June Bride (1948)

Director: Bretaigne Windust
Stars: Bette Davis and Robert Montgomery

We're in the big city and the music highlights just how fast paced it all is. The only thing that doesn't seem to be a mile a minute is Carey Jackson but he's still sharp, given that he's the lead male character in a film obviously sourced from a dialogue driven play. He was a foreign correspondent for the Allied Magazine Syndicate, but big boss Carleton Towne is wielding his big axe and firing everyone. Jackson has been summoned home from Vienna because that office is no longer required but there isn't another assignment for him, only a boring women's magazine called Home Life that needs livening up. Beyond being utterly out of his line, the editor is Linda Gilman, as tough a young broad as you might expect given that she's played by Bette Davis. Towne agrees. 'She does a first class job but she beats writers' brains in,' he tells Jackson, who knows her well enough to have thought about marriage with her, only to back quickly away.

He's played by Robert Montgomery, an appropriate casting choice given the descriptions he's given. Towne calls him 'an institution' but he still throws him at his ex-flame instead of anything of substance. That ex-flame nails his personality to a tee. 'You're not really a heel,' she tells him. 'You just give that impression.' That's a good description of most of his roles over the years, at least the good ones. Davis and Montgomery also play well off each other, though they're helped by some decent dialogue, presumably courtesy of Graeme Lorimer who wrote the source play. It isn't undying classic sort of stuff but it's definitely a cut above the average, however much it shouldn't be. There are little hints of mediocrity all over the place, right down to the fact that the star writer doesn't know the difference between 'its' and 'it's'. The ending is pitiful too, just the sort of thing that continually mars the Production Code era with its atrocious convenience.

In fact after a promising, if stagebound start, the story tails off a little as we rush off to Crestville, Indiana, to cover the June wedding of nineteen year old Jeanne Brinker, even though it's winter and Indiana is liberally coated in snow. While the magazine folks are all hard bitten and cynical, the Brinkers are the epitome of small town Americana and so officially boring in the eyes of the city folks. Mr Brinker owns a hardware store on Main Street and Mrs Brinker is obviously a little fond of her home made apple pie. The most exciting things get in the Brinker household ties to the fact that Mrs Brinker has taken the pledge and Mr Brinker keeps a jug of potent apple cider hanging outside the window, without a cork in it. Fortunately there's a younger daughter, as Jeanne is a waste of space. Seventeen year old Boo, short for Barbara, may be plainer than her sister but she has far more character and she's the one who throws a wrench into the affair.

Ostensibly it revolves around the fact that Carey Jackson looks down on the whole June bride idea as nothing but a bunch of fluff, so he searches for an angle he can use to turn it into a real story. Of course there isn't one, but at one point he finds what might just work. You see, Jeanne is supposed to marry Bud Mitchell, which doesn't make her sister too happy because Boo has been stuck on Bud for years. Jeanne is only marrying him because Bud's brother Jim went into the army and doesn't come home too often. As Boo says, 'Jeanne likes attention,' and she isn't afraid to screw her sister over to get it. So she follows through on what Jackson can't do without being fired and has Jim summoned home to shake everything up. Yes, you can write the rest of the script yourself and you won't be wrong at a single turn but it unfolds pretty well, all things considered. After all it has Fay Bainter to ground everything and Betty Lynn to keep it alive.

The leads play their parts well, but while the story is really supposed to be all about them with everything else backing them up, they're just not interesting. Robert Montgomery is something of a pixie as Carey Jackson and he's great fun to watch, but he's been a better pixie elsewhere and his eye movements are overplayed far too often. Bette Davis is capable but Linda Gilman is annoying. I'm all for Miss Bette playing the career woman because she was a career woman and she was the toughest of the tough, but that just makes the ending here even more thoroughly embarrassing. Before that arrives, she breezes into the Brinkers' home and tears it apart. She removes all their awesome wooden scrollwork, paints over the wallpaper and even saws the sofa in half. She sees their house as 'a McKinley stinker' and while what she does isn't as offensive as what Fred Astaire does to Audrey Hepburn's bookstore in Funny Face, it's still offensive.

To my thinking the film gets stolen out from under both of them by a bunch of supporting actors fleshing out their little subplots. Unfortunately none of them get enough to do, except perhaps Betty Lynn who gets quite a bit of screen time as Boo, a name she was given by Bette Davis on set to distinguish between them. She's young but very capable and she'd go on to great success as Barney Fife's girlfriend on The Andy Griffith Show. Fay Bainter is Gilman's right hand woman and she simply didn't know how to give a bad performance. There should have been much more of her here. Mary Wickes plays another of Gilman's staff and she's as acerbic and blunt as ever. Of the men, only Tom Tully really stands out but he does that by being blissful background. Like the rest of the men in this picture, they all play second fiddle to the women, until the atrocious male chauvinist ending, of course. I wonder if it was written that way in the play. I hope not.

Monstrosity (1964)

Director: Joseph Mascelli
Stars: Marjorie Eaton and Frank Gerstle

I'm driving the highway to Cinematic Hell in 2010 for the awesome folks at Cinema Head Cheese to post a review a week of the very worst films of all time. These are so bad that they make Uwe Boll look good.

I just couldn't resist following up The Brain That Wouldn't Die with The Atomic Brain to make a double helping of brains, even though this film was originally titled Monstrosity only to perhaps be renamed because the original title described the picture too well. Both films ponder the same theme, the old chestnut about mad transplant surgeons, and both come down firmly on the side that it's immoral, unethical and unforgivable. How quaint we were back in the sixties when it came to such things, but then this film was co-written by no less than four writers and directed by Ray Dennis Steckler's cinematographer. Having four writers generally makes the best script turn to mush and it isn't surprising that Joseph Mascelli never directed again. He kept busy for a while on Steckler's films, with 1964 also seeing him lens Strange Compulsion, The Thrill Killers and The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?

The mad scientist here is Dr Otto Frank, because he presumably dropped the obvious last seven letters of his surname when coming through Ellis Island. However we don't hear him speak for a while because we're stuck listening to narration from the distinguished but uncredited Bradford Dillman instead. This is interminable, as inane as any Ed Wood movie and confusing to boot. We quickly assume it's there because Mascelli forgot to turn the sound on during the shoot, or to extend the vague physical similarity between experienced actor Frank Gerstle and Boris Karloff, a similarity we just know isn't going to extend to a sophisticated English accent. Yet characters start speaking when we least expect it, making this feel disjointed like a silent movie that got caught up in the sound wave at the last minute. Dillman tries to give us a framework for the story but succeeds only at not cracking up at the sheer inanity of the lines he has to read.

'Is the next step the transplantation of the human brain?' he asks us. 'Many scientists answer yes, but they pause and add a grim warning.' Fair enough, right? We really should listen to the grim warnings of scientists as they're the experts on such matters and have a firm grip on how they will affect the regular non-scientists among us. So, what are the grim warnings here? Well, Dillman continues on. 'For in the ancient folk legends, tales are told of blood-sucking vampires, crawling out of graves to live on the bodies of helpless victims. Is man now doomed to produce a race of ever-living monstrosities worse than the vampires of legend?' OK, so either this is a new meaning of the word 'science' that I was hitherto blissfully unaware of or those four writers took turns, one line at a time, and had fun messing with each other's heads. To be fair though, Frank is doing a pretty good job at producing ever-living monstrosities as we soon discover.

Dr Frank's thing seems to be grafting living animal brains into human corpses, which is a strange hobby as hobbies go. The corpses are cute, of course, because what's the point of being a mad scientist if you can't have an endless supply of cute female subjects for your experiments? Well, at least as cute as you can persuade to strip off naked and stand in a B movie cyclotron. Hang on, pick your jaw back up off the floor! This cyclotron has conveniently placed metal bands to hide all the juicy bits because exploitation films of the sixties were generally about hinting at the salacious rather than showing it, by necessity of course. The bodies come from the Greenhaven cemetery, through good old fashioned body snatching, but it's becoming a little dangerous given that Dr Frank takes one of his montrosities with him, a man who spontaneously sprouted tusks somehow when he was gifted with the brain of a dog. The dog man kills the night watchman.

All this time we haven't heard anyone speak, just Dillman. It takes a long while before we hear the actual voice of one of the characters, amazingly well over seven minutes, and even then it isn't Dr Frank. It's Hetty March, his employer, who Dillman describes as a 'miserly old woman brooding upstairs in her bedroom'. Really she's the driving force behind everything, a twisted old woman right out of The Twilight Zone who's obsessed with perpetuating her own life through any means necessary. She has it all planned out too. She'll hire servants from foreign countries so nobody will notice them disappear. She'll draw up her will to leave everything to one of them, then she'll have Dr Frank transplant her brain into the nubile young body of her chosen servant and take over her life. She even has a resident gigolo called Victor to take care of her every whim but has every intention to dump him when young and pretty enough to pick and choose.

The actress given the role is Marjorie Eaton, who plays Hetty with relish, sniping at everyone with the unassailable attitude of the very rich. It helps that she spends much of her time in her wheelchair and with her long face, hawkish nose and cruel mouth looks like nothing less than Alastair Sim playing Davros, the withered creator of the Daleks in Doctor Who. Eaton was a very talented actress, though unfortunately she had a tendency to play small parts in big pictures and big parts in small pictures, so while her filmography looks impressive, she was uncredited in movies like The Snake Pit, Witness for the Prosecution and Bullitt, but prominent in others like Zombies of Mora Tau, Night Tide and The Atomic Brain. She deserved better. On the flipside, Frank Fowler who passively absorbs all her barbs as Victor, her ill fated companion and gigolo, earned his only film credit here, after two uncredited appearances over the previous decade.

We spend surprisingly little time watching Miss March, Victor and Dr Frank, given that they really drive the plot, and more time watching the three young ladies who answer the call for servants and don't ask the right questions until it's far too late. They're supposedly international in origin: Nina (bizarrely pronounced Niner) Rhodes is supposedly Austrian, Beatrice Mullins is English and Anita Gonzalez is presumably Mexican, but actresses Erika Peters, Judy Bamber and Lisa Lang change their accents so frequently that we just give up believing their nationalities. Peters had some experience in the genre, having previously appeared in House of the Damned and William Castle's Mr Sardonicus, but she doesn't give any impression at being comfortable with this sort of material. It's not surprising to find that this was her last film. It was Bamber's last film too, a full five years after Roger Corman's joyous A Bucket of Blood. This was Lang's only feature.

While Nina probably gets most screen time, Bea is the one that becomes the focus, not just of Miss March but of most of the crew too. It can't hurt that she seems to be at least a foot taller than the rest of them, but she also claims to have the same measurements as Marilyn Monroe. She certainly seems to have the same ditzy brain too but not that much of the charisma. She can't even kick off her heels when she's lying down. The cameraman seems to keep aiming her way, the scriptwriters come up with scenes for her to stand out and the composer of the score seems to be obsessed. Every time Bea does something remotely sexy, like walking suggestively in front of the camera or bouncing on a bed, suddenly there's a glockenspiel to emphasise just how well suggestive parts of her body bounce. There can't be too many B pictures of this era where you can close your eyes and have the soundtrack suggest to you just how her tush jiggles.

For a mad scientist flick, there's really not a heck of lot of mad science and that's a bad thing when the eye candy doesn't seem to have the slightest clue how to engage us in their bonding and inept attempts at escape. All the memories I have of this film from watching it six years ago revolve around Dr Frank's bizarre transplants which got more bizarre over the passage of time. Viewing afresh I realise that while they may be bizarre, they're really not given much attention and they're not particularly worthy of the memory. Sure, he transplants the brain of his favourite cat into the body of Anita Gonzalez, for reasons that escape me, and he proves the success of the operation by having her catch and eat a mouse in front of Miss March, though she doesn't play with it for a single moment. Lisa Lang bizarrely plays a better cat than she does a Mexican, but there are so many opportunities for the character that are woefully ignored.

In fact the whole film plays out like a woefully ignored set of opportunities. Even when events get interesting, they're not followed up on. The one thing Anita does as a cat, except fall off a roof, is to scratch out one of Bea's eyes from the top of a gazebo, but all the great possibilities that spring from that are lost in the fact that the film was shot in a mere ten days and there's almost no budget for effects. If I wasn't hallucinating by the time the film reached its climax, Bea may just have been electrocuted by her own eyeball, but if that's the case it was hardly dwelt upon with the appropriate level of gruesome exploitation. I won't spoil what happens to Hetty March except to say that it's an appropriate irony but, as always, it's underexploited and badly phrased and so another really cool concept ends up almost boring in its exposition. It's really sad to say that a film with this much promise ends up boring, but it's God's honest truth.

We don't even spend much time in Dr Frank's mad scientist lab, which is insane because his cyclotron is a pretty cool device as B movie lab equipment goes. It whirrs and mists up and feels vaguely important, even if he forgot to build in a safety release handle or an emergency exit in case the door shuts on him while he's inside. He does let early experiments wander around the lab like zombies so it could hardly have escaped his mind as a possibility. Then again, he's so bizarrely inconsistent with his scientific genius that he builds a nuclear bomb into the cyclotron in case anyone comes poking around. He mentions this to Hetty March to make her feel better about the possibility of police tracking his body snatching exploits to her house. 'Close the circut breaker,' he points out, 'and in a matter of minutes this house and any evidence it might contain becomes a radioactive hole in the ground.' Wow! Vaporisation as a way to avoid suspicion!

In fact, come to think of it, is that what really happened in the Gulf of Mexico? Someone came snooping around the Deepwater Horizon and a scientist with a guilty conscience closed the circuit breaker to trigger a nuclear explosion and turn it into a radioactive hole in the Gulf? Suddenly everything becomes clear! Talk about learning the wrong things from movies. In all seriousness though, it's hard to imagine what anyone could learn from this movie except how to magically turn something that is inherently sleazy and exploitative into something boring. The first seven minutes alone are precisely what the doctor ordered, with naked corpses, gibberish gadgetry and outlandish experiments, but perhaps Dr Frank left the real script behind that statue at Greenhaven cemetery to replace the night watchman's bottle. Maybe the first seven minutes was written by the only writer who had a clue, even though he forgot to add speech.

The next chunk of the film is the exposition of Miss March's devious plan and it's certainly one that's worthy of a movie. Marjorie Eaton throws out snipes and barbs like they're going out of fashion and ventures well over the creepy line with her attention to her new servants' vital statistics. At one point she has Bea dressed in a towel and starts lowering it to look down her crack. At another she complains when Bea walks up one of the many flights of stairs in the vast March mansion, because she doesn't want her to develop any of those ugly muscles in her legs. Somehow Bea doesn't trigger to any of these hints that something creepy is going on inside the skull of her new employer and just giggles like an idiot. Maybe she's just following the blonde stereotype or maybe those Marilyn measurements have gone to her head. Whatever the reason, all the glorious creepiness that could have exuded from every pore of these scenes just doesn't.

For a while we watch various laws of physics and internal consistency broken into pieces. Miss March gets out of her wheelchair and descends the endless staircase to the basement and the two remaining girls follow without their high heels making a single sound. Then again this house has bizarre acoustics given that nobody hears Anita scream indoors but everyone hears the dog man attack one of the walking corpses outside. When we realise that all bets are off and open ourselves up to the potential for aliens to beam down and take over, we get all serious again and start looking at ways to scupper the villain's dastardly plot. Even here we get bones instead of flesh and have to console ourselves with a rapid fire finalé that leaves us wondering just how much this quartet of writers cared about telling a story and how much they just wanted it to all be over. When four writers apparently just don't care, you can't help but wonder why you should.

Spirited Away (2001)

Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Stars: Rumi Hiragi and Miyu Irino

I'm climbing the stairway to Cinematic Heaven in 2010 to post five reviews a week of films from the IMDb Top 250 List, supposedly the greatest motion pictures of all time. Are they really? Find out here.

By the time I watched Princess Mononoke for this project back in 2006, I'd seen a sum total of one Hayao Miyazaki movie: a dubbed full screen version of Kiki's Delivery Service. A couple of weeks later when I caught up with this one, I'd seen almost all of them, just short of his earliest (The Castle of Cagliostro) and his latest (Howl's Moving Castle). Now, the only one I still haven't seen is the new latest, Ponyo, which was released in 2008 to the usual acclaim, because once you've seen one Miyazaki you just have to see more. He serves as writer, director and lead artist on his films and is so far from prolific, with only ten films to his credit as director in over thirty years. Fortunately he works for Studio Ghibli, which he co-founded, and so is relatively free to work on whatever he wants, at whatever speed suits him. After Princess Mononoke, he went in to temporary retirement but, luckily for us, he returned to work to make his masterpiece.

Miyazaki is sometimes described as 'the Japanese Walt Disney', but the accolade is misleading because his greatest achievements are very different from Disney's. Walt Disney succeeded in making animation massively popular, with icons like Mickey Mouse, and to make animation at a feature length viable, with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1938, initially dubbed 'Disney's Folly' but soon to become the highest grossing film of the year which won him a special honorary Academy Award: one Oscar with seven miniature companions. An important Oscar is one of the few things that these two filmmakers share, as Spirited Away was the first Japanese anime to win at the Academy Awards, even though anime predates them by a full decade. In 1938, Miyazaki hadn't even been born and so many of the greatest innovations in the industry predate him, with Osamu Tezuka being a better fit for the description of a Japanese Walt Disney.

What Miyazaki achieved is to elevate the art of animation to a whole new level. Working within the most animation friendly country in the world, one whose written language is even comprised of pictures, he brought depth and maturity to the medium that is startling for the deceptive ease by which he achieved it. Inspired by western writers of children's fiction like Rosemary Sutcliffe, Ursula Le Guin and Eleanor Farjeon, he crafts his stories less as movie scripts and more as real works of literature, without descending, as Disney tended to do, to clichéd heroes and villains and hackneyed fairy tale plots. His characters have grand adventures that are exciting to watch, but they also grow through the experiences that unfold, learning about who they are, what flaws they have and how they relate to the world around them. There are distinguishable themes to Miyazaki's work that resonate: feminism, pacifism and environmentalism, but he never preaches.

Because Miyazaki's movies are all about growth and young children at the point of learning about life are perfect as lead characters, the lead character here, as usual, is a young girl, ten years old and far from happy about the fact that she and her family are moving house. As her parents get lost on the way to their new home, young Chihiro just bemoans her fate and whines a lot. There are hints at the magic ahead, in the form of tiny inviting shrines that Chihiro sees out of the car windows, but she's too happy being unhappy to pay much attention. Soon they run out of road and find themselves in front of a tunnel blocked by yet another stone shrine, so they leave the car behind and walk through the tunnel to discover a deserted theme park full of restaurants. It's empty of people but is at least full of food, all hot, steaming and inviting, so her parents tuck in with the intention of paying the proprietors when they appear.

While Chihiro's parents apparently fall under the spell of this theme park and fail to acknowledge anything strange about it, she does and so wanders around on her own to explore. Fortunately she discovers the androgynous young sorcerer, Master Haku, who feeds her a red pill to stop her from disappearing. She's already fading away because as we all know, this place is not what it seems and it's not a place for humans. It's when night falls that the theme park comes truly alive though that is hardly the right word, given the characters we're about to be introduced to. Her parents turn into pigs, the visitors are huge shadowy figures rather than people and the tunnel becomes submerged, turning into a wide river. A paddle steamer brings new guests, leaving the boat as Japanese masks and stepping onto land as varied kami or spirits. You just can't go wrong with kami and if you haven't been introduced to the concept, this is the perfect place to start.

To suggest that this world is fantastic is an understatement but it's vibrant and engaging. Haku may be a young sorcerer with a number of powerful secrets, but he still works at a bathhouse, the central location for most of the film and, as we soon discover, it's a bathhouse where eight million gods can rest their weary bones. This is the safest place for Chihiro though it's still hardly a place for a ten year old girl, especially as humans are close to taboo in this world. Haku gives her directions to the boiler room, asking that she insist that Kamaji put her to work. If she doesn't work, Yubaba, the sorceress in charge of the bathhouse, will turn her into an animal too. And off he goes. You can imagine what a bundle of nerves young Chihiro must be in at this point, her world having been turned into a nightmarish whirlwind where every glance shows her something else weird and wonderful. This is a deluge of imagination and it's only just beginning.

Just as Chihiro has Haku to guide her, at least a little, we put ourselves in the hands of Miyazaki. There are many reasons why his introduction on the Disney-distributed DVD by his friend John Lasseter, chief creative officer at Pixar and now Disney, is so appropriate. While he is obviously uncomfortable in front of a camera, Lasseter puts him there for a brief moment and simply says, 'Hayao Miyazaki, the world. The world, Miyazaki-san.' This resonates with me, not only because he was almost unknown in the west until the release of Princess Mononoke, his genius known only to a select few of the initiated, me excluded. I discovered anime in 1991 with Akira's UK release and I became an instant fan, stunned by the sheer range of material that the medium offered. I put down a standing order for any new titles released and even made odd little pilgrimages to events at the Yaohan Plaza in London and the offices of Anime UK magazine.

Anime was a whole new world, utterly different from the animation I knew, but Miyazaki was its best kept secret, even though to watch anime without knowing Miyazaki is like watching kaiju without knowing Godzilla or watching spaghetti westerns without knowing Sergio Leone. Only when I finally saw one of his films did I realise just what people like Helen McCarthy, editor of Anime UK, were talking about. We all watch cartoons as a kid but there's a point in time where we discover our first Disney movie and everything that went before turns into kids stuff. Spirited Away is so far beyond anything that went before it that it stuns us and we find ourselves laughing and crying at the sheer elation of the experience. We find ourselves lost in the magic and have difficulty remembering to blink or breathe, utterly immersed in the world that has been opened up before us. And yet he is not a household name. The world, Miyazaki-san, indeed.

It's impossible not to see the wonder in every glance. Even the staircase that Chihiro needs to walk down to the boiler room turns into a Herculean task full of terror and relief. Kamaji is a six armed creature with extensible limbs and dark glasses who stokes the furnaces that feed the baths, assisted by balls of soot with arms that carry the coal, one piece at a time. The sheer otherness of the world Chihiro finds herself in is palpable. Suddenly she finds it difficult to put her foot down without treading on someone or something. These sootballs eat little stars, just one reminder that every character is both utterly memorable and utterly different from anything you're likely to have seen before. Yubaba has a huge head with even more huge hair, like a Toby jug, and a collection of huge rings like a gypsy fortune teller. She has three heads that bounce around her room like cushions. She even turns into a bird to fly away during the day.

She's a scary character for a ten year old girl, something that extends from the lead character to the audience watching. She can light a cigarette with her finger. She can pull Chihiro through a set of doors just by waving her hand. She has a huge baby that she dotes upon, and I do mean huge. She can even pull the kanji off the page after Chihiro signs a contract to work for her that constricts her name down to Sen. 'You'd make a lovely piglet,' says the sorceress, 'or a lump of coal,' and you can believe she'd make it happen too. She calls Chihiro 'a lazy, spoiled cry baby,' but the girl persists in asking for work and Yubaba has taken an oath to take on anyone who so requests, so Sen she becomes. Unfortunately, as Haku explains to her afterwards, Yubaba steals people's names and in so doing steals their memories of who they used to be. Haku doesn't remember who he was and even after only a day, Chihiro almost turns entirely into Sen.

As a worker at this bathhouse for the gods, Chihiro experiences all that life has to offer, all its shapes and sizes and flavours. She has an adventure getting down the staircase to the boiler house that first night but walks up it without even thinking the next morning. She's already more than she was, shaped by her experiences. She finds prejudice, oppression and trickery in this bathhouse, but also friendship, belonging and camaraderie. She finds strength, purpose and maturity, all the while remaining a child. She learns how to keep control over her emotions. She even makes an unlikely friend, a tall shadowy creature in a mask. Through his mute help and her own stubborn determination, she turns a disaster into a triumph and the emotions soar, though even he isn't what he might appear. He's No Face, a dangerous monster who generates gold but eats some of the employees. Again she saves the day, through a mix of daring and naïvete.

In things like this Miyazaki keeps us guessing. While it's obvious that Chihiro is the focal point of the story, not least because she's the title character in the original Japanese, Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, which translates literally to Sen and Chihiro's Spiriting Away, there's far from just one story woven into this one picture. Initially it's Haku who plans to rescue Chihiro, given that he knows this environment and she doesn't, and so he tries to find a way to return her parents back from swine into people. Yet as Chihiro grows as a person and becomes more comfortable in her surroundings, it falls on her to rescue Haku from a number of fates. Never one to make his characters one dimensional, Miyazaki crafts even Yubaba, initially the villainess of the piece, in ways that make her more and more morally ambiguous, especially when we discover her twin sister, Zeniba, who has infiltrated her domain in the innovative guise of a flock of paper dolls.

It's watching characters like these who have little obvious connection to the viewer that we can't fail but realise the magic involved in the filmmaking. Miyazaki conjures depth out of paper dolls, draws attitude out of the movement of hair and wrings emotion out of a character with no face. How difficult must this be? Even the little soot creatures have more humanity to them than any characters I've seen Disney come up with in the last fifty years. Cutesy singing teapots do not come remotely close. Somehow Miyazaki can embed emotion into anything and everything, a highly appropriate talent given that this film is full of kami, the spirits that exist in every object, a Shinto concept that finds at once its most obvious and its subtlest cinematic interpretations here. It flows out of the backgrounds, not just the architecture of the bathhouse but the myriad creatures that populate it, even the ones who only exist to flesh out the background of a scene.

Miyazaki packed Spirited Away full of far more background detail than any of his previous films. Every shot is hugely detailed with more attention spent on the ephemeral than most animators would spend on the focal points, yet our attention is never diverted away from where it should be. There are little touches throughout this film, so many that you'll still be discovering them on your fourth or fifth time through, from a chair that lowers itself automatically to suit the person sitting in it to a lantern that hops, for its stand is a single leg. Some aren't even seen because corridors offer only shadowy hints at what lies behind their paper thin walls. There's glorious decoration everywhere, from Yubaba's lush suites to the many painted wall screens, always different and always delightful. Almost everyone and everything in this film has character except for Master Haku who for much of the film is deliberately an inscrutable cypher.

Such attention was not unnoticed. Spirited Away made an unimaginable impact in Japan, even more than Miyazaki has previously done throughout his career. It broke the record set by its predecessor, Princess Mononoke, for the number of cinema tickets sold for a domestic film, then went on to do the unthinkable: break the all-time box office record set by Titanic. It also won the equivalent of the Best Picture Oscar in Japan, and I should emphasise that that was Best Picture not Best Animated Picture. In the States, it deservedly won the Best Animated Feature Oscar in 2002, the films that comprised its competition being unworthy of mention in the same breath. The only other anime ever even nominated was Miyazaki's next film, Howl's Moving Castle, not because anime is unworthy or overlooked but because the Academy's rules require theatrical release in Los Angeles. C'mon, Spirited Away or Treasure Planet? Did they even have to discuss?

Spirited Away is also the longest film to ever be nominated over the entire run of the category, something else that speaks to the different attitudes taken in Japan to America when it comes to animation. There's no expectation in Japan that kids just won't sit still for a movie that runs over two hours, and indeed within a year of its release, one out of every six Japanese had seen this film. Personally I can't imagine anyone not becoming utterly engrossed with Spirited Away, not even if they have ADHD and can't sit still for five minutes at a time. It's the closest thing I've seen to magic on a cinema screen, the best possible entry point to a whole new world, though I'd swear to whatever deity you choose that one experience of Studio Ghibli or Hayao Miyazaki and you'll have difficulty going back to lesser material. In my humble opinion this is the greatest animated film ever made and you are depriving yourself by not seeing it.

Vice Squad (1953)

Director: Arnold Laven
Stars: Edward G Robinson and Paulette Goddard

I was going to mention that it's been too long since I've seen an Edward G Robinson movie but then I realised that it's always too long since I've seen an Edward G Robinson movie. He may just have been the most consistent and reliable actor ever to work in Hollywood, along with the most underrated and overlooked. It isn't just the famous films, from Little Caesar to Soylent Green, it's all those films in between that I'd never even heard of. As I catch up with each of these movies I often discover why I'd never heard of them but I never regret seeing the master at work that one more time. This one pairs him with Paulette Goddard, who was more successful off screen than on, losing out on parts like Scarlett O'Hara but landing husbands like Burgess Meredith and Charlie Chaplin. She'd divorced both by this point but hadn't married the German novelist Erich Maria Remarque yet, who wrote All Quiet on the Western Front. So many husbands, so little time.

There's another major star here but he wasn't at the time, a mere year after a small role in High Noon and the same year as an even smaller one in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. He's Lee Van Cleef and he's so far down the title credits that he doesn't even fit on the first 'and' page. We still see him first though, stealing a car at 14th & Hamilton while his partner keeps a lookout and shoots Officer Kellogg when he tries to interrupt. Van Cleef is Pete Monty and his partner is Al Barkis, both of whom are gone by the time reinforcements arrive, leaving innocent bystander Jack Hartrampf to be discovered with the body. He's guilty of nothing except being in the wrong place at the wrong time, very wrong given that he's a pillar of the community who was spending time with a young lady with a Marilyn complex instead of a corpse. He's an undertaker and she's presumably a kept woman. No wonder he keeps his mouth shut until his lawyer arrives.

By the time he does, Officer Kellogg is dead but the captain of detectives stumbles onto a lucky break. He's Capt Barnaby, known as Barnie to one and all, and even though this is 1953 he runs a Hill Street Blues sort of precinct where everyone has a dozen things on the go all the time and they skip from busy scene to busy scene. One of the many little stories that swamp the precinct involves a cheap crook called Frankie Pierce who's been picked up for another stupid little crime while he was on parole. This time he's prepared, though, with details of an upcoming bank job that he heard about in prison to trade for leniency. It's an attempt on a branch of the Federal Savings Bank that's being masterminded by Al Barkis, freshly released from jail to become a cop killer. Given that we know whodunit from moment one, the joy of this film ends up being in trying to figure out the writing challenge of how these two subplots will intersect once more.

It also becomes a character study. The more the film runs on the more it becomes obvious that the case at hand isn't quite as important as the exploration of Capt Barnaby's character. He has to juggle so many balls at once its unreal and he can't afford to drop a single one of them. It isn't just the big cases either, the bank jobs and the cop killers. He has to find a way to uncover a phony European count who's planning to marry a rich widow for her money. He has to appear on TV for an interview. He has to console the parents of a kidnap victim. He even gets to deal with a kook who thinks television signals get projected onto him whenever he leaves the house. And in his spare time he gets to exercise all sorts of manouevres so that people like Jack Hartrampf go from being in the wrong place at the wrong time to being in the right place at the right time and people like Marty Kusalich, who bottle out of the bank job at the last minute, do the opposite.

Vice Squad is a very well constructed film, merely not the one I expected to watch. I expected a straight forward crime drama, given that this is 1953 and film noir was fading but the excesses of the seventies were far in the future. I expected a police procedural focused on a single case and the progressive steps taken to wrap it up. I even expected a buddy story of sorts, given suggestions that the case would be solved only through teamwork between the chief of police and Mona Ross, the madam of a brothel, erm, I mean the lady proprietor of an escort service. That's what you get for judging a film on the basis of its promotion, I guess, because it's none of the above. It's just another opportunity for Edward G Robinson to strut his subtle stuff and show us a day in the life of a captain of detectives. The stress must be insane but of course he wins out in the end and finishes off with a throwaway comment like, 'See you in the morning, Lacey.'

What else it shows us is just how easily the cops could bend the rules a little in order to get to a desired outcome. Capt Barnaby never breaks them, because he's an honest, upstanding man, but he bends them every which way but loose. Poor Jack Hartrampf gets brought back in twice after his lawyer gets him out, because they know full well he was just a witness, one who's hiding what he saw to avoid having to testify in court and thus expose his illicit relationship with Vicki the Marilyn wannabe. It's beautiful choreography. One moment his lawyer is walking him out of the police station, the next he's being walked back in for molesting a young lady who conveniently walks into him as he turns around. Once released from that he gets arrested for being drunk and disorderly because someone slipped a bottle into his pocket. It's all subtly but cleverly done, but more importantly it's all utterly routine. It's a very telling film indeed.

Somewhere in Sonora (1933)

Director: Mack V Wright
Stars: John Wayne and Duke

John Wayne and his devil horse Duke made six B movies for Leon Schlesinger in 1932 and 1933, labelled Four Star Westerns and distributed through Warner Brothers. I've already noted in my reviews for The Big Stampede and Haunted Gold that these films show notably higher production values than the films he made for Lone Star Productions immediately afterwards, a company that made movies for poverty row studio Monogram. Yet as I read up on each of these films, I quickly realised that each of the six was a remake, keeping the budgets down by reusing footage from the original films. What struck me most was that each was a remake of a recent film, made only four or five years earlier, starring Ken Maynard, someone I hadn't even heard of. Apparently he was a huge star in the silent westerns but he had an ego and temper of epic proportions and so instead of becoming what John Wayne became, he died penniless and forgotten.

Here Wayne is John Bishop, who works at Bob Leadly's ranch and is tipped to win the stagecoach race at the upcoming Twin Forks rodeo. However even though he has the lovely Mary Burton and her annoying friend Patsy Ellis to cheer him on he finds himself in jail after his opposition's coach comes a cropper during the race. Before the race he innocently suggested to Mary that with her rooting for him the other coach would probably fall to pieces, which just goes to prove that you should always be careful how you word things. Fortunately for him Leadly remembers the fate of his son Bart, who also went to jail for something he didn't do but who ended up working for the notorious bandit Monte Black and his outfit south of the border, a crew that you can join but not leave that's known colloquially as the Brotherhood of Death. Leadly doesn't want Bishop to succumb to the same fate so he and his bickering cronies, Riley and Shorty, spring him.

Leadly wants him to head north to Nevada but he decides to head south into Sonora instead to return the favour by locating and bringing back home Bart. Even when Riley and Shorty track him down on the way to point out that the sheriff has caught the real culprit so his name has been cleared, he continues on his quest and of course they go with him. Naturally in a 59 minute B movie there are plenty of conveniences so we can finish up in time with room enough for everyone to strut their stuff, including Duke. Monte Black is conveniently sitting back having a drink in the first cantina the trio stop at across the border. Just as they try to establish their tough credentials in conveniently waltz Mary and Patsy on the way to the silver mine that Mary's father Kelly runs, conveniently located close to Black's hideout. The Rurales are about to hit the Brotherhood of Death so Bishop has to act quickly and conveniently runs into Black on the way.

But hey, we're not watching for intricacies of plot, we're watching for action, romance, stuntwork and hopefully a complete lack of the racial idiocy that plagued Haunted Gold. Fortunately this plays it pretty straight, the comedy being provided by Riley and Shorty who are idiots, albeit well meaning ones. The biggest name in the film belongs to Henry B Walthall, a veteran actor almost at the end of his long screen career that began as early as 1908 in a film that still exists today, Rescued from an Eagle's Nest. Almost three hundred films later, he played Bob Leadly well but deserved a bigger part. Australian actor J P McGowan is a capable villain, though he was a versatile talent, racking up a couple of hundred credits both as an actor and a director and dabbling in producing and editing too. As Monte Black, a play on the name of the silent film actor Monte Blue, he's more than a little ruthless, even executing men who try to leave his gang.

The romance isn't too sappy, Shirley Palmer bringing a sense of surprising toughness to the part of Mary Burton, like the ruthlessness of Black a recognisable precode element that dates the film to before 1934 just as effectively as looking it up at IMDb. She had a surprisingly brief career, 23 films from 1926 to 1934, this being her last credited role. Perhaps she followed the path of many actresses by retiring from the screen when they got married, her husband being the English screenwriter John Collier who made an impact with his first film, Sylvia Scarlett in 1935. It's Mary's friend Patsy who's the token annoying character here, this thankfully being Ann Fay's final film. She's supposed to be from back east so her lack of western experience can set up a couple of bad gags, but we just want to stone her off the screen. Even Riley and Shorty point out how annoying she is and when the characters agree with us, we know we're right.

Wayne, as always is capable, but he doesn't get much to do here. In The Big Stampede he got a great chase scene, tried to play drunk and had fun with a Mexican bandit sidekick. In Haunted Gold he got to be tied up a couple of times and fight a memorable fight while suspended from a cable car. Here he doesn't really do anything of note, merely hang around and play the hero in very thick make up. He's still far more capable than the man he's trying to rescue, given that Bart Leadly merely falls off his horse while trying to escape and loses his gun to boot. He does get a single shot at redemption and he takes it but it's a second of screen time that doesn't hint at the future of the actor playing the part. He's Paul Fix, who went on to be a major name in the genre, not least for playing Micah in The Rifleman but also for being John Wayne's acting coach. In return the Duke gave him parts in over two dozen movies. You wouldn't guess it from this.

The Big Stampede (1932)

Director: Tenny Wright
Stars: John Wayne and Duke

Another Four Star Western featuring John Wayne and his horse Duke, this one has him trying to keep law and order on the Arizona border. It's 1932 though, so this is no political comment on the controversial SB 1070 law passed by Governor Jan Brewer. Instead of the Mexico border and illegal immigrants, we're on the New Mexico border where legal settlers are trying to escape the drought in Arizona by shifting over to New Mexico, only to fall prey to organised cattle rustlers. The bad news is that the head of the rustlers is Sam Crew, the biggest cattle baron in the area, so there's nobody powerful enough to stand against him. The good news is that Governor Lew Wallace sends in a tough deputy sheriff with a tough name, John Steele. Guess which part John Wayne plays in this affair? What's surprising is that he gets to team up with a Mexican bandit to take down Crew and his crew, Sonora Joe by name.

Yet another remake of a Ken Maynard silent, this time 1927's The Land Beyond the Law, Wayne seems at home in the role of the deputy sheriff who leaves his mark everywhere just to torment his opponent. It's like the opposite of many of the pulp thrillers of the era, where the villain torments the hero by leaving notes or symbols. This time it's the good guy doing the tormenting, even before they meet, turning up ahead of a 5,000 strong herd of cattle to etch his star on the bar and slap another on the back of the bartender. It's fun watching the Duke pretend to be a drunk and disappointing that he doesn't get more than a scene to do it, given that he only has a mere 54 minutes to work through the entire story. That's not long for him to hire a deputy, catch the murderer Arizona Frank Bailey, bring the cattle rustlers to justice, stop the big stampede and get the girl, but then he's John Wayne. Even in 1932 he could do anything he set his mind to.

This is a straight western, so it omits all the genre hopping trappings of Haunted Gold, along with its frenetic pace. It does include more examples of the excellent stuntwork seen in that film but they look very much like producer Leon Schlesinger merely inserted some of the footage from The Land Beyond the Law as the grain is different and the frame rate much higher. Some of the long shots, especially of the big stampede itself, look like they were reused too as the cattle keep changing colour and speed. Sometimes I wonder if this production used any live cattle at all or whether every steer we see had already been turned into steak over the five years since the original film. Mostly it's pretty capable stuff but such antics make it feel cheap, something rather surprising to me after the apparently high production values of Haunted Gold, especially compared to the films Wayne would make for Monogram during the middle of the decade.

Where this film succeeds over Haunted Gold is in the sidekick. Instead of atrocious stereotyping with the black coward sidekick Clarence Washington Brown we get atrocious stereotyping with the Mexican cattle rustler sidekick Sonora Joe. However Spanish actor Luis Alberni has a ball with the role in a way that Blue Washington couldn't in the previous film. Short and stocky, Alberni is hardly an imposing figure but he dominates his vaqueros through sheer presence and a great sense of comic timing. The comedy is apparent even in his speech, which is more authentic than most Hollywood attempts at a Mexican accent but reminds of nothing less than Chico Marx's Italian caricatures, especially when getting his maths wrong and peppering his speech with sayings that he alters just a little. 'There is the old saying,' he tends to begin and then follows up with something like, 'All is fair in love and war but no slingshot.'

Sonora Joe takes to the lawful life rather quickly but then this is a 54 minute B movie. We're not here to watch a subtle transition, we're here to watch little villain Joe surprise the bigger villains with his badge and so aid in the capture of Arizona. We're here to listen to lines like, 'There is the old saying. When the cat she works, the mouse she steal the cattle,' or 'Why all this silence? Is this a saloon or somebody she's dead?' We're here to watch him temper the antics of the other comic relief character, young Pat Malloy, the younger brother of the film's love interest. She's Ginger Malloy, who's played by the suitably demure Mae Madison but is also kept mostly out of the way to keep the story moving. Pat, on the other hand, played by Spud from the Our Gang films, Sherwood Bailey, tries to get into a gunfight, takes part in a chase scene and even steals his sister's undergarments to leap around in. His first act in town is to lasso a sleeping Arizona.

On the villainous side, the villains are suitably villainous, hardly surprising given that they're played by well known actors. Sam Crew is Noah Beery, the elder brother of Oscar winner Wallace Beery, but while Wallace usually played the hero, Noah usually played the villain. This was one of ten movies he made in 1932, already a couple of decades into his film career. By the time he died in 1946 he was being credited as Noah Beery Sr, because his son had followed him into the business. Arizona Frank Bailey is played by Paul Hurst, who would go on to appear in five films over the years with the Duke, as late as Big Jim McLain in 1952. By this time he'd already written six silent films and directed over fifty, but was most prolific as an actor. His first credited role was in 1912 and he'd racked up over 150 films by this point. They're both memorable but they can't compete with Luis Alberni, who instead of stealing horses steals the show from the Duke.

Rebel Rousers (1970)

Director: Martin B Cohen
Star: Cameron Mitchell

Officially a Cameron Mitchell movie, somehow I doubt he was the reason anyone watched even back in 1970 when this was released by Paragon International. For a start it's a biker movie that also featured Jack Nicholson, who was certainly not the name then that he is now but he was still coming off Easy Rider, the biker movie of the era and possibly the most important counterculture film of them all. Then again this was shot in 1967 and merely not released until after Easy Rider had proved that there was a market for this sort of thing. By 'this sort of thing' I really mean a film that tries to work a different sort of philosophy, because biker movies had been around for a long while. This is the sort of movie where bikers party it up in a small town cantina while the old folks just ignore them and play checkers. It's the sort of movie where Bruce Dern explains to the cops why they're there with the line, 'It happens to be where things are at. Man.'

Dern is J J Weston, the leader of the Rebel Rousers of the title, a biker gang who roll into some small town on one side of the California/Mexico border, though I couldn't tell you which one. They have precisely the sort of impact you might expect, though in a far more boring way than you're likely to imagine given that Dern has some pretty astounding backup. Nicholson wears a prophetic beanie and a pair of striped prison trousers as a character bizarrely called Bunny. Harry Dean Stanton dons dark glasses and a host of campaign badges as Randolph Halverson. Unfortunately none of them really do much of anything but even if they did we struggle to hear them because the sound is terrible and we can't hear the dialogue behind the music or background noise. They just ride around, have fun in the cantina, ride up and down the beach and shout at each other. J J is just wandering around trying to find something to believe in.

Thankfully there's another subplot but unfortunately it's just as boring. Mitchell is Paul Collier, an architect from LA with about as much personality as my big toe, surprising for someone I know as an action hero. Collier has spent five months looking for his girfriend Karen and finally finds her here in town. She ran away from him and her family because she found she was going to have a baby and he dared to suggest an abortion because they weren't married. 'I was afraid you'd follow me,' she tells him, before explaining that she just wanted to have her baby without feeling like it was the crime of the 20th century. Yes this is a tiresome story of morals that feels utterly dated today and can't have felt much better in 1970. Paul and Karen just sit on the couch emoting at each other while we struggle to hear them behind the music. 'Society can go straight to Hell,' she tells him, 'because I'm going to have my baby.' We want to go straight to bed.

We find the link between the two subplots the moment the film starts. J J notices Paul as he and his gang head into town and recognises him as someone he used to play football with back in high school. Later they reconnect, as some of the bikers attack Paul's car as he attempts to do something that will bring Karen and his future child back into his life. All he achieves is to get invited down to the beach so a biker called Cowboy can usurp J J's authority and beat the crap out of Paul. Karen, who nobody seems to notice is pregnant, becomes the grand prize in a set of races on the beach, something J J conjures up to buy time. Sadly I think this is the point of the film: it's all about J J finding something to believe in and fighting for it. The problem is that we really don't care because that's not exactly much to hang a movie on, especially when he never makes a stand, just conjures up delaying tactics until someone else does something.

Dern is sincere, but then he was always great at sincere. For a film that hinges around him, he doesn't really get a lot to do though and that's the greatest flaw of the movie. Unless we can buy into his discovery there's literally nothing here and he seems to do his utmost to avoid us buying into his discovery. Nicholson gets far more to do as Bunny, because at least he knows what he wants: Karen. However while we get a few of his memorable faces, he has nothing but a one shot character to play, just another footnote in the varied career of a fascinating actor. Stanton is even more wasted here, which wasn't meant to be a pun but the brief shenanigans he pulls while stoned are effectively the sum of the comic relief of the movie. Mitchell is a non-entity, so much so that we almost want Nicholson to win his girl because at least Nicholson has some charisma. Diane Ladd is capable as Karen but she's so far above the material it's unreal.

In fact the only interesting thing about the entire film is something I don't even know for sure but presume is true. In 1967, when The Rebel Rousers was shot, Diane Ladd was Bruce Dern's wife. They had two daughters, the first of whom sadly drowned in 1961 and the second of whom is actress Laura Dern, born in 1967. In other words, I'm presuming that Ladd really was pregnant during the shooting of this movie, making this Laura Dern's screen debut of sorts, even though she only appears as a bump. Mother and daughter first appeared together in the 1973 Burt Reynolds movie, White Lightning, and have continued to do so over the years. The Oscar nominations they got for Rambling Rose in 1991 were the first time mother and daughter were ever nominated for the same movie. It really doesn't say much for this film when thinking about this sort of thing is more interesting than the story, but that's the truth of it.

Haunted Gold (1932)

Director: Mack V Wright
Stars: John Wayne and Duke

This Leon Schlesinger production, a Four Star Western for Warner Brothers from 1932, starts as it means to go on with a repetitious animated bat and a looming shadow to back the credits. The town we soon find ourselves in is dim, dark and apparently empty of everything except howling coyotes and banging doors. It's almost surprising to find a person amidst all the shadows and those we do find, playing poker by candlelight, are pretty scared. It's been thirty years since the town died and its secret panels, creeping shadows and strange noises have them all spooked. The fact that Ed went up to the Sally Ann mine three hours ago and they haven't heard hide nor hair of him since doesn't help either. His horse arrives back eventually, complete with a sinister note: 'I return the horse but let the fate of its rider be a warning to anyone who attempts to enter the Sally Ann mine. Signed, The Phantom.' Yes, you can tell what sort of film this is.

Well, maybe not. It may sound precisely like a standard old dark house yarn, especially given that all the actual residents of the town are old, gaunt and severe, dressed entirely in black, like undertakers, and modern audiences might see it more as a live action Scooby Doo cartoon, but it's really a John Wayne picture. Sure, he's a little thinner than we're used to seeing him, his voice is a little higher and he's far from the measured actor he would become, but he's John Wayne nonetheless. The make up he has plastered over his face makes him look ghostly white, as if to fit the material, and that's assisted by the fact that he has a colourful partner, one who's Blue by name, Brown by character and black by skin. Actor Blue Washington appears a little too dignified for the material, which is the usual idiocy, Clarence Washington Brown being yet another scaredycat black man who rolls dice at the slightest notice.

Wayne plays John Mason but while his horse is named Duke, this apparently isn't where he got his nickname, that having arrived long before courtesy of an Airedale terrier he kept as a boy. Here he's a rancher who owns half the Sally Ann, left to him by his father who discovered it with Bill Carter. Carter's half was lost to a villain by the name of Ryan before he could ever pass it down to his daughter Janet, so it went to Ryan's son instead. Both of these characters are in town too, though Janet was merely mysteriously invited without any explanation. For Mason's part his ranch is just over the ridge and he conveniently just came visiting at the right time. No, the back story doesn't hold up to a heck of a lot of scrutiny, but then it is a B picture called Haunted Gold, after all, not some big budget John Ford feature. I'm sure it won't take much for you to figure out the rest of the story but you might find yourself surprisingly entertained on the way.

This may be predictable but it never quits. The scant 58 minute running time races by, not least because of all the sped up chase and fight scenes, and it looks good, with a production value far above what Wayne would soon be seeing at Monogram, though some footage was recycled from earlier films. There's even a glimpse of the Maltese Falcon from the original 1931 film, on top of the organ that Janet plays right before being kidnapped. The story is recycled, being a remake of a Ken Maynard silent film from 1928 called The Phantom City, but I'd be surprised if everything crammed into this one was crammed into that one too. This is jam packed full of everything you might expect from an action serial, an old dark house story and a western, all thrown together. The stunts are wild and hard hitting, by the horses as well as the stuntmen. I may not have bought Duke's intelligence or Clarence's idiocy but I wasn't bored for a moment.

What stands out most to posterity is the character of Clarence Washington Brown, though he was merely comedic effect in 1932. Supposedly John Mason's sidekick, described at one point as his 'self appointed bodyguard', he gets more screen time than anyone except the Duke. Yet he's a mere eighth on the credits while Wayne's horse shares top billing with his master. At one point he ends up in whiteface, courtesy of mine dust, and he's hindered by a whole slew of lines about spooks and other suggestive slurs. There are racial epithets here I don't even recognise: 'darkie' makes obvious sense but why 'smoky', for instance? Another new one on me is a particularly outrageous line thrown his way while he pretends to be the Phantom. He's pretty successful in a mild disguise until he opens his mouth. 'I iz de Phantom,' he moans, only for the bad guys to reply, 'Not with that watermelon accent!' Sometimes classic Hollywood stuns me.

I've seen enough films from the twenties and thirties to realise that this sort of offensive racial idiocy was merely a screen reflection of a cultural norm, so while it's far from acceptable it is at least understandable for the time. I'm thankful we don't see it any more but I don't find it hard to watch in a film this old. In Haunted Gold though it feels wrong, mostly because Blue Washington, who also appeared in the original film, is so obviously capable of so much more than this. There were a lot of black actors who got work, sometimes very well paid work, acting lazy and stupid. Most obvious were actors like Stepin Fetchit and Sleep 'n' Eat, both real credited stage names, and Mantan Moreland, who played Charlie Chan's manservant. Fetchit even became a millionaire playing an illiterate pauper, but these actors were comedians who were talented enough to make the caricature work. Blue Washington merely seems to be demeaning himself.

As for the Duke, he's not bad here at all as an action western lead, though he nearly drops his gun at one point while doing a fancy twirl. Many of the long shots are apparently Ken Maynard and his horse Tarzan, recycled from old footage, but many of the up close fights and stunts are obviously him. I've only seen one of his other Four Star Westerns from 1932 before, coincidentally another remake of a Ken Maynard silent, this time called Ride Him, Cowboy, and it has a few similarities to this one, not just because of the ghost town and Duke's lifesaving antics. There's much more of a story here, not to mention about ten times more serial action. Wayne gets far more to do too, though he's still very much the lead member of a team rather than the tough man who stands alone, regardless of the circumstances. He gets tied up not once but twice, but of course saves the day and wins the girl in the end. Some things were simply beyond argument, right?

The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962)

Director: Joseph Green
Stars: Herb Evers, Virginia Leith and Leslie Daniels

I'm driving the highway to Cinematic Hell in 2010 for the awesome folks at Cinema Head Cheese to post a review a week of the very worst films of all time. These are so bad that they make Uwe Boll look good.

This film was an official selection at the 8th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Scottsdale in 2012. Here's an index to my reviews of 2012 films.

'Let me die!' a woman's voice repeatedly pleads before the title credits begin, in fact before we see anything. It's a disembodied voice out of nowhere that suggests a female version of Johnny Got His Gun, or at least that begins where that book and film ends. It's all very promising but sadly it's all downhill from there, which possibly explains why this was completed in 1959 under the title The Black Door but wasn't released until 1962 under its current more lurid title. It isn't without merit, as it does contain a number of memorable cult moments, not least one of the most abiding images of all sixties genre cinema, but it still can't live up to the title. It comes from the common mad scientist subgenre of horror/science fiction movies of the time but unlike their progenitor Frankenstein which remains as timeless as ever, this has already been superceded as the unholy transplantation of limbs and organs that it rages against is routinely beneficial today.

It's fascinating to watch these movies and see public opinion, as distilled through scriptwriters trying to please the largest audience possible, change over the decades. This film is only half a century old, but it already seems quaint and dated to those of us who have benefited from or know people who have benefited from the very transplant techniques that are derided by the characters as immoral, unethical and insane. Much of the problem is that the overtly schlocky characteristics of a mad scientist are so much easier to write than his more sophisticated drives, especially if you ignore the idea that science is constantly moving forward; and naturally scriptwriters of schlocky low budget genre movies from the fifties and sixties really couldn't give a transplanted rat's ass for anything sophisticated. They could happily start at 'Burn the witch!' and work backwards from there to generate a salacious heap of scientific gobbledygook.

Yes, that's what this one is, but it does make a token effort to explain where Dr Bill Cortner, our central character, is coming from. After the credits roll, we watch him assist in an operation that fails to save the life of the patient, which naturally doesn't make him happy and so he asks the lead doctor if he can try something new. 'He's dead. I can't do any harm,' he says, fed up with failing by the book. 'Very well, the corpse is yours,' says his superior. 'Do what you want to do.' Apparently the family don't care and medical ethics don't enter into it. So our rogue doctor, too polite to be either Henry Frankenstein or Herbert West, starts massaging the heart and applying electric current to the exposed brain. The corpse returns to life, with a steady pulse. 'Nothing's unbelievable if you have the nerve to experiment,' he tells the nurse. He's been working on this new technique for weeks. Yes, weeks. It really must be new!

In other words, Dr Bill Cortner is a visionary. He views the idea of being a surgeon as more than being a carpenter or a plumber and he dreams of transplants that can save the lives of many. 'It can be done!' he reiterates to his disbelieving superior, who isn't having any of it but tolerates Bill because he's his father. Yes, these folks are all tied together by far more than just a patient. The senior doctor is Dr Cortner too, Bill's father, and the nurse is Jan Compton, Bill's fiancée and dad's secretary as well. Dad's flying off to Denver for a medical convention but he leaves his son with a warning. 'The line between scientific genius and obsessive fanaticism is a thin one,' he points out. 'I want you on the right side!' While Bill's actions have been entirely appropriate thus far you know that's a revelation trigger. 'Sure, I've made a few mistakes,' replies Bill, as he's been stealing limbs from amputee victims to perform wild transplant experiments on people.

It only takes a scene or so of mild sexual innuendo to find out what sort of mistakes and how wild the experiments. A nurse brings the news: a man named Kurt rang for Bill, from the country place where he struts his experimental stuff, and he says something terrible has happened. So they race off to see what's up, just a little too fast. We see the warning signs, literally because writer/director Joseph Green makes sure of it. Bill makes it past 'winding road', 'stop' and 'curve' before he crashes horribly. He's thrown free and lands heavily on soft ground but Jan doesn't get so lucky, as we discover from a great exploitation shot from inside the burning wreck of the car with only her hand grasping up for help to show us that she's in there. He reaches down inside to retrieve something with his jacket and then runs for the country place, his eyes wide like Johnny Rotten's. It's a long run too, so much so that it becomes a stumble by the time he gets there.

Oh, the scenery chewing is outstanding and there's so much of it. I'm not sure if actor Jason Evers pictured himself as an American football player weaving through invisible opponents as he flounders through the woods and up the long steps, or whether he was looking around eagerly for more scenery to chew. He falls, he stumbles, he rests. It's all almost beyond him. It's less a pinnacle of suspense and more us wondering just how long the detached body part that he must surely have wrapped up in his jacket is going to survive and where the inevitable gouts of blood have all vanished to. He can't even open the door when he gets there, just knocks for Kurt to do it for him. Get a move on, Bill! We've come to like Virginia Leith as Jan Compton just a little and we want to see what you're going to do to bring her back from fiery death and dismemberment. It's only when Kurt tries to warn him about what's in the closet that he gets serious about time.

Kurt is Leslie Daniels, an even more unashamed chewer of scenery than Evers. Evers reserves his most outrageous chewing for the most outrageous scenes, but Daniels lets rip from moment one and never looks back. Perhaps he'd picked up his emotional acting style on the continent given that most of his eight films were shot in Italy. He only acted in one further film before specialising in directing the dubbing of Italian movies into English dialogue that he wrote. Evers appeared in a number of movies, including The Green Berets and The Illustrated Man but was better known on television where he guested on what may be every American show ever made. Virginia Leith steals this entire film though, from the twenty minute mark when she becomes something more than nurse and fiancée Jan Compton. She had acted for Kubrick in Fear and Desire and was decent in Violent Saturday but Jan in the Pan is what she'll always be known for.

Jan in the Pan is what we find after a long sequence of Bill hooking up tubes and vials and other scientific gadgetry. It seems to take an inordinate amount of time to complete given how little is hooked up once he's finished but this film has a lot of filler like that. What matters isn't how good Bill would be with a set of Meccano but what we see when he's finally finished. Eventually the camera pans over to show us the unharmed albeit severed head of Jan Compton all wrapped up in a rubber swimming cap and sitting in a pan of Bill's special compound. It's a great cult shot and it just gets better because Jan remains the most important character in the entire film but never gets out of the pan. She hasn't a scar or a blemish, just no body. It would be easy to joke about how this could be the only way Bill was going to get a little head without having to marry her, but he plans to restore her body as before, or someone's body at least.

Now, here's where we find out how inconsistent Bill is. He's obviously something entirely beyond a surgeon, more akin to a magician given that Jan in the Pan can talk, even though she doesn't have lungs or a throat or any other way of generating sound. Yet he doesn't seem to have much of a track record. There's a monster in the closet that gibbers away in some maniacal tongue, so horrible that we aren't even allowed to see it. Even Kurt has a withered and deformed left arm because Bill can't seem to keep it healthy, however many times he tries. In this world, grafting a replacement arm must be a gazillion times tougher than running the gauntlet on an invisible field for ten minutes with a severed head under your arm, then miraculously bringing it back to life without a body. Either that or he just can't be bothered to return to his early failure now that he has AdrenoSerum™ to bring to bear. It's all about how much you care, I guess. Sorry, Kurt.

What Bill cares about is a body for Jan, especially as he has fifty hours to perform the surgery, tops. Where would he find a body worthy of his bride to be? How about the local burlesque joint where the sultry strippers dance to sultry saxophone music and some guy sings 'jiggy jiggy' at odd moments. We get to see two of them: the blonde looks seriously curvacious but the brunette looks like a guy in drag. Perhaps they really were strippers, given that this was blonde Bonnie Sharie's only movie and brunette Paula Maurice had one prior credit as the proprietress of the Kooch Club in The Dead One a year earlier. Bill pulls the blonde, not that it takes much. She plants herself next to him, summons him into her dressing room, plays with his tie, strokes his chest, perpetrates every unsubtle come on in the book. All this makes her perfect: he can just dump her brain and transplant in Jan's to end up as a match made in heaven.

We keep switching back to Jan in the Pan even though she isn't doing anything interesting but after the catfight she becomes the focus. Yes, there's a catfight, albeit a tame one. In walks the brunette stripper with her prominent nipples to get changed for her act and she feels more than a little slighted by her blonde competition. Just in case we hadn't worked out why these strippers start tearing at each other on the floor, we're treated to a shot of two calendar cats on a wall and a very human meow. Oh, good grief! Fortunately we're distracted by Jan in the Pan developing supernatural powers, conversing with the monster in the closet (Jan with a questioning rasp, the monster with one knock for yes and two for no) and playing telekinetic tricks on Kurt. You can't help but admire a movie where the leading lady is reduced to being an almost immobile head but is tasked with acting through body language. The admirable Virginia Leith dominates too.

This is also the period of the film with the most memorable dialogue. It hinted at classic B movie lines early on but in Bill's absence, the country place starts rocking with awesome dialogue. The newly empowered Jan in the Pan hates Bill for what he's done to her and with the monster she can get revenge. 'Together we're both more than things,' she tells it, 'we're a power as hideous as our deformities. Together we'll rake our revenge. I shall create power and you will enforce it! You're the thing outside and I'm the thing in here.' Already a cult character, here she thrives, utterly dominant as she laughs madly at Kurt, who has great lines of his own. What's in the closet? 'Horror no normal mind could imagine, something even more terrible than you,' he says. 'Parts of experimentation twist and turn through mountains of miscalculation and often lose themselves in error and darkness. Behind that door is the sum total of Dr Cortner's mistakes.'

He keeps it up as the film runs on, so over the top that I can never tell if Leslie Daniels is being serious or not. At one point he flounces into the room and poses in the distance. 'I have come to feed your friend,' he says with presumably deliberate Bela Lugosi intonation. 'While you feed yourself with hate, it prefers food.' Thankfully, Jan in the Pan persuades the monster in the closet to rip off Kurt's good arm, so he can drag the bloody mess over every wall in the house and she can laugh hysterically as he contorts and collapses before her eyes. It's an outrageous death scene to rival Pee Wee Herman's in the Buffy movie, merely thirty years earlier. Bill doesn't see any of it because he's driving around, following gorgeous women and attending a Miss Body Beautiful contest. The humour is that he really is shopping for bodies, but he doesn't choose one, not even finalist number four who's so beautiful that finalist number five vanishes.

What's most hilarious is the fact that he's entirely honest about his intentions. Back at the strip club he tells the blonde bimbo that he's just looking around, and once he's done looking around he'll operate. When the brunette asks him to come back later because she'll remember him, he points out that that's what he's afraid of. When he finds an old friend called Donna on the street, he calls her just what the doctor ordered and promises not to hurt her friend. By the time his quest leads him to the nicest body Donna has ever seen, which it patently isn't, given that it belongs to short and scrawny actress Adele Lamont, he tells her that he'll cut her face off and give her body away. 'Do I look like a maniac who goes around killing girls?' he asks her back at the house. She hates all men but she'll do anything to get her acid scarred face fixed and he's counting on that. 'Here's to your future,' he tells her, giving her a sedative. 'Whatever it may be.'

What he doesn't realise is that his severed head of a fiancée has been developing acute psychic powers and she's been tuned into his thoughts throughout his search. She doesn't want Doris's undernourished five foot frame, perhaps as she believes it'll wither away like Kurt's left arm and it was pretty withered to begin with. 'I want you as a complete woman not part of one,' he tells her but has to finally face the truth that she doesn't want it the way he does. 'Can't stop me,' she tells him, though he responds in the most outrageously male fashion imaginable and tapes her mouth shut. This 1959 doctor merely applies the old rule that 'if it moves, WD40; if it doesn't move, duct tape,' but there really is nothing in the annals of testosterone fuelled action film that can truly compete with this moment for sheer chauvinism. What's she going to do? Push it off with her tongue? So much for leaving it until marriage, huh?

What she can do is summon the monster out of the closet for a final reel that was supposed to be shot in gloriously gory colour, but presumably ended up too expensive to be viable. Shot over less than a fortnight, mostly in the basement of a New York hotel, there's no doubt that the film would have benefited from a longer finalé. In fact, had it been shot as intended, it would have beaten out Herschell Gordon Lewis's Blood Feast as the progenitor of the modern gore movie by a year, even accounting for its three year wait in limbo because of legal issues and problems with the censors. So there's no poetic justice in Bill's head being severed and menaced by rats. Instead we just watch Eddie Carmel, a 7' 6¾" giant, chomp on his shoulder and stumble away. The only good thing about this underwhelming ending is that it leaves things open for a sequel. Virginia Leith is still alive, 77 years young and so I'm still holding out hope after half a century.

The African Queen (1951)

Director: John Huston
Stars: Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn

I'm climbing the stairway to Cinematic Heaven in 2010 to post five reviews a week of films from the IMDb Top 250 List, supposedly the greatest motion pictures of all time. Are they really? Find out here.

The African Queen begins on the water, just like the thirty foot launch that provides its name, as we gaze at the incredibly lush foliage of German East Africa and listen to the diverse soundscape of the jungle while the credits roll. 'Lush' is the word to use because we can almost feel it seep through the screen in vibrant Technicolor, this amazingly being the first colour film of both lead actors, Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, and director John Huston. Happily neither the colour nor the sound let up: they soak into the film stock and make it all the more real. There should always be noise in a jungle, but most Hollywood jungle flicks got made on the MGM lot and so missed out entirely on any level of authenticity. It's only the rare ones that got the full on location treatment to bring in a believable feel and the only other movie I remember offhand from this era that sounded this authentic was Mogambo, with Clark Gable and Ava Gardner.

While most of the film unfolds on water, we briefly switch back to land to find Hepburn singing away with gusto inside the 1st Methodist Church in Kungdu. It's September 1914 and she's a haughty old maid of a Methodist missionary called Rose Sayer, notably red from the blistering African sun even though she's in the shade. While she certainly doesn't look good as she plays the organ, she still looks better than she felt for close off screen, out of our sight, was a bucket for her to vomit in between takes because she was suffering from dysentery. Jack Cardiff, the director of photography, called her 'a real trouper', but this sort of attitude is precisely why she was cast. The other half of her character explains how she got the dysentery to begin with. She stubbornly drank only water in protest at the amount of imported Scotch Bogart and Huston constantly put away. 'Whenever a fly bit Huston or me,' said Bogie, 'it dropped dead.'

Rose is the brother of the Revd Samuel Sayer, played to wonderfully sanctimonious effect by Robert Morley, with much the same expression that he had when being force fed his poodle by Vincent Price in Theatre of Blood. They have a full house but it's an open question how much effect they're having on the half naked congregation who are certainly vocal, if not particularly close to the hymnal, and who happily run out to meet the mailman. This is Charlie Allnut, the grizzled Canadian captain of the African Queen, a part entirely unlike any Bogart had played before, as is soon made abundantly obvious when his first scene with the Sayers has him play second fiddle to his own rumbling stomach. We first see him relaxed in a wicker chair, a cigar in his mouth, a glass of whisky in one hand and the boat's whistle in the other. Charlie Allnut is a happy man, as Bogart would soon be too when the part landed him his only Academy Award.

He drops by with the mail and a few supplies they've been waiting for, but more important than long overdue rose bushes is news that the war is on, though he can't remember much more than that the Germans are on the other side to the English and all those little countries are in it too. As soon as he heads back to his boat though, in come the German troops to march around and torch all the buildings like good German troops do, so that they can force the natives into service without anything for them to run home to. One futile attempt at resistance on the Revd Sayer's part and he goes a little mad. Soon he's dead, perhaps of a delayed concussion to the skull from a German rifle butt. However this is a war story the way Raiders of the Lost Ark is a religious film, the Kaiser's troops providing a source and destination to the plot but otherwise backing out so that we can watch the real story unfold in between their brief but periodic appearances.

The story is really about two people, Charlie Allnut and Rose Sayer, or perhaps three if you count the trusty old African Queen herself. For almost the entire film it's just them, the jungle and the river as they head downstream to almost certain death in an insane attempt to strike a blow for King and Country by sinking the Louisa, a much larger German boat that carries the biggest gun in East Africa. It's a real David and Goliath story, but we safely ignore it because we don't really ever believe that they're going to be able to pull it off anyway. We concentrate instead on the performances of the two leads as their two mismatched characters gradually grow together by putting aside their many differences and finding a common ground through shared experience. This worked so well that Hollywood effectively remade it 24 years later with Hepburn opposite John Wayne, albeit with her character renamed Eula Goodnight and Bogart's Rooster Cogburn.

Without the performances given by the two leads and the solid script by James Agee and director John Huston, this could have been a mess, as could Rooster Cogburn for that matter, and neither would be particularly remembered today. I often wonder how many forgotten TV movies with low budgets and awful casts would have become legendary classics if only they had been made by people like John Huston who didn't tend to go for TV movies with low budgets and awful casts. It only takes one bad apple to spoil the bunch. Luckily for us, the script here is razor sharp, based not just on the source novel of the same name by C S Forester but by Huston's observations of the offscreen chemistry of his stars, and those stars are in blistering form, however much they were suffering through the shoot and sometimes even because of it. The ending is a rare thing indeed, a change from the source novel that is appropriate and perhaps even an improvement.

Humphrey Bogart may never have been better, but then he'd have to be good to have beaten out such heavyweights for that Oscar as Marlon Brando (in A Streetcar Named Desire, no less) and Montgomery Clift (in A Place in the Sun). I've never seen him animated like he is here, even when playing second fiddle gangsters for Warners back in the thirties. Maybe he took a leaf out of frequent co-star James Cagney's book: Cagney's acting style was to never stop moving and Bogart never stops here, even when he's not coated in rubber leeches. He's less the captain of his boat and more an integral part of it. His eyes are always looking somewhere new and his face harbours more expressions than you would ever believe the hardboiled dick of the forties could have come up with. Maybe it's the water that did it, given that Bogie was a notable sailor and he successfully defied stereotype again in The Caine Mutiny, as the captain of a much bigger boat.

Co-star Katharine Hepburn is as stubbornly stiff and politely pestering as only Katharine Hepburn can be, and she manages the highly difficult task of remaining stiff and pestering even when she comes to life hurtling down white water rapids. She always had a stubborn and rebellious streak in her, playing tomboys and misfits and getting up to all sorts of unladylike behaviour, because frankly she didn't care two hoots about what anyone else thought of her. She knew she was right and that's all that mattered, even when she was wrong. Here she finds herself prim and proper and in the enforced sole company of a gin soaked but very capable outdoorsman. Most women would happily fall back on stereotype, especially in 1914, and let the man take care of business, but not our Kate. If Rose gets an idea stuck in her head, woe betide anyone who stands in the way of its fruition, even if it's their boat and their supplies and their life that she's gambling with.

It's hard to imagine anyone else's expression going from acute distate to doe eyed and back so quickly yet so believably, yet Kate wasn't the first choice for the part. Bette Davis was the name most frequently associated with the project, having first been offered to her in 1938. She tried to make it again in 1947 and 1949 but by then Hepburn's name was attached and she didn't get another shot. I'm sure it's an interesting question for film geeks to throw around: would this have been as good with Bette opposite David Niven, James Mason or John Mills? Each has possibility but I can't see any of those combinations outdoing how Bogart and Hepburn stamped authority onto their roles. Then again, the original reason Columbia chose to buy the rights to the novel was as a vehicle for husband and wife Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester. That I'd pay to see! Instead they went for a comedic approach to a similar story with 1938's Vessel of Wrath.

There's comedy here, just as there's a war hovering around to be referenced once in a while, but this is a character driven drama. Allnut, who's Canadian anyway and so not too concerned about a war in Europe, is all ready to keep his boat hidden behind an island until the whole thing blows over. After all, there's plenty of food, crates of cigarettes, even a couple of cases of gin: 'all the comforts of home,' he tells Rose but she's having none of it. If you've ever heard Hepburn speak, you can hear the tone in her voice as she states, 'We simply can't remain here in this backwater until the war is over, Mr Allnut.' The British are sure to come but are also sure to not get there as they'd have to pass the Louisa, a hundred ton steamer with a six pound gun, the biggest in all of central Africa. Rose happily decides that the pair of them can redress the balance, with blasting gelatin from the mine, oxygen cylinders for torpedoes and Charlie's skill as a machinist.

For a while he just plays along to humour the crazy lady and wait for her to back out when the inevitable danger threatens, but of course that just isn't going to happen. Charlie Allnut doesn't know Kate the way the viewers know Kate. Charlie Allnut is dumb enough to miss the seizure she almost has when she realises he's drinking alcohol and doesn't for one moment imagine that she would dare to empty it all overboard while he's passed out drunk. He only gets drunk so he can tell her off. 'Whose boat is it anyway?' he shouts before calling her 'a crazy psalm-singing skinny old maid.' And that's it for the Gordon's. At this point they have nothing in common, no frame of reference except Africa itself. Snippets of history, like him coming to Africa to build the Zambezi Bridge and staying on because he can be his own boss, always end up with Rose saying, 'I beg your pardon?' because she no longer remotely understands what he's talking about.

The connections they find grow out of the danger they face. After they head down their first set of rapids, Miss Prim and Proper finds the experience bracing and wonderful, a feeling that she's only ever felt a couple of times before during her brother's sermons when the spirit calls him. 'I never dreamed that any mere physical experience could be so stimulating!' she cries. They get past the Shona, a German fort, under heavy fire, only to hit heavier rapids and a combination of exhilaration and relief leads to the ice being broken by a kiss. Suddenly it ceases to be 'Miss' and 'Mr Allnut' and begins to be 'Rosie' and 'Dear'. Suddenly, Charlie isn't looking at the crocodiles to pointedly suggest to his unwelcome guest that they're just waiting for their breakfast, instead he's making faces at the hippos and imitating the monkeys on the bank, though all the noises he makes are surprisingly dubbed. I wonder what Bogart really sounded like.

It's only on these technical points that the film creaks, because of an inevitable contrast. At least half of the picture was shot in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, much of it at the junction of the Victoria and Albert branches of the Nile, and it reeks of authenticity, not least because most of the crew went down with fever. They all lived it, even the folks we don't see on screen. When Hepburn wrote a memoir of her experience, she subtitled it, How I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind. Even the scenes with the stars in the water look good, though they were shot in studio tanks back in England, but in and amongst are rear projection shots that can't help but stand out against the realism of the rest. It may seem picky to poke holes at bad rear projection in scenes set on river rapids in 1951, but reusing some of the same shots at a number of different points in the film seems a little less forgivable.

Perhaps they'd had enough. By all accounts, the shoot was a memorably difficult one, not that the production was unaware of the likelihood before setting out. Natives were hired to help the crew, but Huston has explained in interviews that many failed to show up, as they believed the filmmakers to be cannibals. Lauren Bacall, who tagged along to cook and camp and be with her husband, even though she wasn't in the film herself, suggests that they weren't always helpful when they did. The African Queen sank twice during filming. 'The natives had been told to watch it and they did,' Bacall said. 'They watched it sink.' Huston also spent time hunting big game, on one occasion unwittingly leading Hepburn into a herd of wild animals, and his exploits, perhaps at the expense of the production, generated a further film, Clint Eastwood's White Hunter, Black Heart, based on the novel by Peter Viertel, who was an uncredited writer on The African Queen.

As a direct contrast to the grim reality of the production's off screen experience, at least except for Robert Morley, who had the foresight to shoot all his scenes in London to be spliced into the film later, the picture itself is a pure joy. It's easy to get swept away into the story and join one of cinema's most memorable pairings down the Ubangi river on the little African Queen to reach a line as memorable as, 'By the authority vested in me by Kaiser Wilhelm II, I pronounce you man and wife. Proceed with the execution.' It's full of relieved tension, poetic justice and Hollywood screen magic, even though the Germans are played by actors as quintessentially English as Peter Bull, later a similarly surprising Russian Ambassador in Dr Strangelove. This project saw my maiden voyage on the African Queen but it's obvious why many people take it again and again. I've already taken a return trip and I'm sure I'll be booking my tickets again soon.