Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)

Nora's Nite

Writer-Director Robert Hamer (1911 - 1963)

Whenever anyone who knew Robert Hamer writes about him, they paint a portrait of a doomed figure whose early promise was cut short. He shares this quality with many of the characters in his work. Yet, with less than a dozen films to his credit, he still managed to achieve more than most of his contemporaries.

He was born in Kidderminster. His schooldays were successful and he gained a scholarship to Cambridge. He seemed set for great things but he was suspended for homosexual activities and his academic career never recovered. After graduation he started in the film industry as a clapper-boy at Gaumont.

He worked his way up through the ranks and by 1940 he was an editor at Ealing and also making script contributions. He was also married to aspiring actress Joan Holt. His big break as a director came with the Haunted Mirror section of Dead of Night. His next two films also starred Googie Withers but it was his fourth for which he will best be remembered: Kind Hearts and Coronets.

Despite his success, his gloomy world view was at odds with that of boss Michael Balcon and he found it difficult to come up with acceptable projects at Ealing. Outside Ealing things were worse as the 50s industry stopped taking risks and turned bland. Hamer's drinking, always a problem, got worse and his marriage disintegrated. His alcoholism finished him off in 1963 shortly after he got the push from writing additional dialogue for 55 Days at Peking.

With his first five films, Hamer created a stylish reflection of post-war disillusionment. The films he made after, though lesser works, usually have moments which make them worth watching.

Britmovie.com on Hamer:

Hamer was the son of British character actor Gerald Hamer and educated at Cambridge University. He worked as an editor at London Films during the 1930's on films including Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn (1939). He joined Ealing Studios in 1940, first as an editor, then producer, writer, and from 1945, director. Hamer made an uncredited co-directorial debut on San Demetrio, London (1943) and Fiddlers Three (1944), before shooting the "Haunted Mirror" sequence in the portmanteau chiller Dead of Night (1945). His first feature-length assignment was the Googie Withers femme-fatale drama Pink String and Sealing Wax (1946).

For several years, Hamer's career soared, thanks largely to his quartet of films with Alec Guinness; superior black-comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), Father Brown (1954), the weak comedy To Paris with Love (1955) and impenetrable Daphne Du Maurier adaptation The Scapegoat (1959). After Ealing, and affected by alcoholism, Hamer directed two films of note, the John Mills film-noir The Long Memory (1952) and comedy classic School for Scoundrels (1960).

Britishpictures.com: Joan Greenwood (1921 - 1987)

It was the voice that set her apart. Husky, plummy, sexy. It cut through her essential gentility and made her seem like a woman of the world even when she was playing it innocent. In one of the most memorable cinema quotes, Karel Reisz described her speaking her lines "as if she dimly suspected some hidden menace in them which she can't quite identify".

She was born in London and went to RADA and then did some theatre. In her first films she usually played children and it wasn't until Latin Quarter that she got her first star role. Shortly after, she signed a Rank contract. Her parts improved but it was Whisky Galore and Kind Hearts and Coronets for Ealing that really put her on the map. Her sexy ingénue in The Man in the White Suit was equally memorable.

Her Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest is the definitive portrayal. Unlike other actresses of the period who made films but preferred theatre, she never gave the impression that she was slumming. She made a couple of films in Hollywood and then retreated to the stage. Marriage in 1959 (to Andre Morell) and children meant that she worked less though she did manage to appear in The Mysterious Island battling against giant crabs and wasps. She also got another good role in Tom Jones.

Her career petered out in small roles in bad films. She turned up on TV in the sea-going soap Triangle as the passenger who never got off the ferry. Triangle was a low point in many people's careers but she was watchable. She was the mad landlady in the sitcom Girls on Top and looked set for a long career playing old bats, but she died after a fall at home. Before she died she left one great performance as Mrs Clennam in the two-part version of Little Dorrit.

With glowing skin and cheek-bones to die for, she photographed beautifully. Unlike many beautiful actresses, she could deliver wonderful performances. She was mannered, but that never seemed to matter since she chose roles for which her style was appropriate. On the rare occasions she chose a realistic role (The October Man) she showed that she could cope well with its demands.

For more see our July 2004 post on The Man in the White Suit also starring Guiness and Greenwood.

Fame (1980)

Pamela's Nite

Pickpocket (1959)

Stuart's Nite

Cérémonie, La (1995)

Peter's Nite
Dinner: Salads from Lalas

Images Journal on Chabrol:

Yet if Chabrol is apparently tabloid in theme, his style has frequently been sophisticated and languorous -- a slow burn examination of his characters' lives with a rapt, patient camera. Consequently, place is of immense importance. Britanny, Massif Central, the Loire Valley, out of season St. Tropez: many a region, small town or village has been focused upon, not simply utilized. In maybe his finest film, Le Boucher, Chabrol gives an onscreen credit to the Perigaud valley villagers who give the film so much of its atmosphere.

Even Chabrol's houses are memorable and significant. The stretched, low slung and vaguely Americanized abode in La Femme Infidèle; the minor chateaus of Wedding in Blood and La Cérémonie, each isolated and aloof; the marvelous convivial country house in the early stages of Un Partie du Plaisir, and the nouveau riche home of the garage owner in The Beast Must Die all indicate characters inextricably linked to the place in which they live. A man's home is almost literally, in Chabrol, his castle, and it is equally true that the castle is the man.

Lest we are in any doubt, watch how Chabrol subjectifies the camera even when not utilising point of view. In La Cérémonie, for example, where swift, darting camera pans have all the admiring envy of a petty bourgeois social climber. When a character finally passes comment upon the property, its pleonastic: the camera's already done all the work for us. However, the repetition suggests the depth of envy. If the camera indicates a keen interest, the words of the lowly postal clerk Jeanne give the film a murderous intent. "A la la ... now there's class for you," she says on seeing the Lelièvres' family home. Teamed with the family's maid, Sophie, Jeanne's powder-keg character awaits the fuse of indignation and finds it when Sophie's sacked by this haute bourgeois family. Jeanne returns one evening to the chateau with Sophie, apparently to pick up Sophie's things. They quietly make hot chocolate while the family obliviously watches Don Giovanni in the study. Then we watch as the pair of them creep up the stairs, pour hot chocolate over the master bed, and rip the wife's clothes to shreds.

Ehe der Maria Braun, Die (1979)

Stuart's Nite

Fassbinder Foundation bio:
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (May 31, 1945 - June 10, 1982) was born into a cultured bourgeois family in the small Bavarian spa town Bad Wörishofen. Raised by his mother as an only child, the boy had only sporadic contact with his father, a doctor, after the divorce of his parents when he was five. Educated at a Rudolf Steiner elementary school and subsequently in Munich and Augsburg, the city of Bert Brecht, he left school before passing any final examinations. A cinema addict ("five times a week, often three films a day") from a very early age, not least because his mother needed peace and quiet for her work as a translator, "the cinema was the family life I never had at home."

Fassbinder made his first short films at the age of twenty, persuading a male lover to finance them in exchange for leading roles. He also applied for a place at the Berlin Film School (dffb), but was refused.

Only after these amateur directing-scripting-acting efforts did ­Fass­binder take lessons with a professional acting studio, where he met Hanna Schygulla, his most important actress, who thanks to him became an international star. It was through Schygulla that Fassbinder turned his interest to the theatre.

In 1967 Fassbinder joined the Munich action-theater. He directed, acted in, and adapted anti-establishment plays for a tightly knit group of young professionals, among them Peer Raben and Kurt Raab, who along with Schygulla and Hermann, became the most important members of his cinematic stock company. Jean-Marie Straub directed the action-theater in an eight-minute version of Bruckner's Krankheit der Jugend , using part of this stage pro­duction in his short film DER BRÄUTIGAM, DIE KOMÖDIANTIN UND DER ZUHÄLTER (1968), with Fassbinder as the pimp. In 1968 Fassbinder directed the first play written by himself, Katzelmacher , a twenty-minute highly choreographed encounter between Bavarian villagers and a foreign worker from Greece, who with scarcely a word of German, becomes the object of intense racial, sexual, and political hatred among the men, while exerting a strangely troubling fascination on the women. A few weeks later, in May 1968, the Action theater was disbanded after its theatre was wrecked by one of its founders, jealous of Fassbinder's growing power within the group. It promptly reformed under Fassbinder's command as the antiteater, which pursued an equally radical and frequently provocative production policy.

By 1976 Fassbinder had become an international star. Prizes at major film festivals, premieres and retrospectives in Paris, New York, Los Angeles, and a first critical study on his work appearing in London had made him a familiar name among cinephiles and campus audiences the world over. He rented a house in Paris and could be seen in gay bars in New York, earning him cult hero status but also a controversial reputation in and out of his films. Art house circuits avidly took up his films: because he had so many to his credit by the time he was 'discovered' with FEAR EATS THE SOUL, the rerelease of his earlier films, together with the steady stream of new work, made his extraordinary productivity seem even more phenomenal.

His flamboyant and at the same time seedy life-style, his openly displayed and well advertised homosexuality, and at the same time life and love to women, the scandals, public outrages and bouts of self-pity ensured that in Germany itself Fassbinder was permanently in the news, making calculatedly provocative remarks in interviews, which nonetheless were usually shrewd and to the point. His work often received mixed notices from the national critics, many of whom only began to take Fassbinder seriously after the foreign press had hailed him as a genius.

In 1972 Fassbinder began his collaboration with a highly experienced and successful producer at West Germany's most prestigious television network, Peter Märtesheimer of WDR. Under Märtesheimer's influence, Fassbinder turned with even more determination to recognizably German subject matter. Together they made, among others, the television series EIGHT HOURS DO NOT MAKE A DAY, and in 1978 cowrote THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN , Fassbinder's commercially most profitable film and the first in his post-war German trilogy (the other two were LOLA and VERONIKA VOSS). For many foreign critics, his crowning achievement was the 14-part television adaptation of Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz , much maligned by the domestic press. Although for VERONIKA VOSS Fassbinder received the Golden Bear at the 1982 Berlin Film Festival, a much-coveted Oscar nomination eluded him. As had often been noted, Fassbinder was the engine and motor (the "heart" in Wolfram Schütte's words) of the New German Cinema. His sudden death from a vicious combination of drugs and sleeping pills in June 1982 symbolically marked the end of the most exciting and experimental period the German cinema had known since the 1920s.

The Commitments (1991)

Pamela's Nite

Roddy Doyle (1958-) via The Guardian

"I still live in the same neighbourhood where I grew up, and I still have to face the milkman and the neighbours if they don't like what I write. "
Birthplace
Dublin, Ireland

Education
University College, Dublin

Other jobs
He was originally a teacher in his old school; his students were the inspiration for his self-published first novel, The Commitments. He didn't give up teaching until the day Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha came out.

Did you know?
He swears that his first novel, the promisingly titled Your Granny Was a Hunger Striker, will never see the light of day.

Critical verdict
Critically and popularly acclaimed for his Barrytown trilogy, a Booker Prize for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (he had already been shortlisted for The Van) drew some anti-populist sneers - and sold more copies than any other winner. Doyle was the Dublin northsider's pride and joy, until a brutally frank film about domestic abuse (Family, later developed on page as the extraordinary The Woman who Walked into Doors) was seen as over-dramatised betrayal.
Recommended works
Doyle's greatest portrayals of dignity in degradation are Jimmy Rabbitte coping with unemployment in The Van and alcoholic, abused Paula, Doyle's only first-person narrator, in The Woman who Walked into Doors.

Influences
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha pays homage to Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (compare the opening lines).

Now read on
Frank McCourt; Patrick McCabe

Adaptations
The Barrytown trilogy has been committed to celluloid; first was The Commitments (dir. Alan Parker), adapted by the duo behind 70s comedy Porridge and The Likely Lads as an exuberant musical with a simple storyline and plenty of jokes. Stephen Frears directed The Snapper and The Van, with screenplays by Doyle; the mood is more bittersweet and understated, but retains the authenticity of the books. Doyle has also written two plays, War (1989), about a pub quiz, and Brownbread (1993), in which a bishop is kidnapped.

49th Parallel (1941)

Stuart's Nite

Screenonline:
For their third collaboration, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were engaged by the Ministry of Information to make a propaganda film. 49th Parallel (1941; The Invaders in the US), was a concerted attempt to influence opinion in neutral America into supporting their government's entry into the war.

Pressburger proved an enthusiastic propagandist. As he later said, "Goebbels considered himself an expert on propaganda, but I thought I'd show him a thing or two." This is despite the fact that Pressburger's own status in Britain at the time was as an 'enemy alien'. On returning from Canada he found himself imprisoned and threatened with deportation, until Powell and the MOI intervened.

Pressburger's script, which won him an Academy Award for Best Original Story, charts the progress of a German U-boat crew stranded in Canada after the sinking of their craft off Hudson Bay. As the six crew members, led by the unflappable Corporal Hirth (Eric Portman), struggle to reach the neutral territory of the United States, they encounter a series of opponents, who serve to contrast Canada's democracy and ethnic diversity with the Nazis' moral bankruptcy.

The ruthless Hirth is a far cry from the more sympathetically portrayed German officer played by Conrad Veidt in Powell and Pressburger's earlier Spy in Black (1939). Unburdened by doubts in himself or in his philosophy, he has no patience with weakness or sensitivity. But his arrogance is his undoing, for he repeatedly underestimates his opponents. The other Nazis each have their own distinct characters, and there is even a 'good Nazi', which attracted some criticism at the time.

German actress Elisabeth Bergner, the only woman in a leading role, jumped ship after shooting a few scenes in Canada; it became clear she had only signed on to get to America. Fortunately, she was very effectively replaced by the unknown Glynis Johns. Two other stars, Laurence Olivier and Raymond Massey, almost pulled out, and the MOI threatened to pull the plug due to budget overspend. When Hollywood giants David O. Selznick and Samuel Goldwyn showed an interest, however, J. Arthur Rank stepped in and provided the rest of the money. He - and the Treasury - made their money back comfortably: a success at home, the film became the biggest British hit to date in American cinemas.

49th Parallel was the first of two collaborations between Powell and Pressburger and the already highly regarded editor David Lean.

The Servant (1963)

Peter's Nite

Caroline Millar via Screenonline:
The opening sequence of stark, leafless trees outlined against a cold English sky suggests the clinical austerity of 1960s Britain and hints at the cold manipulations that follow. The first shot of Barrett, leaving Thomas Crapper Sanitary Engineers (presumably his previous workplace), slyly insinuates the theme of the film as the 'flushing away' of the old order. His clipped appearance and punctuality tells us he means business, while the first shot of Tony (a 'businessman') finds him vulnerable, asleep in a chair.

The drama revolves around issues of both class and gender, and the relationship between the two. While Barrett slowly insinuates himself in the house and manipulates his master by slyly rearranging the decor, it is through sex (in the shape of his alluring and sexually permissive 'sister', Vera (Sarah Miles)) that he finally brings about Tony's downfall. The calculating allure of Vera, in contrast to the stuffy, over-bred Susan (Wendy Craig), cuts through the class barriers and brings Tony down to the same level as his servant. Soon the boundaries between master and servant break down, as Tony succumbs to the will of his stronger adversary.

Belonging to an era of filmmaking which for the first time dealt explicitly with issues never before seen on screen, The Servant (in common with many of the contemporary British New Wave) is also artistically ambitious. Several scenes (particularly those between Tony, Barrett and Susan) are seen through the distortion of the big, round, convex mirror which sits on the living room wall, reflecting the unnatural, misformed relationships between the people in the room. Each shot is directed with precision, often framing Susan or Vera between Tony and Barrett, or positioning one of the two men close to the camera while his rival lingers in the background.

Tom Sutpen via brightlights:
Although Pinter was a contemporary of John Osborne and Arnold Wesker — and was often cited as an essential figure in the “Angry Young Man” school of British theater those men had largely forged — his work resembled theirs only superficially. While Osborne’s plays, for example, couldn’t have been more direct about their social concerns, Pinter’s were obscure to the point of abstraction. If he was “angry” about anything, it was impossible to determine what he was angry about. His work was simply never concerned with the larger issues of society, and the only politics he routinely confronted were those in the language of human interaction, He was endlessly preoccupied with the treacheries inherent in the most time-worn relations. In fact, it was the only theme he returned to again and again: the subtle determination of some to undermine and destroy one another while maintaining a façade of order and civility. In this respect, his screenplay for The Servant is one of his greatest works, the equal of anything he wrote for the stage. With his devastating economy of dialogue and explication, he unblinkingly chronicles the savage destruction of one man’s will at the hands of another; not the half-bright social parable of some critics’ dreams. This, and not a barely existent subtext, is what makes The Servant such a disturbing film.

Viewers and critics who sought to drown The Servant in sociopolitical syrup were avoiding the obvious. There is something indeed tragic about the decline of this upper-class twit that failed to register with more class-conscious critics. In the final sequence, when Susan sees for herself the sodden, hopeless laudanum freak Tony has become, and flees from what she suddenly realizes was always Barrett’s house, she clings to a tree and weeps uncontrollably. And along with her, we can’t help but feel that, despite Tony’s basic lack of character, something has been irretrievably lost. But anyone who imagined that some fundamental reversal had taken place between Barrett and Tony at the end needed glasses. Barrett is no more the “working-class hero” of The Servant than Tony is. Though Barrett has laid waste to Tony’s will more thoroughly than if he'd murdered him, he’s still the man’s servant. He continues to cook the meals, fix the drinks, answer the doorbell, lock up at night. He has attained an enduring power over Tony, and can now indulge himself with the impunity of a Tiberius. But it is a limited power. A power achieved only by performing his duties, by pleasing his employer.

The Rainmaker (1956)

Pamela's Nite

Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)

Nora's Nite

Hud (1963)

Pamela's Nite
Salad, Awesome HOMEMADE PASTA! Fantastic brownies, Spectacular lemon bars.
Nora's interest in doors continues strong.

"Low Key Legend" Seattle International Film Festival tribute to James Wong Howe:

Born Wong Tung Jim in Canton, China, Howe immigrated to America with his family when he was five, to Pasco, Washington to be exact. As a teenager he ventured south to Los Angeles with dreams of becoming a professional boxer. He turned instead, in 1917, to a career in motion pictures, and was first-cameraman within a few years.

He was an artist, and an incomparable one, but he brooked no self-display, no phony self-consciousness. Although sufficiently enamored of low-key lighting to earn the industry nickname "Low Key Howe," he believed that the camerawork should serve the reality of the imaginative situation called up by the story. He strove to avoid "movie lighting," and hated having to deploy shadows all over the place in The Thin Man. Director Woody Van Dyke thought that the more shadows, the more the audience would recognize it was a mystery movie. Howe thought that the more shadows, the more you knew the setup was artificial, a movie scene, not a real room with a logical, dominant light source--or a canyon wall lit only by the sun. (But he gave great shadow in The Thin Man. It was his job.)

He could shoot anything and get it right. He played around with zoom lenses thirty years before the rest of Hollywood became aware of them. Once, back in the pre-panchromatic silents, Howe figured out that a certain vacant-eyed actress would register better on film if he draped a black cloth behind his camera; the black reflected on the retinas of her pale gray eyes – and made her career, and his. You never knew what would work. Getting set to shoot a scene in a Western clearing (in Martin Ritt's Rashomon adaptation, The Outrage), he saw that some rocks were going to throw off sun glare and distract from the actors. Howe pulled out a handy spray can of black paint (always kept a can of black paint in his box), and the rocks didn't glare anymore.

Howe's granddaughter remembers via MovieMaker Magazine:

For young Wong Tung Jim, those early years in America were not happy ones. He was a constant subject of ridicule because of his Chinese heritage. Jimmie would take candy from his father's store to bribe the neighborhood children into playing with him. Prejudice would follow him throughout his life and career; although, ironically, his ethnicity distinguished him from other cinematographers and played a role in making him one of the best-known practitioners of his craft in the world.

James Wong Howe was around 12 years old when he bought a little Brownie camera in a drugstore. He took pictures of his brothers and sisters, even though his father was an old-fashioned Chinese who was superstitious about having his photo taken. When he had the film developed, their heads were missing! This wasn't because of some angry spirit lurking nearby, but due to the fact that his camera had no viewfinder. Just the same, Jimmie's father was very displeased with the results, to say the least.

Several years passed, and Jimmie left for Oregon to take up boxing. This had no lasting appeal for him. Eventually he became a delivery boy for a commercial photographer in Los Angeles, but was dismissed when he helped a friend who was going back to China by doing some passport photos in the firm's laboratory.

Jimmie next took a job as a busboy at the Beverly Hills Hotel. On Sundays he would go to Chinatown to watch a comedy being shot. He spoke to the cameraman, who suggested to Jimmie that he try working in the movies. Shortly thereafter, Jimmie went to the Jesse Lasky Studios, but the man in charge of photography told him that he was too small and frail to carry the equipment. Instead he hired Jimmie to pick up scraps of nitrate stock from the cutting-room floor for 10 dollars a week. In his spare moments, he became familiar with the hand-cranked cameras, the lighting equipment and the film-laboratory processes.

Jimmie's break came in 1919 on the Cecile B. DeMille film Male and Female. The crew was shooting a scene in which Gloria Swanson was to be attacked by a toothless lion. The sequence required multiple cameras, and there were not enough assistants. Jimmie was called from the camera room and given the slate. He was dubbed the fourth assistant cameraman. Before long, Jimmie endeared himself to DeMille. The legendary director had encountered a major production problem: he needed a close-up of a canary singing, and the crew tried everything to get the bird to sing, but to no avail. Jimmie asked if he could try. He took a piece of chewing gum and lodged it in the canary's beak. The bird moved its beak in an attempt to dislodge the gum, and on silent film it looked like it was singing. DeMille was impressed and raised Jimmie's salary to 15 dollars a week.

The Fallen Idol (1948)

Peter's Nite
Beef, green beans a la Nora, Home baked cookies

Deirdre Feehan on Carol Reed via Senses of Cinema:
Born December 30, 1906 in London, British director Sir Carol Reed was the second son of the actor Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and his mistress May Pinney. Following a public school education, Reed made his theatrical debut in 1924. He joined Edgar Wallace's troupe and acted in several plays, later overseeing film adaptations of Wallace's plays by Basil Dean's Associated Talking Pictures. (1) Between 1932 and 1934, Reed worked for Associated Talking Pictures, first as a dialogue director, then later as a second-unit director and an assistant director. (2) With Robert Wyler, he co-directed It Happened in Paris (1935), a comedy based on a French play. Reed's directorial debut came with Midshipman Easy (1935), a historical romance that marked his first foray into novel-to-film adaptations.

He began his directing career as the British film industry blossomed under producers Sir Alexander Korda, Basil Dean, J. Arthur Rank and Edward Black. Reed's first successes, Midshipman Easy (1935) and Laburnum Grove (1936), were produced by Basil Dean and scripted by Anthony Kimmins from popular novels, respectively, Marryat's Mr. Midshipman Easy and J.P. Priestley's Laburnum Grove. Reed collaborated with Anthony Kimmins on the story and the screenplay for Talk of the Devil (1937). Kimmins scripted four of Reed's first five films, bringing his own directing expertise to Reed's productions.

Collaboration marks Reed's most successful films as he himself claimed. (3) He worked not only with the same writers (Kimmins, Eric Ambler, Graham Greene) but often with the same art directors (Victor Korda, Vetchinsky), cinematographer (Robert Krasker) and editor (R.E. Dearing). Reed served as his own producer during the 1940s and 1950s, only relinquishing control after the flop, The Agony and the Ecstasy, in 1965.

Screenonline on Carol Reed:

Carol Reed was born in Putney, south London, on 30 December 1906, one of six children of the actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and his mistress, Beatrice Mae Pinney. Tree, who was respectably married, supported his second household substantially. Reed grew up in solid middle-class comfort, and was sent to a traditional public school, King's School, Canterbury, which he loathed. He planned to follow his father and become an actor, but in 1922 his mother, hoping to deflect this ambition, sent him to Massachusetts to join his elder brother on a chicken farm. Having neither taste nor aptitude for farming, Reed was back in England within six months. His mother gave way, and he joined a company headed by Dame Sybil Thorndike, making his stage debut in 1924.

Edgar Wallace, the alarmingly prolific thriller writer, had formed a troupe to put on stage adaptations of his novels. Reed joined him and appeared in three Wallace productions, doubling as assistant stage manager. When Wallace accepted the chairmanship of the newly formed British Lion Film Corporation in 1927, Reed became his personal assistant, helping to supervise filmed adaptations of Wallace's thrillers during the day while still acting and stage managing in the evenings. This hectic double life continued until Wallace died of pneumonia in 1932. Abandoning the stage for good, Reed moved to Ealing Studios as dialogue director for Associated Talking Pictures, then being run by Basil Dean.

At Ealing Reed swiftly worked his way up from dialogue director to assistant director. His first experience of directing was on It Happened in Paris (1935), a comedy directed by Robert Wyler (William Wyler's elder brother) to which Reed contributed additional footage. The following year he directed his first solo film, Midshipman Easy, adapted from Captain Marryat's Victorian adventure novel. Graham Greene, writing in The Spectator, felt that Reed showed "more sense of the cinema than most veteran British directors". Greene was even more taken by Reed's next film, Laburnum Grove (1936), adapted from a stage comedy by J.B. Priestley. "Here at last is an English film one can unreservedly praise," he wrote with an almost audible sigh of relief; both films, he went on, were "thoroughly workmanlike and unpretentious, with just the hint of a personal manner which makes one believe that Mr Reed, when he gets the right script, will prove far more than efficient".

BFI on The Fallen Idol:

This is the great London film of a director celebrated for his atmospheric evocation of cities such as Belfast, Berlin, and Vienna – urban labyrinths in which secrets lurk around every corner. Shot by the great French cinematographer Georges Périnal, it vividly captures the city's sunlit squares and shadowy night-time streets, as well as the cold, cavernous interiors of the embassy residence.

The critics of the time, wearied by "a flood of second rate sagas", greeted The Fallen Idol with relief, bestowing particular praise on the amazingly natural performance of Bobby Henrey (acclaimed by The Sunday Chronicle as "the greatest Kid since Coogan") and Richardson’s beautifully understated interpretation of his role. Looking back today, the film is also notable for a wickedly funny cameo from Dora Bryan (in just her second film appearance) as the tart with a heart who encounters the runaway Felipe in a police station.

Graham Greene's script, adapted from his novella 'The Basement Room' (1935) about a young boy who unwittingly betrays his friend to the police, was to win him an Oscar nomination as well as the award for Best Screenplay at Venice. Preferred by Greene to The Third Man (his next collaboration with Reed), The Fallen Idol is a work of exceptional psychological subtlety and an acute portrayal of the separate realities inhabited by adults and children, with their conflicting interpretations of the world around them.

DVD Savant goes behind the scenes:

If the stories of the filming of The Fallen Idol are to believed, the actors working with young Bobby Henrey are to be commended, for director Reed had to coax and tease a performance out of a boy simply unsuited for acting work. Henrey had the perfect look and manner -- the typical trained English child actor would have been useless -- but he also had a short attention span, became bored easily and wouldn't follow directions. According to assistant director Guy Hamilton, Bobby would burn up thousands of feet of film looking in the wrong direction or departing from character. Much of Henrey's performance is pasted together from bits of takes brilliantly edited to create a wonderful natural portrait of a charming child. Reed must have had an enormous respect for children to maintain the patience needed to get the film he needed.

New York Times encounters Graham Greene:

''A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious,'' the writer told a questioner in a rare and vivid appearance beyond the pages of his books. He told of cataloguing his dreams, searching for the tracks of a fresh character in fiction. ''Because I was psychoanalyzed when I was 16,'' he said, ''I have always been interested in dreams and the unconscious.'

A select audience of his readers were rapt in inquiring about evil and boredom, God and Communism and the ways of Mr. Greene's mind as he spoke in a private session at Georgetown University Monday night. ''The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about,'' he told another questioner, and Mr. Greene's gratitude and longing for this serendipitous trick seemed palpable in the dimness of Gaston Hall. ''At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.''

Yes, but how do you do it? The questions in the hourlong visit were variations of this basic inquiry into the labors of imagination.

''I generally have a character and the beginning of a story,'' Mr. Greene said, ''and the end of a story.'' A pause, a thin smile from the angular, white-haired man seated onstage in a blue suit worthy of his wartime days as an intelligence agent. ''And in between,'' he continued, ''the middle develops in a way I don't foresee.'' Yes, but how do you do it? ''When I was young, I wrote a book in nine months, like a childbirth,'' he said, looking back from his 82d year. With time, the process lengthened for him to three years, then 10 years, he said, sounding autumnal. ''Now there are long intervals before the idea for a new book comes. That's a very painful period.''

Part of his charm for the audience clearly was that sharp fragments of Graham Greene's reality reappear burnished in his fiction, most graphically in his movie scripts for ''The Third Man'' and ''Our Man in Havana.'' After all his talk of dreams and flight from boredom, he sounded like a proud laborer in describing how anger had worked just as well to settle esthetic struggles with Carol Reed, the movie director.

''The fighting would begin and I'd say, 'Oh for God's sake let's abandon the bloody thing,' and after that everything would go smoothly,'' Mr. Greene told his listeners, who departed after thankful applause, still wondering how he does it.

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973)

Stuart's Nite
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Tom Block on Pat Garrett & Bill the Kid via Highhat:

Despite a highly talkative (and rustically profane) script by Rudolph Wurlitzer, it’s a nearly plotless movie that — at its best — communicates its points indirectly, in shadowy bits of irony that constantly redouble on each other. It’s a film almost baroque in its unevenness, with the warring blood between Peckinpah and Wurlitzer, his producers and himself leading to sundry lapses of judgment and care: a main character who’s more Rorschach test than flesh and blood; a woozy, anxious turn by an untrained leading actor; pages of overripe dialogue; downright toxic performances from a cadre of supporting players; and a Bob Dylan score that often works against the grain of what’s happening up on the screen. To cap it all off Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid was never authoritatively “finished,” with the optimal available version — the so-called “director’s cut” — still falling miserably short of a fine cut and missing a key scene to boot. As problematic Westerns go, it makes The Searchers look like a cakewalk.

Rudolph Wurlitzer built his screenplay around the happily elastic fact that Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid knew each other in some capacity before Garrett became a lawman,* but it would take a major assist from Peckinpah for a story whose foregone conclusion is its very point to take on dramatic shape, and thus solve a problem that’s led so many directors of Christ-figure epics around by the nose.

The Stations of the Cross here are splayed out across a lunar New Mexican landscape, and consist of vignettes, most of them formed as parables or mood-poems, that often end in an act of violence that redirects the principals in some way, with each reorientation bringing the two men that much closer to their final meeting. If not for its bloodletting the movie might play more like opera bouffe than existential drama: Garrett spends his time resolutely avoiding Billy’s hideout, choosing instead to share a few words with seemingly every man, woman and child in Lincoln County before he’s finally moved to finish the job. In Pat Garrett’s world character is often revealed through inaction, leading to a movie about, in producer Gordon Carroll’s unbeatable description, “a man who doesn’t want to run … being pursued by a man who doesn’t want to catch him.”

Wurlitzer had sold the screenplay on the strength of his script for Two-Lane Blacktop, another existential scarecrow, but while his new Western was much admired, its two main characters didn’t come together until the climax. Recognizing that a more clearly defined conflict was needed, Peckinpah added the scene at the beginning in which Garrett visits the Kid at Fort Sumner and gives him five days to leave the territory. It’s a beautifully modulated exchange, rife with the undercurrents of a nettled friendship, as Garrett — mindful of the ear-shot proximity of Billy’s gang — tersely delivers his message to Billy, who, tenderly, and at times almost pathetically, tosses up reminders of their shared past.
Peckinpah also added the movie’s most inspired stroke, the stark black-and-white prologue set some 30 years in the future that shows Garrett being bushwhacked for reasons rooted in his dealings with the Kid. The sequence, completed in the editing room, is a marvel of implication, as first Billy and his gang, and then Garrett himself, are seen in 1881 firing a fusillade of bullets into the Garrett of 1909, bringing home how tightly woven the deterministic web is that binds the two men. The sequence’s visceral power comes from the interplay between the gang’s unwittingly callous by-play — “Damn near perfect” one of them opines as a slug tears out yet another chunk of the old man’s body — with the off-kilter angles and oddly-timed freeze-frames depriving Garrett of any of the majesty that graced Joel McCrea in his descent to the bottom of the frame in Ride the High Country. This brutal opening, one of Peckinpah’s finest set pieces outside of The Wild Bunch, puts its audience on instant notice that nothing pretty is coming its way.

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For more on 'Bloody Sam' see our MovieNite screening of Ride the High Country (1962).