January 2025 – Page 3 – The Magnificent 60s

Uptight (1968) ****

While a misplaced attempt to relocate John Ford’s Oscar-winning The Informer (1935) to Cleveland, Ohio, after the funeral of Martin Luther King, director Jules Dassin more than makes up for it with his exploration of black militancy and racial conflict. The basic story of unemployed alcoholic Tank (Julian Mayfield) trying to regain the favor of local activist committee led by B.G. (Raymond St Jacques) is less interesting than the revolutionary backdrop.

Dassin was suited to uncovering the seamy side of life having helmed film noirs Brute Force (1947) and The Naked City (1948) and while mostly concentrating on dramas he remained best-known for heist pictures Rififi (1955) and Topkapi (1964) so it was almost a given that this movie would feature a robbery. Tank was supposed to be part of a team, led by Johnny Wells (Max Julien), hijacking guns, but he’s too drunk to help, and during the robbery after a guard is killed the finger points at Johnny.

Assailed for his lack of maintenance by Laurie (Ruby Dee), mother of his kids, who subsists on welfare and prostitution, Tank considers informing on Johnny and picking up the $1,000 reward. So the story becomes a question of whether he will succumb to temptation.

But that’s really just a MacGuffin for an insight into the problems facing the poverty-stricken black population and the armed response many feel is the only way to resolve such issues. Several outstanding sequences depict the raw emotions of people trapped in this lifestyle. The opening scene, showing the funeral of Martin Luther King, became a clarion call for violence. Laurie is humiliated by the welfare officer. Police attempting to arrest Johnny are met with a fusillade of bottles.

The case for armed insurrection is made abundantly clear. The black population is continually oppressed, not just by police violence, but being told they lack the skills for a rewarding job. “When you’re born black, you’re born dead.” B.G. rejects the offer of assistance of white civil rights activists.

Not all the locals are underdogs. Clarence (Roscoe Lee Brown), with an apartment lined with bookshelves and wearing fine clothes, does very well out of his arrangements with the police and the black welfare officer clearly gets a kick out of his power to possibly disbar Laurie from receiving welfare.

While it might have proved more incendiary at the time, it’s impossible to miss the injustice portrayed. It was almost a wake-up call for the ruling authorities that there existed a growing underground force determined to achieve equality through violence if necessary. The idea of an organized group, rather than a shambolic mob, is the other clear message.

Any actor would balk at the prospect of matching the Oscar-winning performance of Victor McLaglen in the Ford original and surely no director would entrust the task to an inexperienced actor like Julian Mayfield whose only previous screen credit was a decade before in Virgin Island (1958). Mayfield finds it impossible to conjure up the pathos required and mostly appears as a bumbling fool.

This is despite the movie going out of its way to make Tank appear more sympathetic. He could easily claim he was blackmailed into informing by wealthy stool pigeon Clarence who holds compromising photographs. But, equally, the brotherhood, should it become aware of Clarence’s activities, would surely come down on him hard. Johnny absolves Tank of responsibility for not participating in the robbery, recognizes that while the man’s bulk was useful in the past, he lacks the mind-set for robbery. And he must stay away from Laurie otherwise she will lose her welfare.

But the rest of the cast is outstanding. Raymond St Jacques (If He Hollers, Let Him Go, 1968) stands supreme as an imposing Malcolm X figure. Roscoe Lee Brown (Topaz, 1969) is persuasive as confident gay informer. Activist Ruby Dee (The Incident, 1967) is good, too. And there is strong support from Frank Silvera (Guns of The Magnificent Seven, 1969), Max Julien, best known later for The Mack (1973), and in her movie debut Janet MacLachlan giving a hint of the acting skills that would win her an Oscar nomination for Maurie (1973)

Perhaps the most important element of the picture was the screenplay, a collaboration between Julian Mayfield, Ruby Dee and Jules Dassin, the involvement of the first two ensuring that the main targets were well and truly hit. With Dassin at the helm, the movie never loses its way, tension kept high by the hunt for Johnny, the personal dilemma of Tank and the various confrontations with B.G.

This is a movie that still stands up, not just because of its fearless delineating of the times, but from the suspicion that not enough has changed in the abject poverty to which so many are condemned.

Delivers a social sting.

Behind the Scenes: Mirisch Bros at the Box Office 1960-1964

The Mirisch Brothers, the first of what would be called the “mini-majors,” ushered in a Hollywood production revolution in the 1950s and 1960s by not just paying over-the-odds for top directors and actors – $750,000 apiece for John Wayne and William Holden for The Horse Soldiers (1959) plus $250,000 for John Ford, for example – but giving them far greater freedom in the choice of scripts, control of pictures and a bigger share of the profits. This approach went down very well with the talent, less so with rival studios who complained their approach was driving up costs at a time when Hollywood was on the brink of collapse with major studios teetering on the edge of bankruptcy as audiences plummeted.

Walter Mirisch was the name best known to moviegoers since he worked as producer on the company’s output. Harold Mirisch was best known to the studios since he was the guy who set up the deals and found the funding. Marvin Miriasch was the backroom boy who ensured the whole process kept ticking over.

Mirisch had secured a deal with United Artists to supply a series of pictures, the first contract calling for 20 movies. Generally, the company was lauded by the trade press as innovative thinkers producing a stream of noteworthy movies such as Some Like it Hot (1959), The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Great Escape (1963) and Irma La Douce (1963) .As independent producers they had more than their fair share of Oscar successes.

But like every player in Hollywood, they employed sleight of hand, convincing the media that they were highly successful operators when the reality was exactly the opposite. The Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, part of the University of Wisconsin, holds a vast archive relating to United Artists. Within that archive, I was able to source the materials that cast an alternative light on the Mirisch Brothers’ initial foray into the Hollywood big-time.

The figures revealed that the first 20 pictures – including Some Like it Hot, The Great Escape and Irma La Douce – in the Mirisch-United Artists deal racked up a cumulative $8 million loss.

In fact, one of the factors driving down the company’s potential profitability was the amount of money it gave away in profit-share. In addition, the bigger profits were often to be found in distribution and exhibition. For a start, about 50% of box office revenue found its way into the exhibitor’s pockets. From what was left over, another big chunk went to the distributor, in this case United Artists, and once profit-participants had been paid off, there was sometimes remarkably little finding its way back to the Mirisch Brothers’ coffers.

For example, Some Like it Hot, which according to these figures generated a total of $12.9 million in domestic and foreign rentals* (i.e. what’s left after exhibitors have taken their share), racked up less than half a million dollars in profit for the Mirisch Brothers. The Magnificent Seven earned three times as much overseas as in the U.S. so though viewed as a flop at home it ended up with $321,000 in the bank. The Great Escape brought in a profit of $326,000 on total rentals of $11 million while Irma La Douce topped that with $440,000. The Apartment (1960) delivered Mirisch’s biggest profit of $1.09 million.

But those were the only films – out of the 20 launched in Mirisch’s first few years of operation – to turn a profit. The other 15 all hit the buffers. That was not a good ratio at all. That three-quarters of the Mirisch picks turned into losers was hardly cause for celebration.

Some of the losses were stratospheric for the time. The Children’s Hour (1961), with Audrey Hepburn picking up a colossal upfront fee, was in the red to the tune of $2.7 million. The loss on The Horse Soldiers amounted to $1.8 million with Billy Wilder’s ill-fated One, Two, Three suffering a $1.5 million loss with Toys in the Attic turning into a $1.2 million liability. Stolen Hours with Susan Hayward added nearly $1 million to the company’s overall debt. Even Elvis Presley, at that point a guaranteed box office draw, offered no respite – the loss on Kid Galahad above $430,000 and that of Follow That Dream $195,000.

So you might be wondering with such a poor ratio of hits to flops why the Mirisch Brothers managed to stay in the game. Well, before the final figures were in on the contract to deliver the first 20 pictures, United Artists were already committed to a further 20 movies, some of which were already in production. But there were two other elements acting in Mirisch’s favor. The first was that exhibitors were desperate for new movies, the industry only beginning by 1963 to turn a financial corner, and it was expected that Mirisch would have learned from its mistakes and stop underwriting expensive pictures (which turned out to be untrue).

But second, and more importantly, the Mirisch losses did not impact so badly on United Artists. That studio made the bulk of its revenue from distribution. Even if a picture was a flop, UA’s 30% distribution fee was based on the gross, so a movie that maybe ended up as an overall financial flop could still generate enough revenue to keep UA happy.

Also, UA, now seeing record profits from the likes of its investment in Tom Jones (1963) and on the brink of a James Bond bonanza could afford to carry its production partner. So Mirisch kept on pretending it was a huge success and the trade press kept on believing it.

*These figures do not including television sale or future reissues. But initial television sales in the early 1960s averaged about half a million dollars for successful movies. What television would pay was based on the original domestic gross (i.e. perceived popularity). Only a couple of pictures, most notably The Magnificent Seven, significantly added to their initial release income through reissue. So it is extremely unlikely that the Mirisch Brothers would have gone into profit on those first 20 pictures through reissues and television sales in the 1960s, and doubtful if they would have even halved the losses.

SOURCE: “Mirisch Pictures First 20 Picture Deal,” Appendix II, United Artists Archive, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.

Crooks Anonymous (1962) ***

Charm was in short supply in the 1960s. sure, for a period you still had Cary Grant but David Niven was as often to be found in an action picture (The Guns of Navarone, 1961) or a drama, and others of the ilk, like Tony Curtis, veered more towards outright comedy. Britain had something of what would today be called a “national treasure,” admittedly a term more likely to be accorded females of the standing of Maggie Smith or Judi Dench; maybe a space might be found for the idiosyncratic Ralph Richardson. Dare I put Leslie Phillips into contention for such an honor?

Once into his mellifluous stride and with his trademark appreciation of female beauty, “Ding dong!” a more welcome remark than the more common “Cor!” or “Strewth” or sheer inuendo, Leslie Phillips, not so well known perhaps in the USA and foreign parts, would fit that definition. He had charm in spades.

Unfortunately, you could split his career into those roles where “ding dong” entered the equation and those it did not. This is one of those, and I have to confess I’m both disappointed and delighted. Dissatisfied because the charm appeared part of his screen persona, but pleased whenever I found out he wasn’t tied down to it and could essay other characters just as well.

Here, here’s shifty criminal Dandy, whose only redeeming feature is that somehow he has acquired a beautiful girlfriend, stripper Babette (Julie Christie), who, despite her profession

appears to have steered cleared of seediness and insists he goes straight before she consents to marriage. And that would be fine, except what can Dandy do when faced with such obvious temptation and jewels left idly on a counter in a jewellery?

When she catches him out, he is sent to the criminal version of Alcoholics Anonymous where he is at the mercy of a particularly sadistic “guardian angel” Widdowes (Stanley Baxter – in a variety of disguises). He is locked in a cell full of safes. Food, cigarettes etc are hidden inside the safes, so to eat and satisfy his smoking habit, he must open them. The logic, presumably, is that he will grow sick and tired of opening so many safes for so little reward.

Maybe it’s the hidden punishments – a touch of electrocution and various other booby traps – that do the trick. Or, it could be the glee of Widdowes. When Dandy finds cigarettes, they come without any means of lighting them. He pleads with Widdowes to point him in the direction of a safe containing means of ignition.Replies the “angel”, “I’m glad you asked that because I’m not going to tell you.”

There’s a whole raft of comedy skits revolving around temptation, mostly involving Widdowes in one guise or another. And when the movie stays with Widdowes and a bunch of other reformed criminals, it fairly zips along. But once Dandy is released and plot rears its ugly head it falls back on more cliché elements.

Dandy manages to go straight, employed as a Santa Clause in a department store, while Babette decides to give up her job so both can start afresh. Unfortunately, temptation raises its ugly head to the tune of a quarter of a million pounds and all those goody-two-shoes reformed criminals line up to take a crack at it. The twist, which you’ll already have guessed, is that they have to break into the vault again to return the money they have stolen.

Scottish comedian Stanley Baxter was going through a phase of attempting to become a movie star and was given a fair old crack at it – The Fast Lady (1962) and Father Came Too (1964) followed, the former with both Philips and Christie, the latter with just him.

But what was obvious from Crooks Anonymous was that Baxter was better in disguise – and the more the merrier – than served up straight. He steals the show here where in the other movies his character is more of an irritant.

A well-meaning Leslie Phillips somehow snuffs out the charm and there’s not enough going on between him and Babette when he’s full-on straightlaced. Heretical though it might be, there’s not enough going on with Julie Christie either to suggest she might be Oscar bait. Here’s she’s just another ingenue.

Wilfrid Hyde-White (P.J. / New Face in Hell, 1967), another who generally traded on his charm (in a supporting category of course), is also in the disguise business, so he steals a few scenes, too. James Robertson Justice (Father Came Too) would have stolen the picture from under the noses of Baxter and Phillips had he been given more scenes.

Directed by Ken Annakin (Battle of the Bulge, 1965) from a screenplay by Jack Davies and Henry Blyth (Father Came Too).

I might have preferred Phillips in “ding dong” persona, but this works out okay, especially in the scenes set in the criminal reform school.

Ding dong-ish.

Behind the Scenes: “Sinful Davey” (1969)

The first sign of a movie in trouble is the elongated gap between production and release. This picture took two years. Filmed in summer 1967, but not released till May 1969, this proved a disaster for all concerned, a colossal flop.

It should have been anything but. Director John Huston was Hollywood royalty, for over two decades a top-ranked director, hits like The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The African Queen (1952), Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957), The Night of the Iguana (1964) and The Bible in the Beginning (1966) were interwoven with cult numbers like Beat the Devil (1953) and The Misfits (1960). Huston was a double Oscar-winner with 10 nominations besides (including one for acting, in The Cardinal, 1963)

Producer Walter Mirisch was no slouch himself, credits including The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Great Escape (1963), Hawaii (1966) and In the Heat of the Night (1967) which would win him the Oscar. The independent production outfit celebrated its tenth anniversary with its biggest-ever slate, five pictures going in front of the cameras. As well as the Huston venture, Mirisch lined up The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), Inspector Clouseau (1968), Peter Sellers in The Party (1968) and low-budget war picture Attack on the Iron Coast. So the prospect of a movie about a Scottish rebel flouting British authority, penned by James R. Webb, Oscar-winner for How the West Was Won (1962), seemed dandy.

That it was to be filmed on location fitted in with the director’s lifestyle. An Irish citizen, he had been resident there for several years after falling in love with the country following a visit in 1951. However, Huston was a ready-made exile, one of a flood of actors and directors taking advantage, much to the fury of the Hollywood guilds, of a U.S. Government tax loophole originally intended to spur employment in the Middle East oil industry. He’d been only too delighted to skip out of America to make The African Queen, Beat the Devil, Moulin Rouge (1952), Moby Dick (1956) and others. In fact, he was able to exploit another loophole, as in Ireland he paid no taxes at all.

Ireland was his bolthole and he was disinclined to leave. In an earlier Blog I’d recounted how Arthur Miller, writing the screenplay for The Misfits, had to fly to Ireland to work with Huston.

“When I make a picture,” averred Huston, “it’s because I believe the story is worth telling…with a tendency to choose stories whose point is the irony of man’s pursuit of an impossibly elusive goal.” The narrative here was of a thief who expected to follow in his father’s footsteps to the extent of ending up on the gallows. Huston perceived it as “a light-hearted romp…an altogether delightful affair.”

That it was not welcomed by the critics he put down to interference by producer Walter Mirisch who “ruined” it after the director had delivered his final cut. He accused the producer of “giving full sway to his creative impulses,” by tacking on a voice-over and turning the straightforward narrative into a story told in flashback by the simple expedient of switching a scene from the end to the beginning.

Mirisch, of course, had a different take. Huston’s cut was a massive disappointment for Mirisch. He had previous both with Huston and Webb, even when their work together had not proved successful at the box office. With Huston, as a producer for Allied Artists and Moulin, Mirisch had paired on Moulin Rouge and Moby Dick, even though escalating costs on the latter nearly bankrupted Moulin. Despite that experience, since then the producer had been chasing the director for over a decade. With Webb it was Kings of the Sun (1962), also a financial failure.

Webb proposed a “Scottish period romance about a lovable rascal” called The Sinful Adventures of Davey Haggart. Huston demanded the film, despite its Scottish setting, be shot in Ireland (a good chunk of Braveheart was filmed in Ireland). The movie benefitted from Eady money, a tax loophole courtesy of the British Government, and Mirisch pronounced himself “delighted to get a world-class director.”

Huston was in messianic form. He saw the movie as a promotional tool to help set up the Irish film industry. Although such films as The Blue Max (1966) had been filmed at Ardmore Studios, and Huston shot parts of The Bible and Casino Royale (1967) in the country there was no generic industry as such. With the help of the Irish Government, Huston argued “a market could be built for Irish films.” With 81 speaking roles for Irish actors, Huston felt the picture would put Ireland on the map

Mirisch flew to London to work with the director on preparation and casting. They had a major fall-out over casting Huston’s daughter Angelica (A Walk with Love and Death, 1969) as the female lead. Mirisch argued, “Her appearance was rather more Italian than Scottish and in stature she towered over John Hurt.” Huston agreed to do a test with Angelica and Hurt, which proved Mirisch’s point. “I’ve always regretted having put John into the position of having to tell his daughter she wasn’t going to get the role,” said Mirisch. John Hurt, aged 26, was hired on the basis of his stint in A Man for All Seasons (1966).

A Scottish village was built in Ireland. Mirisch appeared satisfied with progress although a John Barry score was rejected as too serious and replaced with “a lighter score” by Ken Thorne. However, previews were disastrous. Huston both refused to attend previews and to re-cut the film, despite United Artists, the distributor and prime funder of the Mirisch Bros operation, “insisting we must try and help the picture play better.” As far as Huston was concerned, “the picture was to his liking and he wasn’t going to be influenced by the preview audiences.” In fact, his opposition to a recut owed much to his experience on The Barbarian and the Geisha (1958), re-edited against his wishes.

So Mirisch took it upon himself to try and save the picture, supervising re-editing, and while previews “improved considerably” the Scottish accents “bothered the audience” and the finished item – either version – “wasn’t as entertaining as it needed to be” while he counted the casting of John Hurt a failure.

Marketeers worked overtime to come up with an outlandish premise for the British premiere – title now contracted to just Sinful Davey – asking guests to arrive in “sinful costumes.” Contestants vied for a £100 prize, the winner dressed in a black bikini “swathed in chain.” For some reason, the marketing department had managed a tie-up with Raleigh bicycles.

Having spent over $3 million on the movie, even Mirisch must have been staggered by the box office. The box office never recovered from an “unbelievably pathetic” $13,000 gross in its opening week at 16 New York cinemas. It only collected a total of $300,000 in U.S. rentals (what studios retain once cinemas have taken their cut) and another $200,000 abroad. So a loss of over $2.5 million.

SOURCES: John Huston, An Open Book (Columbus Books, 1988), p336-337; Walter Mirisch, I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008) p90, 278-281; “Mirisch Marks 10^th Anniversary with Record Line-Up,” Kine Weekly, March 18, 1967, p27; “Davey Invites That Sinful Urge,” Kine Weekly, May 17, 1969, p22; “Huston Blueprint for Irish Film Industry,” Kine Weekly, July 15, 1967, p14; “Picture Grosses,” Variety, June 11, 1969, p10; “Mirisch Second 20-Picture Deal,” United Artists Archive, Wisconsin Center for Film & Theater Research.

Missing You (2025) ***

A well-off good-looking couple trying to adopt a puppy are challenged by po-faced bureaucrat over the name they have chosen for said animal. Their purported good deed ends in disaster when he shows them a photo of the woman caught in a clinch with another man. We never see the couple again. But the prissy fella, Titus (Steve Pemberton) turns up. He’s some kind of farmer. But he runs a strange kind of operation. In his barn we catch a glimpse of a lot of guys in orange prison-style outfits kept in stalls and handcuffed to the ceiling.

And that would be wow and double wow except the algorithms have gone crazy and none of this gripping stuff occurs until episode two by which time you are bored to death by the insane amount of time devoted to Detective Kat Donovan’s (Rosalind Eleazar) woeful love life and her decade-old grieving for murdered cop father Clint (Lenny Henry).

We know more about Clint than anyone else for about every give minutes she gets all doe-eyed and we cut to flashbacks of the wonderful old dad all huggy and fun. And if that’s not enough every two minutes a colleague or relative or friend interrupts her doe-eyed contemplation to tell her to give up trying to find out why her father was murdered.

As to her love life, I can give you chapter and verse. After Josh (Ashley Walters) skipped out on her eons ago, she’s given up on commitment. She uses men for sex, pretending to be an air hostess in case the idea of dating a cop puts them off. She’s pulled up for the lack of commitment by buddy Jessica (Stacey Embalo) and various others, the same ones giving her grief about her extended grieving. But when Josh comes back into her life, albeit on a dating app, she goes all doe-eyed again – wouldn’t it be such fun to hook up again with that two-timing rat?

Luckily, Jessica is a private detective specializing in the honeytrap to expose errant husbands and even more fortunately one of her grateful clients is a prison guard who can sneak Kat into the prison where her father’s killer, doing life for two other murders, is dying. Although the killer was caught, Kat has driven herself crazy wanting to know why her father was fingered. And, luckily, there’s a prison nurse to hand who will dope up the killer with scopolamine – the old truth drug you might remember from The Guns of Navarone – so he will cough up about the murder, although we have already guessed, as our intrepid cop has not, that he didn’t kill her father just took the rap because he was already facing life for the other two killings.

In the old days, the chief cop either had no love life worth mentioning or had a different blonde/blond on his/her arm in every episode or was going through some hellish break-up, and audiences didn’t have to suffer having to empathize with the poor detective’s awry sex life. But in the old days all love life would have been shoved onto the back burner only popping up at a critical moment as some sort of narrative relief to the question in hand which was solving some horrendous case. Here, it’s the other way round, said case only pops up as a brief intermission to Kat’s awry love life and grief.

This is a Harlan Coban Netflix number but it seems very Coban-lite, a far cry from Tell No One (2006). I was a big fan of the books which seemed set in very realistic worlds with authentic plots and double-edged characters you could root for despite their failings. And mystery was the watchword. But proper mystery, a character caught up in some malfeasance, or the past coming back to haunt them, and rarely were his novels police procedurals.

The quality tailed off after a while but even then Coban knew how to hook the reader and generally the plots, though increasingly far-fetched, had sufficient spice to grip.

You are probably wondering when am I going to get to the juicy part – the case Kat is working on. Well, you see, I was wondering the same. When the heck are we going to get past all the personal angst and devote some time to the case of the missing bloke? He’s the guy who fell off a horse while riding in the lush countryside and after stumbling over said lush countryside is rescued by a fella in a tractor who stabs him with a taser.

As I said, it’s not until episode two that bad guy Titus turns up with his home-made prison and extortion racket but even then it’s hard to drag Kat away from her love life and her grieving.

Golly gosh, I just can’t wait to find out what happened with Josh and whether she will give him another chance. But is that what is meant to keep me going for the next three episodes?

Algorithms go home.

Sinful Davey (1969) **

Major disappointment from a director of the caliber of John Huston. Granted, the quality of his output during the decade had been variable but this marked a new low and the suspicion lingers that he only took on the gig to spend time in Ireland – the movie was filmed there – where he had set up a home in the grand manner of a country squire. Equally odd is James Webb as screenwriter. Having chronicled the American West via How the West Was Won (1962) and Cheyenne Autumn (1964), Webb had turned his attention to British history, beginning with Alfred the Great (1968).

But where that had at least historical reality to guide the narrative, here Webb relies on the dubious autobiography of the titular subject, resulting in an episodic, picaresque, sub-Tom Jones (1963) and even sub-Where’s Jack? (1969) tale set in the Scottish Highlands. And much as John Hurt later achieved considerable recognition for his acting, the role, as played, could have been handled just as easily by any number of rising male stars, since, beyond being able to affect two accents – broad Scots and upper-class English – little is required.

In fact, the director clearly couldn’t distinguish between the Irish and the Scottish accent as among the joblot of accents, none more than serviceable, there is many an Irish lilt. As if to make the point that he couldn’t care less, you will also discern on the soundtrack a refrain from “Danny Boy.”

Beyond that it made a good scene, quite why Davey Haggart (John Hurt) decided to announce his desertion from the British Army in such ostentatious manner is difficult to understand. He’s a drummer, marching along, banging said drum, when he takes it into his head to jump off the nearest bridge into the nearest river, complete with drum, only to find himself headed for a mill. In possibly the best line in the script, seeing the mill wheel blocking his escape, he mutters, “Who put that there?”

From here on it’s a tale of pursuit – two actually. Lawman Richardson (Nigel Davenport) leads the merry chase but he’s also got childhood sweetheart Annie (Pamela Franklin) on his tail to ease him out of scrapes in the hope that he’ll reform. Beginning as a pickpocket, he switches to highway robbery and piracy, rarely with particular success. Loaded down with booty on the carriage he has stolen, for example, he loses control of the horses and is left at the side of the road, as poor as when he started.

He’s certainly inventive but contemporary audiences will recoil from the notion of using the head a height-challenged man aloft another’s shoulders to test the rotting rafters inside a jail, leading not to escape but to a home-made pleasure parlor, since it provides entry to the female jail above where our hero establishes himself as a pimp.

But that’s as inventive as this picture gets and in the manner of Cat Ballou and Where’s Jack? you know that whenever a hero heads towards the gallows you can be sure the hanging will be thwarted. The period setting – the 1820s – offers little assistance, as the picture could be set any time before the invention of steam, and could as easily have taken place in a galaxy far far away long long ago called Brigadoon for all the period authenticity shown.

This didn’t lead to instant stardom for John Hurt and possibly just as well as he’d have been wasted in a series of ingenue roles. Pamela Franklin (And Soon the Darkness, 1970) doesn’t have much to do beyond trying to master a Scottish accent. Nigel Davenport (Play Dirty, 1968) was in his element playing yet another frosty authoritarian figure.

John Huston (Night of the Iguana, 1964) did prove one thing – that he lacked the knack for comedy.

Suspect / The Risk (1960) ****

Marvellous long-forgotten character-driven espionage drama exploring the twin themes of guilt and duty. It would appear to be stolen by two supporting actors, Ian Bannen and Thorley Walters, but in fact both play roles that have significant bearing not only on the narrative but on our understanding of the most important characters. Not only do we have the main plot, but we also have two well-worked sub-plots, one concerning disability and the other of more sinister relevance – a 1984 Big Brother theme.

Basic tale concerns a laboratory that has discovered a bacteria that can cure plague. Hopes of a celebratory drink all-round and academic kudos on publishing his paper for top boffin Professor Sewell (Peter Cushing) are dashed when the Government in the shape of the pompous Sir George Gatling (Raymond Huntly) steps in, steals the discovery and makes the staff sign the Official Secrets Act.

*Romance No 1 – Virginia Maskell and Tony Britton in the lab*.

While the revered professor takes it on the chin, colleague Bob Marriott (Tony Britton) is outraged so vocally in public that he attracts the attention of the shady Brown (Donald Pleasance) who suggests to the dupe that there is a way of getting the information out to the wider scientific community, especially to plague-ridden countries.

However, don’t let Sir George’s pomposity fool you. He doesn’t trust this bunch an inch and puts the Secret Service on their tail to assess “the risk” and we dip into the dark kind of web (not that kind of dark web) and the mundane business of deception and betrayal shortly to be explored by the likes of John Le Carre (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, published in 1963) and Len Deighton (The Ipcress File, published a year earlier).

Rather than this outfit being headed by a version of the prim George Smiley, Mr Prince (Thorley Waters) has a lot more in common with the unkempt Jackson Lamb of the Slow Horses series. His incompetence is an act to make visitors to his shambles of an office under-estimate him. But he’s got that Columbo knack of asking the most important question just when an interviewee thinks the interview is over.

Also in the background, coming more increasingly into the foreground, is an unusual love triangle between colleagues Bob and Lucy Byrne (Virginia Maskell), who kiss and hold hands in the cinema, and Lucy’s flatmate, the disabled war vet Alan Andrews (Ian Bannen). The fact that Lucy and Alan live together at a time when such a relationship was frowned upon and would be career death in certain circles and that they were once engaged to be married gives it an edge. That Alan has lost an arm and a hand so needs to be cared for – fed (as in food spooned into his mouth), washed (you can guess that aspect), cigarette lit and removed between puffs, dressed – suggests significant intimacy for an adult.

Obviously, she’s the kind of lass who couldn’t abandon him to the welfare system, and he’s the kind of man who broke off their engagement so she wouldn’t feel tied to him for the rest of her life. But he also hates what he’s become, his desperate reliance on her, what he’s lost, and that’s turned him into not just a bitter individual but a particularly cunning one, who has developed the trick of torpedoing any nascent romance. “You can’t compete,” he gloats to Bob, “because you can’t make her feel good.”

*Romance No 2 – Ian Bannen and Virginia Maskell.*

But when that doesn’t work, he befriends Bob and surreptitiously eggs him on to betray his country and in so doing, hopefully, kill off the romance.

Mr Prince is a delight. Accorded the best lines, he makes great use of them. When his subordinate Slater (Sam Kydd) abrasively brings Dr Shole (Kenneth Griffith) in for questioning, he reprimands him with the rather coy, “Oh, you haven’t been rough again.” To Dr Shole (Kenneth Griffith), the most susceptible of the professor’s acolytes, he warns, “Tell him (Sewell) not to be a fool or you’ll smack him on the backside.” Though Dr Shole has a superb retort, “We’re not exactly on those terms.”

Professor Sewell appears mostly on the back foot. While quietly seething at being denied his professional day in the sun, he accepts duty. Even so, he’s smart enough to outwit Prince when the traitor is caught.

The background of the wheels-within-wheels of Government, the silent overseeing of ordinary lives, the authorized level of spying, comes as something of a shock, since despite George Orwell’s best efforts Big Brother was seen as a clever fiction that could not occur in this most democratic and upright of countries where “fair play” was the rule. Visually, this is well done, we see eavesdroppers in mirrors in pubs and, as I said, Prince seems the least effective of operatives but with the kind of personality that you could easily have built a series around.

Disability from war was a constant of post-war British pictures, most often demonstrated by a character with a limp, as with general dogsbody Arthur (Spike Milligan) here. The Oscar-winning The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) was the most effective at dealing with the physical after-effects of the Second World War. But there, the worst-affected soldier, had prosthetic hands. Here, Alan does not, so the scenes of him being tended to by Lucy are emotionally more powerful.

She tends to his emotions, too, and will embrace him and kiss him on the mouth though he’s not dumb enough to read true romantic commitment into those demonstrations of affection. Clearly, there is emotional residue from their engagement, from which you guess she will ultimately be unable to entangle herself, unless he can find a more brutal way of helping her out of the dilemma.

The lab aspect is surprisingly well done. We don’t get any real information on the scientific breakthrough. Mostly, what we view is the grunt work, the laborious checking of thousands of samples for another experiment. At one point Bob thrusts his arm into a contraption packed with buzzing flies as if he was a competitor in I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here.

Ian Bannen (The Flight of the Phoenix, 1965) is the standout but character actor Thorley Waters (Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace, 1962) runs him close. Tony Britton (better known later for television comedy) has the least interesting role, but Virginia Maskell (Interlude, 1968) has too much to do without dialog to demonstrate her dilemma. Peter Cushing (The Skull, 1965) is solid as always and Spike Milligan provides light relief.

Joint direction by the Boulting Brothers (The Family Way, 1967), Roy and John. Screenplay by Nigel Balchin (Circle of Deception, 1960) based on his own novel.

Exceptionally solid stuff. I was very much taken by the unusual approach, the themes and the acting.

Worth a look.

A Home of Your Own (1964) ***

The phrase “classic silent British comedy” isn’t one that naturally trips off the tongue. Add in “of the 1960s” and you can guarantee furrowed brows. Thanks to the boom in recycling Hollywood silent classics in the early 1960s there was a subsequent mini-boom in what were called “wordless” pictures, as if using the term “silent” was blasphemous. The oddity is that so many emerged from Britain, primarily in shortened format – not more than one hour long – as the second feature in a double bill.

Blame for this development lay in the hands of producer and later writer and later still director Bob Kellett, Britain’s unsung comedy king.

A Home of Your Own is beautifully structured, following the mishaps in building a block of new apartments. A credit sequence covers the stultifying bureaucracy involved, so that what was a pristine site at the beginning of the endeavor turns into a waterlogged dump before the first brick is laid. Sight gags and slapstick abound with mostly everyone getting in each other’s way, or not, the traditional approach of the work-shy British builder being to provide an audience for someone else to dig up a road or a trench.

No paddle goes unsplashed, mud only exists to drench people, and in pursuit of comedy gold most of building materials end up misused. The gatekeeper’s main job is to make tea and there is naturally a union official whose chief task is to obstruct.

Pick of the gags is Ronnie Barker’s laying of cement, delivered with exquisite comedy timing, followed by Bernard Cribbin’s stonemason delicately chiseling out a plaque only to discover at the end in a laugh-out-loud moment that he has misspelled one word, and the carpenter who appropriates the closest implement with which to stir his tea. Some of the jokes grow legs – the morning tea break, a ham-fisted carpenter, the pipe-smoking architect arriving in a sports car, and a patch of ground on the road outside constantly being dug up by different contractors representing water board, gas, electricity.

Once the building is complete, the job taking long enough for the aspiring apartment-owner, a mere fiancé at the outset, to lift his wife over the threshold accompanied by three kids. Any sense of personal accomplishment – the British thirst for owning property quenched – is undercut by problems the young couple now face thanks to the workmanship we have witnessed.

All this is accompanied by a very inventive Ron Goodwin (633 Squadron, 1964) score which provides brilliant musical cues. As a bonus, the film features a roll-call of television comedy superstars including Ronnie Barker (The Two Ronnies, 1971-1987), Richard Briers (The Good Life, 1975-1978) and Bill Fraser (Bootsie and Snudge, 1960-1974). Peter Butterworth and Bernard Cribbins were Carry On alumni. Janet Brown achieved later fame as an impressionist while Tony Tanner hit Broadway as the star of Half a Sixpence before expanding his career to choreographer-director, Tony nominated for Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

A Home of Your Own went out as the support to the Boulting Brothers’ comedy Rotten to the Core (1964) which gave a debut to Charlotte Rampling. Despite being effectively a B-film, primarily made to take advantage of the Eady Levy (a cashback guarantee for producers), A Home of Your Own was surprisingly successful. “Will delight arthouse patrons” commented Box Office magazine in America (“Review,” October 4, 1965, p160) as British comedy films in those days tended to end up in the arthouses. In part, this was because it was the official British entry to the Berlin Film Festival. It was distributed there by Cinema V in a double bill with Rotten to the Core and launched in what was misleadingly called a “world premiere engagement” at the prestigious Cinema 1 in New York.

Jay Lewis (Live Now, Pay Later, 1962) directed and co-wrote, along with Johnny Whyte. Kellett continued in this enterprising vein with the 55-minute San Ferry Ann (1965) – which he wrote – about a group of British holidaymakers going abroad and the 49-minute Futtock’s End (1970) – which he directed – featuring a bunch of guests descending on an ancient country house owned by Ronnie Barker.

Television stars showcased in these two featurettes included Wilfred Bramble (Steptoe and Son, 1962-1974), Rodney Bewes (The Likely Lads, 1964-1966), Warren Mitchell (Till Death Do Us Part, 1965-1975) and Richard O’Sullivan (Man About the House, 1973-1976). Ron Moody composed the Oscar-winning Oliver! (1968) while Joan Sims and Barbara Windsor made their names in the Carry On series and theatrical knight Sir Michael Hordern appeared in Khartoum (1965) and Where Eagles Dare, 1968.

Though disdained by critics, Kellett went on to become by far the most influential British comedy director of the 1970s. His output included the Frankie Howerd trilogy Up Pompeii (1971), Up the Chastity Belt (1972) and Up the Front (1972), as well as The Alf Garnett Saga (1972). He was well ahead of his time with the transgender comedy Girl Stroke Boy (1972) and female impersonator Danny La Rue in Our Miss Fred (1972).

Fun.

Two for the Road (1967) ***

This film had everything. The cast was pure A-list: Oscar winner Audrey Hepburn (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1961) and Oscar nominee Albert Finney (Tom Jones, 1963). The direction was in the capable hands of Stanley Donen (Arabesque, 1966), working with Hepburn again after the huge success of thriller Charade (1963). The witty sophisticated script about the marriage between ambitious architect Mark Wallace (Albert Finney) and teacher wife Joanna (Audrey Hepburn) unravelling over a period of a dozen years had been written by Frederic Raphael, who had won the Oscar for his previous picture, Darling (1965). Composer Henry Mancini was not only responsible for Breakfast at Tiffany’s – for which he collected a brace of Oscars – but also Charade and Arabesque. And the setting was France at its most fabulous.

So what went wrong? You could start with the flashbacks. The movie zips in and out of about half a dozen different time periods and it’s hard to keep up. We go from the meet-cute to a road trip on their own and another with some irritating American friends to Finney being unfaithful on his own and then Hepburn caught out in a clandestine relationship and finally the couple making a stab at resolving their relationship. I may have got mixed up with what happened when, it was that kind of picture.

A linear narrative might have helped, but not much, because their relationship jars from the start. Mark is such a boor you wonder what the attraction is. His idea of turning on the charm is a Humphrey Bogart imitation. There are some decent lines and some awful ones, but the dialog too often comes across as epigrammatic instead of the words just flowing. It might have worked as a drama delineating the breakdown of a marriage and it might have worked as a comedy treating marriage as an absurdity but the comedy-drama mix fails to gel.

It’s certainly odd to see a sophisticated writer relying for laughs on runaway cars that catch fire and burn out a building or the annoying whiny daughter of American couple Howard (William Daniels) and Cathy (Eleanor Bron) and a running joke about Mark always losing his passport.

And that’s shame because it starts out on the right foot. The meet-cute is well-done and for a while it looks as though Joanna’s friend Jackie (Jacqueline Bisset) will hook Mark until chicken pox intervenes. But the non-linear flashbacks ensure that beyond Mark overworking we are never sure what causes the marriage breakdown. The result is almost a highlights or lowlights reel. And the section involving Howard and Cathy is overlong. I kept on waiting for the film to settle down but it never did, just whizzed backwards or forwards as if another glimpse of their life would do the trick, and somehow make the whole coalesce. And compared to the full-throttle marital collapse of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966) this was lightweight stuff, skirting round too many fundamental issues.

It’s worth remembering that in movie terms Finney was inexperienced, just three starring roles and two cameos to his name, so the emotional burden falls to Hepburn. Finney is dour throughout while Hepburn captures far more of the changes their life involves. Where he seems at times only too happy to be shot of his wife, she feels more deeply the loss of what they once had as the lightness she displays early on gives way to brooding.

Hepburn as fashion icon gets in the way of the picture and while some of the outfits she wears, not to mention the sunglasses, would not have been carried off by anyone else they are almost a sideshow and add little to the thrust of the film.

If you pay attention you can catch a glimpse, not just of Jacqueline Bissett (The Sweet Ride, 1968) but Romanian star Nadia Gray (The Naked Runner, 1967), Judy Cornwell (The Wild Racers, 1968) in her debut and Olga Georges-Picot (Farewell, Friend, 1968). In more substantial parts are William Daniels (The Graduate, 1968), English comedienne Eleanor Bron (Help!, 1965) woefully miscast as an American, and Claude Dauphin (Grand Prix, 1966).

Hepburn’s million-dollar fee helped put the picture’s budget over $5 million, but it only brought in $3 million in U.S. rentals, although the Hepburn name may have nudged it towards the break-even point worldwide.

An oddity that doesn’t add up.

Sweeney! (1977) ****

The two-fisted trigger-happy cops that had changed the Hollywood landscape since Clint Eastwood burst onto the scene hadn’t found much correlation in the small-screen. Television producers were particularly averse to violence and even a new generation of sleuths were only a tad above the cosy crime of previous decades. Since James Bond easily covered the random killing aspect in British movies, there seemed little room for anyone else.

Sweeney! (1977), a speedy spin-off from a successful British independent television series, proved them wrong, the movie censor permitting considerably more leeway on the violence front. These cops are just itching to lay a hand on gangsters and, as if transplanted from Chicago, bring baseball bats and pistols to a fight.

The action only slows down when the subplot gets mired in delivering a political message about big business and corruption or when one of the characters has to take time out to explain the meaning of the title. Turns out there’s a sneaky high-end operator Elliott McQueen (Barry Foster) who runs a string of high-class sex workers to hook politicians like Charles Baker (Ian Bannen). When Baker’s girlfriend Janice (Lynda Bellingham) ends up in the mortuary – suicide the official verdict – McQueen applies pressure to get an oil deal done.

Baker’s gals are expert in what these days would be known as providing the “Girlfriend Experience” though the blokes they service aren’t the ones paying. But a police informant, soft on Janice, believes she was murdered and calls in Detective Inspector Jack Regan (John Thaw) to informally investigate.

When Regan treads on McQueen’s toes it triggers a spate of violence. First the informant is blown away by a machine gun from thugs disguised as coppers. Then a nosy journalist (Colin Welland) is blown up. Then Regan is stitched up and suspended from duty. Naturally, Regan persists with a surreptitious investigation. But the thugs aren’t so covert and he interrupts a gangland hit on Bianca (Diane Keen), another of the “girlfriends” who knows too much.

Not much detection required, really, when the criminals are so open about their criminality and even the most high-ranking politician or sanctimonious cop is going to find it hard to let machine-gun-toting gangsters roam through London. So there’s plenty bloody action and quite a clever pay-off.

The rampant violence in British cinema earlier in the decade had been confined to the gangsters of Get Carter (1970) and Villain (1971) and to pictures wrapped in halos of critical protection such as A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Straw Dogs (1971). Sweeney! ushered in a new era, when cops could adopt the same methods as criminals.

Regan was the rumpled cop, his sidekick Det Sgt Carter (Dennis Waterman) theoretically the more handsome, except his boss had as much success with women. What both were best at was riling superiors and arguing with everyone. You’d need a good grasp of the various policing departments to keep up – here we have Special Branch and The Flying Squad (The Sweeney) and ordinary coppers.

The predilection for selective use of Cockney rhyming slang was a feature of the British crime picture. Flying Squad translated as Sweeney Todd and was then truncated to The Sweeney. Oddly enough there was no rhyme for Special Branch and Scotland Yard, despite the advent of The Shard, has not made its way onto the rhyming dictionary.

British studios had increasingly turned to television as production levels tumbled, but generally in the comedy genre, Up Pompeii (1971), On the Buses (1971) and Steptoe and Son (1972), plus vaious sequels, registering the biggest box office.

John Thaw and sidekick Dennis Waterman proved to be long-term stalwarts of British television, the former heading up Redcap (1964), The Sweeney (1975-1978), Inspector Morse (1987-2000) and Kavanagh QC (1995-2001), the latter following The Sweeney with Minder (1979-1989) and New Tricks (2003-2015). Diane Keen starred in The Feathered Serpent (1976-1978), The Cuckoo Waltz (1975-1980), Rings on their Fingers (1978-1980), Foxy Lady (1982-1984), You Must Be the Husband (1987-1988) and various others. Lynda Bellingham, in a bit part as a naked corpse, would become a favorite through a long-running commercial.

By this time Britain had also produced a core of strong supporting actors, not of the quality of the previous generation of Laurence Olivier or John Gielgud, but with a considerable portfolio behind them, Barry Foster second-billed in Frenzy (1972), Ian Bannen Oscar-nominated in The Flight of the Phoenix (1966).

Directed with huge enjoyment by David Wickes in his movie debut from a screenplay by Ranald Graham (Shanks, 1974) and Ian Kennedy Martin (Mitchell, 1975).

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