The Alphabet Murders (1965)

 "A A, eh?"

This is, I believe, by the creative team behind the Miss Marple films starring Margaret Rutherford who, indeed, gets an odd little cameo here. I'm told they're very good films, if apparently not particularly faithful to the novels. I intend to give them a chance. That is, despite the fact that this film is utterly unwatchable.

I'm not at all surprised that Agatha Christie herself loathed this film. It is rather difficult not to. I can't remember the novel (The ABC Murders)- it's been at least thirty years or more since the one and only time I read it. I read many, many of Mrs Christie's works in early puberty but rather went off her by my mid-teens. Still, I've no doubt that this is a far from faithful adaptation, not least because it scarcely pretends to be a whodunit. It is, rather, an embarrassingly unfunny attempt at "comedy".

It's trying to be a farce. A good farce is, of course, a very clever thing indeed. This is not. The cast, from the awful Tony Randall, surely the worst ever Hercule Poirot, with his ever-shifting accent, in one of the most cringeworthy leading roles ever, to a shockingly awful Robert Morley as an unrecognisable Captain Hastings, is either bloody awful or quite sensibly phoning it in for the money as there's no point doing otherwise for a script like this.

We get unfunny "comedy" setvpieces, one after another, and soooo much smoking.We get Anita Ekberg playing, well, the kind of tall blonde unattainable woman she invariably plays. We get a bit of psychological mumbo-jumbo. And we have a very unfunny conclusion in a train. And at no point is any of it remotely entertaining.

Be warned: ninety minutes of your one and only life are far too precious to waste on this drivel.

A Study in Terror (1965)

 "Mr Holmes is usually right..."

This is quite the obvious concept- Sherlock Holmes does Jack the Ripper- and one which, I suppose, succeeds or fails on the realisation.

There is, of course, something uneasy about the use of Jack the Ripper- of the brutal and sexualised murder of women- as entertainment, particularly in a film where men (and one woman, presented as the one "whore" not driven to the work by poverty). The male gaze, the Bechdel test, the sheer unthinking misogyny of it all- it can't go unacknowledged, much as we accept that such reactions were not common currency in 1965.

That said, though, this is a frustrating film. The script is, I think, first class- a superbly constructed whodunit, albeit cheating just a little with the final reveal of the killer not being earned, despite the neat cleverness of the other complex yet clear threads; good characterisation; a great deal of wit; lots of Sherlockian allusions in the script with frequent uses of Conan Doyle's dialogue. It's also a nice touch that the character of Dr Murray is a likely nod either to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself- a charitable man- or his mentor Dr Bell, or both.

And yet this excellent script is quite poorly realised. John Neville and Donald Houston are a pedestrian, superficial Holmes and Watson, failing to play their parts as actual characters rather than cyphers, wasting the nuanced lines they are given. The direction may be interesting in places- we get a rather odd shot of the final murder from the Ripper's POV, a disturbing riff on the male gaze- but the costuming (all the prostitutes wear symbolic red!) and sets are a little disappointing.

It's a shame that we end up with a film that's merely quite good; the script is better than that.

Genghis Khan (1965)

"It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness."

Oh dear. This film is not very good, Where to start? Well, how about with the arse-clenchingly awful fact that all but a very few characters are played by white actors in yellowface, with James Mason's jaw-droppingly stereotyped performance as Kam Ling being quite something to behold. No amount of accounting for the different social mores of 1965 can let us escape from the fact that this is all incredibly racist.

Oh, the location filming looks impressive and epic, and you can tell that the film is trying to be Lawrence of Arabia. But this is somewhat undermined by the fact that this is a film about Genghis Khan that focuses mainly around inter-Mongol squabbling, the extensive interlude in China doesn't particularly involve him conquering the place, and there's a general lack of conquering going on. In fact, late on in the film, a quick burst of narration jumps smoothly over the conquests of China, Russia and India and jumps unconvincingly into the conquest of Khwarezm. Where's all the stuff we want to see in a film about Genghis Khan?

I accept that a film like this has to show a certain amount of historical inaccuracy, but making the film mostly about the rival between Temujin and his Mongol rival Jamuga is such a waste. And so, ultimately, is the film.

Cromwell (1970)

"An England without a king is unthinkable!"

I watched this film principally because I wanted to see two great actors- Richard Harris and Alec Guinness- play two iconic roles from history; Oliver Cromwell and Charles I. And they are, indeed, magnificent. Their performances- Harris as a principled sociopath slowly descending into a dictatorial sociopath and Guinness as a politely arrogant congenital liar- are superlative and alone enough to make the film worth watching. The film succeeds brilliantly if seen as a character piece based on its broadly valid idea of Cromwell- a man who can honestly give everything for the supremacy of Parliament and then simply dismiss it when it does not live up to his expectations. For this reason the film succeeds as drama in spite of being so incredibly rush and in spite of its ending so suddenly.

And yet... no film set in the past can be historically accurate in full. I accept this. Events must be compressed into a shorter period of time and simplified to fit the medium of cinema. And yet... here we have Cromwell as one of those MPs whom Charles tries to arrest in January 1642. We have Cromwell present at Edgehill. We have the Earls of Essex and Manchester making speeches in the Commons. We even have arch-republican Henry Ireton (a shockingly young Michael Jayson) trying to persuade Cromwell to take the crown, in spite of having died during the (glossed over) Irish campaign in 1651. All this is a little much to swallow; these are not small things.

I'm also uncertain about the dialogue; a film set in the mid-seventeenth century should either use modern dialogue or contrive to use contemporary speech but contrive to favour those sentence constructions and that vocabulary that would be understood today, preferably the second. Instead we get a bizarre mish-mash of speech which mixes archaisms such as "withal" with modern coinings such as "international". The effect is clumsy and distracting.

Still, it all looks magnificent and, in the final analysis, it's all about the acting. And, judged by this criterion, the film is superb.