Operation Mincemeat

2021, UK, directed by John Madden

A terrific (real-life) story that is rather let down by its treatment: there's an entirely unnecessary romantic subplot that detracts from the core tale, while there are at times overbearing music/montage sequences that seem to have come from a different film entirely. Stick to the book, or the 1956 film that covers the same ground.

The Sleeping Tiger

1954, UK, directed by Joseph Losey (under the pseudonym Victor Hanbury)

As so often, a viewing choice inspired by David Cairns, this is an enjoyably ripe melodrama, over-stuffed with plot and challenges to logic, but Dirk Bogarde does good sleaze, Losey directs with great energy, and the climax has a nice bit of visual poetry to it.

The Million Pound Note

1954, UK, directed by Ronald Neame

Something of an Ealing knockoff, this is a generally charming fable about the chaotic consequences of a bet/social experiment as to how a penniless American will handle the titular banknote (Trading Places followed a similar template, albeit with more 1980s grit and volume). The fun mostly comes from the reactions of other people to Gregory Peck's dilemma -- one sequence in a restaurant is especially good -- and the supporting cast is, predictably, very strong, with many familiar faces of the period given some work.

American Animals

2018, UK/US, directed by Bart Layton

About Time

2013, UK, directed by Richard Curtis

The Death of Stalin

2017, UK, directed by Armando Iannucci

The consistency of tone is impressive, and among the large and distinguished cast, Steve Buscemi in particular is exceptional -- it feels like the first time in a while that he's really gotten into his groove (on film at least). You feel a little guilty laughing given the subject material, but that is, I'm sure, quite conscious on Iannucci's part. 

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

2011, UK/France, directed by Tomas Alfredson

The League of Gentlemen

1960, UK, directed by Basil Dearden

Given my general love for the criminal caper film, this is a surprising omission from my prior watching, like Underworld for the American gangster film. The picture is a kind of ur-text for the many, many caper films that followed in subsequent decades, though Dearden's film is carried off with considerably more skill than most of what followed. The one (often very) unpleasant taste comes from the film's treatment of women, who are very much an after-thought, if not seen as an actively malign influence. Hardly inconsistent with the year of production, but no less unsavory for that. 

Churchill

2017, UK, directed by Jonathan Teplitzky

The Man Who Knew Infinity

2015, UK, directed by Matthew Brown

Tasteful, visually attractive, and unfortunately deeply conventional in the British prestige picture tradition; both Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons are more than solid, but there's barely an unexpected note in the entire film.

The Trip to Italy

2014, UK, directed by Michael Winterbottom

Unsurprisingly, just as enjoyable as its successor.

The Trip to Spain

2017, UK, directed by Michael Winterbottom

I see a lot of bad films on planes, and every now and then there's a real surprise; The Trip to Spain, the third in an unlikely franchise, is charming and often hilariously funny, without ever excusing the characters' sometimes boorish behavior (the interplay of the two egos is at the heart of the picture: these men always need an audience, and in a pinch they'll accept an audience of one).

Jigsaw

1962, UK, directed by Val Guest

This is a contribution to the 2017 vintage of the Late Films Blogathon, hosted, as ever, by David Cairns at his wondrous blog Shadowplay. 

It's perhaps a bit cruel to suggest that Jigsaw belongs in Late Films company given that Val Guest was only halfway through his lengthy and eventful life when he filmed the picture, but his career often teetered on the edge and took an undeniable nosedive shortly afterward, so we'll say that this marked the beginning of the end, and a very long final phase it was. There's not much to redeem you once you're stuck helming Confessions of a Window Cleaner, though. 

Jigsaw is much more solid stuff, and like Guest's Hell is a City, made two years earlier, makes for a revealing glimpse into provincial Britain of the early 1960s; the films function as a fascinating north/south Manchester/Brighton diptych, with some compelling moments of local colour, perhaps especially in the earlier film. Structurally, Jigsaw is a fairly straightforward procedural, with Jack Warner playing the lead detective, and like many a later TV show the focus is resolutely on the professional rather than the personal lives of the cops -- there are brief mentions of offscreen lives, another contrast to Hell is a City, in which Stanley Baker's home life plays a critical role (interestingly, both films give prominent thanks to the local police forces, though the Mancunian force hardly benefits from Baker's portrayal). 

Warner is already well advanced in years here, well over the usual retirement age for the average copper -- not that it stopped him playing the lead in Dixon of Dock Green until 1976, a most remarkable feat given that the character was shot dead on his first appearance in 1950. The gravitas of age works rather well here -- unlike a younger detective, Warner has no need to get himself all hot and bothered over each and every lead, proceeding instead methodically through his inquiries, with Guest playing up shoe leather much more than forensics. He orchestrates a clear, compelling march through the exploration and elimination of leads, married to an intriguing depiction of the back-streets of Brighton and surrounds. We're not quite on the seamy side of the tracks, and yet the setting is always something just a little short of respectability, too -- as though the town's true colours come out in the off-season. 

The film also plays with the permissible when it comes to sex and violence in a way that feels of a slightly later era -- though Guest is careful to avoid anything truly gruesome, preferring to have our imaginations add the most ghoulish touches, and the point-of-view shots lack the truly terrorizing quality of, say, Peeping Tom. As David himself has written elsewhere, such modest pushing of the envelope was characteristic of Guest's work at the time, though there's no hint of the lurid on this occasion -- there's a dour, even sour, quality to the depiction of the sordid crime that has at least as much in common with the more domestic dramas of the era as it does with Guest's lively work for Hammer.

While Warner remained highly visible on television for another fifteen years, this was close to his swansong on the big screen, and I must confess that I've always found his bluffly English stolidity rather appealing -- there's not even the hint of a surprise in his depiction and yet it's low-key and effective, grounding the film in a sense of the real that complements the location shooting. The support is generally good, too -- Michael Goodliffe is very well-cast slightly lower down the class spectrum than we usually see him, which of course immediately makes him rather louche, as though he's done something vaguely disreputable and can't get better work than as a hoover salesman; the same might be said of the character played by John Barron, an actor who usually had a more military bearing, often as something of a martinet. There's also a glimpse of Ray Barrett, a key presence in many films of the Australian cinema revival of the 1970s and 1980s, although unlike Goodliffe and Barron he's entirely straight-laced here, in contrast to his most memorable roles back home.  As is sadly too often the case in films where women serve as victim, there are far less notable roles for female actors, though Guest does assign a key smaller part to his wife, Yolande Donlan, who turns the part into something far more memorable than the script probably deserves. 

The poster above seems to have little in common with the actual film -- I'd say the producers were disappointed that Guest delivered such a solid piece of work, not well-suited to the exploitation advertising that the poster suggests. For better or worse, Guest would give them what they wanted with most of the rest of his oeuvre...

It Always Rains On Sunday

1947, UK, directed by Robert Hamer

An atypically downbeat Ealing film, set over the course of the titular day with some brief flashbacks, and centered on a manhunt/criminal back on his home turf. The picture of British domesticity is very carefully and precisely undercut, with the crowded London streets seen to harbor a good deal more than they seem, while the East End’s market-sellers and Jewish businessmen (both legitimate and somewhat less legitimate) get an extended onscreen airing. Unlike in Hell is a City, which I watched immediately before this, there is a certain air of doomed romance, and while some commentators link that atmosphere to pre-war French films, I thought it equated at least as closely with some of the cynicism and sourness of immediate post-war French film.  

Hell is a City

1960, UK, directed by Val Guest

An excellent, unusual British crime film set in Manchester and centered on a manhunt/man-to-man battle of wits between a criminal back on his home turf and an experienced, hard-bitten detective (Stanley Baker), marred only by a score that is rather intrusive at times. There’s nothing romantic about the criminals here, and indeed there’s a brutality in the depiction of the central crime and its aftermath that I don’t usually associate with the time period. In addition to a wonderful gallery of mostly northern character actors, there are some very fine bits of location business: pubs, backstreets, and moors and, in one extended sequence, wasteland used for a game of coin-tossing of the kind we see some years later in Wake in Fright – oddly enough another film featuring Donald Pleasance. The picture was made with the cooperation of the Manchester police, notable mainly because Baker’s character is less than entirely positive, particularly with respect to his home life. 

Lost in La Mancha

2002, UK/USA, directed by Keith Fulton & Louis Pepe

One of those films where you wonder at the sheer volume of self-incriminating material committed to tape/film at the time -- the filmmaking process here has a kind of dual aspect, with the actual film accompanied by a filmed reflection on that film as it evolves or, in this case, fails to evolve. The sense of an unraveling dream is quite unnerving, though it's never entirely clear exactly how the plug gets pulled -- it just all somehow falls apart, just as it all somehow seemed to come together at the beginning with a variety of financiers and other players. Gilliam, for his part, is remarkably sanguine most of the time -- deeply committed to his vision, and infectiously enthused by the few moments they do manage to commit to celluloid, but perhaps naive that the whole thing could have worked at all.

The Arsenal Stadium Mystery

1939, UK, directed by Thorold Dickinson

An interesting pre-war British entry, wherein the central murder is vaguely amusing, very much in keeping with the Golden Age novels of the period. The football backdrop, rare for the time, adds an element of intrigue, particularly since the actual footage came from Arsenal's last pre-war match. Leslie Banks is very good as both lead detective and comic relief, and as a procedural it's rather effective and, in that sense, a little before its time -- the details of forensic practice seem to be taken quite seriously, for instance, years and an ocean away from something like He Walked By Night. 

So Long At the Fair

1950, UK, directed by Terence Fisher and Anthony Darnborough

A film that might pair rather well with Gaslight, as a young woman visiting Paris in 1889 becomes embroiled in what seems like an utterly absurd situation where her brother and his entire hotel room appear to have disappeared. Dirk Bogarde's not at his best here, but the set-up is rather well-handled, and there's a real frisson of strangeness at times. 

Shaun the Sheep

2015, UK, directed by Richard Starzak & Mark Burton

As good as anything Aardman as produced, with their usual spectacular attention to detail -- on every level, from the physical world to the numerous jokes (some of them intended more for accompanying adults). The Aardman films sometimes occupy a world slightly out of time, and the stylisation here often reflects that -- the urban backdrops, the vehicles -- but in terms of electronic communication it's absolutely up-to-the-minute, creating an enjoyable off-kilter sense of time.

Man Up

2015, UK/France, directed by Ben Palmer