The Old Dark House (1963)

Director: William Castle
Stars: Tom Poston, Robert Morley, Janette Scott and Joyce Grenfell

This 1963 remake of The Old Dark House proves itself utterly unlike the Universal original before it even begins. Most obviously it's in colour and in a widescreen format, but it also has bright and cheesy music, accompanying chuckles and opening credits painted by Charles Addams. Then instead of a hillside collapsing in a torrential rainstorm, we get to visit the Mayfair Casino in London. For those Americans reading, Mayfair is the most expensive property on the British version of Monopoly, so you can imagine how exclusive this place is. No wonder they won't let Tom Penderel in without jumping through a lot of hoops, as he isn't just not a member, he's an American to boot.

He's played by comedian Tom Poston, who knew William Castle well, having played the lead in Zotz!, Castle's pretty successful attempt at an American absent-minded professor comedy a year earlier. Penderel is there because of Caspar Femm, with whom he has a strange arrangement. They share the same flat but rarely see each other there. Penderel lives there at night and sells cars during the day, when Femm takes over in the able form of Peter Bull, about to become the Russian Ambassador in Dr Strangelove. Tom is only bringing him an American car, but he's persuaded to travel to visit him at Femm Hall, Caspar's family's ancestral seat deep in the marshes of Dartmoor, to which he flies back every single night in a private plane.

For some reason Penderel takes him up on his offer, even though the invitation is scarily nervous in its delivery and there are more hints at danger and intrigue than can comfortably be imagined. Something's going to happen there, he's sure of it, and the coffins have already arrived! Nobody in their right mind would take Caspar up on such an offer, so Tom Penderel must be out of his. Sure enough he drives there through the torrential rainstorm, which along with a few names, are about the only similarities to the original film. The car gets destroyed outside the Femm gates and so he's stranded at the house with all its chamberpots everywhere to catch the rain through the holes in the roof. And when he finally gets in, it's to find Caspar dead in one of the coffins that he'd mentioned.

Uncle Potiphar says he fell down the stairs but sweet Cecily doesn't believe that. She's Caspar's cousin, the one he was so set on him meeting and of course they fall quickly in love. His other cousin is rather more active in her attempts to seduce him. She's Morgana, a bizarrely voluptuous creature with an outrageously seductive voice, who dresses for effect, usually in a single colour. The tight red number and the flamboyant pink nightgown are both fine, but the flowing leopard print dress is even better. And yet Tom tries to leave!

Perhaps he doesn't realise that Cecily is played by Janette Scott, who had appeared in a slew of English films over three decades, including The Good Companions, also based on a J B Priestley novel, The Day of the Triffids and School for Scoundrels. She retired from the screen in 1967 but returned last year in Simon Pegg's How to Lose Friends & Alienate People. Morgana is the delightful Fenella Fielding, who took a long retirement too. After fifteen films in a decade, including three in the Doctor series and two Carry On movies, she quit the screen in 1970, returning for another Simon Pegg movie, Guest House Paradiso in 1999 and four more films since.

They're both great here, though they're the minor names in the cast. Caspar's uncle Potiphar is Mervyn Johns, his mother Agatha is Joyce Grenfell and yet another uncle Roderick is no less a name than Robert Morley. Boris Karloff's part goes to Danny Green, though Morgan is now yet another uncle, Morgana's father. There's even Peter Bull again as Caspar's twin brother Jasper. They all have huge fun here, with their bizarre habits and hobbies, all to keep them busy because they can't leave the house. Apparently there's a huge amount of money at stake, left in inheritance by a pirate ancestor who also left codicils that mean that anyone who isn't in the house at the stroke of midnight every single day forfeits their share. So Agatha knits 150 miles of wool a year, Roderick has an armoury in his room that includes cups with the names of his relatives written on them and Potiphar has spent twenty years building an ark to survive the rainstorm that he believes is the forty days and forty nights detailed in Genesis.

Of course this is supposed to be a horror movie, so naturally the bodies start mounting up in innovative ways. No, Robert Morley doesn't get force fed his poodles this time out, he'd have to wait another decade for that. Like most William Castle films, this one is so fast paced and so full of charm that it's impossible not to enjoy it, but it's also dumb enough to compare badly to his better gimmick films such as The Tingler, 13 Ghosts and Homicidal. Still ruling the roost in my opinion is his original version of House on Haunted Hill, even though it didn't benefit from the old dark house he uses here, Down Place. Anyone who's ever seen a Hammer horror will recognise this building, which they used in a hundred different films. It's here because this is a joint effort between Castle's own production company and Hammer Films.

It's a mixed bag really. There's very little gore, though so many people get a violent comeuppance, instead it's the humour accompanying the deaths that's the real joy. Best of all is when Agatha turns up with her knitting needles through her neck. Roderick says, in Robert Morley's joyous deadpan voice, 'It must have been murder, she always knitted so carefully.' There are so many good lines, 'delicious' being a description that comes quickly to mind, and I'm not just thinking of the hints at cannibalism. 'It's not every day we have an American for dinner,' they say. The ingenuity can't hold up to that standard, though it does try. Well, mostly it tries. When Penderel wakes up to find a slavering and growling but obviously stuffed hyena nibbling his fingers, I'm not sure if Tom Poston could really find it in himself to appear scared.

At the end of the day, there's much to enjoy here, but the title notwithstanding this is absolutely not the same film that James Whale made for Universal in 1932. This is a William Castle comedy, more murder mystery than horror film, and that with a very light heart. Even though the film is centred around the old dark house of the title, he even manages to slip in a quicksand scene. There's everything but the kitchen sink, really, and that's replaced by a basin of strong acid. Anyone wanting anything remotely similar to the original, a straight remake or just a thematic one, is going to be very disappointed unless they also have a taste for dark but safe sixties humour.

The Old Dark House (1932)

Director: James Whale
Stars: Boris Karloff, Melvyn Douglas and Charles Laughton

The old Universal horrors are joys to me, archetypal and influential, but never forgetting how much fun it is to play with monsters, real monsters that are as scary as they are human, not the cuddly Hallowe'en toy monsters they later became. By the time The Old Dark House came along they were well established, with Dracula, Frankenstein and The Mummy behind them, along with the Chaney classics and Murders in the Rue Morgue. Yet this one somehow left me dry when I finally got to see it in 2006, though the all star cast all have a ball with their parts and the omnipresent howling wind provides an appropriately creepy soundtrack.

A young couple is trying to make it through the Welsh mountains to Shrewsbury and they're more than hindered by torrential rain, very believable in its ferocity. Before long it starts washing down the mountainside and the Wavertons are forced to stop at the first and only place they can find. Philip Waverton is angry and frustrated, his wife Margaret with her light Billie Burke voice not far behind him. It isn't Billie Burke though, it's Gloria Stuart in her fourth film, no less than 65 years before Titanic, where she successfully introduced herself to the modern generation as the much older version of Kate Winslet. Her screen husband is Raymond Massey, just as early in his career. He had only three films and one credit behind him, though he made an impression here and it's no wonder he'd soon go on to films like The Scarlet Pimpernel, Things to Come and The Prisoner of Zenda.

In the back of the car is Melvyn Douglas as the lackadaisical Roger Penderel who doesn't really want to go anywhere, let alone Shrewsbury. He refuses to be phased by anything and proves he's good at that by not being shocked when Boris Karloff answers the door that they knock on. He's Morgan, the mute butler of the Femms, Horace and Rebecca. Horace is a nervous Ernest Thesiger, who looks a little like Lon Chaney's Phantom, only without make up. He's afraid and his sister Rebecca knows it and torments him for it. She's a wild one, cackling away in distorting mirrors and passing judgement on everyone. 'You revel in the joys of fleshly love, don't you?' she accuses young Margaret, before poking her in the chest and gleefully telling her that all her fine stuff will rot and so will she. It wouldn't surprise me to find that Eva Moore influenced Terry Jones in his portrayals of bitter and twisted old women in Monty Python. The Femms bicker at each other with blistering abandon.

Penderel and the Wavertons stay the night, more out of necessity than anyone's deliberate decision, the Femms giving them a roof for the night but hardly making them welcome. They're soon joined by another couple, Sir William Porterhouse and his lively chorus girl companion, Gladys DuCane Perkins. Gladys is played by Lilian Bond and Porterhouse is played by a boisterous Charles Laughton, complete with a broad Yorkshire accent that can't have been too much of a stretch for him given that he was born and grew up in Scarborough. Together they all get to attempt to survive the granddaddy of all spooky mansion stories, complete with its raging storm, its drunken monster of a butler and its dark family secrets, locked and bolted away from sight.

These actors aren't minor names, though most were still establishing themselves in 1932, even Charles Laughton. Top credited is Karloff, still at that point in his career where he only used one name, when he wasn't just using a question mark. They all play up the material, which is sourced from Benighted, a novel by another Yorkshireman, J B Priestley, surprisingly only the first screen adaptation of his work. I'm sure he was happy for the attention but a little less happy at the fact that the filmmakers couldn't spell his name. Benighted was an early Priestley novel and I haven't read it, but if it has half the fun of this adaptation it's got to be a riot.

Most of the cast would return to the horror genre, not just Karloff, and many would continue on for Universal. Laughton would play Dr Moreau in the same year's Island of Lost Souls before becoming a mainstream star in The Private Life of Henry VIII. Thesiger would appear in The Ghoul before achieving genre immortality as Dr Pretorius in 1935's Bride of Frankenstein. Even Gloria Stuart would land an even better Universal horror role a year after this film, as the leading lady in The Invisible Man. Surprisingly Lillian Bond, who echoes Dr Frankenstein's famous 'It's alive!' line here wouldn't return to the genre for quite some time, but she did appear in both The Picture of Dorian Gray and Man in the Attic. Raymond Massey of course would take Karloff's role in Arsenic and Old Lace, given that the Broadway producers wouldn't release him for the film.

The names you may not recognise are just as fun as the names you do. Eva Moore comes close to stealing every scene she's in as the preachy and cackling Rebecca Femm. Brember Wills is a blissful and very active old lunatic, climbing up Melvyn Douglas as he tries to burn down the old dark house. Elspeth Dudgeon is the patriarch of the family, Sir Roderick Femm, who we meet in the key explanatory scene. She was a stage actress of renown but only a minor name in film, though proves her talent here not just by playing a man but even being credited as one, Jack Dudgeon.

Like so many of the Universal horrors this was a trendsetter. So many of what have become cliches in the genre began as fresh ideas in the first half of the early thirties when producer Carl Laemmle Jr could do no wrong. Directors like James Whale (along with Tod Browning and Karl Freund) were major reasons for this, conjuring up magic from a talented cast but a sparse set. With Frankenstein already behind him, Whale had made his mark, but he'd build on it here and would add to that legacy with The Invisible Man and Bride of Frankenstein. Not a bad five years really, those four films (plus a couple of others) providing a firm base from which the horror genre would build over the next eighty years. Filmmakers are still copying his angles and shocks and shadows today.

Killer-Dog (1936)

Director: Jacques Tourneur

Another Jacques Tourneur short for MGM in 1936, this is a Pete Smith Specialty, and Tourneur is firmly on what would become regular ground for him. Strangely though, there's much less here to suggest a future in horror movies and films noir than there was in The Jonker Diamond earlier the same year. This one, a sentimental story at heart of a girl and her dog, is more fun for the outrageous narration of Pete Smith. I've always found his tone rather annoying, presumably something that was fashionable in its time but rather dated to modern ears. He's unintentionally hilarious with some of his lines here and that's the best part of the film for me.

A dog called Major is on trial for his life, accused of being a killer of sheep just like his sire. We follow him through his life in flashback, from being a hungry young puppy eating whatever he can find to saving his young mistress Betty Lou from being run over by her careless mother. Eventually he leaves the house at night, only returning in the morning with a scar along his back. Sure enough there are ravaged sheep at the nearby pen of a rancher, the same rancher who had killed his sire after catching him in the act three years earlier. So Major goes to trial, but the canny judge has a test to see if he's a real sheep killer and he redeems himself with another heroic act that clears his name and takes down the real villain of the piece all at once.

It's a fair enough story and it flows on nicely, if you can deal with Smith's voice. He never varies his tone even when he's coming out with truly outrageous lines that could easily have become taglines for horror movies. When the rancher finds dead sheep in his pen, Smith explains that they're 'grim evidence of a visit by another vicious raider' and 'the rancher examines the victims that forebode renewed massacres of his livestock.' Later in court, 'the attorney pronounces Major a canine Jekyll & Hyde, generally docile enough in appearance but in the eerie hours of the night when the wolf blood of his father runs cold in his veins, he kills.' Just as we never believe kind hearted Major did the dastardly deed, we can't quite buy such theatrics from Smith either.

The Jonker Diamond (1936)

Director: Jacques Tourneur

An MGM Miniature with 'explanatory remarks' by Pete Smith, this is hardly a standard piece, but it's a great opportunity to see the cinematic skills of Jacques Tourneur. This is early in his career, The Jonker Diamond being the first film he made in the States after a few back home in France, and he would go onto renown in multiple genres, but especially with horror films, making a triumphant trio of films for Val Lewton in the early 40s: Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie and The Leopard Man. Later he'd return to it with the influential English film Night of the Demon, but he'd also prove with films like Out of the Past, Stars in My Crown and Nightfall that he wasn't a one trick pony.

Noobody gets to speak here except Smith and none of the actors are credited, even Hugh Marlowe who would go on to All About Eve, The Day the Earth Stood Still and, well, Earth vs the Flying Saucers. Smith's narration isn't quite as annoying as usual and the story of the Jonker diamond is an interesting one. After eighteen years of toil, Jacobus Jonker and his family discover the 726 carat diamond in South Africa in 1905, sell it through auction to Harry Winston in the States for a full million dollars, who hires Lazarre Kaplan to cut it into twenty smaller but perfect gems.

It's surprising to see this million dollar diamond shipped 3,500 miles by parcel post for 64c because what crook would expect that? It's interesting to find that it took Kaplan six months just to study where to make his cuts and then one tap of the hammer to cleave it in half. However while this is a story of a gem it's not quite a gem of a story. It's more fun to watch the Jonkers through the hardship of the search, the joy of discovery and the fear of theft. It's fascinating to watch the angles, the shadows and the looks that are swapped. This is definitely technique that Tourneur would use again later. No wonder Val Lewton wanted to hire him to make films for his new horror unit at RKO.

Caught Plastered (1931)

Director: William Seiter
Stars: Bert Wheeler, Robert Woolsey and Dorothy Lee

Vaudeville stars Wheeler & Woolsey play vaudeville stars Tanner & Higginbotham here, arriving in Lockville without a dime and eager to find a way to make some money. They befriend an old lady called Mother Talley who they find crying on the bus because she's about to lose her drug store because she hasn't a clue how to run it, so naturally they run it for her. It's on its last legs, as evidenced by Harry Waters, the bank man who comes in to point out that she has thirty days to pay back her loans. Waters is played by Jason Robards, though not the one you'd think. This is 1930 so it's Jason Robards Sr, before he ever found the need to use the Sr, and he looks surprisingly like Marlon Brando, especially in profile.

Meanwhile Lockville is beginning to succumb to the plague of liquor and the cops are eager to quash it before it takes hold. Chief Morton believes that these two strangers in town are planning to set up a racket out of the drug store, mostly because Waters tells him precisely that. If you've seen a single Wheeler & Woolsey movie, you'll know from moment one that he's going to be the villain and if he's suggesting that our heroes are bootleggers then that must be his racket. You'll also know that Dorothy Lee will be around somewhere to provide a love interest for Bert Wheeler, and sure enough she soon turns up as the chief's daughter, Peggy Morton.

The story is never the most important thing in a Wheeler & Woolsey film, that being reserved for the gags, but there's more of it than normal here. Waters wants the property badly so when our heroes turn the store around to the degree that they'll be able to pay off their debts, he tries an ambitious scheme to stop them in their tracks. He cons them into buying some sort of lemon soda that is really his bootlegged liquor, not that they notice in the slightest even when they get Peggy drunk as a skunk. Somehow these shenanigans take precedence over the jokes, which are at least as risqué as usual. 'I love to curl up with a book,' says Miss Newton. 'I'd like to see you try,' replies Higginbotham.

There's more vaudeville here than normal, not least because our pair of vaudevillians play vaudevillians. One idea they have to drum up sales is to set up a radio show, the Sunshine Hour, broadcast out of the store, and that gives Wheeler the opportunity to sing to Woolsey's piano, with Dorothy Lee providing backup. The pair also try to make sad old Mother Talley laugh by performing a set of gags which must have been old even in 1931 but the delivery is perfect and we still can't help laughing even as we groan. This is hardly essential but it's a fun way to spend an hour.

Serpent of the Nile (1953)

Director: William Castle
Stars: Rhonda Fleming, William Lundigan and Raymond Burr

I'll take any opportunity I can find to watch a William Castle movie, even when it isn't one of his trademark gimmick horror flicks. This time around it's a historical drama, beginning with the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. We'd call Ironside to investigate but that's Raymond Burr standing over his dead body as Mark Anthony. Rome is in turmoil as everyone vies for succession with swords and arrows. This film had a budget of about ten bucks, nine of which were spent on background paintings, but these battles are superior in my mind to those in the far more expensive epic blockbuster Solomon and Sheba six years later. Even though some of these chariots look like they're made of cardboard, the people dying are people rather than dummies, the swords slice into bodies and arrows hit backs firmly and the whole thing is so blisteringly fast that we don't even have time to catch our breath, let alone think about what we're seeing.

It's over soon, the forces of Mark Anthony and Octavius winning the day. Cassius commits suicide, leaving a note in his hand reading, 'The cause is hopeless'. Capt Lucilius brings the news to Brutus, who gives up the fight. He's a faithful servant who's even willing to take his place when they come for him, but Mark Anthony sees through that and hires him, once Brutus is found dead by his own hand, promoting him to general. Even with Rome restored to peace, there are conquests to be made, beginning with the serpent of the Nile of the title: Cleopatra. Luckily Lucilius was head of Caesar's private guard when he was engrossed with the Egyptian queen.

There's much to be engrossed with here. The visuals often look lavish, as long as those scenes that don't reuse sets from Columbia's Salome, made the same year, skip by so quickly you can't concentrate on the Halloween costumes, plastic props and painted backgrounds. The biggest giveaway that there's very little budget to work with are the scenes that dispose of almost everything except the leads and a single set. When Cleopatra's fleet sails into Tarsus, it's a painting backing moving water, while the welcoming committee is Raymond Burr and William Lundigan, who plays Lucilius, looking out of a window. For all his lack of budget though, William Castle was a highly skilful filmmaker who knew how to keep our attention for a swift 81 minutes.

After all, who's looking at the props and the backgrounds when we have Julie Newmar playing a gilded dancer, painted gold from head to foot, writhing around as two female guards brandish whips and assist with the exotic dance. In fact she wasn't even Julie Newmar yet, this being her third film and first credit; she remained Julie Newmeyer on screen, whenever she got a credit, until 1959's Li'l Abner. If Newmar wasn't enough, there's the charming Rhonda Fleming to play Cleopatra and Jane Easton and Jean Byron both outshining her, as Anthony's woman Cytheria and Cleopatra's handmaiden Charmion respectively.

The dialogue plays well, this being written cleverly in the pulp tradition and delivered well. If you can get by the American accents, this would work well as a radio play, though there's not a lot of explanation as to why both Mark Anthony and his general can effectively win Rome and promptly ignore it to live in Alexandria and pursue the queen. There is a story, with all sorts of intrigue and politicking but none of it really matters much in the grand scheme of things. It's pretty easy to forget what's going on and just sleepwalk through it, ignoring things like the hollow wooden bar holding the gate to Cleopatra's palace closed because of the bear wrestling and the fireball throwing and the hard hitting stunts.

Burr may look a little ridiculous in this sort of costume but he sounds as demonstrative as ever. He simply couldn't sound bad even if he was paid to. Lundigan is pretty good as Gen Lucilius. Even though he's hardly the actor Burr is, he's more watchable here because he fits the material better. Burr deserved better but Lundigan fit the B movie mould well. He admitted that he got stuck in B pictures because he was 'so damned cooperative. Not only did I accept the bad pictures but I accepted lousy parts in those bad pictures.' Another reason is that he was just so good in pulp roles, as good here fighting intruders in his Roman nightgown as playing cops and priests and newspapermen.

While a few people contribute, the real credit here goes to director William Castle and writer Robert E Kent, who spin this yarn so fast that we can't help but get caught up in it. It's nonsense, of course, but it's enjoyable nonsense told well. It's a mid period Castle, that third of his career that I've seen so little of. He was a prolific man in the mid fifties, churning out four films in 1953 and 1955 and no less than eight in 1954, all inviting pulp titles like Slaves of Babylon, Drums of Tahiti and The Saracen Blade. Mostly I've seen his early detective serial films and his later horror movies and these mid period films, like The Law vs Billy the Kid and The Houston Story don't stand up too well in comparison. This one fits pretty well with those: fun but inconsequential.

Hook, Line and Sinker (1930)

Director: Edward Cline
Stars: Bert Wheeler, Robert Woolsey and Dorothy Lee

Sound was new to the movies in 1930, so the opening siren wasn't as annoying to the audiences of the day as it might seem to us watching now. It's a police motorcycle, a really old Harley Davidson, and the cop is pulling them over for traffic violations. That never works regardless of the comedy team on the tandem and it doesn't work here. It's a Wheeler & Woolsey comedy and as they're playing insurance salesmen called Wilbur Boswell and Addington Ganzy, they don't just avoid the ticket they sell a policy too. After all, 'people are dying this year who have never died before.'

While they're held up, up drives Mary Marsh, played by Wheeler & Woolsey's frequent co-star, Dorothy Lee, who I've always felt looked like Marcy Darcy playing Betty Boop. She's running away from home because her rich mother wants her to marry their attorney, John Blackwell. To avoid this, she's heading off to a hotel that her uncle gave her, the Hotel Ritz de Riviera in Floralhurst, which is as utterly unlike what its name suggests as could comfortably be imagined. Naturally Boswell and Ganzy go with her to find that it's more than a little rundown.

They clean it up and persuade the papers to publicise it as the place to be in society that season, a haven for the best and most important people with a large safe to store their valuable jewels. Sure enough, a whole host of nobility promptly check in, from Duchess Bessie von Essie to the Duke of Winchester, but not a one of them is real. John Blackwell is also Buffalo Blackie, underworld kingpin, whose headquarters is under the hotel, and his men aren't the only crooks to turn up either, all of whom are after those non-existent jewels. As the old chestnut goes, hilarity ensues.

Well not quite hilarity, as there are some notable duds in and amongst the hits, but there are certainly some hits. I loved Wilbur and Mary haggling about how many kids they'll have by ringing up numbers on a cash register, the gunfight is as fun as it is inevitable and there are even some solid stunts. I know this furniture must have been made out of balsa wood but there are still some powerful hits that can't help but make us cringe. There are also some highly quotable lines. 'Is it burglar proof?' asks the Duchess about the safe. 'It is so far,' replies Ganzy. 'Are you married?' Mary's mother asks him? 'No, I got this way from riding a bicycle.'

I don't know enough about the comedy teams of the era to suggest who influenced who, something that isn't as simple as just checking the release dates of key movies. The comics of this era were mostly vaudeville comedians too, usually starting there and progressing onto the big screen, sometimes alternating the two, and who knows who stole what from who on the vaudeville circuit. What I do know is that Wheeler & Woolsey were one of the first successful screen double acts, if not the very first, and their substantial success at the time influenced many.

This is the earliest I've seen them, their first success being Rio Rita a year earlier, and I'm seeing an obvious Marx Brothers influence, with Woolsey as Groucho, complete with glasses and cigar (though no oversized moustache), and with Jobyna Howland playing the foil that Margaret Dumont played to Groucho. My wife, growing up in the States, sees a lot of George Burns in Woolsey, and while Burns came to features later and not as successfully, he already had a quarter of a century of entertaining behind him, since starting out as a singer at the age of seven in 1903.

The double act isn't well remembered today, partly because it ended with Woolsey's death in 1938 and perhaps mostly because the highly suggestive nature of the jokes couldn't switch over to television to find a new audience in the fifties. Conversely it's the adult nature of the material that fit the precode era so well that appeals to me more than the more toned down humour that would fill the screen over the next few decades. This is 1930 so they had four more years of freedom to go, which constituted half their screen career as a double act. Given that they were prolific filmmakers, that leaves a lot of risque features to work through. This one's predictable and inconsistent, but all the films I've seen of theirs have been no less than fun thus far and this is no exception.

An Affair to Remember (1957)

Director: Leo McCarey
Stars: Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr

This story, originally written by Delmer Daves and Donald Ogden Stewart, has been filmed three times, which is hardly surprising as it's a good story. What's surprising is that this first remake was directed by the same man who directed the original version, Leo McCarey, no less than sixteen years later. For some reason he must have felt that he could revisit the material and top his own film, which he did. That's quite an accomplishment and I can't think of another example of the same. In the few instances I can think of where a director remade his own film, the original still holds up best, such as the 1934 version of Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much and the 1933 version of Capra's Lady for a Day.

Love Affair was a popular hit in 1939, with Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne in the leads; the former was excellent though I still don't quite understand the appeal of the latter, who's left me dry in every one of the nine films I've seen her in thus far. It collected no less than six Oscar nominations in Hollywood's greatest year but failed to win anything. The third version came in 1994 with Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, and while I haven't seen it, what I've read about it suggests that the best thing about it seems to be the presence of Katharine Hepburn in her final film, an important event that probably warranted a better film. One day I'll find out.

The story is the same throughout the versions, though the name of one of the leading characters seems to change with each one. Here he's Niccolo Ferrante and he's something of a playboy. He's about to settle down by marrying Lois Clark and is on a liner called the Constitution heading over from Europe to meet her in New York as the film begins, prompting international broadcasters to comment on the affair. The American makes a fuss about the six million bucks he's marrying into, his Italian counterpart mourns the loss to the world of a master of the art of love and the English broadcaster can't understand what the fuss is about. Of course the real story begins not with Lois Clark but on the boat: Nickie Ferrante meets Terry McKay and so begins the affair to remember of the title, though hardly in an immediate way.

Ferrante is the charming and debonair Cary Grant, tailor made for a story like this though he initially resisted the casting. His thinking was that Charles Boyer had defined it so well in the original that it didn't warrant a retry, but the role could hardly have been better cast, there being no better lovable rogue in the business. To take on Irene Dunne's role we have Deborah Kerr, an appropriate choice given her particular looks as neither had a conventional beauty. The pair play off each other wonderfully and so have a very believable relationship. I'm not sure how much of their repartee is script and how much improvised by the actors but there's certainly some of the latter and it feels realistic enough for it to include plenty of it.

It's impossible not to be swept up in the emotion as their cruise over the Atlantic comes to an end and these two characters must part. They've behaved impeccably throughout the cruise, no monkey business going on at any point, though Ferrante does try it on shamelessly after their first accidental meeting. To her credit, Terry resists with panache, not interested in this international playboy in the slightest, though they end up spending the rest of the cruise together and gradually fall in love. They fail miserably to hide their shared affection, regardless what they try to avoid being seen together, up to and including their arrival in New York on New Year's Day.

By the time they get there, they've finally realised that regardless of their current plans, they want to spend the rest of their lives together. However they're both realistic to know that they're both living on other people's money so a future together wouldn't be anything like either of them has been used to. They promise to meet up in six months, on the 1st of July, at the top of the Empire State Building, having done all they can in that time to prepare for the moment. Interestingly this promise comes at precisely the halfway point of the movie, showing how much more story there is to come. These final scenes on board the Constitution are impeccable, the last one without them even together: it's merely a collection of glances as they each see who's waiting for them but it tells a whole slew of stories in facial movement and choreography.

Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr provide us plenty of that throughout, both at the top of their game here and with much better material than they had four years earlier in the poor Dream Wife. Grant had retired from the screen after that film, but his retirement only lasted two years before he broke it to make Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief. While it wasn't either the greatest Grant or Hitchcock in the book, it was a great commercial success and two years later this was an impeccable stamp of authority on the future. Even though he was now in his fifties, some of Grant's best work was still to come: with films like North By Northwest, Charade and Father Goose.

Kerr's great roles punctuate her career at various points and she was on a high one here: after Dream Wife, she'd made From Here to Eternity, The End of the Affair and The King and I, among others, all featuring great performances from her. Whatever the reason I don't get Irene Dunne as an actress and I still haven't figured that out, Deborah Kerr seems to me to be far more suited to this story and able to really shine in the role. I see her as much better in the part, even though it was Dunne's favourite of her own pictures, and though she sang her own songs while Kerr is dubbed by Marni Nixon, who had also dubbed her singing voice in The King and I.

There's a key supporting role in the Love Affair films and it's the same role whether it's Michel Marnet's grandmother, Nickie Ferrante's grandmother or Mike Gambril's aunt. It would seem that every version was fortunate enough to get a peach of an actress, able to provide the nuance needed for the character who first really sees how good the leading characters are together, whether they're in a relationship or not. Here the part goes to the least known of the three, Cathleen Nesbitt, who is nonetheless superb.

Nesbitt, perhaps best known as a stage actress who originated the role of Henry Higgins' mother in My Fair Lady on Broadway, played in a number of major films but only in supporting roles. For a film featuring a number of scenes of heartbreak, she knew this well from life, given that she was engaged to World War I poet Rupert Brooke, and she nails this part of Nickie's grandmother, Janou, spot on in both English and French, in sadness and in hope and she plays a very believable piano. She proves able to fill the shoes of the wonderful Maria Ouspenskaya, small in shoe size but large in talent. This is Kate Hepburn's role in 1994 and I'm sure that however good or bad the film she did fine work in the part.

Everything about this version is right, beyond some less than stellar rear projection shots. The pace is utterly perfect, quick enough to capture the passion of the thing but slow enough to take us effortlessly through almost two hours. The score is a sweeping romantic affair but never more than is appropriate. The camerawork is textbook stuff, a scene on the liner being the perfect example. When Nickie and Terry kiss for the first time it's on an outside staircase and the camera refuses to follow him back up to her, meaning that we know precisely what happens without ever seeing it. When they move down the stairs, it's to a perfectly composed shot framing Terry, Nickie and his shadow. There are many such examples dotted throughout the film.

It's no wonder that this is the defining version of the story, even following a highly successful original. Instead of six Oscars, it was only nominated for four and yet again it didn't win a thing. It lived on in people's memories and hearts though, to be referenced in many TV shows and films, not least Sleepless in Seattle, which sparked yet another revival of this version of the story. Having finally got to see it, it's easy to see why. It's one of the great and iconic love stories of the screen, which the American Film Institute rated fifth on their list of such pictures. I enjoyed it a lot more than a couple of the films above it too. I can see myself coming back to it again and again, because for as much heartbreak as there is in the film, it's one of the greatest depictions of hope I've ever seen.

8th Wonderland (2008)

Directors: Nicolas Alberny and Jean Mach

Shooting a movie in twelve languages can only be described as ambitious, especially when it's done by a couple of young Frenchmen who seem to be relatively inexperienced. Nicolas Alberny and Jean Mach co-wrote and co-directed, Alberny only having a few shorts and some soundtrack compositions behind him and Mach one feature back in 2004 called Par l'odeur alléché.... Yet they've conjured up in 8th Wonderland a film that is the most thought provoking picture I've seen since The Man from Earth and which continues to resonate in my thoughts long after the credits rolled. That they did what they did on such a low budget is impressive, that they did it on a global scale through a complex network of translators is even more so.

At any point in time there are a few things going on, with an underlying analogy that begins as the opening static turns into bugs. We're watching some sort of nature documentary about an army of cockroaches led by one who has had a chip implanted into it. These roaches follow their leader everywhere but eventually prove that they can continue on without him, a massive force of nature even without direct leadership. Though it punctuates the film here and there to reinforce its relevance, it quickly disappears as someone changes channels on us. Soon we find ourselves watching some sort of recruitment video for something called 8th Wonderland.

8th Wonderland calls itself a country, one of many concepts that bear reevaluation after watching this film. Most people would see it as a collection of people who meet online to share a common interest. They call themselves a country because that common interest becomes something that overrides any prior loyalties and they become a force of nature able to influence things on a global scale from a convenient cloak of anonymity. They have no leader, they propose motions weekly and vote on them in online referenda in the closest thing to pure democracy I've ever seen.

Initially they seem to be a prankster outfit, mounting stunts like equipping churches in the Vatican with condom machines or publishing the Darwin Bible with its 'authentic' ancient pictures of evolution. Many of these are thought provoking, such as when they kidnap three internationally renowned football players and force them to work in a third world sweatshop for a week making trainers, then dump them back in the real world with a dollar each as pay. They even broadcast it as a reality TV show. Some are hilarious too, such as the kidnap of Paris, the turkey selected this year to be traditionally pardoned by the US President for Thanksgiving. The subsequent 'I want to be a turkey' demonstrations are hilarious, one newscaster finding it impossible to relate the story without breaking up.

Like any democracy they evolve. Being on the news is great but they don't seem to ever achieve anything: the Pope doesn't come out on the side of contraceptives just because of some successful stunt. So they become more ambitious, especially after the name of 8th Wonderland is discovered and associated with their doings, which the 8th Wonderland citizens previously did not claim responsibility for. Their exploits get more daring, but remain purely democratic. If something is passed by vote it happens, even if it goes against their previously stated goals. They have no consistency and do not pander to precedent. So the film asks the question of whether this would work without ever answering that it would or wouldn't. There's a bright side and a dark side. 8th Wonderland begins to achieve great things, but how much could you allow without it breaking your own principles?

One such event happens early on before we skip back eight months to find out how and why. Pablo Guereiro is reelected as his unnamed country's leader, contiguous with an 8th Wonderland vote, and when the votes are announced, his aide promptly assassinates him. Of course this aide is a citizen of 8th Wonderland, these citizens being comprised of a fascinating and eclectic bunch. Some are unemployed, some employed in high up positions of power. Some are privileged and educated men working within the system, some are connecting from a Caribbean internet café on poor and expensive connections. They're from all countries, all walks of life, both sexes and they run the gamut of every other descriptor you could imagine. One is a globetrotting lingerie model, one is an Iranian woman restricted by culture and politics from doing much of anything, except through 8th Wonderland.

The film does rely on much that wouldn't work in the real world, not least everyone sharing a common password to the system but nobody ever giving it up to the authorities. Some of these conveniences are immediately obvious, others only after a little thought. One gem of a scene provides the epitome of this: it features an interpreter in a meeting between the Russian and Iranian leaders about a nuclear power plant deal. She provides a peach of a way to cause dissension at a critical point in world affairs because she's the only person in the room who speaks both languages needed. No, it couldn't happen in real life, each side savvy enough to bring their own translators, but it makes for joyous cinema.

There are many successes here that provide that joy. One such is in the editing, there being very little conventional story here. Most of the film is told either through news footage and a virtualisation of 8th Wonderland. The news footage is global and is the epitome of the film's multilingual approach. While the language within 8th Wonderland is English, these news reporters read their news in the language of their country, of which there are many. To highlight the global scale, these news stories are edited such as to be told across multiple channels and languages even within the same sentence. It's a major achievement and I can't think of a single other film that meets the same global challenge with such aplomb.

The way we see discourse within 8th Wonderland is fascinating. The virtualisation is technologically nonsensical but very apt as a symbolic attempt to show us online meetings without an endless succession of chatroom logs, hardly something that would translate easy into a visual experience. Again, it's not an easy achievement but a clever one, made even more clever by how these online discussions move offline. Whether it be people recognising each other in a bar or arguments spilling offline between the middle Eastern girl and her father, it's appropriate and succeeds in raising yet more questions in our minds. There are so many questions and so little time, but the film succeeds in raising them all yet still keeping focus on the main thrust of the story.

The biggest success in my eyes is the abuse of 8th Wonderland by others after it becomes public knowledge. A man named John McClane (not the one from Die Hard) announces to the press that he is the leader of 8th Wonderland. He's a fraud but he carries himself well and he seems to have inside knowledge, so the public believe him and 8th Wonderland's citizens are forced to respond by appointing an ambassador to the real world. This speaks to the benefits and disadvantages of such an online world, one of the core concerns of the film, the tagline being 'How to fight a country that doesn't exist?' The eventual response by the intelligence agencies mirrors that of the music industry today and their often unintentionally hilarious attempts to stop progress, always doomed to being at least a step behind the people they're fighting. The evolution of 8th Wonderland mirrors the evolution of file sharing, one of the most fascinating stories in technology today, the internet proving to be a hydra who always provides two new heads for every one cut off.

The questions keep on resonating long after the film's ending. A film festival is a busy thing, packed with films and collections of shorts, Q&A sessions and autograph lines. It becomes difficult to find time to eat or sleep, let alone think out films as complex as this one. Yet this one, only the second film we saw this year, staked out a claim in my brain and refuses to be quiet, throwing out new connections and progressions and inevitabilities at the strangest moments. It's already very clear that it isn't going to go away.

Shot over a couple of years from 2006-2007 with heavy use of translators, this can't have been an easy film to produce and there's an inherent need for the filmmakers to give up large amounts of control and rely on trust, not something particularly commonplace in film production. The filmmakers are French so that was the language of the set and they apparently have some ability in other languages, presumably mostly English, the first language to many and the second language to most. However they are certainly not fluent in every language used in this film, so I can't help but wonder if there's anything here to act as a cinematic equivalent to the old chestnut of gullible girls getting fashionable tattoos of Japanese kanji that don't say anything close to what they think they mean. The trick played by the translator in the film could easily have been played by a translator working on the film. That would be a prank worthy of 8th Wonderland.

Bohemibot (2009)

Director: Brendan Bellomo
Star: Davis Hall

Films submitted to film festivals come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. This one came to the International Horror and SciFi Film Festival with a pedigree, with wins and nominations from what seems like every other festival it's been submitted to, up to and including a bronze medal at the Student Academy Awards. The film itself is a daring piece, full of optimistic sets (mostly virtual), excellent special effects and intriguing designs, and told in an invented alien language, without subtitles. All we get is the introductory passage in English before it morphs back into alien glyphs.

It does provide us with some of the background we need to understand what's going on, not that it's really necessary. Planet Zednok is suffering through an apparently endless war between two races who survive centuries of industrial devastation through cybernetic modification. And here on Zednok we watch our tale of Bohemibot unfold. He's a cyborg, intriguingly both a pilot and harpist, two very different vocations, and his story survives to be told to us through his dreampods, memories and dreams saved into what look like futuristic vacuum tubes.

The biggest success of the film is its visuals, which are truly stunning, every bit as good as what you might expect to see in a major studio release costing many millions of dollars. Brendan Bellomo from New York University, whose student short this is, wrote and directed and is no doubt also responsible for most of the technical achievements. Reading through his website, it's pretty obvious that he's a very talented man indeed. The visuals look awesome from moment one, with Bohemibot playing his strange harp in a Roman looking ruin under the light of two moons. It obviously feels good too, because it's an idyllic scene, but not for long as suddenly his hands start burning while he plays and the enemy arrive to massacre them all with their stormtroopers and fast flying ships. It all looks very Starship Troopers as Bohemibot's hands burn.

But our hero wakes up without them because it's all a dream in one of his dreampods. He's a prisoner in some sort of futuristic concentration camp where the Monolythian enemy march their victims with their helmets of blue light into huge ovens. He lives only to sort refuse on conveyor belts heading into the fires of the Recycling Center. And there eventually, as he watches a child burn, he finds a pair of hands which he can attach to his stumps in his cell and break out, along with another child called Zeptro, who he's rescued. It's all very dramatic and overblown, but it looks awesome.

The actor playing Bohemibot is Davis Hall, who seems to morph between other actors as the film progresses. One minute he looks like William H Macy crossed with Henry Gibson, at other Malcolm McDowell crossed with Anthony Hopkins. He's good at what he does and beyond the impeccable visuals (one Terminator-esque make up job being the sole exception), he's by far the best thing in the film. He has only a short list of credits to his name, mostly in long short films, which is very surprising and something that could easily change, given his talent.

The story is a sweeping epic thing but at heart it's a 25 minute blockbuster. It's what George Lucas would have made if he was a film student with access to all the CGI he has at his fingers now and that could easily be read either as a compliment or an insult given your own particular perspective. In particular there's a pointless chase within a dense asteroid belt that exudes George Lucas because there's no excuse for it, beyond it looking awesome enough to be a graphics demo, and a film that attempts to tell a real story can only be distracted by such a scene. The sad thing is that Bohemibot is better than the Star Wars prequels, though it steals from them shamelessly along with everything from Pinocchio to Battlestar Galactica.