The Lesson (2023)

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

The 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