The adventures of a diplomat in the South Seas in 1912.
A pleasant bit of colonial travelogue, most notable for being Britain's first fiction film in Cinemascope.
Script adapt.: Richard Mason (o.a. Sir Arthur Grimble)
Director: Wolf Rilla
Players: Denholm Elliott, Susan Stephen, Michael Horden, Gordon Jackson, Inia Te Wiata, Moira Macdonald, Henrietta Godinet, Ollie Crichton, Hans Kruse, Felix Felton, Petr Bathurst, Clifford Buckton, Rosie Leavasa
James Mason is the legendary Flying Dutchman, cursed to roam the seas forever unless he meets a woman willing to sacrifice herself for him. Ava Gardner is the unhappy heartbreaker who's about to discover the meaning of true love. A fair contender for the silliest love story ever made, this film is kept afloat by the gorgeous photography.
Script: Albert Lewin
Director: Albert Lewin
Players: Nigel Patrick, Sheila Sim, Mario Cabre, Harold Warrender, Marius Goring, Pamela Kellino, John Laurie
When the crew of a merchant ship is stuck at sea with Diane Cilento is it any wonder they start getting itchy?
Script adapt.: William Fairchild. (o.a. Richard Armstrong)
Director: Roy Baker
Players: Anthony Steele, Peter Finch, Cyril Cusack, Geoffrey Keen, Hugh Griffith, Duncan Lamont, Bryan Forbes, Gordon Jackson, Michael Craig, Michael Bryant, Robert Brown, Martin Benson, Patrick McGoohan, Sam Kydd, Glyn Houston, Patrick Westwood, George Woodbridge, John Warren, Ian Whittaker, Scott Harold, Arthur Lovegrove, Leonard White, Peter Ventham, Gerald Andersen, Philip Ray
Ann Todd is stuck married to Claude Rains but keeps having the hots for Trevor Howard.
There's no sign of the off-screen passion of Todd and director David Lean in this tedious drivel.
Script adapt.: Eric Ambler, David Lean, Stanley Haynes. (o.a. H. G. Wells)
Director: David Lean
Players: Betty Ann Davies, Isabel Dean, Arthur Howard, Wilfrid Hyde White, Guido Lorraine, Marcel Poncin, Natasha Sokolova, Helen Burls
The British community in Jamaica get into a tangle of relationships which lead to tragedy.
Decent cast find it difficult to get through this turgid melodrama.
Script adapt.: Joan Henry. (o.a. Richard Mason)
Director: Rudolph Cartier
Players: Bill Travers, Virginia McKenna, Yvonne Mitchell, Alexander Knox, Guy Middleton, Carl Mohner, Ellen Barrie, Martin Stephens, Gordon Heath, Pearl Prescod, Harry Quashie, Roscoe Holder, Danny Daniels, Jan Holden, Waveney Lee
The ultimate in post-war austerity wish-fulfilment. The discovery of an ancient document in a bomb crater proves that part of London is in fact part of Burgundy. No more rationing! But the British government isn't going to let the Burgundians go without a fight. This is the most politically astute of the Ealing Comedies and is full of the cream of British character actors all making the most of their roles. Absolutely irresistible.
Script: T.E.B. Clarke, Henry Cornelius
Director: Henry Cornelius
Players: Stanley Holloway, Barbara Murrey, Margaret Rutherford, Paul Dupuis, Betty Warren, Jane Hylton, Basil Radford, Naunton Wayne, Raymond Huntley, Hermione Gingold, John Slater, Frederick Piper, Sydney Tafler, Charles Hawtrey, Michael Horden
French girl gets tricked into going on the game.
The more hypocritical end of the X-rated market, supposedly an examination of a serious social problem but really an excuse to gawp at a bit of sex and violence.
Script: Patrick Alexander
Director: Alvin Rakoff
Players: Odile Versois, Diana Dors, Herbert Lom, Eddie Constantine, Brenda de Banzie, Robert Brown, Elwyn Brook-Jones, Cyril Shaps, Denis Shaw, Joan Sims, Lana Morris, Robert Fabian, Jackie Collins
A peaceful German village. As the Nazis come to power in Germany, a pastor preaches resistance.
The play on which this was based was a success in 1938 and many production companies saw it as a natural for the screen. The censors had other ideas - they were always hyper-sensitive to the feelings of foreign governments and certainly weren't about to stir things up with the Chamberlain government in such a delicate situation - and banned it and anything else set under Nazi tyranny as a subject. Once war broke out, the race was on to be the first to get a why-we-daren't-lose picture out. Pastor Hall won.
The Boulting Brothers got the chance to bring the play to the screen. As committed anti-Fascists (John was an ambulance driver in the Spanish Civil War) they seemed like a natural choice. However, the cheapness of the production and the (understandable) lack of location footage serve to make the film seem artificial. The Boultings had also yet to learn the lesson that propaganda needs a bit of fun injected into it to be palatable. Pastor Hall is very dry.
As the Pastor, Wilfrid Lawson gives a curiously laid-back performance. There's precious little righteous anger in his demeanour, it's more like he's seen a five-year-old smash a vestry window than witnessed civilisation fall to the barbarians. He doesn't even convey that strange stiff-upper-lipped thing that English actors usually do so well. It's more like he's aiming for sainthood and doesn't want anything to make the Pastor human.
Like many anti-Nazi films of the period, Pastor Hall looks very tame now. It was made before the Final Solution really got underway and so Germany looks like any other country under a dictatorship. On first release it was probably very hard hitting, but arbitrary floggings, starvation and loads of mud really don't say Nazi any more. So many classic films have been made since which handle the events better that Pastor Hall looks rather sad. Besides, Bernard Miles as a stormtrooper ("Well, it's a job") really can't be taken seriously.
The final scene where the Pastor preaches to his congregation and then walks out to be shot by the waiting Nazis is affecting, but it would be a spectacularly poor production if that set-up didn't work.
Script adapt. : Leslie Arliss, Anna Reiner, Haworth Bromley. (o.a. Ernst Toller)
Director: Roy Boulting
Players: Nova Pilbeam, Seymour Hicks, Marius Goring, Percy Walsh, Peter Cotes, Brian Worth, Hay Petrie, Eliot Makeham, Lina Barrie, Manning Whiley, Edmund Willard, J. Fisher White, Barbara Gott, Raymond Rollett
Liverpool, and struggling tug boat captain Edmund Gwenn thinks he's won the pools. Unfortunately, his workmate didn't post the coupon.
Enjoyable working-class comedy, though try not to worry about the Mancunian accents of the cast.
Script: Thomas Thompson, W.L. Meade, Thomas Browne
Director: Carol Reed
Players: Jimmy O'Dea, Betty Driver, Maire O'Neill, Ethel Coleridge, Syd Crossley, James Harcourt, Jack Livesey
Pools winner is relieved of his winnings by a couple of conmen.
Dull comedy only notable for featuring The Goon Show cast of Secombe, Sellers and Milligan.
Script: John Ormonde
Director: Tony Young
Players: Alfred Marx, Bill Kerr, Paddie O'Neil, Freddie Frinton, Vicki Page, Sam Kydd, Joe Linnane, Felix Mendelssohn and His Hawaiian Serenaders
Mancunian was Britain's answer to Republic - a Poverty Row studio whose films rarely rose to the level of B-movies. This is one of their better efforts, starring Luanne Shaw and Tommy Fields as a couple who try to win the pools. There's plenty of slapstick and if the routines feel old at least they're done by professionals.
Script: Arthur Mertz
Director: George Black
Players: Billy Nelson, Duggie Wakefield, Charles Sewell, Harry Terry, Chuck O'Neil, Jack Butler, Mascotte, The Marie Louise Sisters, Macari and His Dutch Serenaders
Yolanda Donlan is the American who inherits a tiny kingdom and brings the joys of capitalism to it. Dirk Bogarde plays a cheese salesman - seems about right!
Script: Val Guest
Director: Val Guest
Players: A.E. Matthews, Mary Clare, Edwin Styles, Reginald Beckwith, Kynaston Reeves, Peter Butterworth, Desmond Walter-Ellis, Laurence Naismith, Eric Pohlmann, Richard Wattis
Absent-minded professor, Miles Malleson, has perfected a robot woman but he needs to have her tested out. An advert in the paper for an adventurous young man produces idle man-about-town Nigel Patrick and his butler Stanley Holloway who agree to take "Olga" out for the evening at a swanky hotel. Meanwhile the professor's niece, Patricia Roc, is feeling a bit stir crazy, since the professor won't let her out alone to prevent her meeting men. She decides to pretend to be Olga and see a bit of life.
Thus, the scene is set for an enjoyable farce as hotel staff, inquisitive aunts and housekeeper Irene Handl get involved in the mayhem. On this level the film is great fun, everything building up nicely to the inevitable moment when Olga goes berserk. On another level, it's a fascinating examination of sexual politics.
The theme of men creating and owning women is carried right through the film thanks to the witty script. Inventor Malleson is contrasted with couturier Michael Ward and his creations, and dialogue describing objects is continually misapplied to flesh and blood women. "Olga" (well played by Pamela Devis) follows every command unthinkingly, though she is programmed to go mad if someone uses the word Love.
Patricia Roc, in a rare comedy role, is delightful. The end, when she agrees to marry Nigel Patrick is very like The Tempest and you want to shout out "You've only seen one man - you can do better than that". Still, it passes for a happy ending and that's what counts.
Script adapt.: Bernard Knowles, George Black, J.B. Boothroyd. (o.a. Wallace Geoffrey, Basil Mitchell)
Director: Bernard Knowles
Players: Anita Sharp-Bolster, Fred Berger, David Hurst, Constance Smith, Patti Morgan, Noel Howlett
Wreckers are at work in this quota-quickie starring Gordon Harker and Ian Hunter.
Script adapt.: Austin Melford, Ralph Smart. (o.a. Evadne Price, Joan Roy Byford)
Director: Michael Powell
Players: Binnie Hale, Milton Rosmer, Donald Calthrop, Reginald Tate, Mickey Brantford, Herbert Lomas, Fewlass Llewellyn, Alice O'Day, Barry O'Neill, Edgar K. Bruce, Louie Emery
Standard, but enjoyable, whodunit which showed that its director was on the way up.
Script: Walter C. Mycroft
Director: Mario Zampi
Players: Ronald Adam, John Stuart, Jock McKay, Olga Lindo, Howard Marion Crawford, Louise Lord, John Varley, Cyril Conway, Leslie Armstrong
