Hammer House of Horror: The Two Faces of Evil

 "You're perfectly safe, my dear..."

This episode, while perhaps a little slow, is splendidly and uncannily directed and uses a simple central idea- a family holiday goes wrong when a hitchhiker attacks Martin, but turns out to be his doppelganger- to maximum effect, wringing  huge amounts of tension out of whether the dead man or the survivor is Janet's husband.

It helps that so many of the cast, including the ward sister, are pleasingly sinister, as is the way everything is shot. The slow pace allows the episode to wallow in the uncanny mood and Janet's unease. The hospital itself is creepy, and from the moment Janet wakes everything feels off-kilter.

Anna Calder-Marshall is superb in the central role, but Gary Raymond is equally superb in a necessarily ambiguous part where you are never quite sure whether he's evil or not. Then there's Pauline Delaney, who is far too good here for me never to have heard of.

A quietly excellent episode.

Look Back in Anger (1959)

 "I learned at an early age what it was to be angry..."

I've never seen a John Osborne play before, and this film puts me in an awkward position. Firstly, I'm inevitably going to be talking about the play more than the excellently shot prduction and, secondly, this isn't the play itself; it's a screenplay adapted by Nigel Kneale who, while well-known for science fiction of the more intellectual and despairing kind, is a strangely appropriate person to adapt this very '50s howl of existentialist, post-imperial despair.

Because that's what it is. It's existentialist, with Jimmy wrestling with the very '50s angst of finding purpose in a purposeless world, with a certain kind of period ennui. It's about class, in a strangely apolitical way. It's realist, if you're comparing it (as people mainly did) to the likes of Terence Rattigan, although the dialogue is a bit too polished for it to be truly that. It feels vaguely left-wing without necessarily having any coherent political point. It's genuinely good, if simultaneously deep and empty. Yet, ultimately, it's far more dated in 2021 than Rattigan wil ever be. It's poetic, its characters are passionately real, bt ultimately it's not actually about anything.

We're supposed to like Jimmy, the "angry young man", the university graduate who works on a stall, slumming it, as what Douglas Couland would call a "slacker" a few decades later. Yet, good as Richard Burton is, Jimmy is a pretentious, misogynistic arsehole who physically abuses his wife with an iron and seems unmoved at the news he's to become a dad. Yet I have a feeling he's supposed to stand as a sympathetic symbol of university educated, working class young men who feel alienated at.... well, nothing in particular. It would be different if he'd been shown to be aspiring to greater things but struggling at the lack of social mobility, but there's no suggestion of any such thing. There's mention of the American age, of the end of empire, of death. Admittedly it's a rather dull time where people were waiting for the '60s to happen. But, to me, Jimmy is just an unpleasant wanker.

Ths is a good film based on what looks to be a good and thought-provoking play. But, social mores aside, this comes across as old-fashioned in 2021 in ways that Terence Rattigan doesn't.