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.

China (1943)

China is a 1943 Paramount wartime adventure thriller.

David Llewellyn Jones (Alan Ladd) and Johnny Sparrow (William Bendix) are American businessmen and adventurers in China. This sounds like a setup for a fun movie but as we’ll see there’s not much fun to be had here.

It is 1941 and the Sino-Japanese War is raging. Jones and Johnny Sparrow trade with anyone, including the Japanese. Given that at this stage Japan and the United States are at peace there is of course absolutely no reason why they should not do so but we are constantly told how wicked Jones is to do this.

These two traders encounter Carolyn Grant (Loretta Young), a very moral American do-gooder. She wants them to use their truck to transport a dozen Chinese girls to Chungdu, well away from the advancing Japanese Army.

Jones sees no reason why he should do this. Eventually he changes his mind when he realises that the Japanese are wicked enemies.

Jones turns from a cynical hardbitten adventurer into an idealistic morally righteous crusader for freedom and democracy. We get some speeches to explain all this. Jones ends up deciding to take on an entire Japanese division with the aid of half a dozen Chinese guerrillas.

These girls are trainee schoolteachers who are going to build a new China and we get some speeches about that as well. We get quite a bit of speechifying.

Jones of course wants to find redemption, having previously devoted his life to wicked pursuits such as making a living and chasing girls. He must become a Hero.

This is a movie in which the leading man and leading lady have absolutely zero chemistry. It’s not as if they initially dislike each other. There’s just nothing. When, very late in the picture, we finally get a love scene between them it doesn’t ring true at all. And they still have zero chemistry.

Thee’s also a weird scene in which, totally out of left field, Johnny Sparrow declares his love for Miss Grant. He obviously doesn’t realise he’s the sidekick and the sidekick never gets the girl. Miss Grant however has pigeonholed him immediately as a sidekick and therefore unworthy of her love. And that scene is then quietly forgotten.

This is a very well-made movie. Australian director John Farrow had a great love for long takes and extended tracking shots and there are some fine examples of the latter in this film. Farrow had major faults as a director but he had his virtues as well and he was technically very accomplished. The action scenes are handled well, although they also have a real edge of nastiness. The audience is expected to take great glee in seeing Japanese soldiers mown down by machine guns. They are after all America’s enemies.

I have always disliked war movies and especially war movies made during wartime and this movie reminded me why. They are invariably propaganda and the propaganda in this movie is very crude indeed. The Japanese in this movie are fiendish cartoon villains. The Chinese are all brave and noble and honourable.

China also suffers from an excess of syrupy sentimentality.

Alan Ladd is one of my favourite actors but this is not one of his better performances. To be fair Frank Butler’s clumsy screenplay doesn’t give him much to work with. William Bendix is OK. Loretta Young is all self-satisfied moral righteousness. I love her early pre-code performances but here she’s rather dull and irritating.

China is pure propaganda from start to finish. The story and the characters don’t matter, what matters is bludgeoning the viewer with the message. I seriously advise you to avoid this movie.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray release looks great.

They Died with Their Boots On (1941)

I’m not a fan of historical movies or of biopics and They Died with Their Boots On, a 1941 Warner Brothers release, is both. It’s a movie I was therefore always going to approach with a certain scepticism. I have never understood why anyone would want to make historical movies or biopics that are mostly pure fantasy and I have never understood why anyone would want to watch such movies.

This movie is also a western of sorts and it is very much an epic. That made Raoul Walsh the ideal director. Walsh had directed The Thief of Bagdad for Douglas Fairbanks in 1924 and while Fairbanks was very much the auteur and Walsh’s job was simply to put Fairbanks’ vision on screen it still provided Walsh with invaluable training in handling epic material and huge productions. And Walsh had already directed a western epic, The Big Trail, in 1930. There was no way that Raoul Walsh was going to be intimidated by a project such as They Died with Their Boots On.

And since this is a movie about George Armstrong Custer, one of the most colourful and controversial men in American history, Errol Flynn was a very obvious casting choice indeed. Whatever you think of Custer he was a larger-than-life character and Flynn was most definitely was a larger-than-life figure himself.

It’s a very long movie and it takes us two hours and twenty minutes to get to the Battle of the Little Bighorn. It begins with Custer’s extraordinary career at West Point which is not exaggerated very much. Custer really did have one of the worst disciplinary records in the history of that august institution.

While at West Point he meets Elizabeth Bacon (Olivia de Havilland). They both know they’re destined to get married, which they eventually do.

Custer’s spectacular career in the Civil War (he was a general at the age of 23) gets plenty of attention. Some of this stuff is historical and some is pure fantasy.

Custer fails to adjust to civilian life and starts to fall apart until his wife pulls some strings and gets him put back on the active list. He is to take command of a ragtag bunch of hopeless new recruits. He will build them into the legendary 7th Cavalry. There are battles with the Sioux until Custer and Crazy Horse (Anthony Quinn) decide they both want peace. Custer trusts Crazy Horse and Crazy Horse trusts Custer. They are both right to do so. Custer persuades Crazy Horse that he can trust the US Government as well and should sign a treaty. Trusting the US Government turns out to be a very big mistake.

The US Government is not the only problem. There are also crooked businessmen who want the last remaining lands of the Plains Indians. Every single businessman and politician in this movie is a liar, a cheat and a crook.

This is a movie that is very sympathetic to the Sioux and the other tribes and to Crazy Horse. Custer is the hero and always behave honourably but in the events leading up to the Battle of the Little Bighorn the movie makes it quite explicit that the US Government were the bad guys.

Custer and Crazy Horse are both brave, honourable decent men but they are helpless in the face of the manipulations of those crooked businessmen and politicians. And so they end up facing each other at the Little Bighorn.

Flynn is magnificent. He plays Custer like a dashing figure from an adventure novel and that is more or less how Custer lived his life. No-one did adventure heroes better than Flynn but here he gets the chance to show that he was quite capable of displaying subtlety and emotional depth as well.

Flynn and Olivia de Havilland always made a great romantic pairing and this film is no exception.

Mention must be made of Sydney Greenstreet’s wonderful turn as the army commander-in-chief Winfield Scott. He’s a joy to watch.

As you’d expect Walsh handles the action scenes with plenty of skill. There is a very real sense of tragedy to this movie. Custer is drawn inexorably to his fate by his thirst for both glory and honour. The movie is of course utter nonsense as history but that’s Hollywood. It’s still wildly entertaining. That sense of tragedy makes this more than just a movie about heroism. Highly recommended.

The DVD release includes a brief TCM featurette on the movie made about twenty years ago so it’s mercifully free of ideological lecturing.

The Last Flight (1931)

The Last Flight, released by First National Pictures in 1931, is a fascinating pre-code exercise in post-war angst and existential despair.

It was written by John Monk Saunders, whose writing credits encompass most of the classic World War I aviation movies of the 20s and 30s including Wings (1927) and the original 1930 version of The Dawn Patrol. He had been an army flight instructor during the war. His job was to teach men to kill, and die, in the air. It had an effect. Saunders committed suicide in 1940 at the age of forty-five.

The Last Flight begins with two buddies, Lieutenants Cary Lockwood (Richard Barthelmess) and Shep Lambert (David Manners), in the midst of their final dogfight over France in 1918. They survive the crash of their plane.

They are among the lucky ones who returned from the war alive. Or are they lucky? When you send young men off to war, even if they come back alive they haven’t really survived. Cary and Shep are all broken inside. Not physically, but mentally and spiritually and emotionally. They are the walking dead.

They head to Paris when peace comes. They only know how to fly and to kill, not useful peacetime skills. And they can’t fly any more. Their nerves are shattered. There is however one thing they can do. They can drink. They decide to devote their lives to drinking.

There’s lots of Lost Generation stuff in this movie. This was 1931. The new American literary superstars were writers like Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, chroniclers of that Lost Generation.

Cary and Shep hang around with other American WW1 vets, all of them broken in some way by the war and all living lives devoted to empty despairing hedonism.

Then they meet a very strange girl. Her name is Nikki (Helen Chandler). To say that she’s eccentric would be putting it mildly. She’s totally mad. She’s also charming, pretty, likeable and weirdly fascinating. Soon she is surrounded by half a dozen drunken admirers, all broken-down ex-flyers. She recognises flyers immediately. They have a certain look in their eyes. She doesn’t actually say this but I think it’s fair to surmise that she can see in their eyes that they have looked upon the face of death.

There’s more than a tinge of existentialism. These young men, and this young woman, have freedom but they have no idea what to do with it. They have their pleasures, but their pleasures leave them feeling empty. The war has destroyed their faith in the old values. They have found no new values in which to believe. Being drunk makes them cheerful, but it’s a despairing kind of forced cheerfulness. They’re going nowhere and they’re in a hurry.

In this very year, 1931, David Manners and Helen Chandler would be paired in a much more famous movie, Dracula. Considering how dull they were in Dracula their performances in The Last Flight come as quite a surprise. David Manners is quite good. Helen Chandler’s performance is bizarre but it’s bizarre in just the right way and it works perfectly. Nikki is a Lost Girl. Like the men she just drifts through life without actually living.

Richard Barthelmess was, briefly, a very big star. He’s very good here. All the performances are nicely judged, with the right amount of disconnectedness.

What makes this a pre-code movie is not the sexual content (there is very little to speak of) but its cynicism about military glory and the military in general, and its overall pessimism. I don’t think the Production Code Authority would have tolerated such a negative view of the military.

The plot takes some very unexpected turns towards the end. There are events that come out of the blue, but given the way these people live you can’t help feeling that something like this was bound to happen. I like the way the shocks are not foreshadowed.

The Last Flight is one of the more successful attempts to capture existentialism on film. It’s a fascinating movie and because it’s a pre-code movie it’s pleasingly unpredictable. Highly recommended.

The Warner Archive DVD offers a very good transfer. It’s barebones. That’s perhaps a pity since this movie is probably easier to appreciate if you know a bit about the intellectual currents of the time.

Escape in the Fog (1945)

Escape in the Fog is an odd little Columbia spy thriller B-feature released in 1945.

Nina Foch plays Eileen Carr, a military nurse who has had a crack-up and has been honourably discharged as a result. She has disturbing dreams. So do lots of people. But Eileen’s dreams come true! She dreams about a man, a man she has never seen before, being attacked on a bridge. And the next day she meets the man. The man is Barry Malcolm (William Wright) and for both of them it’s love at first. And he does get attacked on a bridge, exactly as happened in the dream.

Barry Malcolm is a Federal Agent and he’s just been assigned to a vital mission, to deliver important papers to a contact in Hong Kong. The papers concern American plans to attack Japanese forces in China. First he has to collect the papers in San Francisco.

Unfortunately a sinister Nazi spy ring has found out about the mission. They intend to get the papers. Awkwardly for both the Nazis and Barry Malcolm the papers are now at the bottom of the bay after Malcolm threw them off a bridge.

He’s told Eileen about the mission and she’s playing amateur spy with enthusiasm but with mixed results. She naturally manages to get herself captured by the Nazi spies.

It all turns out to be a very conventional by-the-numbers spy flick. Sadly the potentially really interesting angles, just as Eileen’s talent for precognition, are not developed. The story at least moves along at a good pace.

Nina Foch is quite adequate and very likeable as Eileen. William Wright, a now forgotten actor who died tragically young, is a perfectly serviceable hero. In fact he’s pretty good. Otto Kruger plays the enigmatic Paul Devon and does so effectively if predictably. There’s the expected conventional Nazi villain.

This was an early directorial effort by Budd Boetticher, later to gain fame as a director of westerns. This is very much a B-picture so he doesn’t get much opportunity to do anything clever but films like this were great training in getting on with a story without distracting the viewer with unnecessary padding.

There was obviously no money for spectacular action set-pieces. The title does promise fog and there’s plenty of that - always a useful way of disguising a low budget. The fog is certainly used effectively. And Malcolm’s escape plan is very clever.

While it’s been released as part of a film noir set this movie has absolutely zero claims to being a film noir. It’s just a routine spy story. It’s a pity because the story could have been a lot more interesting if there’d been time to flesh it out and explore Eileen’s psychological quirks. You have to wonder if perhaps the script was intending to do this but the demands of B-film production resulted in the more interesting bits of the story being eliminated - why introduce the dream stuff if you’re not going to explain what’s going on in her head?

This movie is included in the three-disc nine-movie Blu-Ray set Noir Archive volume 1 from Kit Parker Films. The transfer is good if you don’t mind a bit of graininess (which is actually an asset in a movie of this type). The Blu-Ray release is just a way to pack lots of movies on just three discs. The image quality is good DVD quality. The packaging of the set is unbelievably shoddy - three discs all packed into in a two-disc case and not surprisingly not all the discs are playable.

This movie was also released individually on DVD in the Sony Choice Collection series but that edition might be hard to find now.

If you’re happy to accept it for what it is, a pure B-movie potboiler, then Escape in the Fog  offers undemanding but reasonably satisfying entertainment. It’s worth a rental.

Beau Ideal (1931)

The 1924 novel Beau Geste by P.C. Wren (1875-1941) had been made into a very successful 1926 Paramount silent movie directed by Herbert Brenon. Wren wrote a couple of sequels to his bestselling novel and it seemed to RKO to be a logical move to get Brenon to direct a sound version of one of these books. For some odd reason the first sequel, Beau Sabreur, was ignored and the second sequel, Beau Ideal (published in 1928), was chosen. The results did not please everybody.

Most of the film is occupied by a series of flashbacks. First we go back fifteen years, to the childhood games of Beau Geste and his band - his brothers and a young American named Otis Madison (Lester Vail). Otis and John Geste are jousting to determine who will win the hand of the fair Isobel Brandon.

We then go forward quite a few years. Otis returns to England to ask for the hand of Isobel (played as an adult by Loretta Young). He learns that John Geste (Ralph Forbes) is still his rival but misfortunate has hit the Gestes and all the brothers have joined the French Foreign Legion. John is in a penal battalion somewhere in Africa. In a quixotic gesture Otis decides he will find John and bring him home.

To do this Otis has to find a way to get into the penal battalion. But how? He can’t do anything dishonourable. That would be unthinkable. Fortunately fate steps in.

Naturally there has to be a beautiful but bad woman mixed up in the story somewhere. Zuleika (Leni Stengel) is half-French and half-Arab, a dancer known as the Angel of Death for all the men she has lured to their dooms. Now she is involved in a particularly nefarious plot.

One reviewer described the climactic battle scene as politically incorrect. This shows an extraordinary ability to miss the point. The whole film is politically incorrect. It is a film about a bunch of mercenaries (which is essentially what the Foreign Legion was) enforcing French colonial rule on people who had no particular desire to be part of the France’s empire. Unless you’re prepared to challenge the whole colonial concept (which this film is certainly not going to do) it’s very hard to make a politically correct movie about the French Foreign Legion!

Interestingly enough, given the extent to which the Legion so often gets glamourised, this movie portrays it as extremely brutal and rather incompetent. So it’s also a movie to offend French patriots!

Part of the reason this film didn’t set the box office alight may be the extraordinarily grim beginning.

Criticisms of this film usually focus on the dialogue. In many respects it’s a creature of its time. Early talkies did tend to be a bit clunky due to technical limitations of the early sound cameras and the dialogue was often stilted (partly because the actors were often ill-at-ease due to the aforementioned technical problems). A year after this movie was made those problems had been ironed out.

It also suffers from a less than brilliant cast. Ralph Forbes and Lester Vail lack charisma and the chief villains aren’t colourful enough.

Modern audiences will also find Otis’s motivations distinctly puzzling. It’s not just that he has a strict code of honour, he also has a deliberately self-sacrificing streak that may annoy some viewers. In 1931 it would have made sense.

Beau Ideal does have its good points. It’s visually quite impressive. The Legionnaires lost in the desert in the sandstorm is a frightening scene, the photography is good and the climactic action scenes work extremely well.

This movie is in the public domain. I have the Alpha Video version (which is pretty much your only choice) and it’s what you’d expect. It’s not good but it’s viewable.The sound quality is quite uneven although the dialogue is understandable.

Beau Ideal is by no means as bad as it’s often made out to be. It’s an average if slightly clunky movie of its type but it’s watchable if you’re in an undemanding mood. However, given the iffy Alpha Video transfer, I’d hesitate to recommend a purchase (I got it for a dollar in a bargain bin so I’m not complaining). Maybe worth a rental.

Sundown (1941)

Sundown gave Gene Tierney one of her early starring rôles and it’s an interesting mix of wartime intrigue and adventure which would have worked quite well but for a fatal flaw.

The film is set in Manieka, a minor outpost in Kenya. Although Britain is at war the British officials there are pretty casual. Things are usually quiet and peaceful and no-one worries very much about security. That all changes when Major Coombes (George Sanders) arrives to take over command. Coombes is shocked by the laxness of discipline. An Italian prisoner-of-war is allowed to wander about all over the place. Sentries are rarely posted. Coombes is determined to smarten things up. In Nairobi  the war is taken much more seriously and Coombes has been sent to investigate some very disturbing news that the Shenzi, who are described as outlaw natives, are being armed.

The Italian prisoner-of-war then outlines his crazy theory of how Africa is the key to world domination and Coombes thinks it’s a very persuasive theory.

What really unsettles things is the arrival of Zia (Gene Tierney). Zia is half-Arab and half-French, stunningly gorgeous, and is an immensely wealthy trader.

Trouble starts to build and everyone starts to get nervous, especially when the natives start confidently predicting that one of the Europeans has an appointment with death. There are in fact evil conspiracies afoot. These are dark days for the British Empire! But that means opportunities for heroic deeds.

There is tension between the District Officer, Crawford (Bruce Cabot), who is the civil commander and Coombes as military commander. Crawford is, quite honestly, a pompous bore and an extremely irritating character. Coombes is pompous as well but George Sanders can make such a character reasonably entertaining. Bruce Cabot, sadly, does not have that ability.

Hollywood in those days was obsessed by the idea of beautiful mixed-race women. The idea of a woman trapped between two worlds is of course inherently rather interesting. Zia is even more interesting. She is half-Arab but also considers herself to be African.

Gene Tierney in 1941 really was incredibly lovely. This is hardly a demanding rôle but she handles it reasonably well.

Of course being a Hollywood movie made before America’s entry into the war this film is outrageous pro-British propaganda. From the first mention of illicit guns you just know that one of the characters is going to turn out to be an Evil Nazi. In this case his identity is painfully obvious right from the start.

The whole setup of this film lends itself to preaching. And Hollywood never could resist the temptation to get preachy. This movie takes the opportunity to preach to us on both political and social issues. And it does so mercilessly.

On the plus side there are a couple of surprisingly imaginative and visually interesting action sequences. In fact the movie as a whole is fairly impressive visually. Charles Lang’s black-and-white cinematography is extremely good.

Apart from the times that the plot comers to a stop for a sermon it has to be said that director Henry Hathaway handles things pretty well.

Gene Tierney doesn’t really appear until the movie is well under way but we have already seen her briefly in an introductory scene when she arrives in an aircraft. At this stage we have absolutely no idea who she is or what part she is going to play in the events of the movie and this is quite an effective technique - it establishes her rather nicely as a mysterious figure. Unfortunately once she reappears in the film the mystery is not really maintained. She turns out to be disappointingly straightforward.

Tierney was at this time probably the most beautiful star in Hollywood. In this film she’s cast as an exotic beauty and she’s put in costumes that make her look like a princess from the Arabian Nights. The obvious thing would have been to pair her with a handsome charismatic leading man. Instead she’s paired with a non-star with zero personality.

Sundown has fallen into the public domain. The copy I watched came from a St Clair Vision bargain bin boxed set. Surprisingly the transfer was reasonably good.

Sundown had the makings of a decent adventure romance movie but it’s swamped by some of the most embarrassingly ham-fisted cinematic propaganda you’ll ever encounter, and by  the endless sermonising. It’s a great pity because Sundown is visually exceptionally interesting and Hathaway’s direction of the action scenes is lively. And Gene Tierney looks great.

A movie that had promise but while it has its moments it’s difficult to recommend this one unless you’re a Gene Tierney completist.

The Intruder (1953)

The Intruder is a 1953 British drama that is not exactly a crime film in the conventional sense although crime does certainly play a part, and there is a manhunt.

Jack Hawkins plays Wolf Merton, a stockbroker who discovers a burglar in his home. It’s hard to say who is the more surprised of the two. Merton had been a colonel during the war, commanding a tank regiment. The burglar, Ginger Edwards (Michael Medwin) is one of the men who served under him. Actually Ginger is a bit more than that. He’s the man who saved the colonel’s life, and in fact saved the lives of an entire armoured squadron, during a particularly nasty action in North Africa.

Merton is shocked but his immediate impulse is to help the man. He might be a retired officer but he still feels a responsibility for the men who had been under his command. Unfortunately Ginger panics, throws himself through a glass door and makes a run for it.

Colonel Merton is not prepared to let the matter drop. Ginger had been a fine soldier and a thoroughly decent fellow and Merton can’t stand the idea that he should now be a  common thief. If he can find the man he may be able to find out what went wrong, what chain of misfortunes could have brought him to Merton’s house in the guise of a housebreaker.

Finding Ginger again isn’t easy. Ginger had let it slip that he still kept in touch with one of the men from the regiment and the colonel has an idea that the man in question might be Summers (George Cole). He’s almost right but then the trail seems to go cold again. Merton is sure that the man Ginger has been in touch with is one of the soldiers in a group photograph taken in North Africa.

Much of the story is told in the form of flashbacks to the war years. This technique provides a convenient way to let the viewer know the backstories of both Ginger and the colonel but it does more than that. It gives us the backstories of the various men in that wartime photograph whilst we also get to see those same men ten years later. Some of the men seem little changed while others seem almost unrecognisable. In some cases weaknesses of character already in evidence during the war have been magnified; in other cases those weaknesses have been overcome in surprising ways. 

Colonel Merton of course will also find out more about himself during the course of his search for the elusive Ginger. He is also not the only one on Ginger’s trail. The police are after Ginger as well and Merton hopes to find him before they do.

The wartime sequences are extremely well done. This is a drama but there are some comic moments as well, especially Merton’s encounter with a former corporal turned schoolmaster.

Guy Hamilton is best remembered for the four James Bond movies he directed. He does a fine job here.

Jack Hawkins was a fine actor who played a lot of army officers, a role for which he was ideally suited. Colonel Merton is an affable sort of fellow. He cared about his men during the war and now he finds to his surprise that he still cares about them. The war was an opportunity for men to show themselves at their best, or at their worst. In Merton’s case it is definitely the former. Hawkins is able to make Merton convincingly caring without excessive sentimentality. 

Hawkins gets good support from George Cole as the harassed but well-meaning Lieutenant Summers and Dennis Price as the smooth Captain Pirry, a man who has good cause not to want to remember his wartime career in too much detail. Michael Medwin is quite effective as Ginger.

Modern viewers might find the plot to be a little contrived and melodramatic (it’s hard to imagine how anyone could have as much bad luck as poor Ginger) and the ending won’t please modern audiences.

This is a thoroughly typical Network DVD release, no extras but an excellent transfer at a very reasonable price.

The Intruder is a slightly offbeat film that is worth a look. Not quite a crime film, not quite a war film, but an interesting hybrid. Recommended.

Fail-Safe (1964)

In 1964 there were two American movies due to be released both dealing the subject of an accidentally provoked nuclear war. One, and by far the better known movie, was of course Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The other was Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe. The two movies are quite different in tone, Dr. Strangelove being a black comedy while Fail-Safe is (or tries to be) a tense political thriller. The similarities in plot are however quite extraordinary. In fact the plots are so similar that Kubrick and Columbia Pictures sued for plagiarism. Having now seen both films more or less back-to-back I can well understand why Kubrick and Columbia felt justified in taking legal action.

The case was settled out of court and the terms of the settlement were that Columbia should buy Fail-Safe. They did so, and delayed the release until well after Dr. Strangelove opened. When Fail-Safe finally came out it bombed at the box office and fans of the film tend to blame this on the delayed release. In fact Columbia acted very sensibly. Dr. Strangelove was a great movie with the potential to be a huge hit (which it was). Fail-Safe is clunky and dull and was never going to set the box-office alight.

Fail-Safe begins with some VIPs being shown around the Strategic Air Command headquarters. An unidentified radar contact causes some mild excitement but apparently this happens all the time. It’s no big deal, probably a commercial airliner off course. This is followed by some real excitement. Six American strategic bombers, armed with hydrogen bombs, have for some completely unknown reason started heading for the Soviet border. Efforts to recall them fail and now there’s a full-blown crisis and the President (Henry Fonda) is notified.

Also present in the War Room is political scientist Dr Groeteschele (based on real-life political scientist Herman Kahn and played by Walter Matthau). Dr Groeteschele sees this as a wonderful opportunity. He advises the President to launch a full-scale nuclear attack. OK, he calculates that at least sixty million Americans will die but that’s a small price to pay  for saving the American way of life from the evils of communism. (Groeteschele appears in an odd prologue scene being picked up at a party by a woman who seems to have a nuclear war fetish).

The President for some strange reason doesn’t think that it’s a good idea to risk destroying civilisation in order to save it and frantic efforts are soon underway to recall the rogue bombers or to destroy them, or at the very least to persuade the Russians that it was all a terrible accident.

The main protagonists all play much the same role that their equivalents play in Kubrick’s film. Dr Groeteschele is as mad in his own way as Dr Strangelove. The President is well-meaning. The military chiefs are divided. 

Although Fail-Safe is played as a straight thriller rather than a comedy it’s actually a lot less tense and exciting than Dr. Strangelove.

Fail-Safe was based on a book of the same name by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler while Kubrick’s movie was based on an earlier novel by Peter George. The basic plot outline is almost identical.

Sidney Lumet had a remarkable career as a director, managing to make not a single good movie in a very long career.

Fail-Safe is not so much a movie as a political lecture - strident, dreary and clumsy. It demonstrates that Kubrick’s decision to play the same material as comedy was a very very shrewd move. The political subtext in Kubrick’s production is made much more palatable and is in any case more nuanced.

Henry Fonda is an actor I’ve never liked. In this movie he just seems to be playing Henry Fonda. Walter Matthau is ludicrously miscast and his performance is the final disaster that sinks the film. The members of the supporting cast give rather stagey performances. Look out for Larry Hagman in a fairly important role as the President’s interpreter (and he’s one of the better actors in the film).

Sony’s Region 2 DVD looks pretty good and includes a mini-documentary on the film plus a commentary track by director Lumet.

Fail-Safe doesn’t really develop the necessary level of nail-biting suspense. The story has potential but Lumet doesn’t capitalise on it. The whole affair is too self-righteous. I had the same response to this one as I’ve had to most of Lumet’s films. He often starts out with an idea that seems to have potential but he doesn’t appear to know what to do with the idea. The result, more often than not, comes across as thematically incoherent.

If you’re a student of the Cold War or a fan of Cold War movies then Fail-Safe might be worth a look if only for the contrast it makes with Kubrick’s version. Otherwise I wouldn’t bother too much tracking this one down.

We Dive at Dawn (1943)

I have a considerable fondness for submarine movies. We Dive at Dawn is a very decent example of the breed. It was a wartime production, released in 1943, and so there’s an obvious propaganda element (all of the British sailors are incredibly brave) but it has some definite compensating strengths. 

The submarine HMS Sea Tiger, commanded by Lieutenant Taylor (John Mills) has just returned from an unsuccessful cruise and her crew are looking forward to seven days’ leave. They’re not going to get it. They get a single day and then they’re immediately sent off on a highly dangerous and super-secret mission - to intercept and sink the brand new German battleship Brandenburg.

The film gets off to a slow start. The first twenty minutes or so follows the various crew members ashore on their very truncated leave. One is supposed to be getting married. One is trying to put his broken marriage back together. As for the captain, he’s hoping to get to see as many of his numerous girlfriends as he possibly can. This introductory materials serves its purpose of giving us an insight into the various characters even if it drags just a little.

Things pick up once they’re at sea and on the trail of the Brandenburg. The plan goes awry but rather than giving up Lieutenant Taylor comes up with an even more daring and dangerous plan - to break through into the Baltic, running the gauntlet of anti-submarine nets, minefields, the Luftwaffe and most of the German Navy. They do catch up to the German battleship, but whether they can succeed in sinking it or not is another matter.

Things gets even better in the final half-hour. The Sea Tiger’s fuel is exhausted and surrender seems to be the only option but instead a much bolder and much crazier idea occurs to our submariners - why not raid a port in German-occupied Denmark and steal the fuel they need? The movie now becomes an action-packed shoot ’em up extravaganza as they end up taking on half the German Army. The whole film is well made but this final segment is particularly well done.

The Royal Navy, seeing the obvious propaganda potential, lent its enthusiastic support and as a result this is a film that looks and feels surprisingly realistic with a lot of emphasis on how a submarine works and how submarine attacks are carried out.

Of course there are all the usual things you expect in a submarine movie - the tense moments under depth charge attack, the efforts to save the damaged submarine, the cunning plan adopted by her skipper to fool the Germans, etc. These are standard elements in a submarine movie but they’re handled skillfully. 

The tone is of course hyper-heroic. Nobody cracks up under pressure because these are British sailors and Britannia rules the waves. The Germans, perhaps surprisingly, are not portrayed as monsters but as fairly ordinary guys doing their job even if they’re no match for our British heroes.

You can’t go wrong casting John Mills as a British officer. Eric Portman (who shares top billing with Mills) is excellent as the hydrophone operator whose personal life is collapsing about his ears.

It looks pretty good on DVD. The image quality might not be be dazzling but it’s more than acceptable. The Region 2 DVD lacks extras but is fairly inexpensive. 

We Dive at Dawn is perhaps just a bit too heroic and just a bit too sentimental but it’s well-crafted and has some genuinely exciting moments. Recommended, and for submarine movie fans it’s a must-see.