear to want something from him. He is basically worth a reward and he puts together his own worth. It starts when he loses his parents after he’s been playing down at the Suez Canal – we are placed in the major news event of the late 50s by dint of radio bulletins – and then narrowly avoids a beating by an Egyptian teenager. What follows is an amazing travelogue and his path is traced from Port Said to Luxor, the White Nile, the Sudan and finally Durban, all in different vehicles from donkeys and taxis to a ferry and a missed train and even a plane ride. The wallet he carries is from the rascal who gains his trust with the line, Don’t be frightened. I’m not Egyptian. I’m Syrian. I’m pro-British! That tallies with what was on the verge of being done to him on the streets of Port Said. When the man dies horrifically (we see his death from the child’s point of view) Sammy is smart enough to liberate his wallet which Gloria then finds and Spyros figures out it was stolen when he sees the photo of a sexpot tucked away in it. Adapted from the W. H. Canaway novel by Denis Cannan, this gains traction from the intertitles – starting in December 1956 and finishing March 1957, lending it a realism. But this is not a kid who spreads sweetness and light despite the blond hair and blue eyes – he’s tough as old boots and seems to leave disaster in his wake. When he is presented with the dead leopard’s offspring and Cocky tells the preternatual crack shot he just killed the animal’s mother there is genuine anguish in his eyes at putting the beautiful creature in the same situation as his own – that of an orphan. The moment passes - then he wears her skin – just like Tarzan, he declares. He gets over things but he has to do it on his own terms. The relationship with Cocky is that of a son and a father but Lem (Harry H. Corbett) tells Cocky if he wanted to do that he should have thought of it twenty years earlier. Cocky knows this boy’s heart and he lets him go with a lie which Sammy realises later on. Perhaps this isn’t a classic exactly but it’s determinedly unsentimental, relentlessly pitting this singleminded child on a path towards individuation and experience, come what may. Beautifully shot on location in Kenya (with some second unit shots done clandestinely in Egypt) in CinemaScope and Eastmancolor by the venerable Erwin Hillier, this received its premiere before Queen Elizabeth II 18th March 1963. He has to be left alone

8 Million Ways to Die (1986)

I’m an ex-cop. Los Angeles. Matt Scudder (Jeff Bridges) is a part of LAPD’s Sheriff’s Department and he takes part in a drugs bust that goes badly wrong with his colleagues beaten to death. Six months after the internal investigation he’s in Alcoholics Anonymous celebrating his pin for sobriety but his marriage is gone, his daughter lives with his wife and he’s picking up private eye work from his meetings. A request from a call girl Sunny (Alexandra Paul) brings him back into contact with a drug dealer Willie ‘Chance’ Walker (Randy Brooks) he used to know from the streets who’s now running a flash gambling club where he has a business arrangement with Angel Maldonado (Andy Garcia) who himself has an ongoing interest in another one of the prostitutes, Sarah (Rosanna Arquette). When Sunny turns up at his home looking for help because she’s being threatened Matt agrees but she’s abducted and brutally murdered and he’s too late to help. He wakes up in a detox ward and signs himself out. When he finds evidence against one or other of the men at the club in Sunny’s Filofax, he embarks on a quest for vengeance aided by the discovery of a jewel and a mountain of cocaine while Sarah accompanies him and tries to seduce him before agreeing to help … You’re not a mindless lush after all. Adapted (somewhat) from Lawrence Block’s fantastic New York City-set novel, the fifth in the Matt Scudder series, this was a disappointment on several levels. Oliver Stone did the first pass (and more), with R. Lance Hill (writing as David Lee Henry) then went off to direct a film of his own, so Robert Towne was prevailed upon by director Hal Ashby to do a rewrite but took so long the production was already shooting and changes made on the hoof with improvisation by the cast by the time his pages started arriving. Unrelenting and cliched in ways and draggy in the second half, which is surprising given Ashby’s subtle way of controlling narrative, it retains some of the superficial interest that the cast and behind the scenes team accrues but takes too long to get where it’s going and is horribly violent in one scene. The plausibility of an alcoholic former cop being allowed back in the fold to exert a vigilante-type revenge seriously tests the saw suspension of disbelief. And yet this hovers on the edges of greatness which begs the question why it went wrong. The drift commences with the change in setting – which the opening voiceover does not assist in any way. It’s (obviously) set in New York City. Then, Matt Scudder is an NYC detective, cut from a very different cloth than any denizen of LA. All the performances feel a little too loose in a film that swings between character study and crime story. The contrasting styles of Sunny and Sarah seem off and Angel’s swagger is exaggerated. Bad writing, bad direction or both? I live in a world I didn’t make. Bridges had already done better in the era’s popular noir remake Against All Odds and the thriller Jagged Edge – so this was not his best performance although he has his moments as the lower depths of his addiction to the bottle are plumbed. The major problem appears to be the fact that the film was taken from Ashby and edited by someone else. Ashby, as we know, was one of the great film editors prior to directing so this made absolutely no sense albeit he had his own addiction issues and this was sadly his final feature. This is beautifully shot by Stephen H. Burum with a striking score by James Newton Howard but it fundamentally changes the intent of the book and the re-edit altered it completely. The final shootout is simply unbelievable and not in a good way. Novelist Lawrence Block was not happy (to say the least) with this first screen take on Matt Scudder, as he recounted to this author. You can read more about that and Robert Towne in Chinatowne: The Screenplays of Robert Towne, https://www.amazon.co.uk/ChinaTowne-Screenplays-Robert-Towne-1960-2000/dp/1695887409/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1MXGOF3HFVGNA&keywords=elaine+lennon+chinatowne&qid=1705759297&s=books&sprefix=el%2Cstripbooks%2C847&sr=1-1. Waking up is the hardest part. #600straightdaysofmondomovies

Tread Softly (1952)

The door must remain locked. The seals must remain unbroken. When Madeleine Peters (Frances Day) the star of a new musical revue written by Keith Gilbert (John Bentley) walks out of the show in a plot hatched by her lover Philip Defoe (Olaf Olsen) he thinks the company will have to agree to being forced into keeping her as part of their contract despite her unsuitability. He doesn’t reckon on their finding another location – the Regency, a derelict theatre which has allegedly been haunted since their ‘Hamlet’ leading man died on the premises 40 years earlier. The eccentric widow Isobel Mayne (Nora Nicholson) of the dead actor is only persuaded to hire it out when her son Alexander (Michael Ward) agrees and the company accedes to her request that her late husband’s dressing room remain locked with nobody permitted to enter. With chorus girl Tangye Ward (Patricia Dainton) replacing Madeleine, rehearsals commence at the new home but then a body is found – it’s Alexander Mayne. Tangye is scared off and Gilbert comforts her but when Madeleine is found dead there too the police are called in and Inspector Hinton (Ronald Leigh-Hunt) discovers a link with missing emeralds from a jewel theft carried out years earlier with a suspect recently released from prison. As the secret is close to being exposed everyone’s life is in danger but the show must go on … Murder has been shut up there for forty years. Don’t let it out! The lovely actress Patricia Dainton might have expected a bigger career considering the showcase she has in her debut with five terrific song and dance routines in a very well plotted pacy backstage suspenser. Adapted by Gerald Verner from his novel The Show Must Go On with additional dialogue credits attributed to Donald Ginsberg & Vivian Cox, this was originally a radio serial before it was novelised. In a case of life imitating art, young usurper Dainton did indeed overtake Day in a sense, given that she was now definitely a film actress with a decade of good roles ahead of her, albeit in second features, while Day, a multi-talented star of previous decades, faded from view both as a film and theatre performer (she was a lead in Shaw’s final play Buoyant Billions, 1948) with this among her final screen roles. Her last would be for director Charles Crichton in 1957’s There’s Always a Thursday. Her costumes here were provided by Hardy Amies (who also dressed the Queen). Day’s storied private life with affairs throughout British society (male and female alike, from princes to heiresses) is the stuff of rumour and scandal. She was a panellist on the TV show What’s My Line? when feature offers dried up. This was Dainton’s first time to be paired with Bentley – in fact their next film together, and her second film, Paul Temple Returns, was released one month after this, in December 1952. Her ‘discovery’ on stage therefore coincides with her discovery in the film in a classic theatrical story (mimicking her own background as a dancer) and the romance and mystery produce several twists. John Laurie plays Angus McDonald, the theatrical agent with Olivia Winter his assistant played by Betty Baskcomb, the daughter of famed comic A.W. Baskcomb and who made her screen debut in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much. Aside from the crazy camp dancing by Colin Croft, staged by Alfred Rodriguez, perhaps the oddest thing of all in this production is the similarity between the title song (in a few different iterations here) and the 1980s pop hit, Move Closer. Watch out for legendary choreographer Kenneth MacMillan as a dancer in the troupe. Filmed at London’s Granville Theatre, Waltham Green, long since demolished, as well as Marylebone Studios, this is directed by the very accomplished former documentarian David MacDonald, who earned his movie stripes assisting Cecil B. DeMille and who made some terrific melodramas in the 1940s (The Brothers, The Bad Lord Byron) but was relegated to Bs and could have made much better use of the fascinating locations here. And just think what Stanley Donen could have done with those musical numbers by Ivor Slaney! Brush away the dust – you’ll find an older star

Doctor in Trouble (1970)

Famous doctor meets famous surgeon. Renowned surgeon Sir Lancelot Spratt (James Robertson Justice) arranges a cruise for his patient, the television soap star doctor Basil Beauchamp (Simon Dee). The captain of the ship is Lancelot Spratt’s brother George Spratt (Robert Morley). Doctor Burke (Leslie Phillips) stows away by mistake when chasing his model girlfriend Ophelia (Angela Scoular) onto the ship to propose to her so he can get a job in the United States at a famous hospital. She is one of a group of models doing a fashion shoot with camp photographer Roddy (Graham Chapman). Other passengers aboard ship include self-proclaimed football pools winner Llewellyn Wendover (Harry Secombe) and Mrs. Dailey (Irene Handl), a socially ambitious lady hoping to find a wealthy match for her daughter Dawn (Janet Mahoney) who sets her sights on him. Burke is pursued by Master-at-Arms (Freddie Jones) who correctly suspects that he does not have a ticket. Burke tries various ruses to try to escape him, including dressing up as a doctor. Eventually he is caught and exposed as a stowaway. Captain Spratt orders him to serve as an orderly, scrubbing the ship. When the ship’s doctor (Jimmy Thompson) falls ill from a tropical disease, Burke takes over his duties … I would have thought even the meanest intelligence would recognise that as a porthole. The seventh and final entry in the Doctor series, this is coarse but blandly funny with an extraordinary array of gender-bending jokes that might on the one hand offend all friends of Dorothy but also produce giggles at just how on the money some of the au courant references to the spectrum of sexuality actually are. It’s not what he says that makes me lose my cool, it’s those terrible shirts he wears. Phillips’ is one of the three principal intersecting storylines with this being of even more significance as it involves him with Scoular, his lady love and eventual wife in real life (with a really tragic conclusion, sadly). That magic man of media Dee also features significantly, before his extraordinary streak of lightning eventually abated. And then there’s dumpy Secombe, not our favourite person, who purveys his fake pools win into a sexually satisfying position with several dreadful social faux pas punctuating the way. There are crushing reminders of other, better cruise movies – such as a man clearly cast to resemble Charles Coburn in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as the father of one of hapless Secombe’s lust objects and the series’ own entry Doctor at Sea starring Dirk Bogarde with a brunette Bardot – yet there are genuinely amusing moments amid the strain. This is really a Carry On movie with much of the charm of the early Doctor films in abeyance. We could say it’s all at sea but in reality it was all at the dry dock of Pinewood and no amount of Phillips’ charisma can compensate for the impoverishment of the low-budget vision despite several speeded-up sequences to ape silent slapstick comedies. You take care of the patients, I take care of the doctor. Jaws may drop at the sight of Chapman playing a straight (well… ) role and Graham Stark playing Indian steward Satterjee; while the appearance of Joan Sims in the concluding sequence confirms this film’s genre bending ambition. The producers felt the project was doomed after Robertson Justice became ill and couldn’t as planned play his own twin brother on the ship with Morley’s appearance reducing the laugh rate. The rights were sold to TV with Chapman helping script Doctor in the House (LWT, 1969-1970) and appearing as Roddie. Watch out for Marianne Stone, credited here as ‘Spinster.’ Adapted by Jack Davies from Richard Gordon’s Doctor on Toast, this was, as ever in the series, directed by Ralph Thomas, who had done some uncredited directing work on his brother Gerald’s rival series Carry On Crusing episode! You do get extraordinary people on cruises these days

Not As A Stranger (1955)

It isn’t enough to have a brain you have to have a heart. Ambitious medical student Lucas Marsh (Robert Mitchum) aspires to being a doctor with his own practice. Unable to fund his studies himself, he woos the warm, supportive nurse Kristina (Olivia de Havilland) a Minnesotan Swede, an unlikely mate except it is she who has the financial resources he needs for him to realise his dreams. The couple marries and moves to the small town of Greenville, where Lucas works as an assistant to Dr. Runkleman (Charles Bickford). However, after a series of betrayals, having an affair with local widow (Gloria Grahame) and unaware Kristina is expecting their child, Lucas is forced to face life without the help of others … Gentlemen, this is a corpse! This adaptation by Edna Anhalt and Edward Anhalt of Morton Thompson’s 1954 bestseller is notable on several fronts: the directing debut of producer Stanley Kramer; the comeback of sorts of de Havilland who had decamped to France following her marriage to Pierre Galante, executive editor of Paris Match; and her appearance as a blonde; as well as the pairing of Sinatra and Mitchum, surely two disparate if not opposites of midcentury masculinity with Mitchum giving one of his worst performances; and Grahame as effectively the polar opposite of de Havilland, seemingly existing only in the realm of the sensual, from horseback riding to pouting and smouldering incessantly with that surgically botched and quivering upper lip. De Havilland is first compared with Ava Gardner when she and Mitchum walk out of The Barefoot Contessa at the cinema and she looks positively matronly in the role. It’s a film of peculiarly shifting tones, from the horrible surgery scenes (and this is the first film to feature a closeup of a beating heart), the montages of patients at the smalltown medical office, the awkward collegiate sequences including Lee Marvin (with an odd wig) as a fellow student and the sheer weirdness between Mitchum and Lon Chaney as his alcoholic father. Naturally, there’s a moral lesson here in terms of the Godlike position of certain doctors and the others who aren’t as familiar with the texts but who muck along just nicely until they let a typhoid case go unheeded. The thing that kills me about idealists is just how far you go, chides Sinatra as Alfred. And, Sometimes I wish I had 75 more pounds. I’d belt you one! How Mitchum shoulders his superiority and ultimately is forced to confront his Achilles heel and emotional unavailability is the whole thing and he doesn’t handle it well either in performance or character despite the three contrasting role models for a father, his actual father and then his medical mentors. And then, the inevitable. God help him – he made a mistake

The Leather Boys (1964)

I can’t believe we’re spliced. I feel just the same. Working class London cockney teenagers Dot (Rita Tushingham) and biker Reggie (Colin Campbell) get married even though she lives freely under her mother’s (Betty Marsden) roof, encouraged to get together with him. Their marriage soon turns sour. During an unsuccessful honeymoon at a Butlins holiday camp in Bognor Regis, Reggie becomes alienated from the brassy, self-absorbed Dot who gets her hair dyed blonde and is far too vivacious in company. Afterward, they begin to live increasingly separate lives as Reggie becomes more involved with his biker friends, especially the eccentric Pete (Dudley Sutton). Reggie also loses interest in having sex with Dot who never cleans up their bedsit and can’t cook. When Reggie’s grandfather dies, Dot complains that Reggie’s support for his bereaved grandmother has stopped them visiting the cinema. Her boorish behaviour at the funeral and her refusal to move in with Reggie’s grandmother (Gladys Henson) leads to a big row. She leaves, while Reggie remains with his grandmother, who will not leave her own house. He brings in Pete, who has been forced to leave his lodgings, to stay as a lodger with her. The two share a bed. Meanwhile, Dot shows an interest in Brian (Johnny Briggs) another biker. The following day, Pete and Reggie drive to the seaside. Reggie wants them to chat up a couple of girls but Pete has no interest. Reggie now intends returning to Dot, who has hatched a plan to get him back by pretending to be pregnant. Dot is sitting with Brian when she tells Reggie of her supposed pregnancy. Believing he can’t possibly be the father, Reggie accuses Brian and the two men fight. Men? You look like a couple of queers. Dot visits Reggie’s grandmother’s house where she learns that he shares his bed with Pete and argues with the pair of them when she sees how they are living. … People don’t talk like that in real life. Adapted by Gillian Freeman from her 1961 novel (which she published pseudonymously as ‘Eliot George’!), this febrile drama speaks to a London of a certain era before the high rises destroyed communities but according to Tushingham the dialogue the cast were given was out of touch and didn’t exactly roll off the tongue, something they realised when they hung out with London’s real biker subculture. She, Campbell and Sutton improvised much of it in the company of Canadian director Sidney J. Furie who gave them all a couple of days off during the Cuban Missile Crisis (this was shot September-October 1962) because he was so depressed about what seemed like the end of the world. Speaking on Talking Pictures’ documentary Back to The Ace with Rita Tushingham, the leading lady, who was twenty during production, recalls the fun they had on set, the opportunity to visit Butlins in Bognor Regis (which she declares she would never ordinarily have done!) and how innovative Sutton was – he certainly has some fruity lines. When he takes advantage of his friend’s immature marriage it’s like a bomb going off. You look like a bunch of dead roses. He and Campbell died within 6 months of each other in 2018 while Briggs, another TV stalwart, died in 2021. Freeman was on set for several days and according to Tushingham she can be seen in a couple of shots. The Ace Cafe in London’s Wembley suburb on the North Circular, off Beresford Avenue between the Grand Union Canal and Stonebridge Park Depot, is still going strong today as a centre for bikers and rockers, after closing for a period after 1969 and being used as a tyre salesroom. The source novel had been suggested to Freeman by agent/publisher Anthony Blond as a Romeo and Romeo in the South London suburbs and it starts out as a story of an incompatible marriage but with that exploitation title you know it’s heading somewhere more interesting, going beyond the so-called kitchen sink realism tropes to an intersection of sex, class and gay life. Part of the attraction is of course the biking sequences, particularly the road trip to Edinburgh. It’s extraordinary to see how normal the treatment of two young working class men in a relationship could be at this point, given that homosexuality wouldn’t be decriminalised in the UK until 1967. The concluding sequence, when Reggie is finally exposed to the fact of Pete’s gay life at the Tidal Basin Tavern in Silvertown, provides a sharp shock for his character and forces a decision. Up to this point it’s really all subtext and insinuation. It’s certainly notable that it took writing by women to address the topic of homosexuality in the era with Victim (co-written by Janet Green) appearing a couple of years earlier but broaching the issue far more directly. By the time this was released Kenneth Anger’s legendary short film Scorpio Rising would explicitly link bikers with gay sex, receiving its premiered 29 October 1963 at the Gramercy Arts Theater in NYC. Locations for The Leather Boys include: Beresford Aveneue, Park Royal; Haydons Road and the Bethel Church on Kohat Road, Wimbledon; Harbut Road and Southolme Road (now demolished) in Wandsworth; and St Luke’s C of E School (now demolished) in Kingston Upon Thames, as well of course as Bognor Regis where the fresh cinematography of Gerald Gibbs is at its best. That sequence between the lads and Brenda (Valerie Varnam) and June (Jill Mai Meredith) is among the most flavourful in the film. This is beloved cult cinema, both familiar and groundbreaking, fascinating in terms of its position within British screen history, filled with contrasting performance styles and full of the distinctive visual flair of director Furie, still going strong in his ninetieth year. Freeman died in 2019 and aside from some clever novels, ballets and a pioneering study of pornographic literature, is also known for the Robert Altman thriller, That Cold Day in the Park. Her daughters Harriet and Matilda Thorpe are actresses. The Smiths’ 1987 song Girlfriend in a Coma is an homage to the film. Morrissey’s decision to put a Cilla Black cover on the B-side reportedly caused Johnny Marr to leave the band which is why they’re not in the video. We don’t have to live and die together – do we?

At the Ace Cafe in 2007.

The single’s cover featuring playwright Shelagh Delaney

Rita Tushingham today (The Guardian)

Wonka (2023)

May I present, Willy Wonka’s wild and wonderful wishy-washy Wonka walker! Please, don’t make me say that again. Aspiring magician, inventor, and chocolatier Willy Wonka (Timothee Chalamet) arrives in Europe to establish his chocolate shop at the Galeries Gourmet. Burning through his meager savings, he is coerced to stay at Mrs. Scrubitt’s (Olivia Colman) boardinghouse by her henchman Bleacher (Tom Davis) and despite orphan Noodle’s (Calah Lane) warning about the fine print, signs a contract because he is illiterate. To pay them off, Wonka introduces hoverchocs, chocolates that make people fly, facing mockery from three rival chocolatiers who call the Chief of Police (Keegan-Michael Key) to confiscate his earnings for selling without a chocolate store. Unable to pay the exorbitant fees imposed on him by the contract, Wonka is captured and starts to work in a launderette for Mrs. Scrubitt alongside five other captives, including Noodle. Learning of a Chocolate Cartel consisting of the rival chocolatiers, who exploit the Chief’s weakness for chocolate to force Wonka to leave town, Wonka makes his escape with the help of Noodle; while he promises her a lifetime supply of chocolates, she promises to teach him how to read. Wonka tells Noodle that his affinity for chocolate stems from his late mother (Sally Hawkins) and mentions the theft of his chocolates by an enigmatic orange man who has been stealing them for years. To produce his signature chocolate, Wonka and Noodle travel to the local zoo, milking Abigail the giraffe. Together with other launderette workers, they embark on a chocolate selling crusade to alleviate their debts while using tunnels underneath the city to evade Scrubitt and the Chief. Unmasking an Oompa Loompa called Lofty (Hugh Grant) as the thief, Wonka discovers that the Oompa Loompa seeks retribution for the cocoa beans Wonka took from Loompaland years ago under Lofty’s watch, before he escapes by duping Wonka. Using the funds raised from selling chocolates, the captives open Wonka’s dream chocolate store. The Chief and the Chocolate Cartel, now unable to arrest him since he has a legitimate shop, expose him to Scrubitt. Infusing his chocolates with Yeti sweat, Scrubitt incites chaos among the customers, leading to the destruction of Wonka’s store. Wonka agrees to the Cartel’s offer to leave town by ship to pay off everyone’s debts. All of the workers are released from the launderette except Noodle; Cartel leader Arthur Slugworth (Paterson Joseph) pays Scrubitt to keep her there indefinitely. Wonka deduces that Noodle is Slugworth’s niece before he and Lofty are forced to jump off the boat that’s been rigged to explode. After rescuing Noodle with the help of the group, they devise a strategy to obtain the Cartel’s incriminating account book. Taking advantage of Abigail’s distraction, Wonka and Noodle infiltrate the Cartel’s base. They are confronted by the Cartel, who reveal that Noodle, who was reported dead to her mother, was left by Slugworth to Scrubitt in order to eliminate her claim to the family fortune … Many people have come here to sell chocolate, they’ve all been crushed by the Chocolate Cartel. You can’t get a shop without selling chocolate, and you can’t sell chocolate without a shop. An origins story for the Roald Dahl character already adapted to the big screen in live action form not once but twice, this is sweetness and light itself, a story by Paul King developed into a screenplay by King & Simon Farnaby (who makes his customary cameo) following their successful Paddington collaborations. It was apparently conceived as a ‘companion piece’ to the Gene Wilder 1971 version and a prequel to a presumed new version of the 2005 film that starred Johnny Depp. Temptation is very hard to resist. In other words, it is little to do with Dahl and more to do with the Paddington team assembling again to plug a gap of fresh sentiment in abeyance at the cinema since Paddington 3 is nowhere to be seen. Derived from the early section of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and augmented with characters from a short story and villains from Fantastic Mr Fox, this musical extravaganza boasts a winning performance from the leading man who sings and moves well in a seamless production that’s charming, beautifully imagined (in a Hogwartsian style), politically correctly cast when it isn’t utilising the great and good of the British acting fraternity, playful, winsome, witty and heartwarming. Grant’s tiny (in every sense of the word) role as the Oompa Loompa is rightly lauded, perhaps anticipating a repeat success after his notoriously entertaining villain in Paddington 2. It’s a great idea, as one of the character says. But this absurdly saccharin tale is not the perversity purveyed by Roald Dahl. More sweet than sour, perhaps it should have been called Wonky, because the unsettling villains, Slugworth, Prodnose (Matt Lucas) and Fickelgruber (Mathew Baynton) are far more Dahl than Chalamet’s bland candyman. The songs are composed by Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy with incidental music by Joby Talbot but the use of the original film’s theme is just a reminder of what was achieved fifty years ago. Mr. Wonka, I can see you’re a man of great ingenuity