Drama – Page 17 – The Magnificent 60s

The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960) ****

Surprisingly frank, for the times, exploration of a failing marriage that tackles sexuality, racism, bullying, teenage angst. In those days there was no such concept as midlife crisis, so the general attitude of grin-and-bear-it results in a melancholy that suffuses the picture. Adapted from the Broadway hit by William Inge (Splendor in the Grass, 1961), provides more insight into American family life than the more souped-up soap operas of the Peyton Place variety. Except for crisis escalating action, could well have been misery memoir.

Opens with a surprisingly tender scene that’s again pretty raw for the period. In the morning, salesman husband Rubin (Robert Preston) strokes the arms and face of waking wife Cora (Dorothy McGuire), clearly hoping to initiate sex, when she abruptly rebuffs him. Before he sets off on a week-long business trip he tries to toughen up bullied friendless overly-mothered son Sonny (Robert Eyer), afraid of the dark, and bolster the flagging confidence of inhibited teenage daughter Reenie (Shirley Knight), only succeeding in inadvertedly punching his son in the face and triggering a row with his wife.

But, without warning, he’s fired from his job and not equipped to compete in the employment arena with a flood of younger people with college degrees and greater stamina. Pride prevents him owning up to Cora, rejection sends him to the bottle and a lady friend, hairdresser Mavis Pruitt (Angela Lansbury) who scandalizes the town by (and this dates it) always leaving the top button of her blouse open. Cora plans escape, hoping to go and live, temporarily until she can find a job, with bossy sister Lottie (Eve Arden) in Oklahoma City.

Meanwhile, following an accidental meeting, the hesitant shy Reenie strikes up a rapport with the more outgoing confident Sammy (Lee Kinsolving). Lottie isn’t so keen to help out her beleaguered sister. When Rubin finally returns after a four-day absence it’s to a welter of home truths.

He still can’t bear to admit the loss of his job. The uneasy truce is shattered when Sammy is chucked out of a party he attends as Reenie’s escort at the country club for being a Jew. Subsequently, he attempts suicide and dies, leaving Reenie in shock. Cora determines to find out for herself the rumors concerning Rubin’s affair. But it turns out, although Mavis is deeply in love with Rubin, they’ve never slept together, providing Cora with a second chance to make her marriage work.

What distinguishes the movie is the revelatory dialog you’d expect from an award-winning playwright like Inge. Characters reveal their inner selves, not always with prompting, and not always in argument, and such lines often bring characters to life. Included in that are some of the subsidiary characters.

For example, Ralston (Ken Lynch) whom Rubin openly dislikes because he successfully got away with an insurance scam that turned him into a millionaire, hides away in the back room of a pharmacy, drinking away his guilt. “I know what I am. Who I am,” says Ralston, “the town scandal.” And you think this is maybe just a passing character, but this is the guy, guilt or no guilt, who enforces the country club ban on admitting Jews.

The controlling Lottie suspects her husband’s need for a long walk in the evening is to get away from the sound of her voice. Unusually, the sisters broach the subject of intimacy. Lottie confesses, “I never enjoyed it the way most women say they do.”

What’s keeping Cora and Rubin apart is their lack of intimacy, caused by their battles over money, the husband refusing to get into debt to satisfy his wife’s yearnings not necessarily for the finer things of life, but to avoid the endless scrimping and saving, getting maximum wear from a dress for the growing Reenie by turning it into a skirt.

Rudin laments, “Was a time you liked what I had…If you can’t remember sowing all those wild oats with me, I just plain give up.” Finally, they get to the crux of the matter (again bold language for the times). Rubin asks, plaintively, “How come you don’t enjoy sleeping with me any more?” Retorts Cora, “I can’t fight with you all day and then go to bed with you at night.”

If there is a flaw it’s some attitudes that will jibe with contemporary audiences. “If I had a real wife,” argues Rubin, “I wouldn’t have to go high-tailing it to Mavis Pruit.” And I winced at this particular line: “I wished someone loved me enough to hit me,” says a wistful Lottie hearing that, for the first time in his life, Rubin slapped his wife. Lottie clearly equates manliness and ardor with such violence.

But on the whole, the dialog is a cut above. I’m not sure how much came directly from the play itself and how much was added by screenwriters Harriet Frank Jr and Irving Ravetch (Hud, 1963). The opening certainly, such a situation might be mentioned in the play but a bedroom scene like that would never be staged.

More at home in the theater than on screen Robert Preston (he only appeared in five pictures the whole decade including The Music Man, 1962) exudes such energy as the salesman that you can see how denial of sex would destroy his self-confidence. Dorothy McGuire (Swiss Family Robinson, 1960) is excellent as the wife trying her best not to end up as a put-upon stereotype. Shirley Knight (Petulia, 1968) was Oscar-nominated, Angela Lansbury (The Manchurian Candidate, 1962) came across as too wise to be a loose woman, and Eve Arden (in her only movie of the decade) impresses as the bossy sister.

With such terrific material and an excellent cast, Oscar-winning director Delbert Mann (Buddwing/Mr Buddwing, 1966) doesn’t need to do much to guide this one home.

Well worth a look.

A Cold Wind in August (1961) ***

Touching low-budget B-movie shot in black-and-white of a young man receiving his sexual education from an older woman. Motherless Vito (Scott Maxwell), the son of an apartment block super, is seduced by the older Iris (Lola Albright), three-time divorcee, looking for a son to mother.

This is not the transactional sex of The Graduate, and seduction is too strong a description for the yearning Iris whose advances are sensual and romantic, stroking Vito’s head, trapping his hand with her foot, and there is nothing clandestine about their affair either, no false names on a hotel register. They dally in the park, eat hotdogs, and he buys her flowers.

But as he experiences love for the first time, he also experiences more difficult emotions like jealousy and finds it difficult not just to cope with what seems like another man in her life, the wholesaler Juley (Herschel Bernardi), but the fact that she treats him with such contempt. Spoiler alert – well, not really, because you know from the off this is not going to turn out well – the affair ends when he discovers she is a stripper. And while she is left bereft, he now appears more attractive to girls his own age.

In contrast to the powerful emotions stoked up when the pair are together, director Alexander Singer (Psyche ‘59) fills us in on the rest of Vito’s humdrum life, working for his father during the school holidays, goofing off with his pals, and generally failing to make headway with girls his own age. But Iris’s life is not humdrum. Although she has a rule not to work in her own area, she breaks that to accommodate her estranged husband, whom she seems to tolerate, while at the same time drinking herself into oblivion to avoid any moves from Juley. Nor is she ashamed of her profession. It is an act, a job like any other, and provides her with a nice apartment.

Small wonder she treats men with contempt. Perhaps what she falls in love with is untainted innocence. In some senses she is adrift, at other times in full command. And her love for Vito is convincing.

It is full of incidentals. He gulps down ice-cream, she teaches him to drink one sip at a time, without being patronizing the father (Joe De Santis) tries to educate him to honor his inner feelings.

Lola Albright (Peter Gunn television series) carries off a difficult role very well indeed. Without laughs to help him out as it did Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, Scott Maxwell is believable both as the youth growing into adulthood and the youth wanting to remain a youth with no adult responsibilities. The low-key performance of Joe De Santis is worth a mention.

While the picture no doubt attracted attention for the risqué material, which would have certainly given the Production Code pause for thoughts, it provided a more rounded picture than was normal at the time of a woman working in the sex industry, even if only in the stripping department. Iris did not fall into any of the cliches. She is presented as a woman first and foremost rather than a stripper.

Alexander Singer sticks to the knitting and doesn’t come unstuck. John Hayes (Shell Shock, 1964) wrote the screenplay based on the Burton Wohl bestseller.

Unusual variation on the theme.

The Sixth Sense (1999) **** – Seen at the Cinema

If “I see dead people” isn’t one of the greatest lines ever written, I don’t know what is. Apart from anything else it highlights the screenwriting element of director M. Night Shyamalan’s talent. Had the little boy, in whatever haunted manner, simply said, “I see ghosts,” it wouldn’t at all have had the same impact. And reinventing this genre took a lot more than knitting together a few scary moments.

The horror genre had morphed into scaring the pants off women, their screams the soundtrack of the decade, and, of course, it was often the last sound they made as slicing-and-dicing became the norm and body counts multiplied. Nobody dies here. And the dead aren’t zombies either. Little Cole (Haley Joel Osment) almost acts as a psychiatrist, putting ghosts back together, listening to their woes, letting them come to terms with death. I won’t spoil the ending for you in case you haven’t seen it because when it first came out every audience member was urged not to reveal the ending.

What Shyamalan has done is give the ghost story narrative purpose, two characters who need each other, guilt-ridden psychiatrist Malcolm (Bruce Willis), marriage in trouble, suspecting wife Anna (Olivia Williams) of having an affair, finds himself getting unspoken guidance from the kid he is meant to be giving advice to. Cole is bullied at school, treated as a freak, having to conceal his own torment from everyone, and teachers who should recognize signs of disturbance instead resort to punishment. Kids lock him in a cupboard and single mother Lynn (Toni Collette) is at her wit’s end.

The great screenwriters invent scenes nobody’s ever thought about before. Trying to elicit information from Cole, Malcolms plays a game. If he is correct in an assumption, the child takes one step forward. A few correct answers and he’ll be plonked down in a chair opposite the psychiatrist. But if the answers are wrong, Cole takes a step backward. It’s an incredibly clever conceit, exposition disguised as a game. By the end of it, Cole is back where he started, and the boy’s ostensible savior is revealed as a failure.

These are two tormented souls coming together and for the most part it plays almost with an arthouse sensibility to a kid growing up, making his way in the adult world, except as much as Cole is developing, so is Malcolm, his life foundering, walking around in permanent lament for a world that’s gone wrong, somehow slipped away from his grasp from a time he was physically adored and professionally acclaimed.

It’s the psychiatrist’s burden to occasionally fail. Sometimes the consequences are unendurable even if the client was beyond repair and Malcolm puts his current depression, forgetting his anniversary, for example, down to one terrible failure. Cole isn’t entirely defenceless. He can spot adult weakness, and feeling threatened, humiliates his teacher with with vicious aggression that exposes a childhood disability that appears on the face of it successfully overcome but, in reality, still lurking.

Gradually, Cole grows in confidence, matures, is given the leading part in the school play, accepted, and Malcolm can take pride in his accomplishment. Shyamalan is too clever a screenwriter to have the child identify point blank the adult’s problems. The revelation is a moment of stunning self-clarity.

But I promised not to say any more.

Instead, I’ll talk about Shyamalan’s directorial skill, in particular his use of the fade, a little-used technical device from back in the day. Most directors simply employ the cut. Everything is connected, let’s move on, keep this narrative going. The fade is like the end of a chapter, time to turn a page, a sigh, every section allowed time to breathe, before we move on.

We might also credit Shyamalan with bringing out two superb performances from the leads. He wipes that trademark smirk off Bruce Willis’s face, finds ways of making the screen’s biggest tough guy come off as weak. Haley Joel Osment was a tad older than the character he plays, but still no more than ten, I guess, at the time of filming. To carry off such long speeches with such authenticity would be beyond most child actors, who usually come to the fore in some inconsequential froth, rather than a serious drama, was jaw-dropping. Amazing he didn’t win the Oscar or be given a special one. Because it’s a very special performance and without such singular acting the movie wouldn’t have worked at all.

Shyamalan’s been around longer than Christopher Nolan but with none of the comparable accolade. Apart from an occasional foray into sci-fi, he’s stuck, like Hitchcock, to the thriller genre. He followed The Sixth Sense with, in my opinion, his masterpiece, Unbreakable (2000) and had another big hit with Signs (2002) but thereafter his box office wavered and though consistently churning out a movie every two years ended up at the lower-budget end of Hollywood. His new one Trap, due out later this month, is distributed by a major studio, Warner Bros, so if it succeeds, and it’s getting great buzz, he might be welcomed back into the fold.

I was able to see The Sixth Sense on the big screen again not because someone was attributing retrospective glory to Shyamalan but because a marketing whiz has come up with the great publicity wheeze of tying up a package of pictures from the same year by different studios and chucking them out under the anniversary aegis (25^th in case you can’t do the maths) so tapping into nostalgia. As with the current reissue formula, these pictures are restricted to one showing on one day and to my surprise when I saw this, I would reckon the theater was three-quarters full and as much with youngsters as older people.

So while you’ve already missed it on the big screen, I’m sure it’s available on DVD or streaming.

Don’t miss it.

The Condemned of Altona (1962) ****

Shades of last year’s Oscar-winning Zone of Interest but with more guilt, some characters dodging it, others driven mad by remembrance of what they did or didn’t do during the Holocaust of World War Two. But mostly, an object lesson in how to expland a play (written by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre). Despite top class performances from Sophia Loren (Arabesque, 1966), Maximilian Schell (Counterpoint, 1967), Fredric March (Seven Days in May, 1964) and even, astonishingly, from Robert Wagner (Banning, 1967) it’s director Vitttorio De Sica (A Place for Lovers, 1968), with stunning images and clever camerawork, who steals the show.

You won’t forget in a hurry the outstretched hand of a prisoner in a blizzard condemned to die, nor the skeletal jaw seen through an x-ray machine. The backward crab crawl will remind you of a later movie. De Sica moves the camera every whichway. Aerial and overhead shots are mixed in with the camera swivelling from character to character or suddenly pulling back from a scene and then suddenly he stops you his restraint. But that doesn’t prevent him getting to the heart of the narrative matter and adding in some frisson of accuser attracted to accused.

Set at the end of the 1950s, we begin on a Succession note, but without the contemporary angst and back-stapping. German shipping entrepreneur Albrecht (Fredrich March), a war profiteer turned post-war profiteer having taken advantage of demand in the Germany industrial boom, and now with only months to live, wants to pass on his business to son Werner (Robert Wagner). But Werner shies away, disgusted by his father’s unspoken collaboration with the Nazis during the war, ignoring the argument that the businessman was simply dealing with whatever party was in power. And this would be the narrative, father explaining actions, hoping for expiation, planning for the business to pass down the family line rather than be sold off.

Except that Werner’s left-winger actress wife Johanna (Sophia Loren) discovers there is another contender, the supposedly dead older son Franz (Maximilian Schell) who, instead of being sentenced to death for war crimes and fleeing to Argentina, where he purportedly died, as was the story given out, is actually hiding in the family mansion. He’s pretty much been driven mad, the walls of his substantial hidey-hole daubed with disconcerting images. Windows blocked-up and no knowledge of the outside, wearing his Nazi uniform he envisages a Germany languishing in decay, poverty and hunger. He lives on champagne, oysters and chocolate (so not quite the tough prison regime), and, as discreetly portrayed as was possible at the time, has an incestuous relationship with doting sister Leni (Francoise Prevost), the only human being with whom he is in contact. The inmate, knocking back handfuls of Benzedrine, occupies his time by recording messages to be delivered, he hopes, to Germans many centuries ahead.

Johanna wonders how this mentally-ill man came to be obsessed with guilt and we discover that when he was growing up his father rented out spare land around the mansion to the Nazis for a concentration camp where 30,000 people died. But Franz hid a Jew in the house, was reported to the S.S. by his father, and witnessed the man’s execution, then was punished by being forced to join the Army where he was known as a torturer. Finally, he emerges from isolation and sees a different Germany and confronts his father in a shock ending.

Both Loren and Schell had just won Oscars, for Two Women (1960) – incidentally directed by De Sica – and Judgement at Nuremberg (1961), respectively, so their confrontation, where his initial male dominance (the poster image reflects this scene) settles into a more equal power dynamic. Frederic March is good as the father convinced he has done no wrong and I had to check that this was the same Robert Wagner who had often been indifferent in pictures. De Sica draws great performances from all and layers the whole movie in a doom-laden atmosphere. Written by Abby Mann (Judgement at Nuremberg) and Cesare Zavattini (Woman Times Seven, 1967)

Remains surprisingly potent.

A Fever in the Blood (1961) ****

Blistering B-film from writer Roy Huggins (TV’s The Fugitive) that marries political chicanery to legal jiggery-pokery in a movie that races from one twist to another. In his role as producer Huggins calls upon actors he made stars from the television series he created – Efrem Zimbalist Jr. (77 Sunset Strip), Jack Kelly (Maverick) – and gives Angie Dickinson (Oceans 11) the female lead.

Huggins’ brilliant premise is to ignore the dilemma of the man, Walter Thornwall (Rhoses Reason), nephew of a former Governor, wrongly accused of the murder of his wife, and instead to concentrate on accuser District Attorney Dan Callahan (Jack Kelly) and Judge Lee Hoffman (Efrem Zimbalist Jr), both of whom, running for the vacant Governor post, stand to make massive political capital from the publicity surrounding a sensational trial.

Former buddies Callahan and Hoffman are now bitter rivals after the former had reneged on a promise to support the latter’s bid for the political post. Also throwing his hat into the ring is Senator Alex Simon (Don Ameche) whose wife Cathy (Angie Dickinson) once had romantic yearnings for Hoffman. The only one of the trio who has anything approaching a conscience is Hoffman and that is immediately tested when the Senator offers him a bribe to stand down from the race, which the Judge, after an appeal from Cathy, does not report to the authorities. There is another ploy open to Hoffman. Should he find reason to declare a mistrial that would sabotage Callahan’s bid since he would not be riding high in the media after convicting a celebrity killer.

The picture jumps from intense politics, the wheeling-dealing and wrapping up votes, to a trial in a packed courtroom very much in the Perry Mason vein with surprise witnesses, shocks, objections sustained or overruled, clever arguments, dueling attorneys, and last-minute evidence.

A witness has Thornwall running away from the scene of the crime and when his wife is painted as a nymphomaniac that provides ample motive. Further evidence pushes the defendant into a worse corner. But all the while over the trial hangs the stink of political machination.

There are another half-dozen brilliant twists, not least of which is Judge Hoffman letting conscience go hang and embarking on a couple of dodgy endeavors himself including what amounts to sheer blackmail. The District Attorney, one of the sharpest tools in the box, reacts to every setback with a cunning that would have been criminal had it not been legal. Also hanging there is potential adultery between Cathy and the widowed Hoffman.

The writer in Huggins is a past master at shifting the cards in the deck and this has so many twists and turns it feels like a whole series of The Fugitive crammed into one episode. There is as much self-awareness of the underbelly of politics as in Advise and Consent (1962), as much deceit and corruption, as much principle disguised as honor.

But the plot here is so tight, the characters dealing with twists and turns that the movie has no requirement for the depth of characterization that would have been brought to the picture by a Henry Fonda or Charles Laughton. Huggins proves you can have just as much fun without the big boys. None of the stars with the exception of Angie Dickinson made a dent on the Hollywood A-list but they are all perfectly acceptable, and once Huggins tightens the screws plot-wise the last thing on your mind is wishing for a better cast.

A cracker.

Billy Budd (1962) ***

Unfairly muscled out by lavish roadshow Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) but covering similar territory minus sailors going off-piste on a South Pacific island. Peter Ustinov outranked fellow triple hyphenates Billy Wilder (writer, producer, director) and John Wayne (actor, producer, director) in that he could add acting to his other skills (writer, producer, director) and in some respects he was actually better remembered as a noted raconteur on late night television shows. I was surprised to discover he was actually well versed in the directing malarkey by the time he came to helm Billy Budd, four previous excursions dating from the late 1940s and most recently Romanoff and Juliet (1961). He was better known at this point as an Oscar-winner for Spartacus (1960). He would win another for Topkapi (1964) and go on to direct another three pictures.

Billy Budd is a claustrophic affair that you’ll need a bit of a history lesson to understand. The British Navy had two methods of recruiting sailors. The first was the more honest, awaiting a supply of volunteers. The second, the most dodgy legal proces ever invented, involved grabbing any likely candidate and forcing – “pressing”- them into service. Normally, this caper took place on land and gangs of recruitment officers did the business, hence the term “press gang.”

However, I was unaware that in times of war – this is set during the Napoleonic War – the British Navy could board any passing merchant vessel and commandeer any of its crew. In this case, Captain (actually Post Captain if you’re being technical about it) Vere (Peter Ustinov) hijacks only one sailor, Billy Budd (Terence Stamp).

Quite why it’s only this singleton is never explained. There are a couple of other irregularities that run against making this a tight ship in terms of narrative construction. The first is, that in the first of two critical incidents, our otherwise charming and chatty Budd is suddenly struck dumb with a stammer, the first time such an affliction has put in an appearance. The second is that, in consequence, Budd strikes an officer, the bullying Master-at-Arms Claggart (Robert Ryan) who hits his head while falling and dies.

Now even I know, and I’m hardly a naval scholar, that striking an officer is punishable by death. The fact that Claggart has a Capt Bligh disposition, inclined to find any opportunity to bring out the lash, makes no difference to the outcome. So while it seems that court martial provides dramatic scope, here the outcome is never in doubt. This isn’t Queeg on The Caine Mutiny, which is a more complicated affair, where the captain’s sanity is questioned.

So where the narrative should have built up in intensity, it largely flounders and depends (successfully as it happens) on audience appreciation of Budd as an innocent abroad.

That said, like Mutiny on the Bounty, it reveals the remarkable lack of recourse to any higher authority on ship should the highest authority either carry out or endorse cruelty. The minute he’s on the ship Budd is exposed to the sadistic will of Claggart who has condemned a sailor to a pitiless flogging for reasons that cannot be explained. Budd soon learns that Claggart has accomplices who will sabotage a crew member’s gear so that he will be put on a report, accumulation of sufficient black marks resulting in automatic flogging without interference from the captain.

While Vere is hardly in the Capt Bligh category and most of the time comes across as relatively amiable, our introduction to him is firing a shot across the bows of a merchant ship that doesn’t want to stop in case its crew is press ganged. He is quite ready to invoke the rules to get what he wants and is enough of a disciplinarian that the crew kowtow to him. He might feel a touch of remorse that Budd is the sacrificial lamb to the Royal Navy’s rule of law, but he’s hardly going to go against procedure.

So mostly what we’ve got is the acting. Terence Stamp (The Collector, 1965), in his debut, was Oscar-nominated and you can see why and in some senses this is the career-defining role before acting affectations and mannerisms took over. Robert Ryan (The Wild Bunch, 1969) is very effective as the sinister Claggart. And there are a host of other British names to look out for – David McCallum (Sol Madrid/The Heroin Gang 1968), Ray McAnally (Fear Is the Key, 1972), Paul Rogers (Three into Two Won’t Go, 1969) and Niall McGinnis (The Viking Queen, 1967) among the foremost.

Ably directed by Ustinov who wrote the screenplay with Dewitt Bodeen (Cat People, 1942) based on the original Herman Melville novel and a stage adaptation by Louis O. Coxe and Robert H. Chapman.

Worth seeing for Stamp’s performance.

Behold a Pale Horse (1964) ***

Old causes never die but they do go out of fashion and interest from movie audiences in the issues surrounding the Spanish Civil War had fallen from the peak when they attracted artists of the caliber of Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso. But passions surrounding the conflict remained high even 20 years after its conclusion as indicated in this Fred Zinnemann (The Sundowners, 1960) drama.

Manuel Artiquez (Gregory Peck) plays a disillusioned guerilla living in exile in France, who has ceased raiding the Spanish border town under the thrall of corrupt Captain Vinolas (Anthony Quinn). Artiguez has two compelling reasons to return home – a young boy Paco asks him to revenge the death of his father at the hands of Vinolas and his mother is dying. But Artiquez is disinclined to do either. Heroism has lost its luster. He has grown more fearful and prefers to live out his life drinking wine and casting lustful glances at young women.

In France he enjoys a freedom he would be denied in Spain. He is not hidden. Ask anybody in the street where he lives and they will tell you. This is a crusty old soldier, unshaven, long past finding refuge in memories, but not destroyed either by regret. There is a fair bit of plot, some of it stretching incredulity. The action sequence at the end, conducted in complete silence, is very well done, but mostly this is a character piece.

This is not the upstanding Gregory Peck of his Oscar-winning To Kill a Mockingbird. He is a considerably less attractive character, burnt-out, shabby, grizzled, lazy, easily duped, unwilling to risk his life to see his mother. We have seen aspects of the Anthony Quinn character before but he brings a certain humanity to his villain, bombastic to hide his own failings, coarse but occasionally charming, suitably embarrassed when caught by his wife visiting his mistress and praying earnestly to God to deliver Artiquez into his hands. Omar Sharif has the most conflicted character, forced by conscience to help an enemy of the Church.

However, two elements in the picture don’t make much sense. Paco tears up a letter (critical to the plot) to Artiquez which I just cannot see a young boy doing, not in an era when children respected and feared their elders. And I am also wondering what was it about Spain that stopped directors filming it in color. This is the third Spain-set picture I have reviewed in this blog after The Happy Thieves and The Angel Wore Red. For the first two I can see perhaps budget restrictions being the cause, but given the stars involved – Rex Harrison and Rita Hayworth in the first and Ava Gardner and Dirk Bogarde in the second – hardly facing the production dilemmas of a genuine B-picture.

But Behold a Pale Horse was a big-budget effort from Columbia and while black-and-white camerawork may achieve an artistic darkness of tone it feels artificial. This was never going to be the colorful Spain of fiestas and tourist vistas but it would have perhaps been more inviting to audiences had it taken more advantage of ordinary scenery.

J.P. Miller (Days of Wine and Roses, 1962) adapted the film from the novel Killing a Mouse on Sunday by Emeric Pressburger who in tandem with Michael Powell had made films like Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948). The film caused calamity for Columbia in Spain, the depiction of Vinolas with a mistress and taking bribes so upset the authorities that all the studio’s movies were banned.

The L-Shaped Room (1962) ***

Has contemporary bite, given half the picture is about abortion, banned in Britain at that time and the Pill yet to come on-stream. Being a single mother was an equally unwelcome tag unless you were a widow, in which case you were shrouded with respectability.

Pregnant French lass Jane (Leslie Caron) has decided to hang on in Britain rather than face the shameful ordeal of returning home. She knows who the father is, Terry (Mark Eden), to whom she lost her virginity in a week-long affair in Cornwall, but she’s not planning to hustle him into a shotgun wedding and you get the idea that, at 27, her virginity was weighing heavily on her.

Ending up in a bedsit in London – the titular room a landlord’s clever way of turning one decent-sized room into two smaller ones, each with a share of the window – she is clearly au fait with a British legal loophole that permits termination should pregnancy damage her mental health. And there were enough Harley St doctors to mentor her through such a loophole, for a fee of course.

It’s the briskness of Dr Weaver (Emlyn Williams) that puts her off. She has another go, later on, this time with black market pills from one of her neighbors, but they don’t work. Meanwhile, she has fallen in love with aspiring writer Toby (Tom Bell) and divines, correctly, that he won’t want to bring up another man’s child. In the end, she has the baby and scarpers back to France to face the music.

On the face of it an ideal candidate for the “kitchen sink” mini-genre that was pervasive at the time, but actually much more rewarding than many of the genre with dealt with male anger. This is much more about acceptance, without being craven or abject about it.

And there’s much to enjoy in director Bryan Forbes’ understated style. Half the time you could imagine you were in noir from the use he makes of the commonplace manner in which lights in staircases generally went off after a minute or so (not so much an energy-saving device as a money-saving one for the landlord) and he makes clever play of these sudden changes. There are also, unusual for the time, disembodied voices – the camera on Jane as she mounts the stairs, the voice her out-of-sight landlady Doris (Avis Bunnage). And every now and then the camera glides from her room into that of her neighbor, jazz trumpeter Johnny (Brock Peters) who can hear everything through the paper-thin walls, her morning retching and her night-time love-making with Toby.

How Johnny does find out about her baby is beautifully done, the best sequence in the movie. She works in a café where Johnny eats each night and she’s set a little table for him with a flower in a bottle. But he doesn’t turn up. She suspects, for no real reason except the worst, that he’s in the basement making out with one of the sex workers, but it’s Johnny (who had always been a good friend) who tells her that, from a sense of his disgust, he has let her boyfriend know the truth.

Like Darling (1965), this is a fascinating portrait of a woman making the wrong decisions. But Jane lacks Diana’s power. She’s not helpless exactly, and certainly has a good line in getting rid of unwanted attention. Her motives are not entirely clear. She wasn’t in love with Terry and for a long time she fends off Toby. She deludes herself into believing that Toby’s love for her will overcome his distaste that she is carrying another man’s child. That’s when she takes the pills.

You could kind of get the impression, however, that the real reason for Jane’s predicament is so that the actress can follow in the footsteps of Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn et al to wallow in grief. But it’s more subtle than that. She hasn’t been thrown aside by a callous male. She had made a decision to lose her virginity without considering the consequences and now that there is consequence changes her mind in impulsive fashion on how to deal with it.

Surrounding this central tale are some snapshots of life in a tawdry rooming-house. Two of the occupants are gay, Johnny and faded actress Mavis (Cicely Courtneidge), the landlady has a succession of gentlemen friends, while in the basement Sonia (Patricia Phoenix) works as a prostitute.

Leslie Caron (Guns of Darkness, 1962) was nominated for an Oscar and won a Bafta and a Golden Globe. The film was nominated for a Bafta and a Golden Globe. Tom Bell (Lock Up Your Daughters!, 1969) is good as the struggling writer. And Brock Peters (The Pawnbroker, 1964) has a peach of a part.

Director Bryan Forbes (Deadfall, 1968) wrote the script from the Lynne Reid Banks bestseller.

Darling (1965) ****

Amorality tale. Compulsive opening but contradictory ending. Nobody comes out of this well as male and female alike use each other with little compunction shown. British film making that at one point appeared to be disappearing down the kitchen sink explodes into life with an exploration of just how far the Swinging Sixties can swing. Julie Christie picked up the Oscar for her portrayal of the impulsive, wilful, yet vulnerable model sleeping her way to the top, an unpopular theme in today’s climate.

The credits open with a striking image. A poster for global hunger relief being pasted over by one advertising model Diana (Julie Christie), the face of the decade. There are various other potshots at the hypocritical rich, fawned over for deigning to distribute some of their wealth to the poor, but it doesn’t quite complete the circle, because it’s exactly this kind of virtue-signalling philanthropic society to which Diana, with no sense of judgement, aspires.

It would be more convenient to view Diana as exploited, but, in fact, once she loses her puppy innocence, she is as good at the exploitation game as anyone else. First port of call is dull BBC arts journalist Robert (Dirk Bogarde) who provides her with an opening into the fashionable London set. Both, I should mention, are married, but ditch partners (and children in Robert’s case) and set up home together, she in demand as a hostess at charity events.

Trading sexual favors with advertising executive Miles (Laurence Harvey), she wins a role in a B-picture and his backing to make her the face of a campaign advertising chocolates, that commercial filmed in a palazzo in Italy owned by uber-wealthy but older Cesare (Jose Luis de Vilallonga), a prince, from whom she eventually accepts a marriage proposal, only to find she’s just as bored in Italy as elsewhere. There’s a speedy return to London and Robert’s bed, but he dumps her. Theoretically, she’s so powerless and vulnerable, poor lamb, that she submits to his plan to send her back to Italy, rather than, by now considerably more powerful, starting all over again with someone else.

Possibly the morality of the time or in keeping with some movie dictat required an unhappy ending (of sorts). But this seems to contradict her personality. Bear in mind she had already shown how readily she traded men, and you could already see her running off with a wealthy playboy in Italy and dumping the prince.

At the remove of over half a century, the wild goings-on would be viewed as tame by contemporary standards, and the flashiness of the style, which attracted criticism, would be ignored in favor of the stunning performance by Julie Christie and her empowered female. Sure, she’s emotionally immature, shallow and all the rest of it, and as likely to become a member of the hypocritically rich, but she’s managed to finesse a life as a model into a high-flying princess with the world at her feet and sure as heck she would soon learn how to manipulate that world as easily as Swinging London.

The only dated aspect is the sexuality, much of which was sneaked in under the censor’s nose (though I would imagine would be considerably cut for U.S. audiences) but that acts as a time capsule for a period when homosexuality was still in Britain punishable by law. Nonetheless, there are fleeting references to cross dressing, an orgy, a threesome and oral sex. (Although a cynic might observe how effective courting controversy was for publicity purposes). In some senses, the obsession of director John Schlesinger with thumbing his nose at the censor gets in the way of the central section which is meant to show how far, in terms of decadence, Diana has fallen when in reality she seems to enjoy exploring the wilder and more sensual parts of her personality.

There’s a clever role-reversal. Usually, it’s the man who plays away from home but expects to still be accepted back by a resigned partner. Here it’s Diana. If the men in her life are to be blamed at all it’s for being dumb, not recognizing her ambition and demanding nature. A lover who continues to tap away at his typewriter while Diana exhibits signs of restlessness is as dumb as they come. Miles and Cesare are more her type, the sexually voracious former switching partners at the drop of a hat, while the older man probably already has a mistress stashed away and expects his trophy wife to pick up a discreet lover in the way of aristocracy the world over.

So, at the remove of several decades, a different Diana emerges, one very much in control of her own destiny, picking up men as it suits her purpose, yes still some emotional growing-up to do, but you could easily see her turning into one of the dowager duchesses who run these fundraising balls with young bucks like Miles lionising her and leaving a few other husbands and/or lovers in her wake, possibly still unhappy, but the rich rather than the poor version.

Not sure if she’d qualify as a feminist icon, but she certainly navigated the world of the male gaze and used it to her advantage.

Turned director John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy, 1969) into a brand name. Nominated for five Oscars including Best Picture and winning for three, Julie Christie as Best Actress, Frederic Raphael (Two for the Road, 1967) for the script and Julie Harris for costume design. Bogarde, as well as Christie, reigned supreme at the Baftas. Commercially, one of the most successful British films ever, on a budget of around $1 million earning over $4 million in U.S. rentals alone.

Ending doesn’t ring true, but the rest does.

Advise and Consent (1962) ****

Excoriating engrossing political drama in which the unscrupulous take the moral high ground and the principled are destroyed. In other words, the reality of power – gaining it and keeping it and all the skullduggery that involves. And it has resonance in today’s cancel culture for it is minor indiscretions from the past that bring down the most upstanding of the species.

Theoretically, director Otto Preminger (Hurry Sundown, 1967) broke one major taboo in touching on the subject of same-sex relationships. But in reality he took an even bolder step from the Hollywood perspective of giving center stage in the main to older players. Many had first come to the fore in the 1930s or earlier – Walter Pidgeon (Turn Back the Hours, 1928), Lew Ayres (All Quiet on the Western Front, 1930), Charles Laughton (Oscar winner for The Private Life of Henry VIII, 1933) Franchot Tone (Oscar nominated for Mutiny on the Bounty, 1935), Henry Fonda (You Only Live Once, 1937).

This was the kind of all-star cast you used to get in 1960s big-budget pictures filling out supporting roles. But in this ensemble drama, they all, at various times, hold the floor. And this approach lent the movie greater authenticity. Even if few viewers today recognize any, that, too, works in the movie’s favor, giving it an almost documentary feel.

Movies about politics are never heavy on plot, so if you’re looking for a thriller in way of All the President’s Men (1973) go elsewhere. It has more in common with The Trial of the Chicago Seven (2020) with multiple viewpoints and opposing perspectives. What the best movies about politics have in abundance is repartee. Virtually every exchange is a verbal duel, the cut and thrust, the slashing attack, the parry, sometimes the knockout blow delivered through humor.

Given politicians spend most of their lives making speeches, even the shortest of sentences, even the bon mots, have a polished ring. And that, frankly, is the joy of this picture, brilliantly written by Wendell Mayes (Anatomy of a Murder, 1959) from the Allen Drury bestseller. In some respects the plot is almost a MacGuffin, a way into this labyrinthine world, where characters duck and dive like a more elevated breed of gangster

A lesser director would have given in to the temptation of filming these duels in close-up. Instead, Preminger’s direction is almost stately, keeping characters at bay.

A seriously ill President (Franchot Tone), distrusting his feeble Vice-President Harley Hudson (Lew Ayres), decides to fill the vacancy for Secretary of State with highly-principled Senator Robert Leffingwell (Henry Fonda). This not being the beginning of the President’s term, he can’t just do what he wants, his nomination must go before a committee and then face a vote in the Senate.

The Senate Majority Leader Bob Munson (Walter Pidgeon) isn’t too happy with the idea, seeing Leffingwell as a dove, likely to appease the growing Soviet threat. Others on the committee, namely Senator Brigham Anderson (Don Murray) feel the same and the committee hearing has the tone of an interrogation. The fine upstanding Leffingwell parries well until Senator Seabright Cooley (Charles Laughton) introduces a witness Herbert Gelman (Burgess Meredith) who says Leffingwell belonged to a Communist cell, an accusation Leffingwell denies.

Twist number one: Leffingwell has lied on oath. He confesses this to a friend Hardiman Fletcher (Paul McGrath) who then stitches up the witness. The committee apologies to Leffingwell, which means he is a sure thing for the post, but Cooley smells a rat and starts his own investigation. Leffingwell tries to get out of the job but the President won’t allow this. The Majority Leader and Anderson are let in on the secret, the former willing to accommodate the President but the latter outraged and planning to thwart the nomination when it reaches the voting stage at the Senate. Anderson comes under pressure, phone calls to his wife about something that went on in Hawaii.

And so the stage is set. The pressure builds on Anderson. The President becomes more unwell, making the appointment of Leffingwell more crucial. Aware of Anderson’s intentions, the Majority Leader starts whipping up votes, with Cooley doing the same for the opposition. Machinations take over. And for a movie that was initially light on plot, and it ends with three stunning twists, and proving once and for all there is nothing quite so standard as the self-serving politician.

This was the first movie for several years for Henry Fonda (Broadway and television his refuge) and for society hostess Gene Tierney (Laura, 1945) who suffered from mental health problems and the last screen appearance of Charles Laughton. The acting is uniformly excellent and the direction confident and accomplished.

A slow-burner for sure, but a fascinating insight into the less savory aspects of politics and the human collateral damage.