Horror and Sci-Fi films old and new, weirdo trash, arthouse, forgotten gems, well loved classics, and I'm watching the original Dr Who from the beginning.
Taking the master detective out of Victorian London into World War Two, Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon has little in common with anything penned by Conan Doyle, but it is a hokey, entertaining spy thriller.
Holmes (Basil Rathbone) is up against his old nemesis Professor Moriarty (Lionel Attwill who had played Dr Mortimer in the earlier Rathbone version of The Hound of the Baskervilles), with both on the trail of a missing scientist and his invention, a revolutionary bomb sight that could change the course of the war.
The screenplay take it's cue from the Conan Doyle short story The Adventure of the Dancing Men, but there is little left of the original, beyond the plot device of an alphabet substitution code. The character of Holmes is a world away from the dispassionate Victorian gentleman, only taking cases that tickled his intellectual fancy. Here is a paid up patriotic Brit, doing his bit against the Nazis. As such there are no baffling, impossible murder mysteries to solve, just standard spy stuff like disguises and code breaking. Nevertheless, Rathbone brings the sort of energy and focus needed for the part, and Nigel Bruce as Watson is dimwitted but so charming and affable it is impossible not to like him.
In keeping with the secret agent feel of the film, Lionel Atwill plays Moriarty like a James Bond villain, and even has a secret lair with trapdoors and an entrance hidden by a moving bookcase.
The propaganda is kept to a minimum for most of the film, with the war being the McGuffin to drive a standard espionage plot. It only takes over in the closing minutes, with Holmes gazing wistfully into the distance reciting the "Fortress built by nature" speech from Richard II.
The Hand has a grisly premise and a seedy atmosphere but the film loses its way with a talky confused script, uninteresting characters, and poor acting.
Starting in 1940s Burma, the story sees three captured British soldiers being interrogated by the Japanese. When two of them each have a hand chopped off, the third agrees to talk. Cut to 1960s London and a policeman makes a gruesome discovery - a tramp who is missing a hand - is there a link back to the events in the Far East?
The majority of the film is taken up with the police investigation involving Inspector Munyard and his sidekick Sergeant Foster, two solid, characterless, permanently smoking detectives. The investigation mostly consists of the two of them talking, going to places, talking some more, and then smoking, which does not make for gripping cinema. It is not helped by the poorly written script, which feels like a great central premise that nobody knew how to write a pay-off for. The fractured, hard to follow storyline feels like certain key expositional scenes were either not written, not filmed, or cut out.
Having said that there is, for the time it was released, occasional brutal (if off screen) violence, and some surprisingly coarse language. The Hand also has a rather pleasing ambience of Trad Jazz, fog and Brylcream, so if those things appeal, come for the story, stay for the atmosphere.
Perhaps even more than his ground breaking short work, The Great Dictator is Charlie Chaplin's most important and daring work. At the time when world leaders, never mind Hollywood studio bosses were reluctant to annoy Hitler, Chaplin had the guts not only to put his reputation and money on the line, but to make the end product largely free from pious moralising, instead going for the giant raspberry in the face of the despot. The plot is a slightly contrived piece of farce. Chaplin plays a barber (unnamed, just like his tramp character), from the fictional country of Tomania. During military service during the First World War, he saves the life of Schultz, a German pilot, crashing a plane and giving himself amnesia for 20 years. He eventually returns to his barber shop, only to find that a dictator, Hynkel, who is also a dead ringer for the barber, has come to power, and his goons are sweeping through the country's ghettos, smashing up businesses and rounding up Jews. The barber ends up in a concentration camp, from which escapes, just in time for Hynkel to suffer a mishap on a boat which ends with him in the camp and leaves the world with a serious case of mistaken identity. The film largely consists of set pieces, featuring some of Chaplin's best physical comedy, much of it dialogue free as well, such as the graceful dance with the balloon, the hair raising plane ride to freedom, and the running gag involving confusion over the correct salute. Chaplin's reputation as a perfectionist is well deserved judging from the elaborate staging and construction of the scenes. Special mention also needs to go to Jack Oakie, who plays a thinly disguised version of Mussolini, Benzini Napaloni, the ruler of neighbouring Bacteria. The state visit is an increasingly ridiculous exercise in one upmanship, with a misbehaving train carriage, uneven furniture, and a barber chair gag that predates the Bugs Bunny cartoon Rabbit of Seville.
The film only really comes unstuck at the very end, when the barber, impersonating Hynkel, takes to the microphone to deliver a heartfelt three minute monologue to the assembled crowd, both on screen and those sitting in the cinema. There is very little to find fault with in the content, a plea for kindness and humanity in the face of industrialisation and war, and a reassurance to those suffering under Hynkel/Hitler that freedom will eventually prevail. As a standalone piece it is certainly moving and stirring, however as part of the film, the speech jars with the style and content of that which has preceded it and moves towards the earnest lecturing Chaplin had avoided up to then. Your perception of the film's success as a satire may depend on how you personally define satire. Other than the climax, rather than hand-wringing or over intellectualising Chaplin is more interested in showing Hynkel to be a stupid buffoon. He spent a lot of time studying and aping Hitler's mannerisms and speech patterns, and clearly wanted the audience to link their scornful laughter at Hynkel with their attitudes to Hitler. However, writing some years later in his autobiography, Chaplin said that could not have made the film if he had known at the time of the true horror of the Holocaust. While understandable, this would have been a great shame and a great loss to the world. Despots are invariably humourless, and fully deserve to have a raspberry blown in their faces. It may not bring them down, but it may make a chink in their armour, and sometimes, as Mark Twain once said, the human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
The recent BBC TV series was not the first attempt to move Sherlock Holmes from Victorian times into a more contemporary setting. Universal set several of the series of films starring Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr Watson, during the wartime 1940s world that they were released in. What makes Sherlock Holmes Faces Death one of the best of these is that the war is now the backdrop to, not the driving force behind, the story, and the filmmakers went back to the source, adapting the Conan Doyle story "The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual".
The plot sees Watson working at to the Musgrave estate, a country mansion turned makeshift hospital for soldiers wounded in World War Two. When one of his colleagues is mysteriously attacked, Watson asks Holmes to help investigate, but when the great detective arrives, he finds one of the Musgrave family murdered, a long list of suspects, and a possible link to an old and sinister family tradition.
The script plays fast and loose with the original short story, making it more of a straightforward murder mystery, set in a slightly hokey haunted house, complete with thunder, lightning, suits of armour, secret passages and cobwebs. The story plays out in a somewhat formulaic manner, quickly setting up the story and showing us the suspects one by one.
Rathbone's take on Holmes is one that keeps many of the traits of the books, such as the unpredictable energy, fierce intelligence and eccentricity (we first see him shooting bullets into his living room wall in order to test a theory, and he also has an encyclopaedic knowledge of train times and current affairs). His portrayal is the one that I grew up with, and is the one that perhaps set the public perception of the character in the twentieth century,
Watson is not as quick-witted as in the books, but he is a loyal and likeable fellow, as well as, for the audience sake, filling the role of giving Holmes someone to explain the story to (and being the sort of Doctor who prescribes patients "those American cigarettes you like")
Regular Holmes foil Inspector Lestrade is on hand to provide the comic relief, bumbling from one mishap to the next, even though nobody has any explanation for why a London police officer is investigating a murder in Northumberland. Having said that, nobody has any explanation as to why the English village has a distinctly Mediterranean look either.
Unlike previous wartime Holmes films, here, he is not working for the Allies, and the conflict seems rarely to get a mention. Interestingly though there are hints at some tensions between the British and the billeted US soldiers, with one villager talking disapprovingly of somebody "running off with a Yankee". The only time war comes to the fore is the stirring speech by Holmes at the very end, talking of "a new spirit abroad in the land" where "the old days of grab and greed are on their way out". It feels tacked on, and jars somewhat with the rest of the film, which is a fun, interesting, and atmospheric mystery thriller.
After more than 70 years, Casablanca is still a firm part of
popular culture, with the images, songs, and misquoted dialogue possibly
known by more people than have actually seen the film. For me, after 20
years and countless viewings, it’s something that still intrigues and
delights me as much as the first time. What on the surface may appear to
be standard Hollywood melodrama, mixed with war-time propaganda,
actually has some ambiguities in character and plot, and a far from
happy ending.
All This and
World War 2 proves, as a famous man once said, that there is a fine line
between clever and stupid. No matter how clever the idea of cutting newsreel
and movie footage from the 30s and 40s with the music of the Beatles (not the
originals, but covers by stars of the 70s such as The Bee Gees and Leo Sayer)
may sound on paper, the end result is very, very stupid.
The main problem
is that the choice of songs is rarely either appropriate or very imaginative for
the footage, and by limiting herself to Beatles tracks, director Susan Winslow
has to shoehorn something in, regardless of relevance. Good taste does not
really come into it, which is why in the first two minutes, we see scenes of
Hitler visiting his forces, and soldiers marching around doing soldier things,
all set to "Magical Mystery Tour" (complete with a Nazi brass band
"playing" along). While I am sure there was uncertainty and
trepidation around the world as to how the war would turn out, are they
seriously comparing the outbreak of war with a "Magical Mystery
Tour"?
Even a relatively
downbeat pop song such as “Help”, seems crass compared to what we are shown of
the individual heroism of soldiers or the wider struggle of the UK's attempts
to get the USA involved. Sometimes the juxtapositions are not inappropriate, or
silly, but crashingly obvious, with Hitler gazing wistfully from atop his
Bavarian mountain retreat, while “The Fool on the Hill” plays in the background,
or “Getting Better” while things are, well, getting better for the Allies. Most
of the time though the musical choices are just pointless and inexplicable,
such as “Polythene Pam” playing behind scenes of people trying on Gas Masks, “Maxwell's
Silver Hammer” for scenes of men signing up for the Draft, and, most bafflingly
of all, the bombing of Pearl Harbour set to “I am The Walrus”.
The simple fact
is that much of this footage does not need any musical accompaniment, being
dramatic, chilling or moving enough on its own. It certainly does not need
these versions of the songs, none of which improve on the originals, and many
of which manage to suck any life and emotion out of the original and replace it
with dullness or phoney overwrought schmaltz, which jars terribly against real
images of heartbreak and sacrifice.
Rather than just
stringing together footage at random, director Susan Winslow does try to create
a narrative arc, stretching from Chamberlain and his talk of appeasement, right
up to the birth of the atomic bomb. Unfortunately, World War 2 is just too
complex a thing to boil down into 80 minutes, without skimming over or
trivialising many of the aspects of it. A perfect example is the issue of race
in the armed forces. We see footage of white troops training, followed shortly by
footage of black troops training separately, implying that among the forces
fighting a racist ideology there was an element of segregation and racism. However,
later we see a montage of Allied troops (an African-American, an Irishman, a
Sikh, a Pole, and a Frenchman), proudly announcing where they are from. So are
they saying there was no racism? Alternatively, is it more complicated than
that? This is a subject worthy of a documentary of its own, but here, it is shown
and quickly discarded as the narrative marches remorselessly onwards to the
next event, without giving any further explanation or context.
This leads me to
wonder what the point of All This and
World War II is. It is a documentary but it has no message or point of
view, and a distinctive gimmick, but no substance. The skimming over or
avoiding of themes and events means, unless anyone is unaware who won the war,
it is useless as an educational tool. If the Beatles and World War 2 mix is
meant as a joke, it is a five-minute joke stretched over 80. In addition, despite
some occasional lapses in good taste, it stops short of being truly offensive,
so does not even pass muster as a work of pure provocation.
