Fright (1971)

Director: Peter Collinson
Writer: Tudor Gates
Stars: Susan George, Honor Blackman, Ian Bannen and John Gregson

Index: 2025 Centennials.

There are plenty of things wrong with Fright that I can’t ignore, but there are also a heck of a lot of things right with it that I can’t ignore either. With half a century of hindsight, it’s an impressively powerful pioneer of a movie that deserves more attention and I’m happy to give it some as a celebration of Honor Blackman.

I wasn’t aware of it until now, but this is the progenitor of the babysitter in peril movie, a title only challenged by a short from the same year, Foster’s Release, with Dan O’Bannon as the proto-slasher. Here, that’s the similarly named Ian Bannen, who’s far from a one note slasher.

The plot isn’t a strong point, because it does little more than the tagline on IMDb states: “A babysitter is terrorized by the child’s father, escaped from an asylum.” That’s pretty much it for story but not for the film itself because the actors, the director and, surprisingly, the sound editor all bring a lot more to the table.

Fortune is a Woman (1957)

Director: Sidney Gilliat
Writers: Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, adapted by Val Valentine from the novel by Winston Graham
Stars: Jack Hawkins, Arlene Dahl, Dennis Price, Violet Farebrother and Ian Hunter

Index: 2025 Centennials.

In many ways, this is a quintessential British film, but I’m watching it for an American, as Arlene Dahl would have been a hundred years old today. The next most prominent woman in the cast, Greta Gynt, was Norwegian, but made her career in British film. Dahl didn’t. She only made two films in the UK, Wicked as They Come in 1956 and this a year later.

Otherwise, the names are all British. Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, a famous team in a slew of genres, wrote the script. Launder took the director’s role for comedies but Gilliat for dramas like this and he did here. Jack Hawkins is the star, with other old faithfuls like Dennis Price, Bernard Miles, Geoffrey Keen and even a young Christopher Lee lower down the cast. It was based on a novel by Winston Graham, best known for his Poldark historical series.

I should emphasise that it’s a mystery, as it’s keen to start out like a horror movie. We chase through the countryside to an old dark house, then zoom inside in horror fashion to focus on a painting of the very same house. We zoom in there too and there’s a dead man’s hand. It’s a nightmare sequence, being suffered by Oliver Branwell, an insurance investigator.

Sally of the Sawdust (1925)

Director: D. W. Griffith
Writer: Forrest Halsey, from the play Poppy by Dorothy Donnelly
Stars: Carol Dempster and W. C. Fields

Index: That's a Wrap!

While the star of Sally of the Sawdust is Carol Dempster, playing, well, Sally of the Sawdust, the key name here is her co-star, W. C. Fields, because this is a pivotal film in his career for a variety of reasons.

For one, he plays a versatile show man, Prof. Eustace McGargle. His first and, for my money, most impressive routine is comedic juggling, a routine that’s perfect except when he doesn’t want it to be, at which point he loses balls but uses a quick foot movement to regain them as if nothing untoward had happened. It should not surprise that this was Fields’s specialty as a vaudeville performer.

For two, it’s based on a stage play from 1923 called Poppy. That wasn’t his first experience on Broadway, as he’d debuted in 1905 and was a regular in Ziegfeld Follies revues, but it was a lead role, with Madge Kennedy, that made his name as an actor. He was the only actor to go from play to film and he shot a sound remake, Poppy, in 1936, with Rochelle Hudson.

For three, the routine that gets McGargle in trouble is the shell game, though he insists it’s not gambling at all but a game of skill. “It’s the old army game”, he claims. This film and That Royle Girl after it landed him a contract with Paramount and his first film for them was It’s the Old Army Game.

Dont Look Back (1967)

Director: D. A. Pennebaker
Writer: D. A. Pennebaker
Stars: Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Alan Price

Index: 2025 Centennials.

“Don’t criticise what you can’t understand,” Bob Dylan sang in The Times They are a-Changin’ in this film, which every critic should keep in mind as they review it. After all, it’s not your typical documentary and wasn’t in 1967.

Ostensibly, filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker was chronicling Dylan’s tour of the UK in 1965, but, quite frankly, this does a terrible job of that. I left knowing little more about that tour than I did going in, which wasn’t a heck of a lot.

I had to research online to find that it ran for eight nights in seven cities over ten days, that he only performed solo and acoustic and each gig was performed in two halves without support, prompting me to wonder why Joan Baez and Alan Price were there for much of it.

Locke & Key (2011)

Director: Mark Romanek
Writer: Josh Friedman, based on the graphic novels by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez
Stars: Miranda Otto, Mark Pellegrino, Sarah Bolger, Nick Stahl, Ksenia Solo, Skylar Gaertner and Jesse McCartney

Index: Unsold Pilots

There are probably a lot of ways to start an Unsold Pilots project but Locke & Key seems like the perfect one because there’s a long history that highlights how complicated the process is to bring a well known and successful property to television. It doesn’t hurt that my better half is a huge fan.

Locke & Key started out as a comic book, one with a huge name as writer, Joe Hill, who’s one of Stephen King’s sons, each of whom found a success of their own. It ran for six stories over six years, from 2008 to 2013, to great acclaim. It was inevitable that it would be adapted into something by someone at some point.

That turned out to be a TV show developed for Fox for their 2010-11 season. The pilot was made but not aired, though it was screened at San Diego Comic-Con. However, Fox passed on it, so no show was made.

Side Street (1949)

Director: Anthony Mann
Writer: Sydney Boehm
Stars: Farley Granger, Cathy O’Donnell, James Craig, Paul Kelly, Jean Hagen, Paul Harvey, Edmon Ryan and Charles McGraw

Index: 2025 Centennials.

Farley Granger was tempted into all sorts of trouble as the forties became the fifties. Alfred Hitchcock made him a murderer in Rope, then Nicholas Ray put him on the run for murder in They Live by Night and Hitch put him right back in the murder game in Strangers on a Train.

He’s a thief here—“no hero, no criminal, just human like all of us, weak like some of us but foolish like most of us”, as the Chief of Police tells us at the end. He sees an opportunity and he takes it, but then he feels guilty about it so does all he can to fix what he did. His problem is that he does all the wrong things, even if he does them for the right reasons.

Side Street has all sorts of flaws, but it works for me on two fronts. For one, it’s a beautifully shot exploration of New York, the city being a deeper and more substantial character than a bunch of the supposed leads. And for two, it’s a great unwitting descent, where we watch Joe Norson jump into a hole, then continue to try to dig his way out of it until he almost makes it to Australia. If you’re one of those moviegoers who likes shouting at characters on screens to not do the stupid thing they’re about to do, I’d highly recommend this one to you.

Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

Director: John Carpenter
Writers: Gary Goldman and David Z. Weinstein, adapted by W. D. Richter
Stars: Kurt Russell, Kim Cattrall, Dennis Dun, James Hong and Victor Wong

Index: Make It a Double.

James Hong’s Double took me from a movie I’ve reviewed before to a movie I can’t believe I haven’t reviewed before. Nowadays, my go to films from John Carpenter have changed from Halloween and Escape from New York to They Live and Big Trouble in Little China, two movies that I enjoy more and more with every viewing.

This was Carpenter’s Hollywood flop, which cost $20m or so to produce but only took half that at the box office. There are probably a lot of reasons for that but one is that the audience really didn’t understand what it was in 1986.

What they probably expected was an action movie full of Chinese weirdness but without a real understanding of what Chinese weirdness actually looks like. It would happen in the U.S. and Kurt Russell would be the action hero who would take care of it all.

The Gold Rush (1925)

Director: Charles Chaplin
Writer: Charles Chaplin
Stars: Charles Chaplin, Mack Swain and Georgia Hale

Index: That's a Wrap!

I was rather surprised to find that I haven’t reviewed The Gold Rush before, given that it’s the indirect reason why I wrote Charlie Chaplin Centennial: Keystone, a book about his first year in film, 1914. The trigger was a friend of mine attending a college film class, because he was the only person in the room who looked at the cover of the textbook and recognised Chaplin as the Little Tramp in The Gold Rush.

The point, of course, was that a century ago, the Little Tramp’s famous silhouette was the most recognised image in the entire world. To go from that to the comment of “Who’s that dude on the cover?” in a college film class is a scary descent in cultural awareness.

She-Wolf of London (1946)

Director: Jean Yarbrough
Writers: George Bricker, based on an original story by Dwight V. Babcock
Stars: Don Porter, June Lockhart, Sara Haden, Jan Wiley and Lloyd Corrigan

Index: 2025 Centennials.

It doesn’t happen often, but occasionally I’m able to wish someone a happy one hundredth birthday while I remember their life and work through a centennial review.

June Lockhart didn’t have a huge career in the movies, being better known on television, but she started early and kept on going, so the span from her first to last movie is over eighty years and counting, from an uncredited role in A Christmas Carol in 1938 to a voice role in 2019 in Bongee Bear and the Kingdom of Rhythm.

Given that her father, the Academy Award-nominated actor Gene Lockhart, kicked off his professional career on stage in 1897 at the age of six, their shared output stretches into three different centuries. Her daughter Anne, who’s a prolific voice actor, landed her first credit in 1958 and is also still working, with almost one hundred episodes of Chicago Fire to her name.

Blade Runner (1982)

Director: Ridley Scott
Writer: Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick
Stars: Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Edward James Olmos, M. Emmet Walsh, Daryl Hannah, William Sanderson, Brion James, Joe Turkel and Joanna Cassidy

Index: Make It a Double.

I love it when people choose their Doubles, especially when they introduce me to new and joyous films I don’t know. James Hong had lots of opportunity to do that, as his four hundred and fifty credits go back to Dragonfly Squadron in 1953, and they’re wildly varied.

In 1974, for instance, he went from Dynamite Brothers, an Al Adamson feature, to Chinatown, then made a couple of TV movies, playing U.N. Secretary General U Thant first in The Missiles of October then a major role in Judge Dee and the Monastery Murders, a mystery set in China back in the 7th century, shot with an all Asian cast. And they’re just part of one year in a career that’s spanned seven decades and counting!

Instead, he chose the safest double thus far, picking a couple of very well known films that I’ve seen many times. I’ve even reviewed Blade Runner before, but I will happily dive in again. It’s no hardship to watch these two and I can focus more on Hong’s contributions.