IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 17 minutes, 3.5 rated by 1,750 discerning cinematizens. That’s out of 10.
Genre: Horror; Species: Bore.
Verdict: [Snore.]
Professor Moriarty is not only a stable genius but also a great patriot. In an old dark house near a convenient swamp he experiments on men and dogs to create a savage warrior who will slay our fanatical enemies in 1942. His comely daughter is in attendance and none the wiser. She seems to have had no mother. Was she another of his experiments? Her beau is even dimmer.
Morrie’s ethics clearance application for his Hairy Warrior project was decisively rejected by the third anonymous assessor, that is, Dr No. Without a nationally competitive grant Morrie was of no use to the university in the ratings game, so he was manoeuvred into early retirement. Angry, he continues to conjure a savage murderer out of a gentle giant gardener known as Pedro to everyone except the screen credits which have him as Pietro. ‘Look, I just work here,’ said the film editor.
The spectral seminar Morrie holds at the start for exposition is the best scene in the movie. I speak as a participant in such sessions, some to my knowledge and others not. Dr No has had more than one tongue-lashing from yours truly.
There is a menacing atmosphere in the misty swamp and the transformation of the gentle giant into ravening wolf-man is effective, but he is no Lon Chaney and that hat! Ha!
The whole film was undercooked in the five days it took to produce it. Yet it is so slow that it seems almost three hours long. The director must have been taking Rohypnol by the handful.
The daughter-damsel in distress looks almost as bored as I felt, and her rescuing knight was a 10-watt bulb. Neither offered any conviction nor injected any vitality into the proceedings.
I had read about it in detail on Scifist 2.0; ergo I knew the little I was in for. It is freely available on You Tube in a so-so print.
George Zucco
George Zucco was always committed to his roles no matter how ludicrous they were, like this one. He always gave 100 per cent. He alone carries this waste of celluloid but even he limps in the turgid and vague mishmash. By the way, The Great War left him with paralysis in his right arm, where he had been wounded. He always said yes to work and there are 99 credits for him on the IMDb. The name is Greek and he refused to change it to something Anglo, because it was his father’s name.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 10 minutes, rated 6.3 by 437 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
Verdict: ripped from today’s headlines.
Disaster looms as the weather produces giant storms. Polar ice caps melt. Rivers rise. The earth shakes. Avalanches fall. Volcanoes erupt. Hurricanes strike. This manifold threat divides humanity. One half tries to make a profit off this doom and gloom in Ted talks, religion, business, media, and politics. It is a godsend for these hucksters. The other half denies the reality of the threat even as they perish. Yes, it has a contemporary resonance.
After the tsunami destroyed New York City and most of the rest of the world in a Noah rerun, the film follows the trials of an assortment of survivors. But by then it is all rather anti-climatic. The few remaining souls set about recreating the society that destroyed the earth. The preacher fulminates; the businessman tries to profit; the politician sows discontent!
No, I am afraid the focus is more mundane than those stereotypes. A husband and wife were separated by the disaster, and each thinking the other dead, makes other, hmm, arrangements. There is a bully who thinks might is right, a milquetoast wimp whom Bully tramples, and so on. In the allotted runtime husband and wife are reunited, but … well, he already has a new Eve, double-but: no matter. It ends with a ménage à trois in the new Eden. Yes, the 1933 National Board of Review, aka censor, passed this dubious moral conclusion. Strange, no? Strange, yes.
Unusual to see Sydney Blackmer playing the lead. He made a career out heavies when not playing Teddy Roosevelt, to whom he bore no resemblance but played him – count ‘em – seven times. See below.
Never Kick a Man Upstairs (1953)
My Girl Tisa (1948)
Buffalo Bill (1944)
In Old Oklahoma (1943)
Teddy the Rough Rider (1940)
The Monroe Doctrine (1939)
This is My Affair (1937)
The special effects for the disaster (as above) are better than in many subsequent films until Ray Harryhausen revolutionised the business. Done with miniature models, and done well though the You Tube print is poor.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 20 minutes, rated 4.6 by 2,200 cinematizens.
Genre: SyFy; Species: women without men.
Verdict: A Golden Raspberry.
The usual crew (square-jawed captain, drooling comic relief, and oily Romeo) set off on a mission in a NASA launch film clip. Along for the ride (on the hospital bed that seems to be standard equipment on the flight deck*) is Paul Birch, holder of the Order of Sy Fyist Premier Cru for his many contributions to the genre, excluding this one. The mission is to deliver milk to the orbiting space wheel from Conquest of Space (1955).
Drooler is too busy memorising his gag-lines to notice as they veer off course and land on Venus in a snowfield. (This footage, too, comes from another film – Mission to Mars [1953]). When they come across a road sign directing them to Venus City, they realise all that the textbooks about the second planet are all wrong.
It gets worse. It is a planet without men! (Note, Venusians have had this problem before, watch for a forthcoming review of the Ship of Monsters (1960) for enlightenment on this recurrent problem.) This occasions so many stupid remarks that they are impossible to list, and better passed in silence. Suffice it to say that the dialogue is so sexist and misogynist that some critics suppose it was meant to be satire. I wish, but I don’t think so. In any event, it is all consistent and all played straight. The women are decked out in short, short skirts and high, high heels, and so on and on.
In such a shoddy production with such cement-direction that it takes 15-minutes to get going it is surely presumptuous to ridicule anyone else, but there it is. All the costumes and props look familiar because they had been used in previous movies, like the grey on gray uniforms from Forbidden Planet (1956), like the ray guns from Missile to the Moon (1958), like the (miniature) rubber spider from Cat Women of the Moon (1953), like the women’s costumes from World without End (1956), and the list goes on. Likewise the orienting shots, the snowfield landing, the city in the distance, the cosmos, the space station wheel, the initial rocket launch all come from other movies and no effort is made to conceal, integrate, or explain the obvious discrepancies in size, scale, or colour.
(Words have faille me. Supply your own caption.)
One might think this is bad but there is more. Hang onto those steak knives.
It fails the elementary Bechdel Test on criterion #3. The planet may have only women but they talk only of men. On this test…, well, look it up.
All in all, in comparison it makes Quark (1977) look like a quality production with a thoughtful script and convincing acting. (Psst, if you haven’t seen Quark, don’t!)
The inner pedant requires that I say the lead is not the queen, and the queen is on Venus not in Outer Space.
It is hard to believe that this concoction represents the combined creative efforts of Charles Beaumont, Ben Hecht, and Edward Bernds, who each have many other, far superior credits before and after this movie. Beaumont wrote some real chillers like The 7 Faces of Dr Lao (1964) and many episodes of the Twilight Zone. Ben Hecht created Hildy in His Girl Friday (1940) as well as writing Notorious (1946), Walk on the Wild Side (1962), and scores of others. Bernds specialised in short comedy as a director, writer, and designer with hundreds of credits. None of that pool of talent is visible in this widescreen, technicolor release, which looks like an A-movie and plays like a D-movie, those made to go directly to the drive-in theatre screens.
Women without men is a niche market that is well served by film producers with arrested development. It seems to be a frat boy fantasy that somewhere, somehow there are gorgeous women so starved of men that the frat boy will look good. Dream on, Bro. Here is a list of some to prove the point:
Jungle Women (1944)
Captive Women (1952)
Untamed Women (1952)
Cat-Women of the Moon (1953)
Mesa of the Lost Women (1953)
Women’s Prison (1955)
Fire Maidens from Outer Space (1956)
Missile to the Moon (1958)
Wild Women of Wongo (1958)
Women of the Prehistoric Planet (1966)
Mars Needs Women (1966)
Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968)
Chain Gang Women (1971)
No doubt there are others. Some of these are superior to the film under consideration and most do not take themselves as seriously.
The bed is there because there was no fourth recliner seat in any other science fiction movie to borrow so the bed was wheeled in from the studio infirmary. Most of the budget went to the leading lady’s salary, leaving little or nothing for the props and costumes. These insights are from the gossip about the backstage of the film on the IMDb.
IMDB meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 27 minutes, rated 6.6 by 3,744 cinematizens.
Genre: Sci fi; species Nuke paranoia.
Verdict: Lugubrious.
Dr Tom is on vacation from General Hospital when he encounters caveman Ollie on the one day of summer in England. Adventures for both follow. Dr Tom engages in some safe activity with Ollie’s squeeze who has trouble remembering her name, and Ollie loses face and much more.
Spoilers ahead.
As this well-worn trope unfolds, in a parallel line we meet C with his artistic mistress who carves driftwood into members…of her collection. These two are so posh, few dare approach them. But wherever C goes men with military ranks dog his steps with reports. He may be in donnish mufti but he is one big kahuna for sure.
C at work.
These two story lines collide when, with Ollie lumbering after them in slo-mo pursuit, Tom and Squeeze accidentally take refuge in C’s cliffside lair on the fatal shore. Ollie makes three.
Ever wondered what happened to the Village (of the Damned) children? It seems, C adopted them for his science experiment and has them locked away in a stone chamber (aka lair) where nary a geiger counter is heard. In the cave the children are monitored by Big Brother’s television cameras, and occasional nocturnal visits by some of those army officers in heavy duty radiation suits to give them nightmares. Ambiguity intended.
Yes, these sweet innocents are radioactive, and bred to be that way so that they will survive tomorrow’s nuclear war. C is not only a mad scientist, he is also a stable genius whose progeny will inherit the dust.
Tom, Squeeze, and even Ollie get all paternal with the cute kiddies, but recoil when they discover that the kids are icicles. In some Geordie-speak earlier we know they have been infused with radiation so that they will survive in a post-apocalyptic world, and that makes them radioactive to a fatal degree in a normal person. Their blood is uranium enriched! This fact gradually sinks into the would-be rescuers who have exposed themselves. Gulp! Ollie is quicker on the uptake than Dr Tom with all his degree-mill papers. One side effect of the radiation is that the children are colder than ice, but after a while everyone forgets that. The other side effect is that one hug, and you are dead.
Attention, Class!
The three (alleged) adults act spontaneously to escape with the tots without a plan or a clue and it ends accordingly.
There are nice touches. The children are very well integrated into the story, and penultimate scene when in a downbeat ending they are forcibly rounded up and reincarcerated is disturbing. It is not quite the SS in the ghetto but evocative of it. In a way the children drive the action because they are not all the docile sweetness and light that they have convinced C they are when he spies on them. Knowing that he is watching, they have worked out how to avoid that. If C has secrets, they have more.
The inevitability of Nuclear War shadows everything, as it did for us all at the time, and that became the justification for many unsavoury things without a doubt.
C is even colder than the children when he casually murdered his mistress because she learned too much about his work, criticised it, and beat him at scrabble. Three strikes and she was out!
British censors accepted the word ‘Damned’ in titles like the ‘Village’ (1960) of that name, and film producers rushed to get it into titles to titillate audiences. It was even easier to get that word than to get a coveted X-rating to lure in the gullible cinematizens. This film evokes the Village and its sequel, but stands on its own for a viewer who has not seen the others. The children are all posh white bread from the same casting agency. No cockney, no Pakistani. no Geordie, no West Indian, no Irish, no Nigerian…. All home counties.
Dr Tom is as unlikely an action hero as George Sanders was in 1960. He also knows precious little about radiation, it seems, despite his decades at General Hospital where he mostly looked wise.
Ollie tries to look smouldering but mostly looks hungry – bulimia warning. The portrayal of the biker gang members is, well, silly. They are all martial when Teddy Boys were rebels (without a cause) against authority. Ollie wears a tweed sports coat and the gang biker members leather, that is how we know he is the boss. For those who must know ‘Ted’ comes from Edward, as in Edwardian. Suffice it to say that tweed is not Edwardian. Look it up! I did.
Joseph Losey
The direction by expatriate blacklisted American Joseph Losey is excellent even if the story is disjointed. Kenneth Cope as one of the bikers conveys his love for Squeeze without a word or deed in a few superb moments. You might remember him as Hopkirk, deceased, a few years later.
There is no resolution at the end, which I took to be a reference to the end of Dr No.
IMDB metadata is run time of 1 hour and 12 minutes, rated 5.1 by 1,600 generous spirits.
Genre: Sy Fy.
Verdict: Numbing.
Sums it all up in one busy graphic.
Set up: The fabled northwest passage is big business with cargo submarines passing beneath the Arctic ice cap on a polar route. But then disaster strikes: I watched this movie! Curiosity will kill not only cats. Will I ever learn to leave the unseen unseen? Probably not.
One after another of the cargo subs is blown up. No reason to be in a hurry and after about ten explosions the US Navy oozes into action. Slowly, very slowly. The budget cutters have been here. Not only is Navy impoverished so is this production.
We got this far with a ponderous voice-over of plastic models in fish tanks. Commies in the aquarium! It is all Cold War with icicles. Brrr!
America’s finest are recruited from the Retired Actors Home, shorn of their canes and crutches, and sent into action as the A for Arthritic Team. Some of the cast and crew of geriatrics started in silent movies, while others pre-date film itself.
Fortunately the screenplay does not require them to move often from the floor marks however when they do the creaking sounds are their joints not the cardboard submarine set. I ask you what kind of submarine movie is it when the captain does not once say ‘Scope up!’ and so never says ‘Scope down.’
It is almost beyond the pale yet has, surprisingly enough, some merits. First is an ongoing argument between a gung-ho sailor who wants to shoot first and a pacifist civilian scientist. We have, of course, seen this debate before, and seen it better done, but the surprising thing is that it is here at all in this paper thin screen play. Moreover, in this offering the sailor is a hot head while the scientist is the voice of reason. Some marks for good intentions on this point.
The only time the visuals rise above the high school play level is when the intrepid leads find and enter the alien ship, which is a submerged flying saucer, which we all figured out long before any of these droolers did. It is all very German expressionism and cheap, no lights, no sets and the better for it.
By the time the sub-Arctic Sea saucer was found, I realised it belonged to James Arness, aka the Giant Carrot, from The Thing (from another world) (1951), a far superior movie, having sunk through the ice, making Jim an ET with no way to get home.
There is also an echo of the Odyssey, Ripley. Don’t see that often in B minus movies.
Most of the acting is squinting with furrowed brow. Lead Arthur Franz never made it to the A-List and in this film the chip on his shoulder about that is starting to show. He almost as disdainful of his lines as I am.
The alien is a hand puppet but upstages the actors, and it has better dialogue. No wonder it got a second gig with The Simpsons. Kang did not use the lowest bidder to build the flying and submersible saucer spacecraft that is self-repairing like a living being.
America’s best go into action.
Even so our heroes blow it up! It does take them three or four efforts to do so, turning a torpedo into a Polaris missile with some duct tape, but they succeed and we can all heave a sigh of relief because the film grates and grinds to a halt. They make not the slightest effort at technology transfer – theft – from the alien ship while they stumbled around on it.
Overall, it’s so bad that … it’s bad.
I was tempted to watch it after reading a biography of Hyman Rickover, who built the Nautilus, the first atomic powered submarine which transited the North Pole in 1958. There are several other atomic sub movies, but this is enough for now.
IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 45 minutes, and nothing more.
Genre: Documentary.
Verdict: Impressive.
On that day 7,000 ships, 11,000 airplanes, and 1,200,000 men converged on a 45-mile stretch of the French coast. More than 7,000 vehicles soon joined the throng. What an organisational achievement.
In such an enormous and unprecedented undertaking what could go wrong did go wrong. The sea and weather interfered. The tide came earlier and heavier than anticipated and caused havoc all along the strand. Scores of those soldiers drowned in the resulting surf. Machinery broke down; nervous men made mistakes; unexpected obstacles emerged; the bluff at Omaha beach was more than ten feet higher than estimated. Ships collided. Aircraft engines failed. Earlier in the pre-dawn darkness half the 20,000 airborne troops missed the drop zones, many were killed, lost, captured, and ineffective. Maps were misread and Field Marshall Sir Bernard Montgomery took a month to reach his first day’s objective, Caen. A few days later storms in the English Channel disrupted supply.
This documentary features a trove of archival film that I have not seen before. Among the footage is one odd and oddly moving sequence of a uniformed, bespectacled, battered, lone Wehrmacht soldier playing a Brahms requiem on an organ in a bombed-out Normandy church at 1 hour and 23 minutes. Solace of a kind, perhaps.
The narrative is cool, detached, and factual. None of that juvenile breathless ‘Now it can be told’ recitation of trivia from the History Channel and its ilk.
Despite its outstanding high quality it evidently did not have a commercial release. That would explain the voids on the IMDb entry. There are no ratings because raters did not see it. I came across it on You Tube.
IMDb meta-data is run time 1 hour and 48 minutes, rated 6.1 by 1,500 cinematizens.
Genre: snapshot biopic.
Verdict: The man under the kepi.
The film, covers less than three months from April to June 1940 with an emphasis on De Gaulle’s family and home life upon which the war intrudes with the Blitzkrieg causing the two strands of the story to unravel. Wife Yvonne stays at home in Lille with the children and the soldier goes to war. Events pull them further apart when De Gaulle’s duties take him here and there, to Bordeaux, to London, to Toulouse, to Nantes, to Paris, and back and forth. Communication is lost with Yvonne, and she in turn flees the Wehrmacht advance, children in tow, like thousands and thousands of others.
Two stories unwind, her flight and his fight. She travels through a war zone (check the TV news tonight from Ukraine for graphics) and he battles across a table first with the French cabinet where he lost and then with Churchill where he drew.
Why would Churchill invest in this nobody? De Gaulle has an answer: Because I am here.
Much of it is nicely done, though the historic timeline is altered to tell the stories and many written exchanges become interviews.
Listening to others at the conference tables speak in abstract generalisations about the distant war, De Gaulle imagines what Yvonne must be going through. For her part when she sees fields strewn with corpses in uniforms she wonders if De Gaulle might lying in a ditch somewhere. Ironically, the soldier is relatively safe in all the proceedings while she is constantly at risk from army, air, and naval attack as she eventually finds her way in a human tide to England.
There are some explanations along the way about why De Gaulle, a soldier’s soldier, took the doubtful, dubious, and dangerous path he did, and part of it was his personal loathing for what his one-time mentor Philip Pétain had become – arrogant, vain, greedy, rapacious, selfish – but more important was a determination to keep faith with the fallen, some of whom had died at his command around Sedan, continuing their fight so that they did not die in vain.
There is also an explanation of the first radio broadcast that makes sense even if it is not quite historically accurate. Like a lot of good ideas, it came from a subordinate.
Why would Churchill let him on the BBC when there was still hope of negotiation with a French government? De Gaulle has an answer for that, too: Because you know the power of words. Let them be spoken.
The events are cataclysmic but the presentation is low key, emphasising the individuals and not the big booms and bangs, to the disappoint of many of the cinematizens raters. The actors look and dress the parts they play so unlike Hollywood or Pinewood. The fashions are of the times for both men and women. Soldiers have army haircuts and wear hats most of the time. The production values of Yvonne’s trek are excellent, if disturbing, from one disaster to another across the early summer countryside amid the blooming wild flowers, some splattered with the blood of children. The anguish of the Premier Paul Reynaud (with his frightened Jewish wife) as he struggles to fight on are in the background but very well realised. Georges Mandel, the only Jew in the cabinet, is a crucial player in supporting both Reynaud and De Gaulle, and that fact condemns them in the eyes of Pétain as tools of the Jews.
This Churchill, played by Tim Hudson, is one of the better ones, because the actor does not try to incorporate every tic and mannerism, and so distract, but concentrates on the inherent drama of the moment.
IMDB meta-data is 1 hour and 39 minutes, rated 7.2 by 5127 cinematizens.
Genre: SyFy; Species: End of the world.
Verdict: Boring.
Yep, this movie manages to make the end of the world boring. This audience of one could not wait for it to end.
Hero spends most of the film feeling sorry for himself: Whingeing, whining, whimpering about the cruel world that has let him down. He is tall, good looking, young, has a good job, and lives in London; oh, such misery! The end of it all is just another irritation aimed squarely at him personally. (What an irksome prat!) Re-reading that reminded me of that US Supreme Court nominee who did all of that while tearfully declaring himself an alcoholic to boot, and secured his appointment, though he subsequently looked overqualified when the next nominee had never tried a case, argued an appeal, and only been in a court room three times. Yep, appointment made.
The portrayal of a parched and drought stricken London is quite well done, with the yellow cast at the beginning and the ending was very effective. This is climate change over night and more…! Also I enjoyed the backstage look at a great metropolitan newspaper at work with it fire-breathing presses, and the editor’s absolute insistence on facts. Rumpole is superb as the science reporter and so are all of the supporting cast, including Michael Caine in one shot. The same cannot be said for the two leads whose parts are, to be kind, underwritten and overplayed.
Then there is that sanctimonious soliloquy at the end that sounds like a very earnest high school student’s essay, or innumerable juvenile posts on Facebook.
The reviews I had read were positive: ‘one of the finest British science fiction films ever made, it’s also a great newspaper film which ranks with The Front Page and Ace In the Hole.’ See? Though the newspaper workings were certainly well done. True. But in aid of what plot?
What can I say? We must have seen different movies.
IMdB meta-data is 42 episodes (for all three seasons) of 90m each, rated 7.6 by 1067 cinematizens.
Genre: krimi, species Christie.
Verdict: Delicieux!
Season Two is set in the 1950s to the mid-1960s, specifically after 1954 because that is when the très moderne Facel Vega coupé automobile driven by one character came (briefly) on to the market. The ensemble cast includes the dumb blonde in the office, the super cop, and the ambitious and impetuous journalist. It is set in Le Nord, near, but not in the city of Lille. There is plenty of the rain for which the North is famous.
Supercop learns to appreciate the goodhearted simplicity of the blonde secretary who painfully types his reports, exploits a journalist’s youthful fearlessness to blunder into situations, and they in turn appreciate his tenacity in ferreting out la verité, as Maigret would say.
The plots are derived from Agatha Christie, some from the Tommy and Tuppence sequence, others from Dame Marple, and Monsieur Poirot, aussi, but re-potted into French soil, and given a French twist.
While Supercop is a man of many talents, we are spared a backstory and he does not have a painful private life (so trivialised in most cop shows). Indeed, he seems to have little private life at all but he does like slamming up crims.
The redheaded journalist has two first names, Alice Avril, and provides the energy. Marlène the secretary is the emoting and emotional sounding board, while Supercop is the electronic brain. Together they are a kind of family of siblings. He is the older brother who enjoys teasing and tormenting the younger sister journalist, while ignoring the older clothes-horse secretary whose head is full of romantic nonsense from women’s magazines.
Loved the episode where he got a mobile phone in 1954. Yep, a war surplus US Army field telephone the size of a suitcase, which he carried around only to have the Telecom reception drop out at crucial moments. Very realistic. Minitel would have to wait.
Although many changes have been made from the sources, the villains remain the same, in so far as I recall the Dame’s stories. When the ghosts appear in Silent Witness, no effort is made to offer a Cartesian explanation, Horatio.
The touch is light, the movement is brisk, the dialogue sparkles, the villains are ever so polite, though too often the immediate effort to avoid an investigation by labelling the death a suicide or an accident is clumsy and irritating. The worst example is the L’affaire Prothero. Memo to script writers, stop messing about and let the team get on with it. Though in that episode the victim is so repellent we could hardly wait for his demise.
On the other hand, there are occasional dream sequences that are a hoot, as when the journalist is confronted by a dissatisfied and armed reader! (Dare we hope Rupert Moloch has such dreams?) When Marlène gets carried away in a romantic revery straight out of the women’s magazines she devours every day. Or when Supercop realises he cares about each of them and recoils in horror because his armour has rusted. Then there is the singular appearance of his anti-Cartesian mother, the mystic. More mère, please.
The tomboyish journalist has some Cinderella transformations.
There is also some superb acting when the script calls for it. The episode when it seems Marlène has been murdered elicits terrific performances from both Supercop and Journalist as they realise how much they loved her for all her genial incompetence. And Marlène plays a double role as herself and her dowdy, miserable sister. Chapeaux! A reverse Cinderella. Even more memorable is one character actor who says not a line, but the guilt, fear, and shame that cross her face are remarkable in two short scenes.
Anachronisms, there a few. In one episode a school teacher remarks in passing that she is ’gay.’ Surely no school teacher in 1954 would publicly to admit to being a lesbian to anyone, still less a police officer, though Marlène’s stupefied reaction is of the time and place.
Seasons One and Three are set in different time periods with different casts, and from a brief look they do not appeal to me. Each season had six episodes but this team was so popular more and more were made over the years to a total of twenty-seven. Season One is set in the 1930s and Three in the latter 1960s.
These are available on You Tube with subtitles. As always with You Tube, it is best to be quick. There are indications that more have been made and the search has begun. Some episodes can be found subtitled on DVD called (Agatha Christie’s) Criminal Games. Good luck.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 31 minutes of runtime, rated 7.6 by 78 cinematizens.
Genre: Krimi, sub-species: Maigret.
Verdict: Different.
Set-up: Maigret is about to go on vacation with his colleague Inspector Vaimber and the latter’s brood, when an odd inquiry arrives. To handle it, Vaimber will have to put off his departure, disappointing his wife and numerous children. Knowing that Madame Maigret was not that keen on a fishing holiday, Maigret volunteers to look into the matter so that Vaimber can continue with his clan.
Thus, Maigret meets the enigmatic Madame Quatre, so called for the room number of her hideout in a boarding house. Her two tweenage boys are a brat pack of the first rank. She has fled the family home with them after seeing – she claims – the corpse of woman on the floor of the conservatory late one night while her very, very handsome husband was digging in the garden.
What follows is more Hitchcock than the usual Maigret. First and foremost is the ambiguity of Madame Quatre, played with screen-cracking intensity by Marianne Basler. Did she see what she said that she saw? Is she perhaps the villain, shifting the blame on to her husband, who now has himself vanished? Has he become her victim? Is she the villain? Slowly the mystery peels away.
Marianne Basler
To find out, stretching credulity, Maigret goes undercover taking a room at the boarding house. The atmosphere and inhabitants of the house conjure that the Henri-Georges Clouzet classic L’assassin habit au 21 (1942). Ensconced Maigret observes Madame Quatre unobtrusively (as if this bear of a man could be anything but obtrusive).
Maigret is outside his milieu and on his own to protect her and the children while ascertaining the truth of the matter. As he follows her narrative it seems ever more credible despite the lack of tangible evidence, but then he draws back, is he succumbing to a folie à deux? Has he become infected by her psychosis? She is so very convincing because she is so very convinced herself but is that enough? To gain some distance he brings another, younger officer into the house and this latter’s questions snap Maigret out of his trance. In this story he is even more passive than usual.
For three-quarters of the film, we just don’t know whom to believe and neither does he. Both the body count and the tension rises. Nor are we quite sure whether there will be another victim, or who it might be, until …. The villain emerges from the fish tank. Well, sort of.
The direction by Phillippe Berenger is excellent. Even the staircase contributes to the plot when the ankle bracelet is spotted. The screenplay is twisted but sustains interest, and the obvious turns out to be true all along. The number “4” is crucial in a way. If it had been done by Claude Chabrol the cinemaistas would be shouting it from the rooftops.
I cannot identify the title of the original Simenon work (short story or novel). Maigret Takes a Room is not it.
Dominique Roulet is credited with writing dialogue whose work from other films is excellent. I wonder if this was an original story? She did the adaptation of eight of the films in this Maigret series. The screen credit is ambiguous in the attribution about whether it is an adaptation or an original.
P.S.
I have watched several others upon which I may comment later. I have been watching one each evening when the Plex server performs as advertised. Have given up watching the TF2 news for a while as a relief from the daily dose of murder and mayhem, preferring to get my French lesson filtered through these films for a while. So as not to forget these others include:
Maigret et la vente à bougie (1995) – the cat deals with two mice when the candle goes out.
Maigret en Finlande (1996) – more images of watery Helsinki. Why the pipe smoker has a cigar at one point while staring definitely at Maigret is lost on this viewer.
Un Meutre de première classe (1999) – didn’t make use of train. The noisey consul disappears without explanation as above suspicion. The closed world of the railway carriage is dissipated in both screenplay and direction. Tant pis.
Maigret dans un jardin potager (1999) – intense but cryptic. Superb acting from the two warring sisters and for once a uniformed officer gets some dialogue.
Maigret chez les riches (2000) – credibility snapped. How murder saves the family name is lost of most viewers.
Maigret et la croquese de diaments (2001) with the great Michael Lonsdale as a red herring. Set in a canal lock near Belgian border but makes little use of it. Strangely enough the credits cite Lonsdale as Michaël with an umlaut that his name did not have. And, yes, he is ‘Michael’ and not ‘Michel.’ He appeared in an earlier episode which I watched out of order, and in the credits for that one, his name was correctly rendered.
Maigret et le marchand de vin (2002) – skips basic police procedure, does not question the maid, and accepts that no one recognises or thinks to mention the fired accountant. Contrast to others beating witnesses, his approach is softly, softly.
Maigret et la princess (2002) – Maigret at his best as detective and as a person. From the novel Maigret et les vieillards (1960), which title more accurately reflects the story. Slowly he comes to realise what motivates the occupants of the mansion. It was all so obvious that he did not notice it at first.
Maigret et la demoiselle de compagnie (2004) – from the short story La Vieille dame de Bayeux, in which a cardboard judge obstructs Maigret and then does a volte face to stay within running time. The sleazy villain is played perfectly.
