I write the Pick of the Week for Cinema Sentries every other week and then on the off week, I just write it for this site. I keep forgetting to link over to my articles when I write them for CS.
This week a Rian Johnson murder mystery series comes out on Blu-ray. I’m a big fan of the director’s work so I’m excited to finally get to watch it. You can read all about it and what else is coming out this week by clicking here.
This is exactly the kind of film I was thinking about when I decided to dedicate September to British cinema. Night Boat to Dublin isn’t splashy, original, or all that imaginative, but it is well-constructed, solidly made, and darn entertaining. It is the type of jolly-good spy-thriller that only the Brits can make.
At the height of World War II British Intelligence Services fear someone is passing information about the atomic bomb to Nazi Germany. Two intelligence officers, Captain Grant (Robert Newton) and Captain Wilson (Lawrence O’Madden) board the titular night boat to Dublin hoping to sniff him out. Suspicion quickly falls on Paul Faber (Raymond Lovell), a shady-looking lawyer.
Captain Grant secures a job in Faber’s offices posing as a down-and-out military man who (as the story he’s created for himself goes) has secretly gone AWOL. When Faber learns of this he blackmails Grant into doing some illegal business for him. This includes marrying Marion (Muriel Pavlow) an Austrian desperate to become a British citizen.
It is full of fun cloak-and-dagger stuff including a wonderful finale at a grand gothic, cliff-side mansion and an underground cavern. None of it is groundbreaking stuff, but it is very well-made and quite entertaining.
I was cleaning up my office and found a bunch of old ticket stubs (both concert and theater productions). This isn’t everything I’ve seen, of course, just a really random selection. I don’t know if anybody is interested in this, but I wanted to scan them and decided to share them anyway.
Click here if you want to see them. Man, they do bring back memories for me. Kind of makes me sad that so many concerts don’t really give you physical tickets anymore.
On a remote island off the coast of Ireland, a man is found dead with his bones missing. He’s all squishy flesh. The film’s budget doesn’t allow us to see much of that but what we get – a rubbery, flabby face – is pretty great. Constable John (Sam Kydd) calls the island’s physician Dr. Reginald Landers (Eddie Byrne) but his skills are limited and after an autopsy doesn’t pull up much in terms of answers he scurries to London to discuss the matter with imminent pathologist Dr. Brian Stanley (Peter Cushing), who in turn calls on bone specialist Dr. David West (Edward Judd). He’s busy with his lady friend Toni Merrill (Carole Gray) who as luck would have it happens to have access to a helicopter that can take them to the island straight away (although it must return to London immediately after thus stranding them on the island for a few days.
After learning that a cancer specialist had set up shop on the island they go to visit him hoping to gain his help as well, but find him dead and boneless like the other guy. His lab assistants are all squishy as well. But the dude had a really nice lab which allows our heroes to do some nice science-y stuff. They do some autopsies and look at things under a microscope and say a lot of words that don’t make much sense even if you have a medical degree.
Eventually, they find the monsters. They look like slimy Jell-O molds with tentacles. They are impossible to kill and use the tentacle to inject their victims with bone-dissolving liquid. Our guys chop them with an axe, shoot them with rifles, torch them with Molotov cocktails, and even throw dynamite at them, but like I say those creatures are indestructible.
To keep the rest of the islanders safe they lock them all into one room which only causes mass panic when the lights go out. Meanwhile, these brilliant scientists finally decide that they should inject some cows with some radioactive fluid (I told you that the cancer guy had a well-stocked lab) figuring that the monster will eat the cows and then die of radioactive poisoning.
All of this is taken absolutely seriously by our actors and filmmakers. I love these old British horror films from the 1960s. They are so full of absolute silliness with ridiculous plots and poorly built monsters, but the actors perform like they are doing Shakespeare (and no doubt many of them are trained Shakespearean actors). It is wonderful. Just wonderful.
Bob Dylan just announced the release of a new live album, The Complete Budokan 1978 which includes two complete shows (February 28 & March 01) from newly remixed and remastered 24-Channel Analog Tapes.
You can read the full press release here and listen to “The Man In Me” from this set here.
I’m a big fan of Bob in 1978 and especially the Asian tour, so I’m very excited to finally hear these shows in pristine quality. I just dug out my audience recordings of those two gigs just to get me pumped up for its November release date.
My tendency with this theme is to look to the past, to choose very old movies. I don’t know why exactly that is, beyond the fact that I just like old movies. But there is something about older English films that just feel British, more than modern ones do. But of course, Britain still has a large and lively film industry. So I did want to watch some modern British films in this series as well.
I more or less picked Slaughterhouse Rulez at random. I’d never heard of it before finding it on my streaming service. But it stars Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Michael Sheen (who I’ve very recently been thoroughly enjoying in the new season of Good Omens) and I’m always on board with those guys.
I want to say that it is like Harry Potter but without magic and with more monsters, but I don’t know if that’s fair. I mean it is like Harry Potter in that it is about a bunch of kids at a posh boarding school and there are things like houses and head boys, but I don’t know that this concept is exclusive to Harry Potter. Rather it feels very much a part of British culture.
Anyway, Finn Cole plays Donal Wallace, a working-class boy whose mother has found a way to get him into Slaughterhouse School, an exclusive boarding school. At first, he feels out of place since everyone seems to know each other and other are lots of strange rules, but he quickly makes a few friends, a few enemies and meets a pretty girl (Hermione Corfield).
But before it becomes a British John Hughes-style dramedy, some nasty creatures start killing people off. They seem to be coming from a giant sinkhole that was created by a fracking company working on school grounds (and sanctioned by the Headmaster (Michael Sheen)).
It is a perfectly enjoyable little horror comedy, that never really quite scares or makes me truly laugh. It is the type of film that after watching I said to myself, “that was nice” and then moved on to something else. There is a touch of political commentary with the fracking stuff, but it never goes very far with it.
Simon Pegg is one of the school professors who is rather preoccupied with his wife (played by Margot Robbie for some reason) who recently left him to work in some overseas, war-torn country.
Nick Frost is a former student who now heads a guerilla group in opposition to the fracking company who also sells drugs on the side.
It is funny, just not overly so, and the horror is well done, just not exactly terrifying. It is worth watching if you like that sort of thing, just keep your expectations manageable.
I’m obviously a fan of Hammer Studios’ horror productions of the 1950s and 1960s as I’ve talked about them numerous times on these pages. I’ve also talked about how my wife doesn’t like horror films and that I usually watch them without her. She does like Hammer Horror as they usually aren’t too scary or gorey and so when my daughter is away I’ll sometimes throw one of their films on.
So it was with Quatermass and the Pit. My wife was actually busy doing something else when I put it on, but when I hollered down to her that I was watching a Hammer movie she came right up. Quatermass and the Pit is actually the third film in a loose trilogy. The first film The Quatermass XPeriment came out in 1955, Quatermass 2 followed in 1957 and then this third film came out in 1967. I’ve seen the other two but I couldn’t for the life of me tell you anything about them now. This isn’t to say that they were bad, but perhaps they just weren’t all that memorable.
All three films follow Professor Quatermass (played by Brian Donlevy in the first two films, and Andrew Keir in this one) a brilliant scientist who keeps finding himself involved in strange occurrences and alien invasions.
Quatermass and the Pit begins with some scientists down inside a London Tube station. Some construction workers had been digging out a new tunnel and came across some strange ape/man-looking skeletons. After some more digging, they come across a smooth, roundish object. Fearing it is a leftover Nazi bomb they call in the military. A little more digging shows it to actually be some kind of alien ship.
That’s when Quatermass is called in. There is a lot of silly sci-fi nonsense that comes after and the inevitable clashes between science and the military. The Quatermass films always remind me a bit of Jon Pertwee-era Doctor Who in that he’s this brilliant scientist who is amazed at new discoveries and alien lifeforms, and he winds up butting heads with military forces that just want to shoot things and blow them up.
The whole thing is a bit ridiculous and wonderful in the way science fiction films often were in the 1950s. The fact that this was made in the late 1960s makes it somehow even more awesome.
I watched 47 movies in August, 38 of which were new to me. Thirty of those were made before I was born. There was no real theme this month, although I did periodically try to watch a new to me movie made in my lifetime and I watched those in chronological order.
I spent a week at my in-laws and so I mostly watched movies I knew they would enjoy, which means movies that I’ve seen before and loved, or films I knew wouldn’t offend anybody.
I watched a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s silent film The Lodger. It starred Laird Cregar as the Jack the Ripper-esque killer and George Sanders as the inspector. It was pretty good.
I also watched two adaptations of Daniel Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon that did not star Humphrey Bogart. They were both pretty good too, but not nearly as good as the Bogart version.
I watched an adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s incredible novel The Handmaid’s Tale that was recently adapted into a very good TV series (at least the first season is great, I haven’t seen the others). The movie is from 1990 and it is weird.
All in all a very good month.
My favorite films were Red River, The Warriors, Roadhouse (yes the one with Patrick Swayze – it’s terrifically fun 1980s cheese), and The Wonderful Country.
Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Allred entered my top five actors of the year list with six films both to their names. All of their films are from classic Doctor Who episodes. Apparently, I’ve been watching a lot of their era stories. Peter Foster punched his way into my director’s list with four films watched. All of those were from the Mr. Motto series with Peter Lorre.
Here’s the full list.
An Inspector Calls (1954)
Lady of Burlesque (1943)
The Warriors (1979)
The Man with Two Faces (1934)
Night Key (1937)
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir 1947
The Clouded Yellow (1950)
Maggie Moore(s) 2023
Mr. Moto Takes a Chance (1938)
The Third Secret (1964)
The Raven 1963
Doctor Who: The Curse of Fenric (1989)
The Scorpion with Two Tails 1982
The Stuff (1985)
Satan Met a Lady (1936)
Whirlpool 1950
The Maltese Falcon (1931)
The Handmaid’s Tale 1990
Cobra Woman (1944)
Bitter Moon (1992)
The Breakfast Club 1985
Jungle Fever (1991)
Blue Steel 1990
Road House 1989
Slaxx (2020)
Grabbers (2012)
The Doll of Satan (1969)
The Lodger 1944
Strangers in the House 1942
A Study in Scarlet (1933)
My Darling Clementine (1946)
The Birds (1963)
The Guns of Navarone 1961
Two Rode Together 1961
The Wonderful Country (1959)
The Lusty Men (1952)
Bigger Than Life (1956)
Born to Be Bad (1950)
Lonely Are the Brave (1962)
Ocean’s Eleven (1960)
Appointment with Death (1988)
House of Usher (1960)
Doctor Who: Ghost Light (1989)
Popcorn (1989)
Conan the Barbarian (1982)
Red River (1948)
Jamaica Inn (1939)
The Birlings, an upper-class English family sit down to dinner. They are celebrating the engagement of the daughter Sheila (Eileen Moore) to Gerald (Brian Worth) a young man of good stock with great prospects. The father Mr. Birling (Arthur Young) a man of some standing in the community is ever so pleased with this match. The prim and proper Mrs. Birling (Olga Lindo) who dedicates her time as head of a charity organization designed to help destitute young women, is also pleased. Even young Eric (Bryan Forbest) who perhaps drinks too much and is not yet ready to become a serious young man, is happy for his sister.
Into this scene of merriment enters Inspector Poole (Alastair Sim) who tells the family a tale of a young woman, Eva Smith (Jane Wenham) who just that night swallowed some poison and died an excruciating death.
As the family begins to wonder what all that has to do with them the Inspector begins to question them one by one and as it turns out each of them knows the young girl independently of the other. And each of them ultimately treated her quite poorly due to her class and station in life.
Mr. and Mrs. Birling stand by the idea that they did nothing wrong. They treated a woman of her class and station as she should be treated. He fired her for demanding a raise, she denied her charity because she was too uppity and should be able to find means elsewhere.
But the younger people, Eric and Sheila become appalled by their (and their parents) behavior. They treated the poor girl terribly and could therefore be seen as responsible for her death.
In the middle of this is the Inspector. He is from the lower classes which puts him beneath the Birlings in social standings, but as an inspector, he is granted certain powers. He is allowed to question the family but is expected not to push. When he does they push back.
Alastair Sim is magnificent. You can tell the actor was having a glorious time and we do too, just watching him. He seems to know the answers to all of his questions before he asks them, but he wants the Birlings to answer them anyway. He wants them to understand how their behavior affected the young woman (and will continue to affect others.). He pushes just far enough to get their cackles up, but not enough to have them throw him out (or to call his superiors.). A sly little grin periodically appears on his face showing how much he’s enjoying himself.
It is a wonderful little film. As an American class distinctions of the type they have in England are fascinating to me. I love films like this that dig into those social standings and play with them.
I highly recommend seeking it out and watching.
themidnightcafe.org 