1950s
Kieron Tyler
Bradenville is on the way up. The town might only have one bank, but it does have a copper mine and a newly opened pyjama factory. In Arizona, it’s sufficiently isolated to seem the right target for a trio of bad guys looking to help themselves to what’s in that bank. Their plans culminate on a Saturday.The 1955 film Violent Saturday is, potentially, standard film noir. A darkly drawn bank heist caper, it is also a Peyton Place-style melodrama examining the lives of townsfolk, their infelicities, insecurities and foibles. The two styles exist in parallel and meet head on the fateful Saturday Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Another week, another postwar classic. Hot on the heels of last week’s revival of Oh What a Lovely War comes another legendary play from the Joan Littlewood museum of great one-offs. This time it’s a restaging of Shelagh Delaney’s 1958 play about poor parenting and teen pregnancy in Salford. Although this play is lauded in most history books as a great radical breakthrough, it has attracted fewer revivals in recent years than plays such as Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot or John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. Is there a good reason for this comparative neglect?The original play was penned Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A woman tramps the streets of Paris looking for a man. It’s night. It’s raining. She pops into bars asking for him. Everyone knows who he is. He’s been seen, but not recently. Earlier, early in the evening, she was supposed to meet him but he hadn’t turned up. She doesn’t know it, but he’s stuck in the lift of an office block. He thought he’d be in and out of the building in moments. While trapped, the car he’d parked across the street has been taken by a leather-jacketed young tough who brings his girlfriend from a florist’s along for the joyride.Lift to the Scaffold has three strands, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Dory Langdon: My Heart is a HunterAs a singer-songwriter, Dory Previn’s reputation rests on the extraordinary quartet of albums she made for United Artists in the opening years of the Seventies. This, her debut album, was issued in 1958. Commenting on his reaction to hearing “The Lady With The Braid” from 1971’s Mythical Kings & Iguanas for the first time, Jarvis Cocker said “I remember very vividly first hearing this record. I had moved to London. I was living in this squat and I was trying to put a curtain rail up. I was listening to the radio and it’s one of those moments where Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If it ain't broke don't fix it, and writer Heidi Thomas obviously has no intention of tinkering with the Call the Midwife formula. Virtually nothing has changed, except that there's a new character, Sister Winifred, while Chummy (Miranda Hart) is now living with her husband PC Noakes (Ben Caplan) and has a baby son. However, you can't keep a born midwife down, and Chummy's return to the Nonnatus House mothership by the end of the episode was a foregone conclusion.To be fair, the scenery has been altered slightly, because the nuns and midwives have moved out of the old Nonnatus House into a Read more ...
David Benedict
“Her most devastating surprise ever.” Thus spake The Guardian, a quote happily slapped across the cover of the first paperback edition of Agatha Christie’s 1967 thriller Endless Night. While I wouldn’t go quite that far – that honour goes to her still startling, genre-busting The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) – it’s a compelling little chiller. Small wonder that ITV wanted it for their franchise. Just one tiny problem: it’s a crime novel without a detective. Step forward screenwriter Kevin Elyot who, like an invisible mender, has satisfyingly woven Julia McKenzie’s Miss Marple into Christie’ Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Mr Arkadin, wedged between two greats – Othello and Touch of Evil – is Welles’ most chaotic film, its production scarred by budget restraints and a terminal quarrel with the producer, who barred Welles from the final edit – yet again. What you see is often a mess of dismal dubbing, painfully abrupt (as well as daringly innovative) cuts, and swathes of voiceover to cram in the necessary plot explication.As a whole, it doesn’t hang together at all. Welles sails close over the border of the ludicrous with his face make-up as billionaire Arkadin – Harry Harryhausen’s models are more convincing – Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Allen Ginsberg was once approached by two young acolytes eager to discuss literature. The bearded eminence of the Beats was the soul of generosity, giving up no small allowance of time to share his vast knowledge and experience. How they must have basked in the glow as a great poet treated them as equals. At a certain point, having put in sufficient effort, Ginsberg deemed it a good moment to change the subject. “So,” he said, “either of you guys suck cock?”It’s the making of this adventurer which is considered in Kill Your Darlings, and he’s played by the ever questing Daniel Radcliffe. Read more ...
David Benedict
How do you solve a problem like...no, not Maria, Candide? Musicals are loved for their scores – and Leonard Bernstein’s one for this really is a cracker – but they’re held together by their books, i.e. the script/dramatic context that makes audiences care about the characters and plot. Filled to bursting with good intentions, Matthew White’s exuberantly rough’n’tumble new Menier production does its damnedest but there’s no disguising the fact that Lillian Hellman’s adaptation of Voltaire’s satire of inexhaustible optimism remains tension-free. The gulf between the score’s strength and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
How much time does anyone want to spend in the company of Kim Philby? BBC Four’s Storyville allotted him 75 minutes, which isn’t much to tell the story of a third man with two paymasters and four wives. And yet this portrait somehow contrived to outstay its welcome. This is not to come over all huffy Heffer about betrayal. It’s just that hunting for the real Philby is like wandering around a maze uncertain if you’re looking for the entrance or the exit.A dense construct of false fronts and double lives, raffishly charming and impeccably English, Philby amounted in The Spy Who Went into the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Inevitably, an aura of fin-de-siècle gloom hung heavily over this final Poirot. So daunting was the prospect of terminating his 25-year career-defining stint as Belgium's finest (albeit imaginary) export that David Suchet insisted on shooting the last one before the others in the concluding series.In many respects it was business as usual. An A-list of reliable British thesps (Anne Reid, Phil Glenister, John Standing and a deservedly-promoted Aidan McArdle) found themselves incarcerated amid the spartan, crumbling surroundings of a lonely country house. The rain beat down, and the tall trees Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When asked about sex, the newly famous Boy George cocked an eyebrow and said he’d rather have a cup of tea. He was actually at it with the drummer. Compare and contrast with Cliff Richard, into whose afternoon beverage a vat of bromide was dumped somewhere back in the Fifties. His songs have reeked of sexlessness ever since. All that mucky business involving eager groins and sweaty throbbing is not really his department.But they are the department of rock'n'roll, which was so offensive to the parents of its fans because it was overtly about kids getting into each other's knickers. Cliff Read more ...