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Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

“Bounce” had some… bounce to its moralistic romantic tale, as it
sets up a formulaic dilemma for a couple who fall in love and have to face
their own private demons. Don Roos (“The Opposite of Sex“),
the director-screenwriter, has come up with a smart script and lets his
adult stars act like real adults do and is not ashamed of the glossy film
becoming a tearjerker. When the romance story tugs shamelessly at the heart
it feels good because there is a heartfelt rhythm in this film. The film
is thoroughly engrossing and well-crafted until the closing scenes, where
some speeches are made to clear the air which seemed totally unnecessary.
What helped carry the film through such contrived spots was the rumored
real-life romantic couple who star in the film, Ben Affleck and Gwyneth
Paltrow, playing two hurt souls who don’t expect to fall in love but do.
Ben being a smug, womanizing ad executive and Gwyneth, a young widow not
knowing how to bounce back from the loss of her husband in a plane crash.
They had great chemistry onscreen and Paltrow, in particular, was appealing.
In the Hollywood tradition of such love stories it seemed easy for the
audience to root for them to get together and make the romance work, since
the couple seemed to be in love. The only thing is that the film is a little
tougher than how most mainstream films do romances but is not edgy enough
to be an art film — so it falls into the category of being not one or
the other type of film, which might cause it to be ignored by both audiences.

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Waiting out a snowstorm at a bar at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, Buddy
Amaral (Affleck) casually converses with writer Greg Janello (Tony Goldwyn)
and a pretty blonde businesswoman Mimi (Natasha Henstridge), and shoots
a video of the three of them horsing around. Greg voluntarily bumped himself
from an LA-bound flight in order to get two free round-trip tickets to
anywhere in the U.S., plus he received $200. But he feels guilty about
being so cheap and letting down his family by not going home at once. Mimi
has been given a free hotel room because her flight was canceled and when
Buddy sees her flashing the room coupon as a come on, he quickly decides
to give his Los Angeles ticket to Greg and spend the night with Mimi instead.
Greg takes the ticket because he is anxious to get back to his wife and
two young sons and do some pre-Christmas things with them, though feeling
nervous about taking the ticket he is, at least, relieved of his guilty
feelings about abandoning his family because of saving money.

The plane crashes in Kansas and the story goes into much detail of
the passenger mix-up, of the airline first saying Greg is not aboard and
then reversing themselves. Greg’s wife Abby (Paltrow), not knowing if he
was on the flight becomes devastated when she finds out that he was killed
in the crash.

The crash has a great affect on Buddy also as he goes through a personality
transformation from being a slick playboy-type, to someone who becomes
overloaded with guilt and sensitivity. Buddy’s alcohol problem becomes
more severe and he freaks out when drunk during an award ceremony that
his ad company wins for doing this bathetic commercial for the airline
to express bereavement to the families for the loved ones they lost.

A year passes as Buddy goes through an alcohol rehab program and
returns to work, but gets transferred to a different southern California
location, which happens to be where Greg’s wife lives. Greg still feels
guilty for not dying and has a need to meet Abby to see if she’s OK and
make amends to her as part of his A.A. 12 step program, but does not have
enough nerve to tell her that he was the one who switched tickets with
her hubby. She’s going through her own guilt-trip and also lies to him
by telling him she’s divorced. When Buddy feels sorry for her, seeing how
she’s a neophyte in the real estate business, he arranges to throw her
a big bone as he connives his boss (Morton) into letting her sell him the
more spacious building his company needs to move its operations to; thereby,
she unexpectedly gets a tremendous commission.

They both seem tentative about the attraction they have for each
other, as they are afraid of entering a relationship; but, Greg is willing
to forget about Abby and be glad that he made amends by helping her out
materially. But Abby suddenly shows up at his workplace with two tickets
to see a Dodgers game, with the excuse that she wants to thank him for
what he did. Abby also comes clean and admits she lied about being divorced,
but Greg still needs more time to get his secret off his chest. They finally
sleep together, and he then shows he’s a good guy and a changed person
by bonding with the kids. Sex is not presented as the prize here, as much
as a serious and meaningful relationship is. It has probably been ages
since that theme was tried as seriously as it was in this mainstream film,
and that just might be the most refreshing thing about the film.

But Greg waits too long to tell Abby that he’s the one who gave her
husband the ticket on the ill-fated flight, as she finds out in a surprising
way about it and can’t forgive him. Her decision to break the relationship
causes anguish to both of them, as they try to find out what it is they
want and how they really feel. Since Paltrow is the better actor, she mops
up the screen in these scenes of anguish and is convincing as someone who
has been damaged and is afraid of getting hurt again. Affleck is good as
an actor conveying someone who is arrogant and shallow and full of false
bravado, but is not convincing as someone who has been down for the count
and is bouncing back as a changed man. His sudden change to the sensitive-type
seemed artificial, leaving questions about what he was doing in the first
place in meeting her, if he couldn’t tell her that he knew her husband.
It left me wondering, how sensitive of a person could he really have become,
if he could only help her materially and not understand that his drinking
masked deeper problems he had in his character– such as his perverse reason
for lying. Also, what I never quite understood is why he has to make amends
to her, since he had nothing to do with the accident and was actually helping
her husband out by giving him the free ticket. He might have hurt others
during his callow period, but I can’t see how he purposely hurt Abby and
her husband.

But the film had enough of a realistic romance under its belt to
not be buried for dead with its contrivances. In additition it had some
pretty good players in supporting roles. Joe Morton always gives a fine
performance and here as the sturdy, no-nonsense businessman he grounds
the film in some needed reality. Johnny Galecki is around for some levity
as the gay assistant to Affleck who fires away at his boss, not afraid
to confront him with opposition in the midst of his moral dilemma. Caroline
Aaron has the cardboard role as Abby’s supportive friend, but she’s not
intrusive and is pleasant. Alex D. Linz and David Dorfman are perfect as
Abby’s kids, trying to get a handle on Affleck and recover from not having
a father around, while receiving TLC from their harried mother. Jennifer
Grey is the airline rep who covers up for Affleck when he switches tickets
with Greg, and is believable in her small part.

This modest production scored with me. And if it didn’t have that
phony civil court scene at the end, with Affleck forced to act in such
a disingenuously apologetic manner, the film would have been much better.
This is an adult romantic film, with the adults interested in having a
real relationship. I’m so conditioned by now, that I think only foreign
films or art house films operate that way.

As ungainly as its primary, befuddled character, “The Shipping News” not in the least entirely finds its own internal compass. Director Lasse Hallstrom’s and scribe Robert Nelson Jacobs’ reworking of E. Annie Proulx’s beloved novel of a pathetic, failed American rediscovering himself in Newfoundland seems to be playing the author’s music, but like a string quartet that plays a half-beat off, the team behind “Chocolat” one occasionally captures the story’s essential tones of absurd tragedy and comedy. Certain alterations made to the book’s characters and situations, designed to build nervousness, become artificial and are delivered without the considerate of conviction that would sustain the changes. Markedly articulately-cast, with the glaring exception of Kevin Spacey as the tale’s unsure hero, Quoyle, Nor’easter drama’s deliberate pace — making it touch more same Hallstrom’s European work than his Jolt pics — and characters who ever so gradually saturnalia themselves will be appreciated by a dedicated but far smaller aud than Miramax must be hoping seeking during its annual high holiday season.

Though some have doubted, during the eight long years it took for the story to go from page to screen, that there was a movie in a novel so resolutely irreducible and stuffed with seeming asides that are actually essential to the story, the movie is clearly the work of sincere artists faced with a hefty task. Too hefty, it turns out, but Hallstrom’s connection to the material is direct and unforced: Quoyle, a man forever uncomfortable in his own skin, fits nicely alongside such past Hallstrom oddities as Gilbert Grape.

It is, rather, Spacey who is in alien territory, at least 150 pounds lighter than he should be for a character who should have rolls of fat and a huge chin, and working much too hard to make up the difference in a sleepy dialect, a mannered, sad facial expression and accident-prone behavior. The actor does everything he can, but seldom has apt casting seemed so crucial.

Pic went through 11th-hour alterations between the print screened for critics in early December and the final release version. Six minutes have been excised, while Spacey’s added first-person voiceover narration now bookends the tale. Trimming is mostly within scenes and — with one glaring exception — doesn’t intrude on the drama. But neither does it eliminate problems that are part and parcel of the film’s fabric.

Script ties Quoyle’s problems to his abusive father, Guy (John Dunsworth), who pushes his 12-year-old son into the water, where he nearly drowns. A remarkably telling and haunting special effect shows young Quoyle’s face underwater, slowly evolving into the 36-year-old adult, still underwater, only now robotically slaving away at the Poughkeepsie News.

Things happen to Quoyle — precisely what makes him a fascinating novel character but far more of a problem for a movie — and suddenly, the tarted-up and self-centered Petal (Cate Blanchett) happens to him, splitting from a guy and getting into Quoyle’s car. Before he knows it, Quoyle’s in love, fathers a daughter, Bunny, and is housekeeping while Petal openly sleeps around.

Blanchett is a burst of spirited fire whose departure after less than 10 minutes produces a dramatic vacuum the movie never fills. She is so fierce and all-consuming that the viewer never stops for a moment to wonder what Quoyle is doing with her, or she with him.

Things really go downhill, however, when Quoyle’s terminally ill parents leave a phone message announcing their joint suicide. That’s followed by Petal’s taking off with Bunny (played by triplets Alyssa, Kaitlyn and Lauren Gainer) but dying in a car crash. Meanwhile, Quoyle’s crusty Yankee aunt, Agnis (Judi Dench) stops by with condolences for his dead parents.

Agnis is on her way to their family’s old haunts and, needing to find a new life, Quoyle and the rescued Bunny venture with her by ship to the rocky remoteness of Newfoundland and the town of Killick-Claw, which lenser Oliver Stapleton, using a desaturated palette, views as an imposing, daunting outpost. The Quoyle clan left here 50 years ago, and its lonely house still stands, but decrepit and barely livable.

Quoyle quickly lands a reporting job for local weekly rag the Gammy Bird, run by tough but fair publisher Jack Buggit (Scott Glenn) and overseen by insecure, contentious editor Tert Card (Pete Postlethwaite).

While Proulx applied irony to the fact that Quoyle has to report on all the things he abhors — water, car crashes, pressures — they’re mostly handled here with a less-than-effective dramatic solemnity. Still, pic’s newsroom snaps with characters, including Brit Beaufield Nutbeem (Rhys Ifans) and aging Billy Pretty (Gordon Pinsent).

Wavey Prowse (Julianne Moore), walking along the road with her brain-damaged son, Herry (Will McAllister), catches Quoyle’s eye, but his first two encounters with her are buffeted with awkward gaffes.

At the same time, several other story elements are juggled, all of them leaving Quoyle on the sidelines as a kind of spectator.

Jacobs’ script latches onto one incident like a kind of narrative lifejacket, since it gives Quoyle, for once, an active role. When he stumbles upon a Botterjacht, a yacht built for Hitler’s private use and owned by bitter marrieds Bayonet and Silver Melville (Larry Pine and Jeanetta Arnette), Quoyle turns it into a story that so impresses Jack that he gives the cub reporter his own boat column. Quoyle later bumps his boat into the beheaded body of what turns out to be Bayonet, almost drowning himself in the process.

This story-within-the-story provides the passive, lumpen Quoyle with some direction; however, the budding romance with Wavey is the one story strand harmed in the revised release version. A sweet moment on the shore between the pair, where they fall into a revealingly sloppy kiss, is now gone, making subsequent comments by Moore’s Wavey fairly nonsensical. At the same time, Moore’s natural warmth gives the movie a real pulse and the qualities of resiliency that inform the novel.

By the time a storm hits Killick-Claw, leading to the destruction of the Quoyle family house, it’s hard not to reflect on Billy’s journalistic advice to Quoyle for finding “the center of the story.” A center is what seems to elude the film at every juncture, and even a closing narration, as Quoyle claims that he believes “a broken man can heal,” doesn’t do enough to grasp the tale’s heart.

As usual, Hallstrom works in extremely felt sympathy with a host of fine actors. In what would seem to be a man’s world, it’s the women — Moore, Dench and especially Blanchett — who deliver many of the movie’s richest and rawest moments, from Moore’s gentle strains and Blanchett’s roving animal streak to Dench’s granite emotional boundaries, which gently break down in a marvelously quiet scene with Spacey.

Glenn, Postelthwaite, Ifans and Canadian icon Pinsent feel very much like ink-stained wretches keen to life’s absurdities, and Pinsent brings the extra texture of an inbred “Newfie” crustiness. Unlike the play of the exaggerated Minnesota dialect of “Fargo,” there’s no attempt here to stress or overplay the provincial accent, long the butt of Canadian jokes.

Tech credits push for a more severe look than is the norm in mainstream American films, with Hallstrom’s crew embracing what must have been unfriendly weather and natural elements for extra visual and aural realism. Christopher Young’s Irish-inflected score is in tune with pic’s serious mood.

Corporations find. But do they command wisely? Could the home that increasingly controls the essentials of life – that employs, produces and provides, extracts and pollutes, appropriates and monopolises, amuses and seduces, lobbies and bankrolls, disseminates and dissimulates – in fact codify all the characteristics of a psychopath? And wouldn’t that be motivate for refer?

Achbar and Abbott’s clumsy doc goes fitting for the abundant ashen whale of our times: the engine of wide-ranging capitalism’s affluence creation and apportionment, whose ‘hidden’ costs, it argues, gravely overawe the benefits. It’s a vast subject, shrouded in fog and contention, and at nearly two-and-a-half hours the film is bursting at the seams with facts, argument and specimen: it’s both a primer to and omnibus on the ‘dominant institution of our age’. It rounds up the usual suspects on the lucid left – Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Naomi Klein, Michael Moore at his sharpest – but also sounds abroad free-merchandise gurus and captains of industry, advertisers and corporate spies, sponsored students and Bolivian protesters. Some of the most fascinating elements include sequences on Fox News’s craven snuffing out of a scoop on Monsanto and IBM’s alleged providing of Holocaust accounting machines; footage of Canada’s elite preening 40 stories on the top of street riots; and the intensity of born-again sustainability apostle Ray Anderson, CEO.

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Actually, there’s so much material that the coating every now struggles to delineate it. Chapter headers tend to out under the film’s later digressions; neater is its early ruse of captivating the corporation’s rank of permissible personhood and running with it, all the way to the dehydrate: the screen ticks quiet a checklist of the corporation’s sociopathic tendencies. In fact this sociopathy is itself written in law: corporations obligation pay court to profit over all other interests. Parsimony is correct; greed can be harnessed; irons can control his monsters. Eye-opening, irreverent and bang on the nose, this film means business.

Jean-Jacques Beineix, the designer of “Betty Blue,” seems to be a strange stripe of idiot savant — all esthetic sense and no brains. All that means, though, is that the audience has to make an imaginative leap to wrest down to Beineix’s level. The punishment is an extraordinarily sensual movie with its own silly trustworthiness.

“Betty Blue” opens with a luxuriously slow dolly shot of two naked people going at it in bed, while the “Mona Lisa,” hung above the headboard, imperturbably presides over them. He is Zorg (Jean-Hugues Anglade), a Mr. Fixit to a seaside community; she is Betty (Be’atrice Dalle), stormy, gorgeous and all appetite. Betty discovers the manuscript to a novel Zorg has written, declares him a genius and assumes the project of peddling it, an enterprise that forms the movie’s narrative thread.

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Betty is a creature of pure will, given to flamboyant tantrums — when she torches Zorg’s bungalow with the aplomb of a maitre d’ preparing a flambe’, the couple escape to the city, where they crash with Betty’s chum Lisa (Consuelo de Haviland) and Lisa’s beau Eddy, a restaurateur (Ge’rard Darmon). Eddy enlists Zorg and Betty to run the family’s piano store in the country, where the rejection slips for Zorg’s novel continue to dribble in, and Betty gets more and more hysterical.

At the heart of “Betty Blue” are two fatuous ideas: that crazy, self-destructive women are peerlessly desirable; and that such a woman is all a blocked writer needs to recover his inspiration — a man’s art stemming from the tragic flower of womanhood. And it’s dotted with childish humor (working in Eddy’s restaurant, Zorg sneaks garbage scraps onto the pizza of a rude customer). In other words, it’s an adolescent fantasy made with an adult’s polished technique.

But if “Betty Blue” is somewhat jejune, it also has a teen-ager’s boldness, the energy of an imagination uncensored by good taste. Working from a novel by Philippe Djian, Beineix writes outrageously purple dialogue in the adopted style of film noir: “I had known Betty for a week … The forecast was for storms”; “She was a flower with psychic antennae and a tinsel heart.” The dialogue is matched by Beineix’s vivid style, full of dramatic crane shots, an expressive gliding camera and an equally expressive use of music — the full, instantly nostalgic sound of sax and harmonica.

Beineix’s visual talents are lavished on Anglade and Dalle, who spend much of their time wearing nothing or less than nothing: Anglade, sinewy and angular; Dalle, an odd beauty with thick lips, a bullying forehead and rich curves verging on the Rubenesque. And Anglade works some nice touches into Zorg’s character — he makes him a little dopey, always searching for moorings.

But if Dalle finds with remarkable clarity the one note that her role calls for — the petulant volcano — she can’t support the existential weight Beineix wants to drop on her. “Betty Blue” is at its best when Beineix maintains some distance from Betty, as when she throws the furniture out of the bungalow and an old-timer with binoculars comments ironically on the display (”Your pad will look very Zen now”); at its worst when he tries to make her the St. Veronica of the va-va-voom.

“Betty Blue” is rated R and contains nudity in sexual situations, profanity and violence.

Japan. 1999.
Director/Screenplay/Photography ? Shinya Tsukamoto, Based on the Novel

Soseiji

by Edogawa Rampo, Producer ? Futoshi Nishimura, Music ? Chu Ishikawa, Curls & Makeup Contrive ? Isao Tsuge, Production Design ? Takashi Sasaki. Production Company ? Sedic International/Marubeni Corporation/Kaijyu Theater.

Cast

:
Motoki Masahiro (Dr Yukio Daitokuji/Sutekichi), Ryo (Ren)

Plot

:

An acclaimed war surgeon, Dr Yukio Daitokuji lives an untroubled life, running a surgical style. He is luckily married to Ren, who has no memory of her past after he found her in a fire. But then a mysterious doppelganger appears, difficult both of Daitokuji?s parents and then pushing him down a well and leaving him trapped there. The treacherous assumes Daitokuji?s place and to his greatest horror makes love to Ren. But then the double reveals to Daitokuji that he is Sutekichi, his twin kin, and then Ren is not the popsy he mental activity she was ? that she is in to be sure Sutekichi?s wife and comes from the places that Daitokuji despises the most, the slums, and has been faking her amnesia.


A Snake of June

(2002),

Vital

(2004) and

Nightmare Detective

(2006) and

Nightmare Detective 2

(2008). Although if none of these films? maintained

Tetsuo

?s level of twisted fetishistic dexterity, they are at least driven with the single-mindedness of Shinya Tsukamoto?s vision wherein human embody is treated as a war zone in a Manichean struggle of wills and assertion of self-singularity.
Gemini
is quite a different pic to any of Shinya Tsukamoto?s others. In the direction of one, it gives Tsukamoto his biggest budget to date. And with it Tsukamoto leaves behind the raw, pounding ferocity of his earlier films. Instead of ragged, frenetic handheld camerawork of his earlier films, the opening scenes here come with a stately, consummate formalism. Although with Shinya Tsukamoto at the driver’s seat
Gemini
could conditions turn out as anything as simple as a respectable historical scenario and what emerges reminds, if anything, of the deadpan bizarreness of a Peter Greenaway covering. The Greenaway connection is something bolstered by the weirdly floor-ornamented costumery ? the upper-classes in pale-faced makeup and shaven eyebrows, the women with exaggerated bun hairstyles, and the double in a mixed bag gear and makeup that for all the world looks like a rainbow-hued rat that has no more than emerged from a subdue puddle.

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Shinya Tsukamoto?s films are always dualistic battles between parts of the self. Even in adapting a 1956 squat plot outline by Japanese mystery/horror writer Edogawa Rampo here, Tsukamoto still manages to imprint the film with his Manichean struggle notwithstanding uniqueness. The horror story comes out as something more akin to
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
than anything Tsukamoto has previously done. On one side Tsukamoto contrasts the Jekyll tantamount ? the chattels doctor Dr Daitokuji who leads a spark of life of prim morality and social respect. Tsukamoto contrasts the doctor?s primly moralistic life with the slums and the beggars whom the doctor regards as diseased plague victims. The majuscule letters-genre homelife is motivation in scrub, formal composure, while contrastingly the scenes in the slums are the driver’s seat quickly with frenzied camerawork and a physique filled with dirt, grime and dense texture. Here Tsukamoto creates a complex and out of the ordinary metaphor of sexual repressions wherein the double not only comes to pretend the Dr Jekyll peer?s libidinous side come to haunt him but an entire repressed social group.
Shinya Tsukamoto?s films on occasions arrange plots. They exist more in terms of imagery than they do as coherent story. In what way

Gemini

does, perhaps due to its basis in another originator?s story (although Tsukamoto apparently adapts this very liberally). There is quite a remarkable refinement in the shifting dualities of character ? how each character?s newly adopted position (the counterpart posing as the doctor, the doctor reduced to barbarism while down at the seat of the adequately, Ren posing as an amnesiac and then judgement herself desiring the love and gentleness she finds there) shifts and merges in association to the other. It is a story that requires the actors to junkets between extraordinary poles of stamp. Both principals, especially the lynx-faced Ryo, speechify on up particularly well here. The smokescreen?s psychogenic resolution eventually comes in the merging of the moralistic and the repressed as the good doctor goes off to work in the slums, no longer spurning the beggars yon him.

Last updated: Saturday, 15 August 2009

Report tells us that Napoleon Bonaparte died in maroon on the unhappy key of St. Helena in 1821. Or did he? This film supposes a more fanciful tale. A quietly network of loyalists hatch an ingenious plot: the Emperor (Ian Holm) compel return to Paris, while a facsimile takes his place in deport. Trading identities with a dissolute captain, Napoleon is ardent back to France to rescue his throne. Hitherto, prematurely on in the scheme, the scenario goes awry. The double refuses to give up playing Napoleon thereby stranding the departed Emperor in Paris. Friendless and unaccompanied, he meets and falls in place of a pleasing widow (Iben Hjejle). Ian Holm puts on a double performance as both the humbled Emperor and his grandiose imposter.

Good show! VCI Entertainment has released British Cinema: Classic ‘B’ Film Collection, Volume 1, a three-disc, six film collection of some sprightly, fast-paced programmers from Britain’s lower-end production companies. Purists will be upset by VCI’s use of beat-up syndicated television prints (including a pan-and-scan version of the only widescreen title in this collection), but ‘B’ movie lovers (hopefully) will just sit back and enjoy the shows - especially when one considers these entertaining but admittedly marginal titles may not come to DVD in any other way than in these compromised transfers. Titles include 1938’s Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror, 1940’s Crimes in the Dark House and The Girl in the News, 1952’s The Frightened Man, 1958’s Tread Softly Stranger, and 1960’s The Siege of Sidney Street. There’s not a dog in the bunch (another big plus for this kind of collection), with one title, Sir Carol Reed’s The Girl in the News, showing flashes of genuine art amid the more meat-and-potatoes offerings in this set. Let’s look at the individual titles.

SEXTON BLAKE AND THE HOODED TERROR (aka: THE HOODED TERROR)

Cool English man of adventure Granite Grant (David Farrar) is in deep trouble in Shanghai. Thugs belonging to the world’s most dangerous criminal organization, The Black Quorum, have set upon him, almost killing Grant for what he knows about the shadowy terrorist group. Sending a message to London via his friend Paul Duvall (Bradley Watts), Grant wishes to alert Sexton Blake (George Curzon), London’s master detective, of The Black Quorum’s activities. But a South American blowgun ends Duvall’s life before Blake and his trusty right hand Tinker (Tony Sympson) can decipher Grant’s code. Complicating matters is the arrival of Julie (Greta Gynt), a French espionage agent who seems quite interested in multi-millionaire stamp collector Michael Larron (Tod Slaughter). Will Blake and Tinker, with the reluctant aid of stout, doubting London police inspector Bramley (H.B. Hallam), save Julie from the clutches of the mysterious head of The Black Quorum, The Snake?

SPOILERS ALERT!

I’ve never read any of the variously-authored Sexton Blake mysteries (a Sherlock Holmes knock-off who enjoyed a surprisingly long career - over 80 years - as the star of penny dreadfuls, pocket mysteries, magazines, radio serials, ‘B’ movies and even his own television series in the 1960s), but I suppose that doesn’t matter here, considering Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror operates much like a lesser Sherlock Holmes story married to a traditional Saturday matinee serial. None of it is original in the slightest, but it’s carried off with a bit of verve despite the low, low budget (the casino itself is rather creepy, with its wax-work dummies standing in for real patrons, while the finale’s Death Chamber of Serpents is acceptable - if too brief — horror). As with any kind of ‘B’ like this, there’s quite a bit of exposition to explain events that aren’t covered by the budget. And the physical look of the sets can be underwhelming (particularly the rather pathetic casino lair of The Black Quorum). But producer/director George King never lets the film idle, keeping the screenplay by A.R. Rawlinson (who penned the screenplay for the 1940 British version of Gaslight) moving along at a rapid clip.

It’s a surprisingly funny script, too, with numerous comical asides thrown in to leaven the affair. The Tinker character provides most of the common-man joking in the film (he blows himself up in Blake’s lab at one point), but other comic bits are sprinkled throughout the film (I particularly like the waiter who throws up his hands in resignation after giving Blake a message the waiter doesn’t understand), keeping events light and amusing. The Blake character will be thoroughly familiar to anyone who has ever watched a Sherlock Holmes film, but he’s varied just enough (not at all depressed, a bit of a rake, game for making physical threats) to keep one’s interest (at one point, he kicks Tinker in the rear - I’d like to see Holmes do that just once to the phlegmatic Watson). Today, the film probably garners interest solely for the appearance of legendary stage and screen “barnstormer” Tod Slaughter as the head of the criminal organization. Appreciated on the same level as performers like Vincent Price or Bela Lugosi (for his enthusiastic hamming-it-up in low-budget shockers), I didn’t find Slaughter exceptionally menacing here (he’s much better in his other appearance on this disc, Crimes in the Dark House). But then again, it’s difficult to work up much interest in his escapades when the mystery is so obvious (even my kid cracked the longitude/latitude code before Blake) and the details sometimes silly (why do The Black Quorum members keeping wearing and taking off those ridiculous black hoods when they meet? Don’t they already know each other already?). Still, Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror is a perfectly acceptable programmer that doesn’t outstay its welcome, and which provides a bit of fun and minor chills in the less-demanding form of the traditional ‘B’ filler.

CRIMES AT THE DARK HOUSE

Adapted from the evergreen “sensation novel” The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, Crimes at the Dark House begins at an Australian gold mine with the horrific murder of the real Sir Percival Glyde by an unknown stranger (Tod Slaughter), who assumes the identity of Sir Percival when he learns that Percy has inherited a vast estate. Returning to England to collect his ill-gotten booty (or his “ill-booten gotty,” as Hawkeye would say), the false Percy is in for two shocks: the estate is mortgaged to the hilt, and Lady Catherick (Elsie Wagstaff) comes forward to accuse Percy of fathering her illegitimate child Anne (Sylvia Marriott), who now resides in an insane asylum because of her psychotic hatred of her reprobate father. Lady Catherick, shady Dr. Isidor Fosco (Hay Petrie), and family lawyer Merriman (David Keir) don’t believe for a second that Percy is really who he says he is, but that might not matter once Percy marries sweet, innocent Laurie Fairlie (Sylvia Marriott again), who was promised to the real Percy in an earlier marriage contract. She’s loaded with dough, and easy on the eyes, too - just what the fake Percy is looking for in a woman (when he’s not fooling around with the cheap chambermaid Jessica, played by Rita Grant). But when the mysterious “woman in white” begins appearing in the windows of Percy’s estate, all hell breaks loose and the bodies start piling up.

SPOILERS ALERT!

Now I get the appeal of cult favorite Tod Slaughter. The film itself is a crackerjack entry in the bloodthirsty Victorian melodrama genre, with producer/director George King (working from a script by Frederick Hayward, Edward Dryhurst, and H.F. Maltby) once again zeroing in on the exploitation angles that no doubt kept the second-run houses’ patrons happily clutching their chair arms. Shot again with lightening speed (it only runs 69 minutes), it’s over long before you start to see the cracks in the low-budget production. The minor romantic subplot featuring Marriott and Geoffrey Wardwell as painting tutor Paul Hartwright (his character’s name should confirm to you that this is pure, unadulterated melodrama), is a bit of snooze, no doubt exacerbated by Wardwell’s ridiculous stiffness (Marriott, though, is quite lovely and charming), but it plays distinct second-fiddle to Slaughter’s outrageously broad portrayal of the murderous Sir Percival Gylde - and thank goodness for that

Slaughter, a legendary figure in the English theatre who “barnstormed” his way through the English theatrical circuit for five decades, was primarily associated with the Victorian “blood and thunder” melodramas that proved popular year after year with provincial audiences looking for sensational, exploitation thrills. Most successful at playing a villain (his signature roles included Sweeney Todd and the marvelous British urban legend, Spring-Heeled Jack), Slaughter really gets a workout here in Crimes at the Dark House. He’s basically the whole show, and I haven’t seen this enjoyably a hammy performance in quite some time. Looking as if he’s still playing to the back stalls, Slaughter refuses to tone down his melodramatic arm flourishes (watch him pantomime palming Jessica’s rear as she walks away from him - hilarious), Slaughter can barely contain himself as the oversexed, psychotic murderer Percival. Literally licking his lips and brushing his moustache in the best Simon Legree fashion, Slaughter indulges in his trademark snickering chortle at the drop of the hat, bumping off people left and right as he practically begs the audience to laugh at him/laugh with him/fear him. It’s a remarkably affected, hammy performance, and one supremely confident in its goals to broadly enthrall. He’s no Olivier, to be sure, but he’s damned entertaining.

THE GIRL IN THE NEWS

Lovely private nurse Anne Graham is on trial for murder. Her patient, Miss Blaker (Irene Handl), a petulant, vindictive, insecure woman confined to her bed, initially set-up Anne for theft (stowing away some items in her valise) when Anne refused to work for her anymore. Relinquishing her threat to leave, Anne leaves the needy, whining Miss Blaker alone for a moment - which is long enough for the invalid to miraculously get out of bed and take an accidental overdose of sleeping pills. Found innocent at her trial with the help of defense attorney Stephen Farrington (Barry K. Barnes), Anne finds it impossible to get a job when people still suspect her of murder. It doesn’t help, either, that her own lawyer is still suspicious of her innocence. Following a mysterious, anonymous lead for a job opening with a kindly, wheelchair-bound millionaire Edward Bentley (Wyndham Goldie), Anne soon finds herself involved in more intrigue as butler Tracy (Emlyn Williams) and Bentley’s wife Judith (Margaretta Scott) resent her growing closeness to Edward. Or do they?

SPOILERS ALERT!

Certainly the best offering here in the British Cinema: Classic ‘B’ Film Collection, Volume 1 set, The Girl in the News offers not only a tight, lean mystery like the other films here, but also flashes of real cinematic style, courtesy of director Carol Reed. The story itself is a fairly layered mystery (with a screenplay by expert scenarist Sidney Gilliat, based on the novel by Roy Vickers) which actually has something to say about its characters outside the conventions of its plot structure (a real rarity with exploitation ‘B’ programmers). Anne’s anguish over events she couldn’t control mesh with Stephen’s suspicions of her real intentions to make an intriguing subtext concerning guilt by innuendo and association. The Girl in the News’s script gives the audience something outside mere plot points to hang their interest on, rewarding the viewer with a resonant story that isn’t dependent on the enjoyable yet formulaic thrills of this set’s other titles.

As well, the director, Carol Reed (Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol, The Third Man, Our Man in Havana, Oliver!) successfully infuses The Girl in the News with not only a foreboding Hitchcockian atmosphere of dread and fatality (a luxury in fast-moving, basic chillers), but also a handful of artful cinematic tricks that one almost never sees in your average ‘B’ programmer. Nice little directorial touches are scattered throughout The Girl in the News, touches that most programmer directors didn’t have the budget, time, or frankly, talent, to work out and include in their tight, rigid productions. When Miss Blaker (in an effectively repulsive performance by Irene Handl) gets out of bed to take the sleeping pills she so desperately craves (and which have been forbidden by Anne), Reed has her little bedmate, a small, black kitten, playful tug at her frayed nightgown hem - creating not only added suspense (will she stop to admonish the kitty and thus be discovered by Anne?), but also providing a perverse inverse take on the old “while the cat’s away…” saying. With Anne safely employed with a new identity, she finds she can’t escape her past when, caught in a traffic jam, she spots Stephen on the sidewalk. Reed has some fun with the audience’s tension on whether or not she can successfully hide from Stephen (in a scene very reminiscent of Hitchcock). Stephen’s roommate, Bill Mather (Roger Livesey), who just happens to be a police detective, has a nice Hitchcockian moment where he retraces Anne’s movements…right back to his own apartment (where she met Stephen the night before). And fellow murder accomplice Tracy (Emlyn Williams) has his face distorted and reflected in a silver plate he’s polishing - which later shines a light on his face when the police pass him, discussing who might have murdered Bentley. The film’s climax - the oft-used blind witness fake-out - is crisply and neatly turned out by Reed; compare his handling of it with the director of Tread Softly Stranger, included on this set, who also utilizes that hoary old mystery cliche.

THE FRIGHTENED MAN

At a second-hand antique shop in a London suburb, Roselli (Charles Victor) anticipates the arrival of his son Julius (Dermot Walsh), who is enjoying a break from his architecture studies at Oxford College. Roselli’s assistant, the prissy Cornelius (Michael Ward), isn’t too sure of Julius, nor is “Corny” happy with Julius’ associate in antiquing, Alex (Martin Benson), a shady character who recently sold Roselli a pair of stolen Ming vases. When Julius does return home, it’s not an especially happy occasion. He tells his father he’s been “sent down” (kicked out) from Oxford, and that he has no plans on going in with him on his “junk” shop. Julius is obviously embarrassed by his immigrant father, and treats him abominably; he even steals 50 pounds from his father’s secret stash to buy a car. Which seems to impress Amanda (Barbara Murray), a lodger staying with Roselli who was going with Harry (John Horsley), a cultured, kind lodger also sharing digs at Roselli’s. Julius’ petty theft doesn’t stop with stealing his father’s money; soon, he’s cavorting with known shady crook Maxie (John Blythe), who involves Julius in an armed stickup - a descent down a criminal path that will end in tragedy for all concerned.

SPOILERS ALERT!

A thoroughly familiar but solid, unpretentious little crime meller/film noir, The Frightened Man is notable (at least in this set) for the increased use of real locations. The previous offerings relied on studio mock-ups almost exclusively, but in The Frightened Man, the viewer gets to breathe a little of that London air as writer/director John Gilling goes outside to get some gritty urban shots. Influenced perhaps by the recent influx of American film noirs, as well as European neo-realism imports, both of which stressed naturalistic location shooting, British crime thrillers from this period increasingly moved outdoors to open up their sordid little tales of deception and betrayal. Directed with a sure hand by veteran John Gilling (The Reptile, The Mummy’s Shroud, The Saint), and backed up by legendary ‘B’ producers Monty Berman’s and Robert S. Baker’s Tempean Films, The Frightened Man may hold no surprises, either in plot or in character motivation, but it doesn’t take the audience for granted, either, working over its familiar plot with an admirably straight face.

TREAD SOFTLY STRANGER

Which can’t be said for this hysterically-pitched ‘B’ programmer. Sharpie Johnny Mansell (George Baker), all primed in his killer bachelor flat for another conquest, beats a hasty retreat from his babe when he gets a call from his bookie requesting his owed money…or else. Returning home to Rawborough, a bleak, sooty industrial wasteland, Johnny reconnects with his bookish brother Dave (Terence Morgan) who works as a bookkeeper at the local steel foundry. Johnny also gets acquainted with Dave’s next-door neighbor and would-be girlfriend Calico (Diana Dors), a blonde bombshell with legs for days and cleavage…for days. An insatiably horny gold-digger, Calico has latched onto Dave because he’s a non-threatening dope who blows money on her, but once she gets a load of dangerous Johnny, she puts out like there’s no tomorrow. Unfortunately for both brothers, Johnny learns that Dave got all that dough by embezzling from the foundry - and he only has a week to get the money back before auditors are due to check the books. Naturally, Johnny gets involved, and events quickly spiral out of control.

SPOILERS ALERT!

Probably of interest today strictly for the inclusion of British bombshell Diana Dors, Tread Softly Stranger is certainly the funniest film in the British Cinema: Classic ‘B’ Film Collection, Volume 1 set - and that’s entirely unintentional, I’m sure. That’s not to say Tread Softly Stranger isn’t entertaining; on the contrary, it’s delicious fun because it’s so awful. The love triangle between two brothers - one bad, one worse - and a money-hungry tramp is as old as the hills, so no one is going to be surprised where Tread Softly Stranger winds up. What’s amusing about the film is the apparent straight face that everyone managed to put on - despite the ridiculous situations and dialogue.

George Baker, an excellent second lead you’ll no doubt recognize from British films and television from that period, is all wrong for the part of hot-shot gambler Johnny. Trying to act both tough and flippant, Baker frequently tosses off these off-kilter smirks and mugs that are supposed to, I assume, make Johnny appear roguish, but which actually achieve the effect of making Johnny appear addle-pated (watch him check himself out in a mirror, combing his hair with a flourish that’s giggle-inducing). Disastrously, in the film final scene, Johnny is supposed to react with fiendish, ironic, grim humor, laughing at the twist of fate that has befallen him (the old blind witness-trips-up-the-thieves gag), but Baker instead manages to convey not humorous existential justice, but forced lunacy - like a drunk laughing too loudly at his own bad joke.

The rest of the cast is competent (the always enjoyable Patrick Allen has a nice supporting bit as the good-natured Paddy, who begins to suspect the brothers of murder), and despite the flaws in the transfer here, you can tell the film looked great when released, with cinematographer Douglas Slocombe capturing the gritty, gray-skied industrial wasteland of Northern England perfectly. But too much of Tread Softly Stranger is ridiculously overheated - no doubt due to Dors’ presence - leaving one to sit back and observe the characters with amusement, rather than with sympathy or suspense. Dors, modeled throughout her career as Britain’s answer to Marilyn Monroe, can clearly act; it’s just a shame that director Gordon Parry has her enacting a roll call of various Monroe shtick (the pouting mouth, the over-the-shoulder looks of lust) that come off as pale, unflattering imitation. In the moments where she flashes tough, she reminded me of Jane Russell, rather than Monroe, but mostly she’s asked to seethe and writhe in passionate heat, which she overdoes to the hilt. Director Parry gives her a memorably kitschy intro shot (bent over in too-small shorts, doing her exercises), but he then proceeds to let her become the living embodiment of a dirty joke - not a character.

It doesn’t help the film’s drama chops, either, when the filmmakers indulge in some funny, obvious Freudian editing. During a particularly hilarious scene, Johnny goes out on his grimy terrace, where Dors is stretching and clawing at the moon like a cat in heat. With Johnny looking like he just received a hammer-blow to the head (I don’t blame him), and Calico pouting like mad, the film then jumps to various shots of molten iron exploding and sparking at the foundry. Later, when Johnny finally pushes Calico too far, and she attacks him, he kisses her passionately (which she naturally, in this kind of film, responds to), with the filmmakers cutting to a shot of a massive phallic piston being inserted a vat of molten iron, with an orgasmic flow of the smelt spilling all over the floor. That kind of obviousness, married to the overblown, misdirected acting, makes Tread Softly Stranger totally worthless serious drama, but highly entertaining junk.

THE SIEGE OF SYDNEY STREET

Based loosely on the true events of January 2, 1911 (”The Battle of Stepney”), The Siege of Sydney Street recounts the untold story of Latvian revolutionaries who, living as expatriates in London, form a robbery gang with the intention of funding their political activity. Peter (Peter Wyndgarde), the leader of the group, falls for Sara (Nicole Berger), a newly arrived refugee from the murderous pogroms of Russia. This relationship causes trouble within the group; specifically with Toska (Kieron Moore), a violent, amoral thief who wants Sara for himself. After the gang poorly executes a bank robbery (with two of their members dead), the gang decides to break into a jewelry store safe through the wall of an adjoining office. But the police are tipped off to the operation, and soon the thieves are on the run. The deaths of several police officers lead to a standoff on Sydney Street, with hundreds of police offers battling the holed-up thieves.

SPOILERS ALERT!

Accurately assessing The Siege on Sydney Street is made most difficult by the technical limitations of the transfer here; specifically, it’s a pan-and-scanned TV print of the widescreen film (originally filmed in 2.35:1 Dyaliscope). Thus, action is redirected almost constantly, with characters either cut out of the frame from entire sequences, or popping up in inadvertent “jump cuts” from the scanning process. This compromised transfer seriously impacts the film (most definitely to the negative), so consideration of its dramatic worth necessarily take a back seat.

Still, it’s hard to imagine that The Siege on Sydney Street was entirely successful as anything other than a standard crime actioner. While most films dealing with historic events take liberties with the facts, The Siege on Sydney Street presents very little facts to begin with, to the point that anyone not already familiar with the actual event might wonder what, exactly, is going on. If the film eventually does get around to telling the viewer what the revolutionaries’ ultimate purpose is, I don’t remember it. Certainly that stage isn’t set at the beginning of the film (they don’t even correctly label the gang as Latvians - just “Russians”), nor is enough info (if any) given about what the gang plans on doing with their money, who they’re helping, and why they feel the need to steal. And very little character motivation is given for how they feel about being thieves, either. In short, we wind up not caring one way or the other for these criminals, because we don’t know what the hell they’re really up to here.

As for the action elements of the film, they’s decently handled - if infrequently (there’s a cool knife fight between Moore and undercover police agent Mannering, played with cool detachment by Donald Sinden). The final siege doesn’t convey the scope of the actual police standoff, but that can be chalked up most probably to the film’s limited budget. Unfortunately, too much of the film is exposition, but exposition that doesn’t cover what should be important in the film. Quite a bit of The Siege on Sydney Street is taken up by the romance between Sara and Peter (played with remarkable quiet by the usually animated Wyndgarde), but it’s a relatively stale affair. Neither dramatically or thematically fleshed out enough, nor particularly rousing in its action sequences, The Siege on Sydney Street is interesting enough, but ironically (considering it probably had the biggest budget of all the films in this set), it’s the least successful in terms of delivering a unified cinematic experience.

The DVD:

The Video:
This will be the section that purists will no doubt dislike - and with good reason. VCI Entertainment hasn’t spent a dime cleaning these prints up, nor would there be much point, since most of them appear to be TV syndication prints. I have no idea what, if any, cuts may have been made to the films. The prints themselves vary greatly in quality, mostly in the fair-to-good quality - for these types of films. I, just like other movie fans, would like releasing companies to release beautifully silky, pristine prints of every title available, digitally cleaned up and offered up on sparkling, bit-heavy transfers. But that’s not reality. It’s likely that small, marginal films like these won’t ever get that kind of treatment, simply because a company can’t make any money with such a proposition. The outlay would far exceed sales. That’s not to say that better prints for these titles aren’t out there, and that a releasing company with more money and more interest in presenting pristine prints won’t surface. But for me, VCI, despite the sometimes iffy quality of the prints here, should be given credit for putting out these obscure titles in the first place. They don’t look any worse than when they showed up on TV decades ago (if they ever did here in the States), and I seriously doubt anyone is going to schedule them any time soon on cable. Scratches (sometimes big), screen anomalies, film shrinkage, rough splices, and even some fuzz and hair show up in that projector gate, but again, the prints are surprisingly clean considering that nobody probably thought these films had any reason to still exist seventy years later.

The Audio:
Audio quality (English Dolby Digital mono) is variable, as well, with plenty of warbling and hiss associated with these types of transfers. If you’re used to this from previous exposure, you won’t mind. No subtitles or close-captions doesn’t help, though, VCI.

The Extras:
Each of the three discs includes two vintage trailers for other films. They are: Taming of Dorothy and No Orchids for Miss Blandish on disc one; Bachelor in Paris and Papaer Gallows on disc two; and The Frightened Bride and The Third Man on disc three. There’s also an animated photo gallery on disc one, that features some stills and posters from The Siege on Sydney Street.

Final Thoughts:
I love the clean, crisp, razor-sharp look of digitally remastered, anamorphically enhanced, widescreen movies on my big monitor. Who doesn’t? But I also profess a nostalgic fondness for the way I viewed films when I was a kid: on crappy, small TVs, with ghostly black and white images coming through the scratches, the splices, and the high contrast. On that very specific, narrow level, British Cinema: Classic ‘B’ Film Collection, Volume 1 works just fine. The films offered here are good examples of tight, concise ‘B’ filmmaking, and they move, fella. It’s a pity better prints weren’t found, but we may be lucky just to have these obscure titles in any condition. Good show. I recommend the British Cinema: Classic ‘B’ Film Collection, Volume 1.

Paul Mavis is an internationally published film and small screen historian, a member of the Online Film Critics Society, and the author of The Espionage Filmography.

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