Force of Nature: The Dry 2 (2024)

One decision – one small mistake – can change everything. Federal police detective Aaron Falk (Eric Bana) attempts to coerce further information about an international money laundering scheme from a company employee, Alice Russell (Anna Torv) but she refuses to give him any further information when he approaches her on the school run. The next day, she embarks on a corporate team-building hiking retreat to the rainforest in the (fictitious) Giralang Ranges of Victoria with four other company employees, her boss Jill Bailey (Deborra-Lee Furness), childhood friend Lauren (Robin McLeavy) and sisters Brianna aka Bree (Lucy Ansell) and Bethany aka Beth (Sisi Stringer). Three days later, Falk receives an incomprehensible phonecall from Alice which quickly drops out, only to later be informed by fellow agent Carmen Cooper (Jacqueline McKenzie) that Alice’s hiking partners had returned from their trip injured and Alice is missing. Suspecting something has happened to her due to her being a whistle blower, Falk and Cooper quickly join the search to find her. In flashbacks, it is revealed that Falk’s mother Jenny (Ash Ricardo) also disappeared from the same area during a hiking trip with him (Archie Thomson) and his father Erik (Jeremy Lindsay Taylor). After tirelessly searching for her for days, the pair finally found her injured and malnourished but she ultimately died shortly afterwards in hospital. Alice’s co-workers reveal that during the first night of the trip, Jill’s husband Daniel (Richard Roxburgh) who was responsible for the laundering scheme, met up with the group and led Alice away from them. Afterwards, Alice became frantic and desperate to leave the trip early even after Daniel has left. Brianna, who’s been hospitalised due to a bite from a funnel web spider, reveals that she’d misread the map in her hungover state and caused the group to become lost. While attempting to follow the river back home, the map falls into the water and Lauren is injured while attempting to retrieve it. Bethany later admits to Falk that she previously had a drug problem, which had resulted her in serving jail time due to her neighbours reporting her for selling her sister’s belongings for drug money, which resulted in Alice not trusting her. The group continues on and Jill finds out that Alice has seemingly been intentionally leading the group in the wrong direction and becomes furious. The next day, the group discovers an abandoned cabin and decide to stay there for the night despite Alice’s protests. Later on, they discover the gravesite of a dog, causing Alice to insist they may be on the hunting grounds of an infamous serial killer who lured his female victims using his dog, but the group brushes her fear off as her trying to persuade them to leave the cabin … Your mind starts to play tricks on you out there. You get really paranoid. That talented Australian novelist Jane Harper wrote one of the best novels of the past decade The Dry and following its successful adaptation starring the great Eric Bana a followup was destined to be on the cards – the 2017 novel Force of Nature came first and this adaptation was made in 2022 in a very different and non-dry environment. Perhaps it should be called The Damp. Everyone is soaking. Moving deep into the undergrowth of the rainforest acts as a kind of metaphor for a story that has many tangled strands – Aaron’s own psyche and past, his association with whistleblower Alice, her school-age daughter Margot’s (Ingrid Torelli) alleged bullying of her colleague Lauren’s daughter Rebecca (Matilda May Pawsey), the financial misdeeds at Alice’s company boss and the crimes of a four decades-old serial killer in the very area Alice is missing. Knitting these together into a coherent screen story seems almost impossible very quickly particularly when the four remaining women’s recollections resemble those of Rashomon – overlapping, contradictory and untruthful. Linking the search for Alice with Aaron’s retracing his steps into his own history with a trip taken alongside his parents seems a trope too far – and one presumes it forms a link to the notorious serial killer – yet clever construction, transitions and characterisation through the twists and turns of a mystery plot ultimately keep everything from tipping too far into the realm of coincidence or predictability. The local police sergeant Vince King (Kenneth Radley) wonders why Aaron is really out here, a long way from finance fraudsters. Paired with the brusque Carmen, Aaron’s forced introspection means that the flashbacks conjoining his mother’s predicament with Alice’s situation force them – or squeeze them – into the same narrative loop. The undercurrent of female relationships – at work, mothering, friendship and colleagues – with their basis in bullying is never far from the surface. And could they be any worse prepared for this trek? Can we just keep this between the five of us please? And, the quid pro quo into which Alice has been forced by the feds for what she was prepared to do for her daughter is the moral quandary that literally turns this in to a guilt trip writ large, adding melodrama to an already busy screenplay. Everyone has reason to dislike and even motive to kill Alice but we find ourselves asking why sisters are working at the same company and why Alice and Lauren are friends. It seems unlikely. Perhaps this structure dilutes the impact of the first film with the multiple storylines and one unresolved plot issue but Bana is somehow the still centre of the complications, a restless soul with a desk job whose past knowledge of the territory makes it more navigable. Even with a background in tragedy however this doesn’t have the emotional resonance it strives for and the mood is broken by issues of plotting placing it at some distance from a famous Aussie film about a disappearance, Picnic at Hanging Rock. It helps that this is lined out with some of the country’s best (and best known) actors with Torv now an international name thanks to TV’s The Newsreader, while Furness, a scene-stealing Roxburgh and an underused McKenzie are a pleasingly familiar ensemble, driven by a powerful score from Peter Raeburn. Beautifully shot in a number of Victoria parklands by Andrew Commis, this is written and directed by Robert Connolly, reprising his role from the first film. At least out there Nature holds us all to account

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?

Recoil (1953)

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

The Life of David Gale (2003)

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

The Unseen (1945)

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

The 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

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