Igenlode Wordsmith

The WIcker Man (1973)

Sat, 05 Jul 2025 23:35:45 GMT

I do not recommend playing a concert on 3 hours' sleep (and a twelve-mile cycle ride following a similar one returning at 11pm the night before).
I got through it, but it was a bit unfair on the rest of my section -- of which I'm supposed to be the leader! The effects are of course similar to drunk driving; habit gets you through the actual notes and dynamics, but reaction speed and concentration are affected. I kept losing my place in the complex/repeated passages, which is pretty much my job to keep...

I had been to see 'The Final [restored] Cut" of "The Wicker Man", although it is still apparently missing 7 minutes or about 50% of the shortened material. https://www.rogerebert.com/features/the-wicker-man-the-cut-may-be-final-but-the-film-is-still-incomplete I had just been reading Christopher Lee ("Tall, Dark and Gruesome"), who talks about all the little character parts having been cut, the butcher, the chemist etc., while the archive video introduction warned us that the crucial scene establishing that the protagonist 'had never known a woman' was missing and needed to be inferred in order to understand the plot. I could well imagine that a significant proportion of the film's intended charm might have lain in the background detail (as with the abridged translation of "The Phantom of the Opera"), so this seemed like a good opportunity to see it.( Read more... )

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The Phantom Light (1935)

Sun, 10 Dec 2023 00:34:10 GMT

"The Phantom Light" was showing at the BFI as part of their Powell & Pressburger season -- I had a vague misgiving just before I bought my ticket that I had seen/been shown an extract from this before, as part of a set of railway-related clips, but in fact the scene I was thinking of never appeared. (On second thoughts I think it may have been an early British Hitchcock film.) Completely unexpected, however, was that the film turns out to open with extended footage of the Festiniog Railway in the 1930s... presumably representing the weirdest, quaintest little piece of Welshness the film-makers could think of! I did think that the scale of the track in the opening shot suggested narrow gauge, and then an unmistakable double Fairlie pops up in shot, with the protagonist sitting in one of the tiny four-wheeled 'bug boxes'!

Another complete surprise is that the lead actress is none other than Binnie Hale( Read more... )

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Night Train to Munich

Fri, 09 Sep 2022 00:27:30 GMT

The French are ardently patriotic; the Germans swell with tender pride; the Americans get earnest and emotional; but surely only the English can ever have acquired the idiosyncratic habit of making propaganda by raising a laugh at our own expense? It's a trait that, I suspect, may well leave other nations mystified; but it is this sting of self-deprecating irony that leavens the best of British war films and is characteristic of its era. Coincidentally, it also helps to make them notable long after the event, where more conventional propaganda tends to become ponderous and slightly embarrassing. Englishmen of a certain class have always made a virtue of never taking anything quite seriously — and so, in lieu of John-Wayne-style heroics, we have Leslie Howard or Rex Harrison serving King and Country under the mask of the charming, seemingly-incompetent amateur.

In Night Train to Munich, Charters and Caldicott illustrate perhaps the epitome of English humour at its own expense — as caricatures they could almost have stepped out of propaganda for the other side. We are intended to laugh at them, and we do. But they represent also all the dogged and prized eccentricity of the nation, a red rag in the face of Nazi efficiency and uniformity. They are insular and sport-obsessed, far more interested in their own affairs than in interfering with the rest of the world: but by jingo, if they do—!

As a comedy-thriller "Night Train to Munich" went down very well at the National Film Theatre, and I was very glad to have caught the final screening of the season after missing them all when it played here last year. I did feel that the comedy elements were ultimately more successful than the pure action sequences, though. Given the constraints of wartime filming it suffers understandably from an absence of location shooting and some rather obvious model-work, and the big battle at the finale is riddled with unintentionally comic clichés, such as the revolver that fires dozens of shots without reloading only to come up suddenly empty for dramatic convenience, the enemies who couldn't hit the proverbial barn-door with a rifle while the hero is unfailingly accurate with a hand-gun, and a crippling wound that is conveniently forgotten when it comes to mid-air acrobatics. The beginning of the film also features one of the most bizarre episodes of would-be brutality that I've ever encountered — presumably censored for audience sensibilities — where a concentration camp inmate is apparently being savagely beaten by a guard, but the sound effects attached suggest something more along the lines of a petulant tapping with a fly-whisk!

Watching Rex Harrison infiltrate Nazi Germany armed with nothing more than supreme impudence and a monocle, on the other hand, is pure unalloyed delight, as are his undercover scenes in England as he endeavours to hawk popular songs by means of persistent performance. His double-act with Margaret Lockwood as they portray the warring couple who inevitably end up united is both amusing and genuinely credible: the film admirably refrains from underlining the moment when she — and the audience — realise that she really does care for him. And, as always with actors originally recognised from performances in middle age, he comes across as amazingly young and debonair, and yet still unmistakably Rex Harrison — a slightly disorienting experience!

The real disorientation, however, comes from the casting of Paul Henreid in the rival role of Karl Marsen, the Nazi intelligence agent, a coup that becomes quite unintendedly effective from his subsequent Hollywood career featuring parts as romantic leads. Given that I'd last seen him as sensitive confidant of Bette Davis in "Now, Voyager", I instinctively assumed that his clean-cut Czech resister was to be the hero of the piece, and the role reversal took me as completely by surprise as could have been hoped for. But the character remains an oddly sympathetic one — indeed, the Germans in general are depicted as harassed human beings rather than monsters — and it is hard not to empathize with him as he watches his 'womanising' rival supposedly sweep the girl they both love off her feet. In the final scenes, as he lies wounded in the path of the returning cable car, I found myself frankly terrified on his behalf that the action clichés would culminate in Karl's death crushed beneath the cabin that has carried his rival to safety, and surprised and relieved when he was allowed — albeit bereft — to survive the battle.

"Night Train to Munich" is probably most effective when it is at its most flippant, whether at the English or German expense, and at its most formulaic where it tries to be 'serious'. But it has moments of genuine tension and feeling and is a fast-moving, entertaining picture. It's a long time since I saw "The Lady Vanishes" — of which this is often cited as a pale shadow — and the Hitchcock production doesn't seem to have left much impression on me over the intervening years; but I thoroughly enjoyed "Night Train to Munich", for all its flaws, and remain impressed by its sheer sangfroid as a wartime morale-raiser.

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Back from the holidays... to a needle-drop score

Thu, 08 Sep 2022 23:55:09 GMT

Having had very little Internet access at all to speak of during the holidays (this room was in use again as a guest chamber), there are a great many things I could have written of, but didn't. So the world, alas, will have to do forever without the tale of how I went to a funeral, found a headless half-inch nail embedded in my back tyre, and had to push my bicycle two miles back again and then perform an extraction with my pen-knife... or the story of how I attended a screening of the silent "Peter Pan" to the accompaniment of a "fairy harp" (very successful)... or even any account of how I spent the most abstemious Christmas ever, after contracting a gastric infection on December 24th and being quite unable to eat any Christmas dinner, or of how I cut my thumb open with a sharp knife (a Christmas present — not mine) and spent two hours waiting in the hospital to have it fixed up, and then a week or so completely unable to use the digit, and amazed by the number of everyday activities which appear to require the use of two thumbs... But like the tale of the Giant Rat of Sumatra, some stories are fated never to be heard...

One thing I did discover when I got 'back' was that I'd received a friend request from a lady named Nia; sadly it had already expired. So if the lovely Nia is reading this, she might like to know that her attentions did not go entirely unnoticed — just rather delayed. (And if 'she' is a gentleman, then my apologies doubly so!)

I had an interesting experience at the National Film Theatre at the weekend. I attended the new 'Mediatheque' and selected a film for screening that had no soundtrack, being a silent transfer without score. In the old days, apparently, it was quite common to purchase an 8mm print for home viewing and supply your own music via a selection of records put on as the projector rolled — literally, a 'needle-drop' score, often composed of popular period music &mdash and I've heard this approach recommended even for new DVD releases where the score provided is one so avant-garde or simply uninspired as to detract, in the owner's opinion, from the quality of the film.

But having been spoilt by a regular supply of silents with freely-improvised musical accompaniment from the experts at the NFT, where the music is tailored more or less every second specifically to the action on-screen, I've always steered clear of silent films without a soundtrack; the music is such a very important part of the experience.

However, I was particularly curious to see this one, The Lure of Crooning Water, since it's supposedly a long-lost classic, 'the British Sunrise', and I was sufficiently excited when it showed up in the list of new titles available from the Mediatheque to bear in mind possibilities for going to see it. Ready-armed with an accompaniment, of course, since watching a feature-length drama in total silence would probably kill it stone dead.

In the event I ended up watching "The Lure of Crooning Water" to the accompaniment of the only vaguely-relevant disc I could lay my hands on in a hurry, having left rather late: an unsatisfactory Christmas present consisting of the Korngold scores for "The Sea Hawk" and "Deception" in their original state rather than as arranged to stand as music in their own right. To my amazement, it proved an uncannily successful choice.

The music which was so unsatisfying as background listening proved totally apt to the ever-shifting moods of an actual film; its lack of shape or stability was exactly (of course) what was required. But what was really uncanny was the way that film and music seemed to fit themselves together, with the interpretation coming from some kind of synthesis between the two.

If I'd known the film beforehand it might have come across, I suppose, as sacrilege. But the experience was inextricably shaped by the quite unrelated moods of the accompanying soundtrack — a composite of tracks from two different films (the second half of "The Sea Hawk" plus trailer music plus "Deception" plus cello concerto, to be precise...), neither of which had anything in common with the plot of "Crooning Water" to speak of. But it's amazing how duel music can re-interpret itself to the racing shapes of ominous clouds threatening a harvest, or to a frenetic party, or to an argument... Likewise, seemingly peaceful pastoral scenes were lent sinister undertones by the music of suspicion from "Deception" which, as it turned out, was entirely appropriate; the only cases where the accompaniment really couldn't be made to work turned out to be when the tempo of events simply didn't match the pace of the score (at which point I skipped a track or two). Otherwise, it was quite astonishing how tiny references in the score would appear to reflect events on screen for which they could not possibly have been cued in: cymbals for a flash of lightning, or a sudden swell of emotion as a character turned away or gazed up.

I have no idea whether any score could be made to fit any film, or indeed whether any piece of emotional orchestral music could be made to fit any turbulent feature, or whether Korngold's idiom happens to be the one that has founded our generic ideas of what 'movie music' ought to sound like; but it really was very odd the way that the mind would persist in reading in connections that could not possibly have been there.

As for the film itself, it's easy to see where the comparisons to "Sunrise" come in, since it deals with the corruption of a country man by a city girl, and a trip from the quiet country to the frenetic town; but it really isn't the same. (And as it's much earlier, any influence would have had to have gone the other way!)

In some ways it's actually better than "Sunrise", in that the 'city girl' is more than just an archetype; she has feelings and motives too, and she is not just a plot lever of unmitigated evil. It has a similar mix of lyricism, humour, and plain drama, and it's very well acted; for a 1920 feature it is remarkably sophisticated and subtle (far more so than the later "The Lodger", I have to add). On the other hand, it doesn't contain anything like the sheer joy in existence and imagery of "Sunrise"; it is much more interested in people and plot, and it centres around the girl rather than around the married couple. The wife, Rachel, is left as something of a cipher — she represents maternal love and married loyalty, but she doesn't get much of a character of her own.And I do wonder if the Mediatheque transfer (or source print) may be lacking a few feet at the end of the film; it appeared to end very abruptly.

The picture certainly merits Matthew Sweet's championing of it as a masterpiece of early British cinema, and it stood up very well under its somewhat unorthodox screening. I'd like to see it again with a 'proper' accompaniment — which is an accolade in itself — and see how it comes out. But I can't honestly say that it had as overwhelming an effect on me as the best of the films that I've seen; — as "Shooting Stars", for example.

Good? yes. Great? That remains to be seen under happier circumstances.

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"Kampf ums Matterhorn" (1928)

Thu, 09 May 2019 01:06:13 GMT

I took a guest to see the silent film Kampf ums Matterhorn ("The Struggle for the Matterhorn") on Bank Holiday Monday, since there was nothing showing at the local cinema save for children's films presumably scheduled to keep the little darlings occupied while they were out of school...

I'm not sure she'd seen a silent film before, and if she had it would have been the Laurel & Hardy type. Her reaction: "Gosh, they could really act with their faces, couldn't they?"
My (unspoken) reaction: 'Clearly someone who hasn't seen Sunset Boulevard :-p'

( We had faces! )

The film was showing as part of the National Film Theatre's 'Weimar Season', but it's really nothing at all like the 'Cabaret'/'Lulu'/'Dr Caligari' stereotype of weird, transgressive art from the decadent Weimar Republic. It's a straightforward morally unambiguous story, a member of a genre that has no English equivalent: a Bergfilm (mountaineering melodrama).( Read more... )

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"The Goose Steps Out" (1942)

Wed, 06 Jan 2016 00:36:13 GMT

Loved this -- probably one of the funniest Will Hay films I've seen. I far prefer the pictures he made with Charles Hawtrey to the 'classic' teaming with Moore/Marriott, and an excellent supporting cast here includes Peter Ustinov and Frank Pettingell (of "Gaslight" fame).

I always find Hay funnier when he is being a pompous but resourceful twit rather than simply an arrogant incompetent, and here his schoolmaster character is put up against the Nazis and manages (with assistance) to rise to the occasion... aided by the fact that his opponents half the time are even bigger buffoons than he is. A sharp script relies heavily on verbal humour, with two outstanding scenes that riff on the absurdities of the English language. The invasion plan sequence in which Hay improvises strategy wildly in a cascade of puns while attempting to pick a German general's pocket deserves to be a classic of the genre (take them from the flanks in Lancs to keep the Paras all tied up in Notts... but don't get caught with your Panzers down in the Severn Tunnel).( Read more... )

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