F.P.1 Doesn't Answer (1933)

F.P.1 Doesn't Answer is a 1933 Anglo-French-German co-production. Intriguingly three different versions were shot with three different casts, one version in English, one in German and one in French. The English and German versions survive. This review deals with the English-language version.

It’s also interesting in having been co-written by Curt Siodmak, brother of the great director Robert Siodmak. Curt Siodmak went on to great success as a science fiction novelist and screenwriter (he wrote The Wolf Man).

The F.P.1 is the brainchild of Captain Droste (Leslie Fenton). It’s not an aircraft carrier but a giant floating aerodrome which will be moored in mid-Atlantic. At that time commercial airliners were small and did not have the range to make oceanic crossings non-stop so while the idea sounds odd it did make some kind of sense in 1933.

The movie begins with a burglary that is not what it seems. The burglar is Droste’s buddy Major Ellissen (Conrad Veidt), a famed aviator.

As a result of the burglary that isn’t Ellison meets Claire Lennartz (Jill Esmond). She owns the shipyard that will eventually construct the F.P.1.

There are mysterious plots afoot to sabotage the F.P.1.

A romantic triangle develops between Claire, Droste and Ellison. Both men are hopelessly in love with her. She’s attracted to both men but it starts to look like she will marry Droste.

Two years later the F.P.1 is ready to being operations and then things start to go wrong. It seems that the sabotage attempts have been resumed.

Eventually Claire has to set out on a rescue mission to save the man she loves, Droste. She persuades Ellison to fly the rescue plane. He agrees, because he’s too decent a guy to refuse.

This sets up some decent suspense as attempts are made to save F.P.1 and its crew and the romantic triangle comes to a head.

Leslie Fenton and Jill Esmond were fairly big names in Britain at the time and they’re both good. They give their characters at least a small amount of depth. Droste is a visionary, a driven man, perhaps too much so. Claire is caught between two men and she really doesn’t want to hurt either one. She’s trying not to succumb to the temptation to play them off against each other.

Conrad Veidt is the acting heavyweight here and he’s extremely good. Ellison is a complex man. At first he’s arrogant and ambitious and then, on a long-distance flight, he crashes. He seems to lose all his confidence. His life starts to fall apart. He’s a tortured man but he’s fundamentally decent.

This is borderline science fiction, made at a time when science fiction films were few and far between. I say borderline because the technology is all basically early 1930s. Even F.P.1 itself is probably not something wildly beyond the technology of the time, assuming someone was willing to spend vast amounts of money. It might be more accurate to describe this as a techno-thriller.

While the 1930s aircraft and the crazy floating platform are fun the real focus is on the the three key characters and the interactions between them. Most of all it’s the story of a man who has lost himself. Maybe he will have one last chance to find himself again.

F.P.1 Doesn't Answer is an oddity but I like interesting oddities and I liked this movie. Recommended.

F.P.1 Doesn't Answer is now available on Blu-Ray from Kino Classics. I don’t know if the Blu-Ray includes the German-language version as well.

Union Depot (1932)

Union Depot (AKA Gentleman for a Day) is a 1932 First National release which gives us a glimpse of a day in the lives of an assortment of people who all happen to be in a major railway station.

The opening shots are intended to convey to us the sheer variety of these people and there are a couple of pre-code moments here - there are two very obvious whores and there’s a woman waving good-bye to her husband only to heave a sigh of relief and fall into the arms of her lover.

Chick Miller (Douglas Fairbanks Jr) is a hobo and a thief. He steals a suitcase and in it he finds a fancy suit of clothes and a bankroll. Now he’s as good as any gentleman.

He runs into Ruth Collins (Joan Blondell). She spins him a line. He’s heard sob stories from dames before but he starts to think that maybe this one is telling the truth. Chick’s attitude to money is easy come, easy go. He’s happy to splash out some money on a cute dame, especially when it’s not his money.

Part of Ruth’s sob story involved a sinister doctor who had made attempts on her virtue. Surprisingly the sinister doctor actually exists.

Things get complicated when Chick’s hobo buddy Scrap Iron Scratch (Guy Kibbee) finds a left luggage ticket. The two decide to collect whatever it was left at the luggage office. It’s a violin case. We already know the violin case belongs to a pompous German aristocrat (played by Alan Hale). There’s no violin in the case, but there’s a huge stack of money. Chick starts spending the money on Ruth. Chick is really enjoying himself as a rich gentleman.

Unfortunately the cops are interested in reclaiming that money. While Chick and Ruth are enjoying their blossoming romance they don’t realise they’re now mixed up in something that is way too big for them to handle. And Chick has really fallen for Ruth.

Fairbanks is in fine form. Chick is a scoundrel and he’s irresponsible and shiftless and untrustworthy but he’s likeable and he has a kind generous side. Fairbanks could do that sort of part extremely well.

Joan Blondell is always good and she’s very good here. The chemistry between Fairbanks and Blondell is excellent.

The supporting cast is strong with Alan Hale and Guy Kibbee being as much fun as usual.

It’s a slightly offbeat romance with a crime element and the balance between the romance, crime and light comedy elements is just right. The railway station setting works well as a device for throwing people together in unexpected ways.

There’s some pre-code outrageousness here. Ruth needs some money badly and she is clearly prepared to sleep with Chick in order to get it, until he figures out that she is not that kind of girl. There’s a slight undercurrent of free-and-easy morality running through the movie and Chick’s thieving is treated as being hardly worthy of condemnation.

This is also very much a Depression movie. Money is tight and you do what you have to do to survive.

The story sounds fairly conventional but it’s handled in a breezy slightly quirky way and the ending is definitely not what I expected.

This is an unassuming but rather charming movie with two very charismatic leads. Highly recommended.

The Warner Archive DVD provides an acceptable if less than pristine transfer.

The Beguiled (1971)

The Beguiled, directed by Don Siegel and starring Clint Eastwood, was released in 1971. It’s not at all what you might expect from either Siegel or Eastwood. It’s set during the American Civil War but it’s neither a western nor a war picture. It’s more of a gothic melodrama.

The setting is an estate in the South. Corporal John McBurney (Eastwood) is a Union soldier lying wounded and dying. He is found by a little girl named Amy. Amy cannot bear to leave him there. She drags him back home. Home for Amy is Miss Farnsworth’s school for girls.

(Geraldine Page) is horrified. He’s a Yankee. She wants to turn him over to the Confederate authorities so he will be sent to a prison camp. She is persuaded by the other ladies that she cannot possibly do that in his present condition. Miss Farnsworth and her girls decide to nurse him back to health.

All the men are off at the war. There are only women at Miss Farnsworth’s mansion now.

McBurney is a youngish good-looking very masculine man and as you might expect his presence sets feminine hearts a-flutter. Three of the women find his presence particularly disturbing. Martha Farnsworth is one. The second is young teacher Edwina. Edwina is still young but seems to be settling into a life as a dedicated spinster teacher. Until McBurney awakens her female emotions. The third is one of the pupils, Carol (Jo Ann Harris). Carol is man-crazy. Tensions rise and jealousies begin to fester.

McBurney is in a bad way and he’s helpless. The women’s suspicions of him start to subside. Romantic complications ensue with Miss Farnsworth, with Edwina and with Carol. Suspicions flare up again. Jealousies blaze ever more brightly.

And then the movie takes a perverse turn and becomes steadily more perverse. There are dangerous games being played here and they get way out of control.

One of the pleasing things about his movie is that it resists the temptation to bludgeon the viewer with political messaging. The women are all Southerners. Some are kind and selfless. Some are spoilt and selfish. Some are embittered by life. In other words, people are the same everywhere - some are good, some are bad, most are in-between. There’s a very mild anti-war message to the extent that war makes people afraid and brutalises them. McBurney assumes that household slave Hallie (Mae Mercer) will welcome him as a deliverer but she doesn’t. She likes him but she insists that he’s no more free than she is. That seems to be one of this film’s major themes. We’re all prisoners. McBurney wasn’t free when he was a soldier. Now he’s literally a prisoner of these women. And the women are prisoners of their fears and desires, and in the case of Edwina and Miss Farnsworth, of their pasts.

The Civil War setting is irrelevant, aside from the fact that it provides a convenient explanation for this being an entirely female household with not even a male servant, it explains why outsiders are shunned, it explains why the women must keep McBurney’s presence a secret and why he cannot risk leaving. Any wartime setting would have worked just as well.

There’s plenty of complexity to these characters. Martha Farnsworth is a hard woman with a bitterness stemming from her past but underneath there’s still some humanity.

We’re told that McBurney is a Quaker and was a medic with his regiment, and that therefore he has never actually borne arms against the Confederacy. He doesn’t seem the slightest bit like a Quaker. He’s a nice guy but we wonder how truthful and trustworthy he is. He seems keen to seduce Edwina. He seems keen to seduce Carol as well. And maybe Martha, given half a chance. For a godly Quaker he sure does like chasing skirt.

There are fascinating power dynamics that have nothing to do with gender. The power shifts are caused by circumstances and because the various characters have their own psychological reasons for either gaining in self-confidence and power, or losing self-confidence and power.

It’s interesting to compare Eastwood’s excellent performance here to his equally excellent performance in Play Misty For Me in the same year. In both cases he plays a man brimming with self-confidence and convinced that he knows how to handle women. In both cases he finds out that he’s wrong. He is in fact hopelessly out of his depth and confronted with women who do not behave the way he expects them to.

This is a movie with no political axe to grind. It’s a story of loyalty and betrayal, deceit and manipulation, and jealousy. It certainly does deal with female sexual desire and emotional longing but there’s no political aspect to it. These are just complex people driven by contradictory emotions. Miss Farnsworth and Edwina are desperate for love but confused as to what to do about it. Carol just wants to get laid.

These are not particularly admirable people but mostly they have reasons for their actions.

What I love is that there is so much ambiguity and the fact that the ambiguities remain unresolved is a strength. We never find out exactly what McBurney’s story is. We don’t know what his intentions are because he doesn’t know - he’s just playing it by ear. There’s a very slight hint of an attraction between Miss Farnsworth and Edwina but the two women may not even be aware of it. They’re both desperate for love, and for sex, but they don’t understand their own motivations clearly. Amy’s feelings toward McBurney are confused.

This was a labour of love for both Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood. Eastwood read the source novel, became obsessed by it and gave it to Siegel to read. Siegel became equally obsessed. This was a movie they just had to make. They were both very proud of it. It was a box-office flop. Siegel felt very strongly that Universal spectacularly mishandled its release. To the extent that Universal promoted it at all they promoted it as a shoot ‘em up Clint Eastwood action war picture which was bizarrely inappropriate.

It has a certain gothic look and ambience. So many candlelight scenes, and a sense of gothic doom.

The Beguiled is an excellent complex, subtle, multi-layered film. Very highly recommended.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray offers an excellent transfer and there are quite a few extras.

Grand Hotel (1932)

Grand Hotel is a 1932 MGM all-star extravaganza melodrama, but this is not like some of those later all-star movies that actually featured fading stars reduced to doing character parts. Here we have major stars who were either at their peak or rising rapidly - Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, John Barrymore, Wallace Beery, Lionel Barrymore.

The setting is the opulent and glamorous Grand Hotel in Berlin. This is Berlin in the age of Weimar Republic decadence. We get the stories of various guests and they’re a wildly assorted bunch.

Grusinskaya (Greta Garbo) is a prima ballerina whose life is falling apart. She feels that her career is in decline. She is right, although that’s largely the result of her own self-doubts, unpredictability and self-destructiveness. She is also no longer sure that her career matters to her. She wants love. She will find love, very unexpectedly.

She finds love in the person of Baron Felix von Geigern (John Barrymore).

The Baron is irresponsible and penniless and he is a jewel thief. He is a rogue, but a loveable rogue. He plans to steal Grusinskaya’s priceless pearl necklace. Instead she steals his heart!

Otto Kringelein (Lionel Barrymore) is a dying businessman who wants to have one last adventure and the Grand Hotel seems like the place to be.

He works for, or did work for, General Director Preysing. Preysing (Wallace Beery) is a vulgar but very rich business tycoon on the verge of ruin. He might be vulgar and ruthless but he is honest. That has been his downfall. Now he has succumbed to the temptation to be less than frank with his business partners. Preysing is in the midst of delicate merger negotiations. He has hired a stenographer. A very pretty young stenographer.

The stenographer is Miss Flaemm (Joan Crawford). Her friends call her Flaemmchen.

It was an inspired decision to cast Garbo and Crawford. They give radically different performances, each actress playing to her own strengths. Garbo gives one of her most extravagant performances. She is beautiful, moody, mysterious, tragic, tortured, neurotic and ten times larger than life. Grusinskaya is not a star. She is a Star. She is a tortured artistic genius. Garbo goes way over the top but she knows what she’s doing. This is melodrama. Garbo understood melodrama. She is beautiful and sexy in a very European way.

Joan Crawford is bold, brassy, sassy and sexy in a very American way. The contrast between two totally different acting approaches works because of the kind of movie this is. The characters are all very different people and they have very different stories. Any kind of story can happen in the Grand Hotel. The stories of some of these people will play out as tragedy, some as melodrama, some as romance, some as farce.

John Barrymore is terrific. He could certainly be a ham but in this movie his performance is restrained, subtle and controlled. In 1932 he was still a huge star and a very handsome man.

You can see why Grusinskaya falls head over heels in love with him. The Baron is a scoundrel but he’s charming, sensitive and romantic and he has a doomed tragic vibe that would excite any woman - Grusinskaya knows that her love can save him. And perhaps it can. Anything is possible in the Grand Hotel. The chemistry between John Barrymore and Garbo is extraordinary.

There is plenty of MGM gloss but it’s totally appropriate. Edmund Goulding as director does a very stylish job which makes the most of some wonderful Art Deco-inspired sets by Cedric Gibbons. And you can’t go wrong with Bill Daniels as your cinematographer.

The most pre-code element in the movie is the relationship between Preysing and Flaemmchen. He wants her to go to England with him, as his secretary. It is very clear that most of her duties will be performed in the bedroom. Flaemmchen understands this, and accepts the offer even though he’s a married man. He gets her a room in the Grand Hotel. We are left in no doubt that he expects her to share a bad with him and that she is willing to do so. There is no suggestion that this makes her a bad woman. A girl has to eat.

The characters have their own stories which gradually intersect.

The most surprising thing about this movie is that while it’s glossy it’s not frothy. It has a slightly dark and cynical edge. And there are no storybook happy endings for any of the main characters. Most survive, but they will be left with emotional scars.

The characters have more depth than you expect, and the script has more substance than you might expect. Garbo, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery and John Barrymore give top-notch performances.

Grand Hotel was a triumph for MGM, cleaning up at the box office and winning the Best Picture Oscar. This is stylish entertainment that has more than mere gloss going for it. Highly recommended.

Ossessione (1943)

Ossessione is Luchino Visconti’s 1943 unauthorised adaptation of James M. Cain’s 1934 novel The Postman Always Rings Twice.

The novel has immense historical importance. Along with Don Tracy’s Criss Cross, published the same year, it has strong claims to be the foundation text of noir fiction and thus indirectly one of the foundation stones of film noir. Oddly enough there has never been a satisfactory film adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice.

The novel is very much a Depression novel and very much an American novel. Moving the setting to Italy works up to a point. Although the movie was made during the war Visconti wisely makes no mention of the war. We assume the setting is the 1930s. And like Cain’s novel it has a background of poverty, frustration and desperation.

Drifter Gino Costa (Massimo Girotti) arrives at the roadside trattoria owned by middle-aged Giuseppe Bragana (Juan de Landa). For me Gino and Bragana’s wife Giovanna Bragana (Clara Calamai) it’s lust at first sight. After a dispute about non-payment for his meal the penniless Gino is persuaded to accept an informal position as an odd jobs man.

It takes no time at all for Gino and Giovanna to end up in bed.

Giovanna despises her husband. She married him because she was desperate. She had been reduced to whoring herself out to men in return for food. She has no intention of going back to that. But she hates being married to Giuseppe. She wishes he would just die. Then she and Gino could be happy together, with Giuseppe’s money.

You know where this is going to lead.

The problem with the 1946 MGM Hollywood adaptation is that it’s too clean, too glossy, too respectable and has none of the necessary lust and sleaze. John Garfield is miscast as the male lead. He’s not rough enough and he’s not sufficiently disreputable. I’m a big fan of Lana Turner but she looks like a movie star when she’s supposed to look like a cheap waitress. The attraction between the two is too wholesome and lacks any erotic heat.

The 1981 Hollywood version was perfectly cast. Jack Nicholson was ideal as the male lead. Jessica Lange came across as cheap and brazen and slutty, just as her character was supposed to be. Nicholson and Lange generate vast amounts of sweaty erotic heat, just as they should. Unfortunately this version totally self-destructs midway through.

Ossessione has the right leads. Massimo Girotti has the right sort of animal virility. Giovanna takes one look at him and you know that she wants to tear his trousers off. And Girotti gives off the right vibes - a man who truly is drifting with no self-awareness at all. Clara Calamai projects the right kind of earthy sexuality. She might have daydreams of romance but right now she wants hot dirty sex with Gino.

The problem with Visconti’s version is that it loses direction midway through and the action slows to a crawl with irrelevant subplots.

Massimo Girotti’s performance is all over the place. It just doesn’t ring true. One minute he’s a rough, tough hyper-masculine guy and the next he’s some kind of passive sensitive soul. It’s as if the original idea was to base Gino fairly closely on the character in the novel and then it was decided to make him a totally different character.

Some of the movie’s problems are inherent in the story. The early parts of the story dealing with the beginnings of the two characters’ obsession are great stuff. Lots of dramatic tension, the inexorably rising sexual temperature, the tense three-way relationship between Gino, Giovanna and Giuseppe with all its attendant betrayals and deceptions. Then the murder occurs. In the 1981 version the movie then self-destructs. In Visconti’s version it just starts to drift aimlessly.

There’s a lengthy sub-plot involving another drifter, a guy known as Lo Spagnolo. It’s fairly clearly implied that a romantic attachment develops between Gino and Lo Spagnolo. This sub-plot goes nowhere and feels clumsily tacked-on but this is a Visconti movie so I guess he wanted to include it.

There were half-a-dozen writers involved which perhaps explains why the script lacks tightness and coherence. The movie is about 40 minutes too long. It just meanders.

This was Visconti in full-on neo-realist mode and so I suspect that it was deliberately intended to be visually uninteresting. Which it is. I have to lay my cards on the table here. l I despise neo-realism.

The fact that this movie has such a high reputation says less about its inherent quality and more about the deficiencies of the Hollywood adaptations. There’s also the fact that Visconti was one of the darlings of the arthouse movie crowd so there’s an assumption that this must be a great movie, which it clearly isn’t. It’s very much like the 1981 version in some ways - some great early moments between the two leads but then it loses its way.

Worth a look if you want to be able to say you’ve seen all three adaptations of the novel but don’t set your expectations too high. It’s a bit of a misfire.

Body Heat (1981)

Body Heat, released in 1981, is one of the great neo-noirs.

This was Lawrence Kasdan’s first film as director and it’s a stunning debut. He also wrote the script. He was a huge fan of classic film noir. Body Heat is an homage to the great films noirs of the 40s but it’s also one of the defining neo-noirs. It’s more than just a recycling of 1940s film noir tropes.

Ned Racine is a two-bit lawyer in a two-bit town in Florida. He’s a lousy lawyer but he has considerable success with women. If he put half as much effort into his job as a lawyer as he puts into chasing skirt he’d be a great lawyer. He’s a loser but he doesn’t yet know how much of a loser he is.

Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner) attracts his attention immediately. She is beautiful and she has class. He wants her. His pursuit of her is clumsy. As a ladies’ man Ned has no style but he does have determination. He just doesn’t get the message when she gives him the brush-off. He has to have her.

They have sweaty steamy sex. Soon she’s as obsessed by him as he is with her.

Matty is married. She tells Ned how important it is for them to be discreet. Her husband Edmund (Richard Crenna) is rich, powerful and mean. But they’re not discreet.

They both know that there is only one obstacle to their happiness - Edmund. If Edmund had some sort of accident, of the fatal kind, they could be together. And they’d be rich. Very rich.

It’s a classic film noir setup but there are some subtle differences. This is not just a rehash of Double Indemnity. Matty is a femme fatale but Ned is the active driver of events. He seduces her. He’s the one who suggests murder.

Ned has a plan. It’s ingenious but there’s a fair amount of adolescent wish-fulfilment fantasy in all of Ned’s scheming.

Very early on we get one of the greatest lines in film noir industry. Matty says to Ned, “You’re not too smart are you? I like that in a man.” It’s not just a great line, it’s important. Ned really isn’t too smart. That’s why he’s a cheap lawyer in a cheap town. Had he been smart he’d have been a big-time lawyer in Miami.

And there are genuinely unexpected twists to come. There are no perfect crimes. The cleverer the murder the more things there are that can go wrong.

William Hurt was not yet a star. Kasdan didn’t want established stars for the lead roles. This is the movie that really put Hurt on the map as an actor.

This was Kathleen Turner’s film debut and what a debut. She sizzles.

Everything about the Ned-Matty relationship is steamy, sweaty, sleazy and desperate. And cheap and tawdry.

The biggest single difference between the classic film noir of the 1940s and 1950s and neo-noir is the visual style. One of the most important defining characteristics of classic film noir is the visual style and that visual style only worked and could only work in black-and-white. There are things you could only do in black-and-white and film noir is one of them. It’s all about the shadows.

Neo-noir starts with John Boorman’s Point Blank in 1967. It hit its stride in the mid-70s. By 1967 black-and-white was no longer a commercial option. A way had to be found to create a new noir aesthetic that would work in colour.

With Chinatown Polanski and his director of photography John A. Alonzo found one solution. Rather than having dark, moody, shadowy black-and-white cinematography that complemented the dark, moody doom-laden subject matter they would go for lots of colour and bathe everything in bright California sunshine as an ironic counterpoint to the dark, moody doom-laden subject matter. It worked brilliantly. It became one of the standard neo-noir techniques. You can see it in Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct almost two decades later.

In Body Heat writer-director Lawrence Kasdan and his D.P. Richard H. Kline found a different solution. Kasdan came up with a masterstroke - setting his movie in Florida. Not the glamorous tourist Florida but a grimy little town in the middle of a heat wave. The kind of fairly unprosperous town in which air conditioning was not yet ubiquitous. Nobody in Kasdan’s small Florida town has an air conditioner. The heat is stifling and oppressive. Everybody is bathed in sweat. The whole town reeks of sweat.

There’s heat but we don’t see much glorious sunshine. Everything seems like it’s seen through a misty heat haze. There’s nothing healthy about it. It has the atmosphere of a foetid swamp.

There’s plenty of eroticism in classic film noir but it all had to be achieved by suggestion. In neo-noir it’s right out there in plain view. The sex in Body Heat isn’t the slightest bit explicit but it’s very sleazy.

Body Heat is superb stuff. Very highly recommended.

Body Heat looks great on Blu-Ray and the disc includes something rare these days - genuinely worthwhile extras.

Endless Night (1972)

Endless Night is a 1972 British thriller written and directed by Sidney Gilliat and with an intriguing cast headed by Hayley Mills, Hywel Bennett and Britt Ekland.

Gilliat and Frank Launder had been an immensely successful writing, directing and producing team (they wrote The Lady Vanishes for Alfred Hitchcock).

The movie is based on a 1967 Agatha Christie thriller. Yes, this is an actual thriller. Agatha Christie did write several thrillers and Endless Night was the best of them. It was her last truly great book.

Mike Rogers is a rental car driver although that is just the latest in a series of jobs. Mike is a very nice young man but he’s a bit of a dreamer. Mike has a fantasy - to build his dream house overlooking the sea. He has already chosen the spot, known as Gypsy’s Acre. The land would cost a lot of money, the house would cost a fortune and Mike is penniless. It’s just a dream.

Doing a driving job on the Continent he meets the renowned architect Rudolf Santonix (Per Oscarsson). Santonix is only in early middle age but he is running out of time. He has severe health problems and may only have a few years left. Mike shows him photos of the site at Gypsy’s Acre. It becomes a kind of dream for Santonix as well. This is a site worthy of him. He could design a house for that site, a house that would be his final masterpiece. But since such a house would be immensely expensive and Mike has no money it’s just a dream.

And then Mike meets a cute American girl, Ellie Thomsen (Hayley Mills). They take a shine to each other. What Mike doesn’t know is that Ellie is one of the richest women in the world.

It can’t possibly work out. Penniless hire car drivers like Mike don’t marry fabulously rich heiresses. But they do get married.

That’s when the plot twists start to kick in and the atmosphere becomes increasingly foreboding, and will soon become sinister. We know something bad is going to happen but we don’t know what it will be.

There are lots of potentially sinister characters. There’s the weird old woman muttering stuff about doom. There’s Greta (Britt Ekland). She’s Ellie’s best friend and was formerly her paid companion. Everyone warns Mike about Greta. There’s Ellie’s family, and a nasty money-grubbing snobbish bunch they are. Reuben (Peter Bowles) is married to Ellie’s aunt and he’s clearly a bad ’un. There’s Ellie’s aunt Cora (Lois Maxwell) who oozes spitefulness. There’s also the family lawyer, Andrew Lippincott (George Sanders). He’s charming but he’s a lawyer and much too clever to be trustworthy.

Both Mike and Ellie are dreamers. Santonix is a dreamer. The film has a slight fairy-tale vibe (and Ellie describes herself several times as Cinderella). My feeling is that you’ll appreciate this movie more if you think of it as having a subtle fairy tale quality. Ellie is the beautiful princess. Mike is the handsome but penniless coachman who wins her heart. The house is an enchanted castle, created by the wizard Santonix. Greta is a witch (the beautiful glamorous witches are the ones you have to watch out for). She might be a good witch or a bad witch. The crazy old lady could also be a good witch or a bad witch. Reuben is the adventurer who hoped to marry the princess. Cora is the evil stepmother. Andrew Lippincott is the old king’s courtier who might want the throne himself.

I have no idea if Gilliat had any of this in mind but there is a faint whiff of unreality to this movie. A slight storybook feel. It’s a long long way from fashionable 70s gritty realism. In fact the overall feel reminds me a little of Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951) which also has that ambiguity, that sense of being not quite reality. This is a movie that has more of a 1940s or 1950s feel than an early 70s feel. Although it does have a slight affinity with Roddy McDowall’s extraordinary The Ballad of Tam Lin (1970).

While these people live in a futuristic modernist house there are constant evocations of the past such as Mike’s love of beautiful old things, and the fact that Ellie is a singer but she sings 18th century songs. There are also subtle little otherwordly hints - when we first see Ellie she looks like a fairy dancing in a field, there’s the way the old lady keeps just appearing from nowhere. These are very subtle hints but to me they reinforce the idea that reality might not be all it seems to be.

There’s also a subtle dream-like quality to this movie. Again it’s a very slight undermining of reality.

This is a deceptive movie. It’s much smarter and more complex than it initially appears to be but you don’t know how smart it is until the end. It was promoted as an ingenious whodunit, which it isn’t. The mystery plot is very simple, very straightforward and very obvious. The mystery plot is not the point of the movie but you don’t know that until the end.

Hywel Bennett is outstanding. There were certain roles that he just did better than anyone else could have done. This is one of those roles. Hayley Mills is very good although she has a less showy part. Britt Ekland is very good indeed. This movie is stacked with fine British character actors and they’re all good.

Endless Night is intriguing, stylish, enigmatic and clever. Highly recommended.

And it looks great on Blu-Ray.

The Second Woman (1950)

The Second Woman (later re-released with the title Ellen) is a 1950 United Artists release that has languished in obscurity and that’s rather unfortunate.

The opening is obviously and I would assume deliberately reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Rebecca. A woman tells us that she keeps remembering a house, a house named Hilltop, now just a ruin.

There are moments that will call to mind several other notable movies of the 1940s, including other Hitchcock movies.

We get a scene with a man seemingly over come by carbon monoxide fumes from a car with its engine kept running in a garage.

A woman is told that she should leave her house immediately because she is in extreme danger.

We need to be wary of taking anything we see in this movie at face value.

Then we go into a flashback which occupies most of the movie’s running time.

Ellen Foster (Betsy Drake) meets Jeff Cohalan (Robert Young) on a train. He’s charming and friendly and he seems to be trying to pick her up (and she seems to like the idea) but there’s something slightly odd about him. He seems a bit distracted, a bit moody. As if something was haunting him.

They’re both heading for the same small town.

Jeff is an architect and apparently a very successful one. He’s well-liked but people worry about him. He has never been the same since the accident in which his wife was killed. Nobody likes to talk about the accident and Jeff certainly doesn’t want to talk about it.

But Ellen has fallen head over heels in love with Jeff and there’s no way to restrain a woman’s curiosity.

Jeff invites her to look inside Hilltop, the house he designed and in which he lives. That causes some surprise to the locals - Jeff has never allowed anybody inside Hilltop.

Jess seems to be getting more distracted and disturbed. And strange things keep happening to him. His much-loved horse breaks its leg. His dog is poisoned. There is worse to come. The painting is a particular puzzle. It’s one of Jeff’s prized possessions but the colours have started to fade. Ellen is convinced there’s something very significant about this painting.

And as Ellen says, it just isn’t possible for anybody to have that much bad luck. There’s something sinister going on. Everything that Jeff loves dies. Dr Hartley (Morris Carnovsky) is concerned that Ellen might be in danger. That seems more and more likely.

One nice twist is that we cannot be certain that Ellen is the one in danger. Events seem to be heading inexorably towards disaster but we don’t know from which direction the danger is coming and we don’t know the motive.

There are several plausible explanations for these strange events. The movie does a pretty good job of keeping us in doubt about the actual explanation.

The plot twists are handled quite deftly. There’s some decent misdirection. Mostly it relies on an atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia that builds gradually but inexorably.

I loved Jeff’s cliff-top modernist house (I dislike modernist architecture for public buildings but I have a real weakness for modernist houses).

I have issues with Robert Young in his 1930s movies. He tries too hard and he’s too hyper-active. By 1950 however he had learnt to tone things down and he gives a fine subtle performance here. Betsy Drake is a likeable lively heroine.

This is a psychological thriller at times veering toward psychological horror and with some hints of the gothic. There are obvious echoes of Rebecca but also of Suspicion and Spellbound and maybe Laura.

This movie ticks just about all my boxes. I enjoyed it enormously. It deserves to be much better known. Highly recommended.

My copy of this film, which obviously had fallen into the public domain, is in one of those Mill Creek 50-movie DVD sets (in this instance their Mystery Classics set). The transfer is quite good.