Blithe Spirit (1945)

While I’ve never been much of a fan of David Lean’s later grandiose films I did enjoy Brief Encounter and had heard glowing reports of his 1945 Blithe Spirit so I decided to take a chance on it.

It is of course based on Noël Coward’s hit play. Coward produced and co-wrote the film.

Charles Condomine (Rex Harrison) and his second wife Ruth (Constance Cummings) are happily married. Charles is a mystery writer and as research for his next book he has arranged for renowned medium Madame Arcati (Margaret Rutherford) to conduct a séance. Neither Charles nor any of the other participants have any belief in the occult but if nothing else it should be amusing. 

And Charles hopes to learn some of the tricks used by phoney mediums. 

Unfortunately it turns out that Madame Arcati is not a fraud after all and she manages to materialise a ghost. The ghost is Charles’s first wife Elvira (Kay Hammond) who died seven years earlier.

Even more unfortunately it seems that Elvira intends to stay. Permanently. And, as you might imagine, Ruth is less than entranced by the idea of having her husband’s deceased first wife as a permanent house guest. These two women do not exactly get along.

Ruth might be displeased but Elvira is thoroughly enjoying herself. She likes nothing more than to stir up trouble.

It is not possible to touch Elvira but she can pick up objects and can even drive Charles’s car.

Madame Arcati has no idea how to send Elvira back to the spirit world. Or rather she has lots of ideas but none of them work.

And Elvira has returned for a reason. She has a scheme in mind.

It’s all sparkling lighthearted fun, and occasionally slightly risqué compared to Hollywood movies of the same era. Elvira and Charles had not been very faithful to each other. Adultery had been a favourite pastime for both husband and wife. 

The movie’s biggest strength is its terrific cast. Rex Harrison has just the right kind of amused charming cynicism for this material. Kay Hammond shines as the exasperating and slightly wicked Elvira. Constance Cummings is very solid.

And Margaret Rutherford is, as always, an utter delight as the dotty Madame Arcati.

As director David Lean displays a lightness of touch that is sadly lacking in his later work and the pacing is pleasingly brisk.

The special effects are simple but they work.

Blithe Spirit was shot in Technicolor and looks lovely.

This is a witty and wickedly amusing movie and it’s delightfully cynical. It’s a great deal of fun and it’s highly recommended.

My copy is the Spanish Blu-Ray which offers a fine transfer and includes the original English-language version with removable Spanish subtitles.

I’ve also reviewed Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945).

The Rhine Virgin (1953)

The Rhine Virgin (La vierge du Rhin), directed by Gilles Grangier and released in 1953, is included in the recent Kino Lorber French Noir 2 Blu-Ray boxed set.

We get voiceover narration by a guy named Pietr. He’s a crewman on a barge on the Rhine. A somewhat battered stranger (played by Jean Gabin) talks his way into a job as the second crewman. The skipper of the barge is Meister (Olivier Hussenot), Also aboard is Meister’s daughter Maria (Nadia Gray). 

The stranger claims to be a German named Martin Schmidt but oddly he has no trace of a German accent.

The barge belongs to a man named Labbé and his wife. When the founder of the company, Jacques Ledru, was killed in the war Labbé married his widow Geneviève (Elina Labourdette) and took over the business. Labbé seems to be mismanaging the company and selling off its assets.

Martin Schmidt is broody and taciturn and gives the impression of being a dangerous man haunted by a mysterious past. Naturally Maria falls madly in love with him. What girl wouldn’t?

Slowly we realise that Martin Schmidt has some very big secret which is the reason he was so anxious to secure a berth on the barge. Not just any barge, but this one. He has been away and he has returned because he has unfinished business to take care of. 

There is a reason he has bought a gun.

There is also a reason why someone tries to kill him.

It all connects with his past but obviously I can’t be more specific without risking spoilers. And there will be some major misdirection. And a murder.

This is a movie in which information is concealed not just from the audience but from the key characters.

A word about the movie’s title. The name of the barge is the Rhine Virgin but there is a deeper significance. There is a huge cliff jutting out into the Rhine known as the Lorelei and when the barge passes it our attention is drawn to it. There is a legend attached to this rock - a beautiful young maiden was betrayed by her lover, she drowned herself in the river and was transformed into a kind of siren, luring boatmen to their doom. This siren is known as the Lorelei. She is the Rhine maiden (or virgin if you prefer). This is clearly a sign that we should we should be on the alert for the appearance of a femme fatale.

And there is a femme fatale. Three women will play important roles in this story.

Jean Gabin was a huge star in France at this time. He made all kinds of movies but especially crime movies. He was a kind of French Bogart - weather-beaten and hardboiled with plenty of charisma. Like Bogart he was not an obvious sex symbol but women loved his air of brooding masculinity. He’s in fine form here.  

Elina Labourdette provides the glamour and feminine danger. She gets to wear some exquisite Jacques Fath gowns.

Nadia Gray is excellent, playing Maria as a woman who gets more and more interesting as the movie progresses.

The Rhine Virgin is not a film noir. It’s a murder mystery with some suspense thriller touches, but personally I’m not complaining because I love murder mysteries and this is a good one with a rather interesting structure. Highly recommended.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray pesentation looks terrific and there’s an audio commentary featuring Max Allan Collins.

Gilles Grangier directed some superb noirs, including Speaking of Murder (1957) and Le Désordre et la nuit (The Night Affair, 1958), both of which I’ve reviewed. At this point I will watch any movie directed by Gilles Grangier that I can get my hands on.

The Great Train Robbery (1978)

The Great Train Robbery was written and directed by Michael Crichton, based on his own novel. It was shot in England and financed by Dino de Laurentiis. It’s a heist movie set in 1855.

Crichton had become obsessed with Victorian England and also with the question of the origins and nature of criminal underworlds. He had also come across a factual account of an attempted robbery which had been the first of its type and which was the inspiration for Crichton’s novel.

Crichton’s story concerns an attempt to rob a moving train - a feat considered at the time to be impossible. The target is a very large shipment of gold, gold which will be used to pay British troops fighting in the Crimean War.

The gold will be in a safe which requires four keys and the keys are in the custody of three  separate bank and railway officials. The first essential step is to steal those keys.

An apparently respectable but actually very shady businessman named Pierce (Sean Connery) believes the gold could be stolen and he intends to steal it. 

His chief accomplice is Agar (Donald Sutherland), a brilliant pickpocket and lock specialist.

And he has his girlfriend Miriam (Lesley-Anne Down) whose very considerable powers of seduction will be very useful.

As in most heist stories there’s a long lead-up to the robbery but that’s no problem here because the gang has to carry out a whole of series of impossibly difficult and daring preliminary crimes.

And the heist itself is immense fun.

Crichton was famous for his techno-thrillers but what makes The Great Train Robbery so interesting is that he approaches it the same way - meticulous research and an amazing ability to make painstaking attention to detail of absorbing interest.

And with his keen interest in Victorian criminality Crichton would have been aware of the challenges facing the police. In the days before central databases and fingerprinting establishing a criminal’s identity could be tricky. Forensic science did not exist. And without international telegraphy if a criminal could get out of England he could disappear very easily and very completely. The police of course had informants but they more or less had to catch criminals in the act. So if Pierce and his gang can penetrate the security surrounding the gold shipment and get hold of the gold they might then be very hard to track down.

Connery oozes charisma and plays his part with a twinkle in his eye which is absolutely the right approach. And lighthearted adventure was something Donald Sutherland did extremely well. Connery and Sutherland make a delightful pair of rogues. And Lesley-Anne Down makes a fine Sexy Lady Rogue.

While the aim was always to get a PG-13 rating what I do like is that Crichton gives the film a delightful feel of Victorian bawdiness. There’s some extraordinarily risque dialogue  laced with delicious double-entendres. The brothel scene and Miriam’s seduction scene are naughty in a very Victorian way. It’s also obvious that Miriam is an ex-whore but this is suggested rather than stated.

The movie was well received by critics with the one criticism being the pacing but listening to Crichton’s audio commentary it’s clear that this was deliberate - he wanted that more leisurely Victorian pacing rather than 1970s pacing. And he was right. 

And it’s never boring. There’s fine suspense and the action sequences are superb. The budget was tight but it looks great and the period details are a joy. It has a fine old-fashioned rollicking adventure yarn feel.

The Great Train Robbery is immense amounts of fun. Highly recommended.

The main extra is an excellent audio commentary recorded by Michael Crichton in 1996.

The Hot Spot (1990)

The Hot Spot is a very very interesting 1990 neo-noir erotic thriller directed by Dennis Hopper.

It starts like a western. Harry Madox (Don Johnson) is the mysterious stranger who rides into town, except that it’s the 90s so he drives. Landers, Texas is a small town that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a western.

Harry talks himself into a job as a car salesman at George Harshaw’s car yard. We have no idea if he’s a decent guy who’s going to land himself in trouble or a bad dude looking for trouble. He doesn’t give much away. He is rather interested in the local bank.

He’s going to get involved with two women either one of whom could turn out to be a femme fatale. The first is Harshaw’s secretary Gloria Harper (Jennifer Connelly). She’s as cute as a button and seems like she’s as wholesome as freshly baked bread. Then Harry accompanies her on a repo job. The car to be repossessed belongs to Sutton (William Sadler) and he comes across as a violent sleazy alcoholic loser. But Gloria behaves very very strangely indeed. And Gloria has a tendency to be jumpy and secretive.

Gloria has a secret. She’s obviously a Good Girl, but probably a Good Girl in Trouble. If a man has any sense he runs the other way at this point. But since when do men behave sensibly about sweet gorgeous girls? Harry’s reaction is the obvious one. He can save her. He can fix her. And this is Noir World so we know Harry’s a goner.

Then he meets Dolly Harshaw (Virginia Madsen). She’s the boss’s wife. The boss’s much younger wife. Harry isn’t totally stupid. He knows you don’t get mixed up with the boss’s wife. But what Dolly wants Dolly gets and she obviously wants Harry. And when it comes to sexy blondes Harry isn’t all that sensible. I mean, she’s making it obvious that she’s there for the taking and what is he supposed to do? He figures it’s just one roll in the hay and that can’t lead to any trouble. One of Harry’s problems is that he’s a bit too confident of his ability to avoid getting entangled in personal dramas.

We soon learn more about Harry’s interest in banking. 

And Harry discovers that he’s well and truly entangled with both these women. Gloria’s secret gradually comes to light and it’s a huge mess that no sane person would want anything to do with but by this time poor Harry has fallen in love with her. 

And Dolly wants more than bedroom shenanigans. She has a plan. Harry wants no part of it but by now Dolly has a hold over him (connected to his interest in banking). 

Bad girls are dangerous and good girls are just as dangerous when they need rescuing. And we’re in Noir World. Who can tell for sure which are the bad girls and which are the good girls?

You can see the kind of nightmare that is waiting just around the corner for Harry and the nightmare does indeed eventuate. A man who likes to be totally in control finds that everything is now totally out of control. 

We can see various obvious ways this could end but the ending we get has a neat double twist and it’s both unexpected and completely satisfying.

Perversity is something we expect in neo-noir and there is some and it comes as a surprise. There’s a fair bit of nudity and sex - this is both neo-noir and erotic thriller and the plot is largely driven by lust and Hopper is quite rightly in prepared to make sure the movie has the required erotic heat. 

Don Johnson is extraordinarily good. He’s charismatic and he nails the contradictions in Harry’s personality - he’s a scoundrel but then he suddenly does something noble and Johnson makes both sides of Harry’s character believable.

Virginia Madsen is clearly having insane amounts of fun doing the full-on femme fatale thing. She’s a joy to watch.

Jennifer Connelly has the toughest part because Gloria is simply swept along by events and she’s a character offering no opportunities for an Oscar-bait performance. But Connelly does a fine job.

There’s a genuine noir atmosphere, a great plot, excellent performances and it’s a visually impressive movie making good use of the Texas setting. A fine directing effort by Dennis Hopper. A top-tier neo-noir. Very highly recommended.

And it looks great on Blu-Ray.

The Sin of Nora Moran (1933)

The Sin of Nora Moran is a pre-code melodrama made by Majestic Pictures in 1933.

As the movie opens Nora Moran (Zita Johann) is awaiting execution for murder. We don’t know whom she murdered or why.

The first flashback gives us the beginning of her story.

Nora had been an innocent convent girl with dreams of becoming a dancer. That dream fails to materialise so she joins the circus, as assistant to the lion-wrestler, Paulino (John Miljan). Yes, he’s a lion-wrestler, not a lion-tamer.

Unfortunately Paulino is much too interested in his beautiful naïve assistant. Her attempts to defend her virtue are unsuccessful. And Paulino is none too gentle in getting what he wants.

She runs away again and becomes a night-club performer. She meets ambitious politician Dick Crawford (Paul Cavanagh), a man being groomed to be the next Governor. They fall in love. He sets her up in a little cottage in the country. She is now a kept woman.

To what extent Dick actually loves her is slightly uncertain. What is even more uncertain is just how much Nora understands of her situation. She is very naïve. She must understand that Dick is married, but perhaps she just doesn’t want to understand.

Of course this happy little arrangement is bound to strike trouble. Dick’s brother-in-law District Attorney John Grant (Alan Dinehart) has been managing his political career. He is accustomed to the corruption of politicians and assumes that Nora is planning blackmail. 

And then the fatal event occurs.

I wouldn’t say that Zita Johann gives a good performance in a conventional sense but it’s a fine overheated melodrama performance. And this movie is full-blown delightfully overcooked melodrama.

The other performances are fine but the focus is entirely on Zita Johann.

There’s plenty of pre-code content with Nora being taken by force by Paulino and the fact that later on she is a kept woman is not glossed over in the slightest.

The movie uses the kind of montage effects you just don’t see in movies any more but I like those effects. It uses techniques that at the time were quite bold.

This movie is structured in an odd but interesting way. There are flashbacks, but they’re not done in a straightforward way. I won’t say any more in order to avoid spoilers but there is an enigmatic quality to the storytelling. The plot isn’t particularly unusual but it’s handled very oddly.

This is not a conventional movie for its time. It’s quite bizarre in many ways.

It’s that offbeat quality that makes it so fascinating. And you really can’t be sure where it’s going or what the real theme of the movie will turn out to be.

Not surprisingly critics at that time were bewildered by it and failed to understand that its oddness was intentional. It flopped badly at the box office. Whether you decide that it actually works or not is up to you but for its willingness to break the rules it’s highly recommended.

The movie looks great on the The Film Detective Blu-Ray. As an extra you get a documentary on the film and its star.

The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (1947)

The Private Affairs of Bel Ami, released in 1947, is based on Guy de Maupassant’s 1885 novel Bel Ami, or, The History of a Scoundrel: A Novel.

It is Paris in 1880. Georges Duroy (George Sanders), an ex-cavalyman now just barely eking out a living in a menial job, is thrown a lifeline by his old army buddy Charles Forestier (John Carradine). Forestier is a successful journalist and is sure he can wangle Georges a job. He could write about his experiences. Georges has no idea how to write but Forestier’s beautiful clever ambitious wife Madeleine (Ann Dvorak) gives him a crash course.

Georges gets the job and is modestly successful but he is aiming much higher. He is ambitious for money and influence but is also driven by resentment about his humble provincial upbringing.

He is introduced to a charming and pretty young widow, Clotilde de Marelle (Angela Lansbury). He takes her to the most notoriously disreputable dive in Paris. Clotilde is delighted. Clotilde is soon madly in love with him. She gives him the name Bel-Ami (from a popular song).

But for Georges women are merely stepping-stones to advancement. As cute as she is marriage to Clotilde will not advance his career.

He has some other marriage options in mind. He’s an effective muck-raking journalist and he is clever and devious in various ways but he knows that marriage is the most effective way to get ahead - there’s no better way to gain riches, influence and respectability. At one point in the story he is stringing four women along simultaneously. It’s just a matter of making the most astute choice. If he sets his sights on a woman and she isn’t interested he is confident he can break down her resistance. He has a lot of charm and no scruples at all.

His only redeeming quality is that at least he knows he is a cad.

Laroche-Mathieu (Warren William) is just as much of a scoundrel but much less honest about it. Georges has plans to make Laroche-Mathieu Foreign Secretary. Laroche-Mathieu is a fool, a hypocrite, a liar, a coward and a swine so he has all the qualities needed to be a Cabinet Minister.

Of course some of the women whom he uses come to hate him. Clotilde just loves him more and more.

Of course Georges is now like a juggler trying to keep a lot of balls in the air all at once so he cannot afford a single mistake.

This is very much a studio picture, shot on sound stages and the backlot with Paris represented by plenty of matte paintings. I love this kind of golden age Hollywood artificiality.

George Sanders is at his caddish best. He’s a delight. 

Warren William and John Carradine are very good. Ann Dvorak is excellent as a woman almost as ambitious and ruthless as Georges himself. Whether she is as clever remains to be seen. Angela Lansbury is terrific. She is a fool where Georges is concerned but the tenacity of her love gives her some dignity.

Of course this was the Production Code era so there’s a lot of stuff that is implied rather than overt. Does Madeleine have a rich older lover? It’s strongly suggested without actually being stated. Does Georges bed the various women he pursues? It’s left ambiguous. There’s an atmosphere of decadence but it’s handled cautiously.

The Private Affairs of Bel Ami is stylish and rather delicious and it’s highly recommended.

Writer-director Albert Lewin only made a handful of films but they included the superb Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951). His final feature film was the horror movie/jungle adventure The Living Idol (1957) which is way better than you might expect.

Bluebeard’s Castle (1963)

In 1960 Peeping Tom ended Michael Powell’s career as a film director in Britain. After that he took work where he could get it. Bluebeard’s Castle is a low-budget German TV-movie and in anyone else’s career it would be an oddity. But Powell’s career was full of oddities.

The project was conceived by Norman Foster, who was the producer and star, and production designer Hein Heckroth. Heckroth had worked with Powell and decided he’d be the ideal choice to direct. So this was not a Michael Powell project from the outset.

It was intended for television broadcast but shot in colour so as to allow for a possible theatrical release as well. It was completed and then pretty much sank without trace until its rediscovery in the late 70s.

It’s a filmed version of Bartók’s very obscure 1911 opera.

It is obviously based on the fairy tale.

The libretto by Béla Balázs strips the fairy tale’s plot down to almost nothing. It becomes a psychological exploration.

In the film Bluebeard’s eighth wife Judith arrives at his castle to find that there are seven locked rooms. She insists on having the seven doors opened.

It’s all heavily symbolic. The doors don’t really lead to rooms in the castle, they lead to compartments of Bluebeard’s mind. Judith hopes that she will learn what makes her husband tick. What she finds is lots of darkness. But she finds no explanations. Neither Judith nor the audience has any idea why Bluebeard’s other wives met such unpleasant ends.

In the accompanying interview film critic Ian Christie suggests that it’s all rather Freudian and very very Jungian. It probably is. There are lots of elements that are symbolic of something although I have no idea what. The weaknesses of the film are undoubtedly inherent in Balázs’s libretto so Powell cannot be blamed.

The production design is all full-blown artistic modernism (and artistic modernism is one of my least favourite things in all the world). The visuals are extraordinary and wildly imaginative although also extremely ugly. Some of the visuals are effectively startling and memorable but some just seem overdone. But they are interesting and if you have more of a taste for modernism in art than I have you’ll enjoy them more than I did.

The ugliness was no doubt intentional - to represent the ugliness inside Bluebeard’s mind but since we have no idea of the reasons for his inner darkness the impact is not all it should be.

I’m also not particularly a Bartók fan which probably didn’t help.

This movie was a logical step for Powell. Powell and Pressburger had had a huge artistic and commercial success with their ballet movie The Red Shoes. They had followed it up with the even more ambitious The Tales of Hoffmann which combines ballet, opera and cinematic magic in a breathtaking way. It was not, alas, a commercial hit. Bluebeard’s Castle was done much more cheaply on a much smaller scale but it’s no surprise that Powell was delighted to get the directing gig and thoroughly enjoyed himself.

There are only two cast members. Ana Raquel Satre looks striking and is very good as the bewildered but adoring wife.

I don’t want to give the impression that I disliked this movie. I didn’t love it as much as I had hoped to but it is breathtakingly daring and visually extreme and in 1963 it was wild wild stuff. And it’s impossible not to admire Powell’s ambition. And its visual outrageousness is undiminished.

Bluebeard’s Castle is recommended as a unique slice of cinematic folie de grandeur.

The BFI Blu-Ray looks superb and there are some extras. This release includes the movie on DVD as well.