Peach-O-Reno (1931)

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

Mr & Mrs Joseph Bruno are celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary, but this is a story about Reno, the biggest little city in the world, so you know that can't last. It takes about five minutes for the dinner to turn vicious and violent and prompt them both to race to Reno to get a divorce each. The law was allowing quickie divorces there in 1931 and it was was allowing gambling too, so Wheeler and Woolsey were quick on the mark to combine these two concepts into a comedy feature. It turns out to be one of their best, with some very sharp and risque gags and only a few misses. It only begins with the ethos of 'Marry in haste, divorce in Reno.'

This is unmistakeably a precode, joyously and blissfully so. Wattles & Swift are the most popular divorce lawyers in town, who advertise on the train platform and have a bus waiting to transport them directly to their offices. However, it's only a law office during the day as it turns into a casino at night, every piece of furniture transforming into something else, up to and including the big set of bookshelves that revolve around to become the orchestra pit, containing the Wattles & Swift 10 Alimony Jumpers. Of course the clientele are precisely the same and so are the employees, who strip off their clothes on cue to serve drinks.

The Brunos comprise the basic framework of the story, not that it matters. They both end up at Wattles & Swift, though separately, so Joe hires Wattles and Aggie hires Swift. To provide grounds for the divorce they even arrange to have them seen in public with members of the opposite sex, so Swift takes Aggie to the casino while Joe goes with Wattles, who dresses up in drag without Joe's knowledge. After all, he has to hide anyway, as Ace Crosby, a hard drinking, fast shooting, gambling man from Arizona, is in town to shoot dead the man who gave his wife a divorce: Wattles, of course. To complicate the divorce still further, the two young Bruno daughters turn up too in an attempt to talk their parents out of such a drastic step.

Nobody who's seen a Wheeler & Woolsey movie before will be surprised to find that one of them is played by Dorothy Lee and sure enough, she's Prudence Bruno. Her sister Pansy is played by Zelma O'Neal, who gets a fun scene on the floor with Robert Woolsey but little else. Lee usually got much more of a part than this but she hardly gets anything to do until a song with Wheeler two thirds of the way through the film. What makes this one so special are the risque gags, always the best thing about Wheeler & Woolsey comedies but even better and even more risque than usual and I spent half the time laughing and the other half wondering how they got away with it. They got away with it because it's a precode, of course.

Most are inevitably about marriage. 'Are you married?' Swift asks Prudence, who replies 'No, I'm just worn out on account of the trip.' I recognise some, including the old gag I know from when Winston Churchill used a version on Mary Astor. 'If I had to live with your father again I'd give him poison,' says Aggie to her daughter. Her husband replies, 'If I had to live together with you again I'd take it.' Best of the lot has to be when Mrs Doubleday-Doubleday (that's four days, the week's almost over) shows Julius Swift her legs. 'Were you looking at these?' she asks, only for him to reply, 'I beg your pardon, madam, I'm above that.' Most outrageous is one gag that doesn't even need a punchline. When Wattles dresses up in drag so Joe Bruno can be seen with a woman in the casino, he's wearing his college football pin. Joe asks him how he can wear it, given that you only get one when you make the team. Wattles merely looks coy and laughs.

They go on and on and I wish this snip of a 63 minute movie would do the same. It's my sixth Wheeler & Woolsey comedy and it's the certainly the best of the bunch so far. While some of their films attempt to build a storyline but do it so flimsily that it falls apart if you even look at it, this one doesn't even make an attempt. We get a setup, we get a set, we get some actors and then in come the gags and that's all that matters. Peach-O-Reno is definitely the peach of their collective filmography thus far for me. I'd happily watch it again next week.

Chandler (1971)

Director: Paul Magwood
Stars: Warren Oates and Leslie Caron

This is a hard boiled detective yarn, but it's led to a whole slew of horror stories. You know it isn't going well when the producer and director of the film take out an advert in the Hollywood Reporter to publicly apologise for their own picture. In an article in Time magazine they alleged that James T Aubrey, who ran MGM at the time, recut their film. He switched scenes around, restored deleted scenes and updated the score to have a more contemporary and less film noir feel. He even barred Paul Magwood, the director, from the editing room while he did it. There were lawsuits and court cases but what's left for posterity is the movie itself, and that isn't much at all in this instance.

Chandler ('as in Raymond', he says) is the hard boiled detective, of course, the name being a tribute to the creator of Philip Marlowe. He's played by Warren Oates, which means that the film is going to be worth watching for at least him. Oates was perfect for hard boiled detective roles as he had one of the most lived in faces of any actor and, as Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia testifies, he could look more like shit warmed up than anyone else in the business when the part called for it. He's in that category when the film starts, obviously about as happy to be in the company of his fellow security guards as he would be in a concentration camp. By the time the credits finish rolling he's quit.

Then an old friend called Bernie Oakman comes to hire him for a job. A French girl is flying in, some sort of government witness who 'they' want to keep an eye on. As it's obviously something better to do than drown himself in a bottle back home, Chandler takes the case. Unfortunately he's being set up as the patsy in some kind of shenanigans, though it takes us forever to find out what. All we know is that old men with deep voices and too many pounds stuffed into their business suits have some sort of plan that has to do with Ron Melchior, the man that Katherine Creighton, our French girl, knows intimately.

They're quintessential American TV movie tough guy businessmen of the era who want to be mobsters, ordering dastardly deeds but never getting their hands wet. They have leather chairs that they can swivel in a sinister manner towards the camera. They have dartboards on the wall with faces on them. They're supposed to exude power but they have cables dangling down their walls like they don't actually spend more than five minutes a month in their command centres. The thinner ones probably ended up on Grecian 2000 commercials, the others probably didn't last long enough. They're all painful to watch, especially when they sit on couches in their offices to plot their plots and scheme their schemes. The one who ends up as the father on Dharma and Greg doesn't look right without grey hair.

Anyway Chandler follows Creighton to a funeral parlour where she picks up a fake identity. He finds out she has a train ticket to Monterey so he follows her there, even talking to her on the train. In Monterey, she's forced into a cab and Chandler gives chase, saving her though she doesn't want to know in the slightest. He describes himself as a 'relic' but he becomes something more like a stalker, following her wherever she goes, making no attempt to hide himself and well, you've seen hard boiled detective stories before so you know how certain plot threads are going to end up without me spoiling them. The bits that make sense here are obvious, the bits that don't (which is most of them) don't do anything. By the time Chandler works it out we really don't care any more.

We're left to watch Warren Oates, who as great as he is still struggles with some of the inane dialogue he's given here. There's only so much he can do with things like 'Remember me?' and 'I don't know' and 'Yep' and You'll do.' Leslie Caron is terribly miscast, even though the filmmakers really should have known her strengths and weaknesses as she was married to the producer of the film at the time and later married its director. Then again she divorced both of them so perhaps they never learned. She's an emotionless leading lady and there's no chemistry between Caron and Oates at all, who plays better off Walter Burke as a funeral director and Scatman Crothers as a piano player called Smoke.

Given the reaction of the filmmakers to the released version of their picture, we have to wonder about what this could have ended up as. There's no doubt that it could have been better but I'm not convinced it could even have been good under the best of circumstances. The story does make sense, it just isn't very good and I don't think it would have been much better for some obscuring. The editing may not be masterwork stuff but it isn't inept, it's just as generic and unmemorable as the score, which isn't particularly out of place but merely does nothing. Some of the acting is terrible but it wouldn't have been any better rearranged into a different order. There are some good shots here and there but mostly the cinematography is average at best.

In fact the best thing about the entire picture in my humble opinion is also the worst thing, and I'd probably have thought the same had James T Aubrey not ever stuck his nose into the picture. We're treated to some truly astoundingly, awesomely, painfully bad seventies wallpaper, which honestly steals the show with its sheer assault on the eyes at some points, especially late on at a hotel. It forces its presence on us claustrophobically until we want to escape. It's the most obvious character in the film and the one that invokes most reaction from us. That doesn't say much for the picture as a whole or any of its component parts.

One Point O (2004)

Director: Jeff Renfroe & Marteinn Thorsson
Stars: Jeremy Sisto, Deborah Unger, Bruce Payne, Eugene Byrd, Ana Maria Popa, Lance Henriksen and Udo Kier

Released on DVD as Paranoia:1.0, that title fits this material pretty well, as a young programmer called Simon J spends this film trying to work out what's being done to him. He keeps receiving neatly wrapped but apparently empty packages at his apartment which is enough to make anyone wonder. He has other worries on his mind too, as he's overdue on his projects at work and he's getting eviction notices, but now he wonders if someone's following him. Certainly every time he comes back home, there's another empty box waiting for him inside his apartment. What's worse, there are cameras everywhere and not one of them picks anything up that he can use to identify who's doing this to him, whatever this is.

Everything around him is strange, including the people. His landlord's fridge contains nothing but meat. His neighbour Derrick has a robotic head and a self cleaning couch in his apartment. Trish is a nurse but hangs out at some sort of underground bar, literally underground in what look like cleaned out sewer tunnels. Another neighbour runs bizarre virtual reality bondage games on the net. The local supermarket is always empty except for en elusive follower but the cashier is surreal. We're not sure who or what Howard is, but he's some sort of handyman who does Al Jolson impressions. Simon hears people talking from within the garbage chute. Even his own computer has taken to spitting out messages like 'Do you want to know what it is to be afraid?'

It can't help that he lives in an environment that is big and empty, old and European, desolate and decaying. It's shot in wonderfully saturated colours that exude textures like ancient oak, burnished brass or antique leather, even when actually depicting rot and decay. We're not told when or where this film is set, obviously by deliberate choice of the filmmakers, but it fits that it was shot in Romania, a country with a rich heritage that was nigh on destroyed a couple of decades ago by Nicolae Ceauşescu. Kafka-esque is the word of the day, especially as Simon J just has to be a take on Josef K, but there's a huge amount of Philip K Dick in here too, because Simon's paranoia seems to be well founded and as we get sucked into this story we can only wonder how big the conspiracy is and who is involved.

The root of it all is in nanotechnology, with corporate nanites released into the wild to act as advertising signals directly to the brain and turn people into human billboards. This is why everyone in the story seems to be focused on one product alone to the exclusion of all others, whether that be juice, meat or cola. In Simon's case it's Nature Fresh Milk, to which he's apparently allergic. Even with that knowledge though, we can't be sure who's doing this, who's on his side and who isn't, and I'm sure it'll take a few viewings to fully work all that out. It's a highly intelligent plot that revels in not being simplistic. As Howard explains at one point to Simon, 'There are good people and bad people. The bad people can save you but they won't. The good people want to save you but they can't.' We have no idea who fits into each category as almost anyone in this film could easily fit into either. That's the point.

This is a real triumph, an intelligent science fiction story that deliberately removes itself from time and place yet remains utterly timely. Jeff Renfroe and Marteinn Thorsson wrote and directed and both look to have interesting filmographies to work through. This picture marked the first credits for each of them as both writer and director. Thorsson has done neither of those things since though has worked on a number of films in different roles. Renfroe has made a few more pictures, mostly TV movies made for Syfy (hate that name), but will write and direct the forthcoming futuristic ice age movie The Colony, which is in pre-production. They're both obviously names to watch.

Somehow, and I'd love to know how, they landed a peach of a cast for their first feature. Simon J is a very believable Jeremy Sisto, best known nowadays for TV series Six Feet Under and Law & Order but who is also a prolific film actor with four other movies to his name in 2004 alone. He also co-produced this film. Derrick is Udo Kier, a very well known genre name who has credits going back to 1966 and who has worked for pretty much every great name in modern European cinema. A very busy man, Kier has racked up almost fifty titles in this decade alone and he's always interesting to watch. Trish is Deborah Kara Unger, credited here without the Kara, and she's tended to find quirky roles ever since she was so memorable in Cronenberg's Crash in 1996.

The lesser names don't disappoint either, most especially Eugene Byrd, who I know mostly from TV's Bones, as a characterful courier, able to provide anything to anyone. Best of all though is Lance Henriksen, definitely showing his age but his talent too, as Howard. The various projects he's working on at present push him to a full hundred titles in his filmography and I bet every single one of them will be fascinating for what he does, if not for any other reason. You could easily call this a genre dream cast and that's only going to help this little gem to find a cult audience.

The Bride Wore Black (1968)

Director: François Truffaut
Star: Jeanne Moreau

I can't think of too many better ways to start a film than with a printing machine churning out picture after picture of a topless Jeanne Moreau, which is what François Truffaut gives us here, in his most obvious Alfred Hitchcock homage with its sweeping voyeuristic camera, its story from a novel by William Irish (a pseudonym of Cornell Woolrich, who wrote Rear Window), and its score by Bernard Herrmann who had so memorably scored seven of Hitch's films, including those memorable shrieking strings in Psycho.

Moreau is the bride of the title, Julie Kohler by name, though we know nothing about her husband David. She's a mysterious bird from moment one, being rescued from suicide by her mother as she tries to leap out of her window. Saved from death, she leaves town, or at least she pretends to, as she gets off the train again before it leaves the station. She has a purpose that she follows singlemindedly: she promptly tracks down five men, one by one, to kill them, beginning with Mr Bliss. After setting herself up as a mysterious admirer, she turns up at his wedding reception, entices him out on the balcony and pushes him over the edge to his death. The only explanation she gives before he dies is simply, 'I am Julie Kohler.' There's not even a following, 'you killed my father, prepare to die!'

Just as Hitchcock played around with the concept of the perfect crime in many of his films, not least Strangers on a Train, Truffaut does the same here. These five men are connected but not in any way that can be easily ascertained because by necessity, they've hidden their own connections. She doesn't take anything to connect her back to them. She doesn't care about being seen though she does make a perfunctory attempt to hide her trail. She knows precisely who she's looking for but she only knows their names, not their faces, so she has to set up ways to be introduced to them.

To meet her second target, Robert Coral, she sets him up with a ticket to a private box at a concert, then turns up late to meet him. Once introduced, she obtains an invitation back to his place where she poisons him with a bottle of liquor that she's brought with her. For the third, Clement Morane, she follows his son home from school, then has his wife summoned out of town and turns up at the door pretending to be his son's teacher. She kills him by locking him in a cupboard under the stairs, that she seals with duct tape, thus proving the maxim that 'if it moves, WD40; if it doesn't move, duct tape'.

Truffaut wasn't happy with how this film turned out but it works very well to my mind. While there's an underlying theme that all these men are womanisers, that really has nothing to do with the price of fish in Denmark, the story unfolds cleverly though inevitably. After all, to these men, this woman comes out of the blue without any apparent motive to do anything and they have no reason to suspect her, so they let her into their lives, trusting her far more than they soon find out that they should. Coral calls her 'his impossible dream', but he's thanking God for the impossible rather than questioning it.

Beyond the story, which unfolds to its natural conclusion without having to pander to a Hollywood ending, there's one scene of cinematic brilliance. Obviously fascinated to discover what's driving Julie Kohler to hunt down these men, we're finally let in on the necessary background in a scene told entirely with visuals and Bernard Herrmann's score. There's no dialogue to help us, but we don't need it. It's as clear as if it were in mime, wonderfully told with perfect accompaniment. It's easy to forget the contributions of a composer, though we immediately notice the absence of a score in those early thirties films like Dracula that had no music at all. Yet Bernard Herrmann's work always stands out, and to both aptly underpin the action and yet still stand out is a powerful achievement.

Jeanne Moreau is excellent as Julie Kohler, so down to earth that she doesn't even appear to be even acting. Being a French film, all the men she kills are played by actors well established in French cinema but without being name stars like Moreau. Most widely known is the bilingual Michel Lonsdale who has played in a number of important films, both in French and English, up to and including Hugo Drax in Moonraker. Charles Denner would follow this up with a role in Costa-Gavras's highly renowned political drama Z. Jean-Claude Brialy, who plays Corey, the most important character in the film who isn't on Kohler's hitlist, has appeared in a lot of French films that I've seen. Sometimes it's films like this with casts like this that highlight just how much I've only scratched the surface of French cinema.

Twilight of Honor (1963)

Director: Boris Sagal
Stars: Richard Chamberlain, Nick Adams, Claude Rains, Joan Blackman, James Gregory and Joey Heatherton

While Twilight of Honor contains one of the last performances of veteran actor Claude Rains, a powerful and scenestealing one too, it's more important here as the introduction of a number of names to the big screen. Most obviously it's the first time Richard Chamberlain, as Dr Kildare the biggest TV heartthrob of the era, starred in a movie. He had appeared in two films before this, The Secret of the Purple Reef and A Thunder of Drums, but only in supporting roles and neither seem to have been particularly memorable. It's the debut appearance of Joey Heatherton, one of the quintessentially sixties blonde bombshells. A long way further down the credits and with just one line of dialogue is Linda Evans, also debuting on film with only a few episodes of TV series behind her.

Twilight of Honor is a courtroom drama. Ben Brown is on trial for the murder of Cole Clinton, though apparently it's a pretty open and shut affair: after all, his wife turned him in and he promptly confessed. The locals have already made up their minds about such an important local case, even heading out to the airport to see the man they are already convinced did the deed arrive in chains. They're thronging outside the Durango County courtroom too, meaning that David Mitchell has to fight through them to get in to be assigned by Judge Tucker as the defense attorney.

In such a case as this, where the murder victim was a much beloved local man, known by everyone, that would hardly be an easy task for an experienced lawyer. However Mitchell hasn't worked a case in three years and even then it was as a prosecuting attorney. He has no more than two days to prepare, which is far from sufficient. He's even up against a special prosecutor, Norris Bixby, appointed in the stead of the district attorney. He has very little on his side, even if we can believe that Brown didn't do it, which isn't even suggested. One is that Richard Chamberlain is far from hard on the eyes, with a grin that reminds of people like Dennis Quaid or Jan-Michael Vincent. Of course he had that grin first, by a long shot. The other is that he has a mentor to turn to for help.

Of course, this mentor is Claude Rains as Art Harper, a massively experienced and respected lawyer but one who has become too old and infirm to handle the case himself. It's only with Harper's help that Mitchell even believes he can make an attempt at Ben Brown's defence, and we're more than happy to see that help. Harper walks with a cane, his breathing is audible and he drinks vicariously, by watching other people do it and then sleeping it off himself. He also has a habit of undue excitement, which his doctors and his daughter Susan try their best to dissuade him from. He doesn't join Mitchell in court, at least until the last day, but they work through what happened there every night.

There are two very different takes on the story, though both begin and end the same way. Apparently Cole Clinton picked up Brown and his wife on the road, stopped at a bar for drinks and then put them up in a motel, even staying there himself as an old man tired after two long days on the road. And here's where the two versions differ. As Laura Mae Brown has it, her abusive husband Ben murdered Clinton in cold blood for his bankroll, bludgeoning him to death with a gun he took from Clinton's car. This is backed up by Brown's confessions, which the special prosecutor had reprinted on the front page of the local newspaper, and in his wife's testimony. Outside his confessions, which he says were cut before he signed them, Ben Brown says that he killed Clinton in self defence. He woke up and found his wife in bed with another man, who when he pulled her out, threatened him with a gun he'd already seen him use.

The biggest problem this film has is that it's set up to fail because the ending is almost guaranteed to be a disappointment. To avoid that would require a miracle on the level of the one Mitchell has to conjure up in persuading the jury, which is made up of the murdered man's friends and colleagues, that Ben Brown is innocent. After all, regardless of the intricacies of the story, which to be fair are superbly unfolded, we're watching from a completely different perspective from the characters in the film. They're asking whether Ben Brown is guilty or not. We're asking whether he's going to be found guilty or not. There's a big difference.

The townsfolk in the story begin with a guilty verdict because hey, everyone says so, including the papers, and so merely have to decide over the course of the testimony and courtroom theatrics whether there's anything there to make them change their mind. From our point of view, on the other side of the fourth wall, we begin with a not guilty verdict because Dr Kildare is the hero defense attorney and he's fighting for truth, justice and principle, so we merely wonder about whether Mitchell can work that miracle. If he succeeds then we need to be given a believable reason why, a reason that would be very hard indeed to deliver; if he fails then we're watching To Kill a Mockingbird and it would be a most ambitious film to try to outdo that on its own turf.

So, inevitably Twilight of Honor fails, but it has a joyous run until it does. While stars today flit back and forth between TV and film, that was hardly the standard back in 1963. Richard Chamberlain was trying to break that barrier and he gave it a good shot without huge success. He didn't appear on the big screen again for another two years and wouldn't really arrive as a film star until the 1970s. In the meantime he carried on as Dr Kildare, which series ran until 1966. Nick Adams, who is excellent as Ben Brown, was best known for TV too, having played Johnny Yuma for three years in The Rebel, but he had started out on film and had a number of supporting credits in notable movies behind him, including Mister Roberts, Rebel without a Cause and Picnic. He was Oscar nominated here, the only actor who was, but still two years later he'd be relegated to low budget genre movies like Mission Mars or Die, Monster, Die!, and kaiju flicks like Frankenstein Conquers the World and Godzilla vs Monster Zero.

Perhaps it's the presence in the cast of Claude Rains, who is as superb as he always was and he always picked up a cast, but the acting is solid throughout. Joey Heatherton is perfect for her part, and picked up a Golden Globe award as the Most Promising Female Newcomer for her work, though it doesn't seem to be much of a stretch for her. Joan Blackman channels some young Eileen Brennan to play Art Harper's daughter and of course David Mitchell's love interest. James Gregory is excellent here as special prosecutor Norris Bixby, though his work here isn't a patch on what he did a year earlier in The Manchurian Candidate. Of them all, I think I enjoyed Edgar Stehli as Judge Tucker most, because it was impossible to work out if he was the impartial judge he should be or whether he had an agenda, and if he had an agenda then whose side he might be on.

It's a shame these actors didn't have a story to work with that could have succeeded, because except for that inherent flaw it unfolds very nicely indeed. Director Boris Sagal, the father of Katey, was best known as a director of TV shows and presumably knew Chamberlain well having directed a number of episodes of Dr Kildare. While he was massively experienced in 1963, this was only his third film, after The Crimebusters and Dime with a Halo, hardly movies that had made a large impact. Similarly writer Henry Denker, who adapted the novel by Al Dewlen, mostly worked on TV, again with a number of credits to his name. This may well be the best feature film for both of them.

Young Bess (1953)

Director: George Sidney
Stars: Jean Simmons, Stewart Granger, Deborah Kerr and Charles Laughton

A couple of decades before They Only Kill Their Masters, MGM were the biggest studio in the world, famous for their lavish costume dramas. By 1953 costume dramas were on the wane but this would seem to have been the perfect film for the year, given that it's about the life of Elizabeth I before reaching the throne of England, made in the year that her namesake Elizabeth II was crowned. They had some time to make the film, given that the current queen acceded to the throne on the death of her father on 6th February 1952 but wasn't crowned until 2nd June 1953, three days after the release of this film. Like that was remotely coincidental...

We begin in 1558 at Hatfield House where the 25 year old Elizabeth's servants are celebrating the news that her half sister Bloody Mary is dying and isn't expected to last the night. That means that the era of Mary I is over and the era of Elizabeth I is about to begin. Young Bess is about to become the Queen of all England. We flashback to her in the cradle, only to be effectively exiled to Hatfield House as an illegitimate child after her mother's beheading. We then quickly progress through the years as she's trotted back out to London to meet each of her successive stepmothers, eventually becoming legitimate again and moved back to court during the era of the last of them, Catherine Parr.

The cast is impeccable, led by Charles Laughton as the king, returning to a role that he had made his own two full decades earlier in The Private Life of Henry VIII. He doesn't get that much of a part though, given that he soon gives way to his heir and successor, his son Edward VI. He gets a good death scene, at least, struggling against the one force of nature greater than himself and praising the stubbornness of his daughter. He sees in her not only her mother, Anne Boleyn, but plenty of himself too. Given the fact that she was his true successor in spirit, even though three monarchs (including Lady Jane Grey who only reigned for nine days) separated them on the throne, this is highly appropriate however the history actually played out. There's no 'Monks! Monks! Monks!' outburst here to hasten his death.

That daughter is played by Jean Simmons, already a star after her work in Guys and Dolls and already married to her co-star Stewart Granger, who plays Sir Thomas Seymour, brother to the king's third wife and husband to his sixth, the one he left a widow. It seems strange to watch an actress fall in love with her husband on screen, only for him to love and marry someone else, but then that comes with the territory. It's happened before and it'll happen again. The connections don't end there though. Apparently Granger proposed to Simmons after seeing her in Black Narcissus, a Deborah Kerr film, and apparently also had an extramarital affair with her. Needless to say, Kerr plays his wife in this film. Oh, what a tangled web we weave.

Simmons is an apt choice for the part, which in this story is a headstrong, stubborn and clever woman who managed to influence some of the decisions of her brother. She's very believable in portraying the young Elizabeth growing from a girl to a woman in only a few years, with all the difference in poise, judgement and temper that the transition suggests. Granger is decent but I couldn't help seeing Bruce Campbell in the part from the first time Seymour appears on screen. Seymour here is something of a pulp hero, dashing and romantic, but also a very able admiral who wins battles for the crown on the high seas. While this is certainly an A list picture, Seymour is a B list character and Campbell would have brought it even more to life on those grounds than Granger can, even though Granger had been typecast in such heroic roles for years.

Deborah Kerr is the fourth name at the top of the credits, and she's a decent Catherine Parr, but hers is not an extroverted part and so she's easily outshone by both Simmons and Granger, though not through any fault of her own. There are a couple of points where she gets more of a chance in the spotlight and she makes the most of it but the part simply doesn't warrant much more. In fact, Rex Thompson gets far more opportunity than she does, as the young Edward VI, who died at the tender age of fifteen in 1553. At least he had the chance to give his name to the school I attended before moving north: King Edward VI Grammar School in Chelmsford. Its motto, 'Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might' is something I try to live by and it fits how Elizabeth I lived too, very well indeed. Thompson plays a suitably sassy child king, and just as King Edward died at fifteen, so did Thompson leave the screen at fifteen. There are connections here too: while he only made five films, the other one I've seen saw him play Deborah Kerr's son in The King and I.

And of course I tried not to talk about history here, because this is Hollywood. Surprisingly though there's at least some adherence to reality. Elizabeth I succeeded to the throne at the age of 25, just as is suggested here, and Jean Simmons was a pretty close 24. Thomas Seymour did marry Catherine Parr, and Granger is the right age to play him, but the romantic connection between him and Elizabeth is utterly backward. In real life it was he who pursued her, rather than the other way around, beginning when she was 14. The history books suggest that her lifelong avoidance of marriage might have more to do with being traumatised by Seymour than holding him above all others in her heart.

The ending of the film is a departure from history too, as we're set up to believe that Elizabeth, about to be pronounced Queen of England, would immediately take her revenge on Edward Seymour, who as Lord Protector over King Edward VI had caused his brothers execution. In reality he was executed before Edward died. Hollywood never did stick too much to history, but I was surprised to see some accuracies here. Hollywood was interested in spectacle, and there's much of that to enjoy in this film. It's worth the two hours just to see Laughton and Simmons bicker.

They Only Kill Their Masters (1972)

Director: James Goldstone
Stars: James Garner and Katharine Ross

The timeframe of this movie is obvious from moment one, from the flute music playing over the short opening credits to the font used to show us the names involved: James Garner, Katharine Ross and Hal Holbrook. The whole opening beach scene screams early seventies too with Jenny Campbell's corpse being dragged to shore by her dog, a Doberman Pinscher (sorry, they only call them dobermans now, apparently, says veterinary nurse Kate Bingham). The dog is Murphy, he's very well trained, and he's not just the chief suspect in the murder, he's the only suspect. At least that's until chief of police Abel Marsh in this sleepy coastal town of Eden Landing turns up with a court order to have put him put to sleep.

Marsh doesn't even like dogs but in passing the time of day with the vets he finds that the whole thing doesn't add up. Mrs Bingham knew of another doberman who had killed its master, but that one went down in an understandable way: the dog had been beaten for years and when it finally turned it went for the throat. Marsh wonders why such a well behaved, thoroughly trained animal would kill her and if it did why wouldn't it go for her throat? So he gets the lab to do some tests and sure enough, Murphy is cleared. Jenny didn't bleed to death; she was drowned. Someone killed her in freshwater, attempted to diguise the act by pouring in salt and then dumped her in the ocean. The lab also finds out that she was three months pregnant.

So Marsh gets to investigate, in his lazy small town sort of way and as much he can given how underfunded his police department is. The small town setting means that he knows pretty much everyone and the underfunding doesn't mean that he isn't capable, as he proves by breaking up a bar fight with a couple of bikers. This impresses his date, because you know he just had to try it on with Mrs Bingham, once he finds out she's divorced. She is played by Katharine Ross, after all. He's a little less willing to take on Murphy too, but he's saved him from being put down and nobody else wants a dog that the papers have labelled a killer.

The mystery is well written here, by Lane Slate, but is hardly a detail oriented thing with clues coming out of the woodwork every ten seconds. There's no attempt to work an Agatha Christie type yarn with a set of suspects and a set of motives. There are merely a few hints dropped here and there and a cop dogged enough (sorry) to work it all through, in the process discovering that his sleepy little town has a dark side. Jenny seems to have been a popular girl and not just with the sort of people you'd expect. There's an undercurrent of homosexuality here, not just Jenny being bisexual but in the use of dialogue. I was surprised to hear James Garner use the word 'faggot', just as I was surprised to hear Katharine Ross use 'dyke'. Somehow such words seem out of place in a story that exposes a sleazy undercurrent to the town but otherwise tells its story in a safe TV movie sort of way.

Garner was great in this sort of laid back role, which fit him to a tee, and he'd soon be even more laid back as Jim Rockford in six seasons of The Rockford Files, which began two years after this film. The tone of the film and Garner's portrayal of the chief of police reminds me of Tom Selleck's work as Jesse Stone in that series of TV movies. I was amused to find that the only time Garner was nominated for an Academy Award was for a film called Murphy's Romance. No, it wasn't a sequel to this film in which Jenny's doberman finds a girlfriend. Ross is a lovely leading lady, who gets quite a bit of screen time and who seems to walk around naked under her coat because it's longer than her miniskirts.

Both the leads may be fine, as is Hal Holbrook as the town vet, but it's the name cast of supporting actors who really colour this film. This was the last film shot on MGM's #2 lot in Hollywood after a few decades of being one of the most important places in filmdom, and it proved to be a golden opportunity for a number of golden age actors who knew the location well to make a movie there for the very last time. They get mixed treatment, though it's good to see them all, some of whom hadn't been on screen in a long time.

Worst treated has to be June Allyson, who has only a small but crucial role as the vet's wife and who deserved to be a much bigger part of the story, especially as she hadn't appeared in a film since 1959 and only had two more performances left. In worst condition is Tom Ewell as one of Marsh's cops. He looks scarily out of shape, nothing like the young man who fantasised about Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch, and it isn't surprising to find that he was close to the end of his career, only two more films left for him too.

Rat Packer Peter Lawford plays the victim's husband, who she apparently left for another woman. He looks older than I'm used to seeing him but the nineteen year old girl on his arm fits just fine. Arthur O'Connell and Edmond O'Brien are both excellent in their small parts as owners of Eden Landing businesses, full of character and stealing their scenes ruthlessly but apparently effortlessly. Best of all is Ann Rutherford, best known for being Andy Hardy's girlfriend Polly in a couple of films a year as the thirties became the forties. She even snuck in a performance as Scarlett O'Hara's sister in Gone with the Wind. Here she's married to Tom Ewell and works with him as the police department's secretary. She gets more time on screen than any of the other old timers and she does quite a lot with it.

Murphy is unfortunately uncredited, but he's the star of the show, and he's the reason I'm watching. This makes precisely one of the classic doberman pictures that my wife has been waiting to see again for years. Now I just need to find The Doberman Gang, made the same year as this film, and its sequels, all made by Byron Chudnow. There were three sequels, the second of which features quite a few interesting names. How can you go wrong with a movie about a former conman controlling his five dobermans by remote control and taking down a criminal gang, especially when the ex-con is Fred Astaire? Well that film is The Amazing Dobermans, made in 1976, with James Franciscus, Barbara Eden and even Billy Barty. For now I'm happy to have finally found this one.

Smooth Operator (2009)

Director: Alyn Darnay
Stars: Cynthia Enriquez and Bruce Linser

Infuriatingly cheerful music accompanies shopping kids and a woman really enjoying her shower. She has little fluffy dogs. She's Kelly and her husband Drew is blissfully asleep. Then we find out what this short film is all about. Drew isn't quite as infuriatingly cheerful as everyone else because Kelly has removed his appendix and we're about to be treated to some of the best deadpan suggestive lines in movie history. Whatever director Alyn Darnay and actors Cynthia Enriquez and Bruce Linser brought to this film, and all three of them do a fine job, it's writer Larry Gotterer who should walk away proudest here because this dialogue is wonderful.

When Drew discovers that his wife has removed his appendix, he 'thought she was over that', but no, it's gone the way of his spleen, kidney and liver. 'What a busy week,' she says. Even though this is a short film even for a short film, we still have the reasons to come. Personally I think he deserves it because he chooses to live in Trenton, NJ and he has a Boondock Saints poster on his wall. God, I hate that movie. I prefer this one much more, having a real story, great dialogue and not a single shot in slow motion. In a year where every other short film seems to have zombies in it, this is refreshingly different. There are just as many stories that can be woven out of the cliche 'Hell hath no fury' than out of the living dead, after all, and they don't need as much make up.

Aaaaagh! A Monster! (2009)

Director: Gabriel Renfro
Stars: Joel Sappington

Steve is being chased from moment one but he does make it home, at least someone's home, because it isn't his. 'There's a monster coming after me and it's going to kill us all,' he tells the throng assembled in front of the TV and naturally they ignore him, even after he locks himself in their bathroom. And here we discover that he isn't kidding. As the monster arrives and begins to massacre everyone in the house except him, he sneaks a peek around the bathroom door with its map of the human digestion system on the back. Sure enough, it isn't safe even here.

Writer/director Gabriel Renfro, a film student at the University of Southern California, only has six minutes to make this film work and he proves to be an imaginative man, giving us nice little hints at what's going on without actually showing us, hints that involve lots of blood and guts, this being a horror short in case you hadn't worked that out from the review thus far. Almost the entire film is spent inside one bathroom watching one man try to escape, which is hardly an easy feat given that all the cool stuff is happening on the other side of the door. He does leave it eventually, so the effects guys get their chance to strut their stuff, but only to set up the finale. I won't spoil this ending, which is a peach, but it seems to have been written about my idiot stepson number one. I wonder how I didn't hear about it until now.

As a film student, obviously Renfro hasn't much of a body of work behind him, but he's starting off on the right foot. His other credit as a filmmaker is Nora Breaks Free, which he wrote and directed in 2006. This looks intriguing, given that it's 27 minutes long and has a much bigger cast that includes Doug Jones, a superb actor who seems to rarely appears outside of seriously inventive makeup so we wouldn't recognise him if he walked up and said hi. Think Abe Sapien in the Hellboy movies, the faun in Pan's Labyrinth and the title character in 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer. Maybe he's more recognisable as himself in Renfro's short.

Cabin Fever (2002)

Director: Eli Roth
Stars: Rider Strong, Jordan Ladd, James DeBello, Cerina Vincent, Joey Kern and Arie Verveen

Even though I'm a huge fan of horror movies, for some reason I've managed to entirely avoid the career of Eli Roth. That wasn't any deliberate decision, it's just the way it turned out, as I'm really interested in seeing what he can do and this seems like a good place to start: Cabin Fever was his debut feature as a writer/producer/director/actor/you name it, made on a low $1.5m budget. While he's lumped in with other modern filmmakers as one of the Splat Pack, focusing on gore and scenes of outrageous torture, I've always seen his name in something of a different light.

Of all the modern directors, he seems to be the most recent example of the the classic model of the fan made good. Seeing Alien at age eight turned him into a filmmaker, churning out film after film on Super 8 before growing old enough to sign up for film school at New York University. He gives the impression that while he's obviously successful at what he does, it doesn't really matter. He's there because he makes movies, it's simply who he is, and if nobody in the world wanted to see another horror movie ever again, he'd carry on making them just so he could see them. No wonder Peter Jackson and Quentin Tarantino are fans of his. They're kindred spirits.

Cabin Fever starts like many a horror film, with a set of college kids heading up to a remote cabin in the woods for a vacation. There are five of them and they're the usual sort, though we surprisingly get less gratuitous sex and nudity than we might expect and more character development as they react to the enemy they face together in the woods. They find themselves attacked by the least attackable enemy of them all, a contagious flesh eating virus, inspired by Roth's own experiences of the debilitating skin condition called psoriasis which I know well. At least my skin never came off in strips when shaving but that gave Roth a highly memorable bath scene here out of his experience.

There's talent here, that's obvious. Roth seems to delight in playing with our expectations, especially early on but throughout the film too. We get good transitions between scenes and artistic contrasts in colour and sound. We even get a great scene that demonstrates just how far out of their own world these kids are going. The owner of the store they stop at on the way to their cabin is Old Man Cadwell, a stereotypically nice old man with a long white beard who wouldn't say boo to a goose. And then, in the same happy tone he uses all along to pass the time of day, he explains that the bottle of fox urine is for foxes and the rifle is for niggers.

The kids make it to the cabin and get a day of fun before Henry the hermit comes out of the woods with his flesh eating disease. Henry has already run into Bert, who shot him with a rifle because he somehow mistook him for a woodchuck, but now he's up against all five of them, who naturally don't want anything to do with some crazy dude outside their cabin with his face falling off. When they don't let him in, he tries to steal their truck, vomits blood all over it and ends up dying when they accidentally set him on fire and leave him to rush off ablaze into nowhere. The irony is that while they successfully keep him out of their cabin, he ends up in their water supply instead, dead and rotting into the reservoir. Soon the virus is alive and well in the cabin, working its way through our college students, though in a wonderful example of clever scriptwriting it becomes a MacGuffin.

The kids do a good job here, believable and distinguishable from moment one. We're given nothing of their background, except they all went to some college and Paul may or may not have spent his childhood at a bowling alley where all the employees got massacred. This whole flashback, told as a campfire story, could easily be a windup and an excuse for Eli Roth to get bloody on us again. So they have to forge their characters through reactions to circumstances that show their true colours, and while we inevitably get some genre cliches they're mostly left behind in favour of realistic responses. They're far less disposable than most disposable horror movie victims.

Hired at low rates because of the lack of budget, the cast and crew made out well in the end, because Cabin Fever was a massive success, the highest grossing horror film of the year, and Eli Roth shared the profits with them. I wonder how differently this would have turned out had the budget been huge. Who would have been cast? Would they have played their parts differently with a bulkier wage packet in their pockets? Because it was low budget, Roth ended up with an intriguing set of names who have probably done very well out of this film indeed.

The five college kids are Rider Strong, Jordan Ladd, James DeBello, Cerina Vincent and Joey Kern, of which list I'd heard of precisely one: Jordan Ladd. The daughter of Cheryl and granddaughter of Alan, she has become something of a horror genre regular, going on to films like Club Dread, Hostel: Part II and, most recently, the excellent Grace. Strong is best known as one of the stars of the TV show Boy Meets World and Vincent was Maya the Yellow Power Ranger. Both are fine here, but the characters of Bert and Jeff give their co-stars more opportunities to be highlighted.

DeBello plays Bert a little like John Belushi might play him. After buying tons of stuff at the store, he steals a Snickers bar, presumably just because he can. It takes no time whatsoever before he pees in the woods. He takes a rifle to shoot squirrels, 'because they're gay', then clarifies that he'd shoot them anyway whether they were gay or straight. He sets a fire circle in the woods and leaves. He's an idiot, the funniest guy in the world to some friends and a complete pain in the ass to everyone else. In contrast, Kern channels some River Phoenix to play Jeff, the least able of the bunch to stick together and deal with the problem at hand. Sure enough, when he heads out on his own, he takes a case of Arrogant Bastard beer with him.

Eli Roth himself turns up in the form of Grim, a skater from Berkeley with a dog called Dr Mambo, and he's one of a few characters who really don't contribute much to the film but nonetheless stand out as memorable. One of the others is deputy sheriff Winston Olsen. In the hands of Giuseppe Andrews, Olsen (so named because genre nut Roth is bizarrely a huge fan of Mary Kate and Ashley) reminds of nobody less than Corey Feldman. If you can imagine the Feldmeister playing a cop, you've either seen this film or you're seriously twisted in the head. Maybe both.

Most obviously there's teenage ballet dancer and martial arts exponent Matthew Helms as Dennis, a true gift of a part to anyone, whether they're an actor or not. Dennis sits on the bench outside the store at the beginning of the film and bites Paul. After all, 'nobody sits next to Dennis' explains his dad. Roth pays attention to the little details in his script and sure enough, after a quick liability discussion, posts a sign saying 'Do not sit next to Dennis'. The pancakes scene, late in the film, is hilarious and surreal and whatever the talented Helms does with the rest of his life, this will always be a great talking point.

Of course it's impossible to talk about Eli Roth without mentioning the gore and his effects work is excellent, without ever becoming the most important thing in the film. That surprised me. The one exception is the scene where Paul runs into an obviously stuffed deer at one point that could surely have been edited into something a lot less painful. There's blood everywhere, like a highlights reel from CSI, and there are memorable shots like the bath scene, Ashley Ladd's eaten face and what happens to the harmonica. This is a lovely little touch and it's not the only one: there's also a giant rabbit (and his credit) and the inevitable ending is handled very well indeed. With obvious inspirations from films from Deliverance to Night of the Living Dead, Roth plays our expectations enough to create something new and while it's not difficult to see through some of them, some of the others are gems. No wonder it was the biggest horror hit of the year.