Dad's Army (1971)

 "And I must ask you to keep your hands off my privates...".

Obviously, this film isn't ever going to be as funny as the TV programme, which I'll prpbably never blog, fuzzy thoiugh my principle of never blogging sitcoms may be. Films, being directed differently and, in this era, on film instead of video, are not directed for comic effect in the same way as a contemporary sitcom episode.

Despite this, the film is bloody funny.

A lot of this is, of course, down to all the familiar characters, well-established by 1971. The opening scenes establish this so well, as Mainwaring walks to the bank in the morning and greets the townsfolk.

It's amazing to ponder that 1971 was fifty-one years ago, and that old people at that time- such as John Laurie and Arnold Ridley- would have been born in the century of Victoria. The cast is superb, as much as the script, as ever with Dad's Army, is the best kind of farce, entirely based on well-developed character.

Yet this is, too, a fascinating historical document, chronicling the events of 1940 through ordinary people. And the ending- where Mainwaring is a genuine, bona fide hero- is both superb and something we'd never see on telly. Mainwaring may be a pompous ass, but he's no coward and, indeed, as brave as any western hero. Such is the complexity of life.

I love the constant comical friction with Bernard Archard's general. I love that this is a rather well done origin story. I love the whole bloody thing. Cinematic versions of sitcoms didn't often succeed in this era. But this certainly does.

The 39 Steps (1935)

 “There are twenty million women in this island, and I've got to be chained to you..."

I ought to begin with a confession that I've never read the John Buchan novel.

This is the earliest Hitchcock film I've yet to blog, and it's rather good; a cleverly and appropriately directed tale of paranoia where reality is a slippery thing and, brilliant, the spy plot remains somewhat vague and unreal throughout, leaving us to question our sense of reality no less than Richard Hannay himself.

Redundant though it may be to say so, the suspense is exquisite. Robert Donat is excellent, despite his questionable Canadian accent, with Madeleine Carroll excellent too. The two of them are convincing in the tempestuous yet sexually charged situation in which they find themselves, with lots of sexual chemistry. A very young John Laurie is also superb as a religious zealot and, unlike literally all of the other characters in a film largely set in Scotland, has a genuine Scottish accent.

Yet this is a film about how the world we think we know may have less comfortable realities lurking bebeath, which feel almost supernatural in their unreality. The thirty-nine steps; the missing fingertips; the shadowy nature of the whole conspiract and, of course, the grand guignol circumstances of the mysterious woman's murder all combine to give us a film which establishes a creepy mood well beyond its mere plot. There's nothing supernatural here on the surface, but it certainly doesn't feel that way. Superb.

The Reptile (1966)

 "They don't like strangers in these parts!"

This may not exactly be Hammer's finest hour. It may, indeed, be a deeply formulaic Hammer Horror with a pleasingly unironic approsch to tropes. After all, we have both a pub that empties at the mention of the evil residence in question and a conclusion based around a country house being set on fire. But it's quirky, it's fun, and frankly I could never dislike a film in which Private Fraser from Dad's Army is bitten to death by Servalan from Blake's 7.

Yes, the film does tend to get slow towards the end as it runs out of plot but needs to pad out time until the exposition and conclusion, with various characters dramatically exploring the house to eerie Stockhausen-like incidental music. Yes, the reptile make-up is rubbish. But it's cheesy, it's fun, and it's recognisably Hammer.

It's nice, too, that there aren't any stars here, and that instead we get a stream of character actors. I'm not sure that this film is in any way scary, but there's plenty of intrigue, tension and mystery to hold the interest. Jennifer Daniel and Ray Barrett make an intriguing enough leading couple, while both Noel Wilman and Jacqueline Pearce are suitably sinister. John Laurie, of course, steals every scene he's in.

This is nothing special, certainly. It's Hammer by numbers. But there are times when Hammer by numbers is exactly what we want.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)

 "It was English cooking..."

This is, of course, a wonderful film. But the wonder is that, for a British film with a military theme made in 1943, it’s strangely lacking in jingoism. Indeed, I understand Churchill tried to have it banned. I’m rather glad he didn’t succeed.

This film is at once superb and unique, fitting into no real genre. It’s all about war but is not really a war film as we know it. It’s as creatively and wittily directed as one might expect from Powell and Pressburger, with clever visual motifs abounding and a non-linear narrative which is human, cultured and above all realistic about war, and the essential similarities between soldiers who happen to be fighting on different sides but could easily have been friends if fate had not led them to try and shoot each other. 

Yet this is also a film about love, about forgiveness, about not allowing one’s opinions to become too reactionary as one gets older. It’s a film about the essential absurdity of Prussian duelling, about war versus sportsmanship, about the excitement of waiting for the next instalment of The Hound of the Baskervilles in Strand magazine. It’s also a film with quite a large part for an alarmingly young Private Fraser from Dad’s Army.

Most of all, it’s human and warm and funny and wonderful. If you haven’t already, watch it.

The Way Ahead (1944)

"I wonder what we'll look like in 1970, ."

I write this on the seventy-fifth anniversary of VE Day, in 2020. It's a weird anniversary, during the Great Plague and in the midst of lockdown. But oddly enough spirits seem to be raised. I took Little Miss Llamastrangler out on her scooter this afternoon and lots of people have decorated their front gardens and are socialising from a distance. A decent amount of alcohol, I hope, has been consumed. I'm doing my bit. The anniversary of Nazi rule being crushed is well worth celebrating, and can perhaps give us hope.

So what better to blog than a wartime propaganda film from 1944, when things were looking up but victory was uncertain? Prpaganda this may be, but crude it isn't. Eric Ambler and Peter Ustinov (also appearing as a pied-noir cafe owner in occupied Algeria) have given us a very human script full of individuals who ring true today, let alone in 1944. Lloyd (I recognise the actor from The Great Escape) is an unscrupulous landlord turned courageous soldier, while Parsons is a victim of such types. There's mention of the Beveridge Report. For much of the class consciousness and difference which is the main thing which ages social mores in this film, there's a real solidarity that demands a Welfare State along with victory.

There may be better way films than this, but it does a fine job of showing ordinary blokes slowly being turned into soldiers, with lots of action at the very end. David Niven is excellent and charismatic, Stanley Holloway is brilliantly comedic, but a young William Hartnell perhaps gives the best performance as the sergeant. It’s also clear that this was a huge influence on Carry On Sergeant in terms of plot, and not just Hartnell. Then again, a young John Laurie may as well be playing a younger Private Fraser from Dad’s Army, and the Chelsea Pensioners acting as Greek Chorus probably contain the seeds of a certain other character who was wont to mention fuzzy wuzzies. Very much worth seeing. And happy VE Day. Stay safe.

As You Like It (1936)

"He that sweetest rose will find / Must find love's prick, and Rosalind."

Well then. This saucy, decidedly queer play, new to me, is not what I expected from Shakespeare, and the fact that this is a post-code film from 1936, subtitles for YouTube provided for cultural reasons by the US Government (I bet Trump has put a stop to that) only serves to show how intrinsic to the play this queerness is.

I know Shakespeare, I flatter myself to say, better than most. I have a mere undergraduate degree, from Nottingham uni, but before tonight I knew 22 Shakespeare plays to varying extents, now 23. And until tonight I have given no more than perfunctory acknowledgement to queer theory in relation to the bard. I am, of course, aware of the trope of women dressing as men in such plays as Twelfth Night, but have accepted this as early modern LGBT (let us not forget the T) only in the generic way that one must accord to all cross-dressing. And yet... here Rosalind calls her male disguise "Ganymede", Jove's eponymous catamite. It's hard not to see deliberate, glorious, authorial queerness here. And that's before considering the wonderful sexual ambiguity of pretty much all of Rosalind's lines once she takes on male guise. It's doubly wonderful that this happily queer character should be played here, with a noticeable accent but a great deal of charm, by Elisabeth Bergner, a Viennese Jew who had fled Hitler's Berlin.

Ok, queerness aside this stuck me as a relatively ho-hum Shakespeare comedy with moments of lyrical genius, not quite up there with his best, but that's a relative statement. But there's much to marvel at with this somewhat ancient artifact. My reason for watching this was the presence of Henry Ainley, father of the actor Anthony Ainley, well-known to us Doctor Who fans and subject of a splendid biography. Ainley, though, turned out to be the exemplar of something truly fascinating; the theatrical delivery of Shakespeare of a certain era, still "traditional" although pretty much beyond living memory, against which the more "naturalistic" delivery of actors such as Lauence Olivier.

Also notable are the presence of John Laurie (Private Fraser in Dad's Army) as a young heartthrob and a young Peter Bull- the Soviet ambassador in many James Bond films- as a young yokel. This film is fascinating, in the public domain, and on YouTube with proper subtitles.

The Black Knight (1954)

"I know I'm not a knight, but is it impossible to become one?"

I only sat through this film because it had Patrick Troughton, Peter Cushing and Andre Morell in it. I wish I hadn't. I can honestly say that this is the worst film I've blogged thus far. Even Teenagers from Outer Space was better than this.

The historical inaccuracies... where to begin? Obviously you accept a certain amount of artistic licence for the Arthurian genre, with the early sixth century setting typically being depicted as the High Middle Ages, but here we have Patrick Troughton as King Mark of Cornwall, leading an anti-Christian alliance of pagan Vikings and druids(!) with "Saracens" who apparently prefer associating with pagans than people of the book. Hmmm. One of these "Saracens" is Knight of the Round Table Sir Parmenides, who has his own castle in the English countryside. 

But that's not all. The centrepiece of the film sees our very silly alliance of baddies perform a comedy pagan ceremony of sacrifice at a matte painting of Stonehenge. After their defeat Arthur orders the monument to be trashed, a bit like Daesh in Palmyra. This is appropriate, I suppose, as Arthur spends the entire film behaving like a twat. Oh, and he's depicted as a King of "England"  the very country that any real life Arthur would have devoted his life to strangling at birth. Arthur didn't like immigrants much, a lot like most Britons today. This Arthur seems positively encouraging of diversity, notwithstanding his twattishness.

Even disregarding these frighteningly ignorant depictions of history- children actually watched this film!- the plot is annoying and relies on Arthur being stupid and thick-heatedly disbelieving for the plot to work.

Patrick Troughton gives us some top class moustache twirling but Alan Ladd phones it in as heroic blacksmith John. Then again, with a script as hopeless as this, why wouldn't he? A film not worth bothering with.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

“A brass unicorn has been catapulted across a London street and impaled an eminent surgeon. Words fail me, gentlemen.”

This is the last review I’ll be doing in this strange, alcohol-fuelled, work-free interregnum between Christmas and New Year and, indeed, my last review of 2011. In 2012 I’ll go back to the usual schedule, continuing with the Buffyverse and (mostly) a film on Saturdays. I’ll also be reviewing certain programmes pretty much as they air in the UK- Doctor Who, obviously, but also, starting next week, Sherlock. In the meantime, here’s a fun little movie review that I didn’t have to think too hard about.

This is the perfect movie to watch if you have a certain sense of humour and you don’t want anything too heavy; it spends ninety minutes doing nothing but mocking its own tropes. Phibes (played, with the expected brilliance, by Vincent Price) has an absurd lack of any real motive for his ridiculously over-theatrical crimes, and that every little intricate little thing goes to plan is utterly unrealistic, but all of this is gleefully thrown in our faces; the film knows exactly what it’s doing. That Phibes is just a take on a certain archetype is shown near the end as he reveals his true, horrifying, Lon Chaney-esque face, and starts playing the organ in an obvious reference to Universal’s silent version of Phantom of the Opera. Yep, this is more of that metatextual fun that I love so much.

The police are hilarious, too; nice, decent, but with all the plodding incompetence that tradition leads us to expect from the Yard. For all that Trout (a great performance from Peter Jeffrey) is a thoroughly decent, put-upon chap (his interactions with his superior are the funniest thing about the film, mainly because his superior is only saying what the audience thinks!), he cocks every single thing up at every single opportunity.

All of the surgeons are subject to a certain amount of mockery too, and none more so than Terry-Thomas’ lecherous old man.  This is not a film that exactly treats authority figures with respect; in fact the gleeful grotesqueness of the various methods of dispatch is the film’s main selling point, as the audience has fun trying to guess how the theme of the Ten Plagues of Egypt, revealed quite earlier on, will show itself in the murders. The chap being impaled by a brass unicorn is the best, but many of them are quite horrific, especially the frog mask. Given the otherwise light tone of the film, there’s something particularly nasty about this one.

Still, it’s a superbly entertaining, and rather undemanding, piece of entertainment. One thing, though; who was Vulnavia?