IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 12 minutes, rated 7.1/10.0 by 8062 cinematizens
Verdict: In the beginning.
The Set-up: Monsoon rains in Wales wash out roads and lead two separate travelling parties to pitch up at the Old Dark House of the Femm family. If only the travellers had been able to read the map where it said ‘Do Not Stop Here.’ But it was too wet, too dark, and the director was in too much of hurry for that warning.
You rang?
There they find the hirsute, mute butler, Frankestein’s monster, moonlighting in a second job. Melvyn Douglas wise cracks; Raymond Massey looks serious; Lillian Bond just looks as does the very talented Gloria Stuart (of Titanic) in this pre-Code film; but Charles Laughton has the best part and plays it superbly. Then there are the cross-dressing Femms, Horace, Rebecca, Saul, and Roderick engaged in a race to the nut house.
Enthusiasts for creepy old dark houses, ahem, like me, are in for a disappointment. There are no secret passages (from which chain saw wielding cats leap), no sliding panels (to reveal a torture chamber), no peep holes (through which to see terrible sights, like a Republican), nor does anyone flounce around in a cape (the most common ensemble for villains in Old Dark Houses).
On the other hand, the Femms do provide compensations. Horace jumps every time someone scratches. Rebecca screeches denunciations of all as sinners. Roderick is the cross-dresser. Saul likes fire. Lots of it.
We never do find out anything about the travellers and they all survive the night to continue being unknown though in a slightly different configuration. In these days Douglas often played the wise-cracking wastrel, belying his later, memorable dramatic roles.
Potato any one?
Gloria Stuart before taking passage on the Titanic
James Whale of Frankenstein directed, wasting Boris Karloff behind some hairy make-up, from the novel Benighted (1927) by J.B. Priestly; the screenplay closely follows the book. Among the nice touches are many visuals, nobody can open a door like Frankenstein’s monster, or the split mirrors before Gloria Stuart, the shadows on the dining room wall, and never did the phrase ‘Have a potato!’ seem so strange. By comparison the Hammer remake in 1963 is a toga party.
Robin Bailes, The Vengeance of the Invisible Man (2019)
Good Reads meta-data is pages 236 rated 0.0 by 0 litizens. (Lazy sods!)
Genre: krimi, academic
Verdict: Whoa! I did not see that coming.
Recovering from her Mummy’s Quest (2018) adventures in Egypt, Amelia has been digging in Romania. Romania! Yes, Rumania in the Carpathian mountains. Seems there are pictographs there, too, for her to interpret. In anticipation of Christmas she has returned to Cambridge and her sister, the high powered Zit who talks a mile-a-minute while running hither and yon. She is loud, full tilt, and one-dimensional, contrast to the shintrovert Amelia.*
Zit’s publishing firm is bringing out a work of fiction – Memoirs of an Invisible Man. In short order, the question becomes ‘Is it non-fiction?’ because strange things start to happen. The author does not show up at the book launch, but the books go flying through the air. Sales follow. There are several other public displays of the invisibility – a pair of empty trousers dance through Christmas shoppers, and so on. Nothing that would be noticed on King Street in Newtown.
The sensation hungry media adds to the fire garnishing invisibility with hyperbole. Sales continue to soar. Zit loves the sales but cannot communicate with the author, still less set KPIs. All of this intrigues Amelia, who read the manuscript and found it poignant, even moving, whereas, compliant with her McKinsey training all Zit sees only £’s.
In a parallel track professors two in Cambridge fastness have been strangled in locked rooms. Were they victims of collegial animosity. Well, as a matter of fact….. [But that would be telling].
Plod Harrigan applies the acids of questions, shoe leather, and patience to crack the case much to the fury of his superior who wants RESULTS! NOW! Bullying subordinates is certainly a chapter in the McKinsey Management Manual these days. Nonetheless, as he nears retirement Harrigan keeps on keeping on, despite the badgering, er hmm, management of his superior. Loved Harrigan’s musings about his last words, and pleased he did not need them.
Meanwhile, Amelia connects the dots between the murders and the invisible man. Seems obvious, and yet there are surprises to come. Believe me: I was surprised. Of course, they are connected but not in the way I expected.
A victim of her own curiosity, Amelia gets in the way and has a brush with the invisible one that frightens her into contacting Universal (see The Mummy Quest, reviewed elsewhere on the blog, for an explanation). She expected [sigh] the suave, dashing, handsome Boris to come to her rescue. Instead, thanks to the duty roster, she gets the short, unsympathetic, and dowdy Elsa who saves her neck more than once with a willingness to believe the unbelievable and a resourcefulness honed from previous encounters with the unbelievable.
In the midst of all this Amelia meets a man who does take her seriously and she him, but fitting courtship into a schedule dominated by the unbelievable is difficult. This romance is charming, but it does slow the action.
There are references to the formidable Maggie at the start and finish, but I was disappointed she did not put in an appearance. She just about stole the show in Egypt. The crystal ball suggests that she will figure in the next title in the series that will take us to Nosferatu country.
There are many great lines in what is essentially a screenplay. Elsa says that in her experience the dividing line between the living and the dead is a grey area. There are more where that came from. Read on.
Razor-tongued Robin Bailes (host of My Dark Corner of this Sick World to be found on You Tube) cannot be stopped, and in this one he comprehensively outsmarted this jaded reader with the double-barrelled plot. It brings together many threads from the cinematic suite of invisible man films discussed elsewhere on this blog. This is the third book in Bailes’s series, and the best for my AUD $4.95 on Kindle. Very clever. Chapeux!
*Shintrovert is a shy introvert, a term coined by Jessica Pan in Sorry I am late, I didn’t want to come (2017) discussed elsewhere on this blog. Do try to keep up.
Multi-lingual Brit secret service agent Bernhard Newman is rambling through the Vosges Mountains on his honeymoon, when….. Because of his experience in ferreting out German spies, Papa Pontivy, head of the French Deuxième Bureau, asks for his help. In the inner sanctum of a fort on the Maginot Line a dead body has been found. That is bad. Here is what is worse. The deadman is unidentified. Worse. Worst: he was shot dead but no one heard anything. Oh, and the corpse was naked and disfigured, to prevent identification it seems. How is it that no one noticed all of this in the claustrophobic confines of the underground fort?
How did a stranger penetrate the many defences of a Maginot Line redoubt? Sacré bleu! How did he do so in secret? How did someone else kill him without leaving a trace? All good questions.
After a tour of the fortifications Newman goes about his honeymoon business….ahem. And Papa Pontivy takes over. He disregards evidence and relies on his numerous instincts. Gallic though he may be he does not practice the Cartesian method, which in general is to accept nothing as true until verified beyond doubt, to divide the problem into its smallest components, to take each component in turn, to start with the easiest and (re)solve it and then on to the next. To make enumeration complete and reviews general so that nothing is omitted. Pops does none of this.
Thereafter the novel violates most rules of fiction. It divides the action and the narrative voice. Newman leaves. Pontivy takes over insisting on his instinct, which by the way make no sense but reference to his instinct is constantly repeated to the point where I agree with one of the characters who says to him, ‘I am tired of hearing about your instinct!’ Amen, brother! He then goes to Brittany which his instincts tell him is the key to the Line. He does not bother to look at a map, but relies on the writer to prove him right.
This instinct that he cannot stop talking about when Newman says a Captain seems to have recognised him (Newman). That sets Pontivy off but it is not his perception at all but Newman’s. And even that makes no sense since the Captain certainly recognised him since he had earlier encountered him in the woods and marched Newman in to explain himself. One rule for writing fiction is, I know, write fast and do not read what is written. This author applied that rule to the hilt. I kept going because of the few details about the Maginot Line, but as a krimi it is tedious.
Bernard Newman (1897-1968) was a prolific author. He had been a liaison officer with French forces during World War I. After this war he travelled widely in Europe on a bicycle. He was in France in May 1940 and saw for himself the onset of the German invasion. He often made himself the protagonist in his novels as above.
Bernard Newman
His oeuvre includes travelogues, spy stories, science fiction, and journalism. His The Blue Ants (1952) described a nuclear war between Russia and China set in 1970. There are nearly a hundred titles in all listed in the Wikipedia entry. Some have been re-issued in a Kindle format. Probably not for me.
Confession. As a boy the encyclopaedia we had at home featured an extensive entry on the Maginot Line which fascinated me. Later I appreciated the political and social aspects of this engineering feat, and that added an informed layer of interest. André Maginot had served in the trenches at Verdun in World War I and he marched with veterans at the consecration of the tomb of the unknown solider in the Arc de Triomphe after the war. He entered politics to prevent another blood bath, and when he was invited to join a cabinet he wanted Defence so he could build that wall that later bore his name, though it was never officially named.
There were two major military reactions to the bloody stalemate of trench warfare in World War I. One was to turn to mobility in tanks, trucks, motorcycles, and air planes. Proponents of mobility included Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle, both of whom had also been in the trenches, and also Erwin Rommel who had practiced mobility on the Italian front in World War I. But Churchill and de Gaulle were marginalised in the post-war politics.
The second response was to build impregnable trenches under nine feet of steel and concrete which itself was under tons of earth. Maginot was one who responded in that way, but more importantly so was Phillip Pétain, the defender of Verdun, and his word was law on military matters because of the sacrifices at Verdun, birthplace of Jean d’Arc. This was an effort to learn lessons taught in blood.
Most of the lore about the Maginot Line is mistaken, like most lore. It did not continue along the Belgian border because the Belgians vigorously objected to that, and claimed that their neutrality would be respected, and if not, then their own Albert Line would suffice. In either case no unnamed (German) invader would threaten France through Belgium. When came the test, the Albert Line was breached in a few hours – it had been built by the lowest bidder, a German firm that turned over all the plans to the Wehrmacht. That may sound dumb. So does contracting with Chinese-owned firms for defence computers but we do that right in the wide brown land. Nonetheless, Maginot was determined to continue the Line to the coast, but he ran out of money and because of the Depression he ran out of political support. One of the reasons the Germans attacked when they did, was to strike before the Line reached the coast. Where it was tested in the South, it proved impervious to Italian attacks.
The Maginot Line was built:
To prevent a German surprise attack.
To slow a cross-border assault.
To protect Alsace and Lorraine.
To save manpower. (Recall that Germany had twice the population of France.)
To allow time for the mobilisation of the French Army..
To be used as a basis for a counter-offensive.
To invite Germany to circumvent the Line by violating the neutrality of Switzerland or Belgium which would galvanise world opinion against it, and it would also make the field of combat those countries and not France itself.
In the polarised whirlwind of the Third Republic, the French general staff forgot its own strategy and spread men and material along the Line so that there was no concentration and in a crisis none would be possible. Consequently, the Line was fully manned, leaving no troops in reserve for such a counter-attack.
I read this novel years ago in the Fisher Library copy. It has not improved with age.
Not to be confused with Double crime sur la ligne Maginot (1937), a film that depicts a love triangle among officers in the Line and offers so many images of the formidable Line and hundreds of troops that it must have been made with the cooperation of the army, perhaps as propaganda to show how great the Line was. In the event, German agents were the villains. There is a version of it on You Tube, and it is dead boring.
Good Reads mea-data is 480 pages, rated 3.46/5.00 by 197 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: Brrr!
The set up: Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station where all directions are north. This is the most extreme version of the Castle at Otranto yet.
For four months of the year this base is accessible by air. For the remaining eight months it is sealed off by the weather which at times also precludes all radio and electronic communication. During this winter, overland travel is suicide, and where would one go? The nearest habitat is the Russian Vostock Station 800 long kilometres away, well beyond the range of the ground vehicles in good weather. In the winter, in the open nothing works very well. The metal of machines is so brittle it snaps. GPS devices burst if taken in hand to look at them. Cabin heaters cannot match the -99 Fahrenheit temperatures with a wind of two hundred miles an hour.
Add to all that the drying air and the two mile elevation that produces altitude sickness and dehydration without exertion. Though they sit on enough ice-locked water to double the fresh water on earth, they are always thirsty and there is never enough water to drink. To melt the ice takes a lot of avgas and that is husbanded because it powers the generators that keep them alive. Did Virgil take Dante on a tour of this locale for the Inferno?
Over winter a party of forty scientists and technicians remain to continue research and recording conditions until the warmer weather returns. Into this mix two new comers arrive on the last flight before close-down: Protagonist and Dr Bob. Pro is hangdog from the start, there in desperation it seems. The money is not great but since none is spent in the eight months, it accumulates. Truth to tell I was never quite sure why he was there. On the other hand Dr Bob exudes the confidence of a dean, unable to distinguish sociology from psychology. Yep, the two are used interchangeably in the book. Shudder.
No sooner do they and the bad weather arrive than the plot thickens. Bossman has a secret for Pro, a meteor found at the bottom of one of the core sample pits. By prose convulsion we are given to understand this rock might be ejecta from Moon or even Mars. (New Jersey was ruled out as the rock is too clean.) If it is, it has enormous scientific and commercial value. Ssssh.
In this small town there are no secrets, and though Bossman pledges Pro to secrecy, he finds soon enough that everyone from the cook to the femmes knows the secret already. Bossman is the only one who does not know that the the secret is not secret. That does not matter much since he is the first kill, down the bottom of one such pit. Accident? Suicide? or Murder? Well, we all know the answer to that. More little Indians follow.
As the body count increases the survivors desperately want the deaths to be unassociated accidents or even suicides, anything to blame the victims. If that is so, then they do not feel threatened. But this ante is soon upped. They are all threatened. What the meteor has to do with all this is lost in the shuffle as far as this reader could tell, though it reappears near the end.
The characterisations of eight or so principals is well done. They differ from one another. Sounds simple but it is not. In too many of the escapist novels I sample all the characters, after their clothing is laborious described, sound alike, us the same speech patterns and vocabulary.
The atmosphere in the Otranto Station is superbly realised. The descriptions of the weather are integrated into the story and make fascinating reading.
That the South Pole is the end of the world is clear, but it is also the beginning of outer space and much of the work done at it underwrites space exploration research. In the middle of vast Antarctic continent there is nothing but the weather. Penguins are a thousand miles away on the coasts where the weather is better. There is nothing there and no reason to be there, except that it is there.
Having visited the International Antarctic Centre in Christchurch, where this story starts, and the Antarctic displays at the Maritime Museum in Hobart, I find all of this fascinating. It is the dark side of the Moon at the South Pole.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 10 minutes, rated 5.1/10.0 by 333 cinematizens.
Genre: Old Dark House
Verdict: A well lit Old Dark House.
Wallace Ford rocks up at the Rogues’ Tavern, aka the Old Dark House, with his fiancée to cross the state line for a quickie … wedding. With that mind and little else, they could not pass by a place called Rogues’ Tavern. the more so one possessed of a possessive apostrophe. Wallace does his best, as always, to inject some energy and wit into the catatonic proceedings. This is a classroom specimen for a film school assignment: which is worse? The leaden direction or the directionless screenplay. Tough call there.
Gathered at the Tavern (which had none of the furnishing that the word ‘tavern’ calls to mind, spilled beer, overflowing ashtrays, dart boards, big screens, buxom barmaids, a fetid atmosphere) where an assortment of crooks sit around looking crooked in very long takes. After the third take, the fraternity brothers dozed off.
Along for the fun – aside: that’s an ironic comment – is a femme who reads tarot cards like the telephone book. Slowly without inflection. More very long takes of her looking at the camera.
There is a dog howling on the sound track, perhaps pained by watching the film, a face peering in the windows from behind coke bottle bottom lenses. It did not require a degree in scriptwriting to recognise the colour of these herrings.
These are the high points. The rest is worse. Believe it or not, Ripley!
But, as every review of this sludge notes, it has a surprise ending, which, while nothing can redeem the sludge, certainly demands and gets attention. The villain has a lot to say and says it, though a few lessons from Bart Simpson on maniacal laughing would have helped. The last one standing was of course the villain but even so the speech is a rarity. That may explain the inflated rating of 5.1 when nothing else could.
Wallace Ford had a biography more tortured than any imagined by Charles Dickens. That is hard to square with the sunny disposition he always projected on the screen. Born in England an unwanted baby he was taken into an overflowing foundling home. In a few weeks he was packed with others and dispatched to a colonial orphanage in Toronto from whence he was enslaved to seventeen foster homes before he ran away to join the circus, more or less literally – The Winnipeg Kiddies. While a teenager he and a pal rode the rails to New York. Along the way, his pal was killed in a rail-yard accident hopping freight trains in a switching yard and Wallace took his name as a tribute. Stage struck, his fresh face, energy, willingness to do anything got him work on Broadway and led to his two hundred IMDb credits. In Hollywood he starred in B movies and when these evaporated he became a character actor in movies and then a regular guest star on television.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 7 minutes, rated 6.1/10.0 by 3170 cinematizens.
Genre: comedy, horror (like much of life, an odd combination)
Verdict: Clichés along the Nile.
While The Mummy (1932) is a subtle romantic film about love across the millennia with the title figure in only one scene, The Mummy’s Hand is the film that spawned all the clichés that have followed in The Mummy’s Tomb (1942), The Mummy’s Ghost (1944), The Mummy’s Curse (1944), The Mummy’s Homework (1955)….. and which are still repeated in re-makes. A title search on IMDb yields 200 title hits.
In this outing the mummy stumbles around at treacle pace like a concussed NFL lineman, trailing bandages with the use of only one arm, and that hand. His victims have to lie quietly while he sets upon them, and per the director’s orders they do, one after another.
To begin at the beginning, in Cairo two down-and-out Yankees come across a clue to a rich tomb — X marks the spot! — and set out to pillage it in the American way. Locals demur but lack the dosh to recruit the Magnificent Seven. Instead they turn to the curator at the local museum, George ‘Shiver’ Zucco, whose paladin is the titular escaped anatomy school specimen who lumbers around. So mysterious are the Tanna leaves which sustain Lumber that Wikipedia says they are fictional. Ha! False fact! They are as real as anything the president in thief says.
While the plot starts out like The Treasure of the Sierra Madres (1948), it lacks the soul of that memorable film. This one is played for laughs. Cecil Kellaway appears with a peppery daughter to add to the fun, and they sure do. Square Jaw is accompanied by the breezy Wallace Ford, whose mugging steals a few scenes but Kellaway holds his own and Marta, the daughter, makes an impressive entrance with six gun in hand. These four set off across the desert. These are the Tomb Raiders heading for Tombstone!
For what facts are worth these days, this film does not continue the storyline of The Mummy and ergo is not a sequel though it is routinely called that by those who uphold the contemporary standards of journalism.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour 22 minutes of runtime, rated 5.6/10.0 by 324 cinemtizens.
Verdict: nicely done.
On a quiet country road in the Yorkshire Dales a dazed individual steps out of the mist in front of a car, and gets walloped. (He had to wait a long time for a car to come along that road.) The driver takes Victim to the hospital and talks to the police after salting away his companion paramour. Of whom more later.
Meanwhile, some British National Servicemen are asleep at the switch when a blip occurs on the radar, and continue sleeping when the electric power goes off and on and off. These chaps are the Isles first line of defence if the Cold War got Hot. SSSh, don’t disturb them. These are the same ones in X The Unknown (1956) and it stayed that way as far as they were concerned.
Plod comes to investigate the scene of the accident and finds the now trigger-happy soldiers prowling around. A cast of familiar faces crosses the screen: Barrie Ingham, Glyn Houston, Valerie Gearon, and Lyndon Brook – it began to look like an episode of Z Cars. [Sigh, if only].
The plot thickens when at the hospital Victim who looks Chinese, has no blood, and — most suspicious of all — wears a latex suit straight out of a 1970s exercise video. The Chinese nurse in residence in this rural hospital, after a glance, says he is not Chinese, despite appearances. What will he say about her when he regains consciousness? Well they all look alike and later when an imposter takes this nurse’s place no one else notices the switch. (Not even her since we never see her again. Loose end or what? Wake up the Continuity Editor.)
Square Jaw sweats a lot in the effort to be reasonable. Victim is a talkative alien who says he was taking some prisoners to the galactic slammer when his low-bidder built UFO blew an O-ring and he had to crash-land on the Third Rock. In the subsequent confusion his two charges — two equally bloodless women, who are also not human, but are women, nonetheless (figure that one out) — got away. All this explaining did in the fraternity brothers. Mind you their interest had waned since the reading matter of the radarman was left behind.
Many dark atmospheric shots of figures watching, womanly figures. They scare the car driver to death. Oops. We come in peace, and all that.
Meanwhile, the hospital heats up, and up, and up. Now everyone is sweating including Square Jaw. It seems Victim likes heat and he keeps turning up the thermostat on the central heating. Sure, like an NHS country hospital would have central hearing in 1965, let alone such advanced technology as a thermostat. Victim also wants privacy and the hospital is surrounded by a forcefield. The McKinsey trained hospital manager knows a KPI when he sees one and he sees in this alien publicity, funding, and, let’s not forget, promotion, the keyest of all KPIs. A devotee of Pox News he does not believe in science, still less than anything he cannot see, so he get into his Austin saloon and speeds off … smack into the forcefield. In the days before the Red Queen made everyone buckle up he went right through the windscreen to his final KPI, as in Killed Performing an Indicator.* That sobers everyone up. They came in peace. Now two dead.
Somewhere out in the countryside the National Servicemen smoke cigarettes and look bored, as do viewers at this stage. The light is too poor out there for further reading.
Then the page of the screenplay turns, and the doctors begin to think that Victim may be the villain, and the two others are the police making a terrible job of looking for him. Well, why not, that makes as much sense as anything else.
Two things standout. The hospital switchboard operator gets hysterical and has to be slapped into sense by one of the doctors. The slapping doctor is a she. The hysterical women is a standard feature of this genre but that is the only time I can recall seeing the mandatory slap delivered by a woman in authority. Nice twist. Though the only reason the operator is there is to get slapped. It would have been even better if she had slapped an hysterical man. For that, we are still waiting. Second, Square Jaw saw The Third Man (1949) and is inspired to take to the sewers to evade the forcefield and retrieve his iPhone or something. He slogs back and forth between sceptic tank and well for no discernible reason but an actor has got to do what a director tells him to do.
Victim makes a run for it, and the alien women (the not human ones, probably Kappas, muttered the fraternity brothers) explain they are the Law and he is the Villain. One of the doctors goes all Stockholm Syndrome and follows Victim cum Villain to the downed spacecraft and after he ditches her he boards and fires up. But in the sky his ship is blown up. Was the Law in another ship blasting him, or did he hit another forcefield? Or was the low-bid contractor at it again. We’ll never know.
There is also a faint hint earlier that the inhuman women run the show where Victim comes from, but that is never developed. Still it is intriguing for a while when Victim asks with incredulity ‘She/ does what you tell her?’ when a male doctor directs a nurse to bring water. (Warning: Men, do not try this at home.)
The use of Asian talent is the most obvious distinction of the film: Yoko Tani, Ric Young, and Tsai Chin got a gig out of it. It catches the eye but is not integrated into the plot or character.
The reviews I scanned are condescending, but I rather liked this low key approach. The direction is not Val Guest standard and there is treacle time, especially at the start when many of the actors move as if underwater. The screenplay is not Nigel Kneale level but it has more intellectual bite than most of this ilk. But in the end too much was left unexplained. Why was the driver’s paramour such a zombie? And why was she there at all? Did the cat do it? Who fenced up the forcefield? Why don’t the doctors notice the switch of nurses? Who let the dogs out? If the inhuman women are Law why don’t they go all Dirty Harriettes and get their man? What is the ISO rating of that hospital? Why are the aliens Lysterians? Why not Republicans? What does the title have to do with the story? Best for last: Who cares anyway?
*A biography of the Red Queen is discussed elsewhere on this blog. Get clicking.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 34 minutes, rated 7.1/10.0 by 1290 cinematizens.
Genre: Atomic.
Verdict: Compelling.
Dr Memory has a crisis of conscience about what god hath wrought and writes a letter to the PM threatening a surface nuclear test in Westminster. Amid the flotsam of nut case threats that flow into the PM’s office, a routine investigation follows, led by the brisk, decisive, and focussed Quatermass. Don’t blink and there is a gangly Joss Ackland, cocking his head, in one scene.
The staging is marvellous and the tragi-comic woman with whom Mr Memory shacks up is a humane touch. He threatens Armageddon; she fusses over her cavalier terrier dog. Earlier the boarding house owner wrangles a herd of cats. These snippets of ordinary life relieve much of the tension; although they do not give Memory pause, they do give the viewer perspective. Then there are the sight gags, the man in the sandwich boards trying repeatedly to board a train, or the Tommie rifling clothes.
Such detached subtlety is a million miles from the grind-it-in-their-faces approach of Hollywood these days.
In this work of fiction the representatives of the media are presented as sober and responsible, rather than first fomenting hysteria, then trading on it, and finally denouncing the hysteria and panic they do so much to cause. More fiction: The political leadership is calm and the army disciplined (almost). Where are the McKinsey managers in all this, history will ask.
But Memory’s moral crisis is not developed. None of the others give it a moment’s thought. Yet Robert Oppenheimer and Andrei Sakharov were just two of many atomic scientists at the time who did worry about the world they had made. Biographies of both these scientists are discussed elsewhere on this blog. Get clicking. The film was released in July 1951 when the Cold War was hot in Korea and tense in Berlin.
The film is all the more focussed for not having big name stars in it to distract attention from the story. Unlike Dunkirk (2017) there is no Kenneth Branagh of the day taking off his hat and putting it back on again and again to steal scenes. Does he really need to do that? Evidently, yes.
The Boutling Brothers performed magic in this film. The crowd scenes, the evacuation, the military patrols, the empty streets, the reflection in the widow, Paddington Station, all touches of a master like Hitchcock done on a pittance. They have a long string of well known and much loved films to their credit, e.g., The Outsider (1948), Private’s Progress (1956), The Risk (1956), I’m All Right, Jack (1959), and Heavens Above! (1963) in which they ridiculed sacrosanct institutions like church, social class, army, and state, and in others in which moral dilemmas were front and centre without any preaching. Among the actors they repeatedly cast was Victor Madden who does his nervous twitch on command first in the pub and then outside the church.
IMDb is runtime 1 hour and 34 minutes, rated 7.1/10.0 by 787 cienmatizens.
Genre: Fantasy, Mystery, Thriller, one or all of the above.
Verdict: Nicely done.
A routine flight full of British character actors (Alexander Knox, Denholm Elliott, Michael Redgrave, Sheila Sim, and more, abetted by Michael Hordern) goes awry in the waning days when Britain still pretended to be a world power before James Bond took that nostalgia duty. Leaving from a very Brit Hong Kong for Tokyo they stop at Okinawa for fuel. From blooded Okinawa they will overfly devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki to perv on the atomic wastelands. At least two of the characters had been imprisoned by the Japanese and a little perving has appeal to them.
Foreboding was generated by a prologue about a lost flight, way off course, and a passer-by with a dream, hence the fantasy element.
We all know that things will go wrong, and some of the passengers are worried about that dream. (Yes, it is confusing isn’t it.) Are dreams premonitions or indigestion? Deep. Will knowledge of this dream be reflexive? Will it effect how people act and become self-fulfilling? That seems to be the point. That theme is later played out in miniature with the pilot.
Stock is on the right.
Once on board the film becomes an examination of the characters from the withdrawn RAF veteran, the naive stenographer, the worried Sinologist, the brash business stereotype, the two Tommies who get off at Okinawa, the unflappable Air Marshall, and the comatose Ambassador. Nigel Stock who went on to Amsterdam is superb as the pilot when he reminds the Air Marshall who is in charge right here, right now. Victor Madden is wasted as the flight engineer serving tea. Not once does he go all twitchy as only he could do. The flight seems to take real time.
Victor Madden
There is also a corker of a last line about being lost and then found.
The Overdue Life of Amy Byler (2019) by Kelly Harms
GoodReads meta-data is 328 pages, rated 3.94/5.00 by 3178 litizens.
Genre: Chick Lit
Verdict: Go, girl!
By a quirk of fate (= a college roommate from the salad days), Single Mom school librarian from the mud that is western Pennsylvania, while attending a conference, becomes the subject of a comprehensive multi-media makeover on a brief vacation in New York City from her innumerable maternal duties. Her vanished ex-husband reappears to take care of the children, twelve year old Einstein and a fourteen year old wanna be party girl. Single Mom has fifteen minutes of fame.
She is riddled with guilt, self-doubts, and hesitations about leaving home alone but keeps on keeping on. Roommate cuts through all that. Meanwhile, daughter sends encouraging and disconcerting texts. Her junior Einstein continues to solve math problems mentally for relaxation, mulling over careers as a neurosurgeon or astrophysicist. Made-over Single Mom’s idea of doing the town in the Big Worm is to go to bookstores, despite some strong-arming from roommate.
There are plenty of laughs along the way. Nerd boy makes jokes in Latin. Does he ever! Roommate says Single Mom has to wear make-up, otherwise people will think she is dead; so pale is she. Her assigned personal trainer is desperate to make this project work to further his career and that includes pimping for her, whether she wants it or not. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, #tags are all employed.
When occurs an accident Amy takes over while her Ex goes into Chernobyl meltdown. Crisis management according to Amy: if no one is dead and no one’s hair is on fire, we can cope. Party girl daughter was doing unsupervised diving practice in her Olympic ambitions to master the springboard and did a Greg Louganis. Then there is the fate of the stuffed cheetah at the hospital. Best not think about that.
By the way her conference presentation concerned Flexthology to encourage reluctant readers. She might have applied it to some of the GoodReads contributors who complain about this term, this idea, this….they know not what. The essence of Flexthology is a variety of comparable books from which these reluctant readers choose to complete reading assignments. To overcome peer pressure the reading is done on e-readers, having no tell-tale covers. There are many financial and legal issues to resolve about intellectual property. It is anthology reading but since there is choice it is flexible. The 2.0 ratings I glanced at on GoodReads grouse about this unusual term, and the very idea they might have to stop and think what the neo-logism means.
Kelly Harms
Of course libraries serve the same purpose: a variety of books from which a reader may choose. Amy’s point is to standardise that variety enough and to put it in tiers to fit it into a school curriculum. But wait, let’s not get too serious. It is after all only a plot device.
