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Reviews
Tinker (1949)
Bygone look at mining in Durham and very interesting.
I only got to see the last quarter of this fim which was a silly story about a gypsy boy getting taken on as an apprentice in Easington colliery in Durham's then extensive coalfield. It offfers many scenes of bygone mining villages in Durham and is very interesting from that point of view.
I'm 2 years older than the film and it is pretty sad to see how badly off the miners were and how they were treated by the owners and the new National Coal Board.
Film does portray the general decreptiude of the mining villages, the spoil heaps, intriguing shots of the great pithead wheels, red hot coke pouring out of the coke ovens to be transported to Durham's long gone steel works, and everything covered in coal dust.
Final scenes involve the boy running away and climbing into a tub being carried along the aerial cableway to the tower built in the sea where the tubs were tipped to pour spoil and missed coal into the sea.
History buffs will enjoy the film.
Roaring Roads (1935)
Very nice vintage strint car racing.
Film shows the empty roads of 1935 America and an improbable plot with some slapstick comedy.
Set in sunny small town or suburb wit dirt road and old houses.
The racing shows some gorgeous sprint cars and some racing on a banked dirt oval that I can't identify.
Heroine's car is labelled McDowell Special and in one scene it can be seen it has a weird intake system presumably because McDowell was a man making speed parts for the Ford Model A engine.
Practically identical cars have been sold in UK in 2022.
The film is panned by many youngsters who cannot appreciate the naievity of cheap 1930's films and unknown actors.
Chicago Overcoat (2009)
Boring mess!
I liked the story line and the tommy gun action but the rest of he film was a boring mess of obscenities and dumb stupidities!
The hitman dropped guns full of fingerprints and the acting was over the top Italian gangster mumble talk.
Cops made so many mistakes around the gunmen they deserved to die. Running straight into a room where a gunman may be.
Final shootout has the hitman swing round with a gun when any good cop would have stepped back and to the side ready for such a thing and put two bullets into him!
What baffled me was why are the streets, bars and restaurants so empty!
I'll not bother watching it again.
The Leather Boys (1964)
Nice period piece with a twist!
Just watched this today 31 July 2023 on a rainy afternoon.
I remember bits of it from some long ago viewing but probably never watched it through before.
Now it was a nostalgic journey through my youth: lovely British motorbikes, trolley buses, grim black streets of grim black houses and steam trains - and the coffee bars with juke boxes that stayed open till late and were gathering places for the bikers.
Lead pair spoke in the awful Cockney Sarf London speech that really grates on my Yorkshire ears!
Freeview tv channel has kowtowed to the WOKISTs who had the soundtrack cut when Rita said 'puffters' as the two men hugged each other.
The Gentle Gunman (1952)
Good historical film
I think I tried to watch this many years ago but was put off by the grim scenery and confused Irish history but just watched it through today and it was quite interesting.
Lots of long dead actors proving just how few actors were working in poverty stricken UK in 1050s. Elizabeth Sellars enigmatic smile used often.
Bleak moorland settings with lonely roads, city views with endless grim terraces, ethnic steretyping galore, cliffhanging last scene.
Car chases look more like Keystone Cops action with the miserable old British cars that thankfully were not worth preserving.
Well worth watching if you like real history.
Alien Autopsy: (Fact or Fiction?) (1995)
Perfect example of autopsy on a Kamikaze humanoid hybrid.
What most peopel cannot accept is that for many decades UFOs have been abducting humans and cattle to be used in creating the hybrids similar to the Nephilim and halfhuman-halfanimals hybrids that were around before The Flood of 4,370 years ago.
This autopsy reveals the humanoid to be a simplified hybrid probably sent on a one-way kamikaze mission to check out the area where the US had first detonated the A bomb.
Being a kamikaze it had no need for food or water nor any way of going to the toilet in the tight body suit.
The opened body has no liver, kidneys nor intestines and has just one large organ or mass that may combine those duties and be a fat store to last the mission.
Ring of Spies (1964)
Really interesting slice of life film!
This film is well worth watching as it illustrates perfectly how the poorly paid British in secret organisations were and probably still are susceptible to turning spies for a few hundred pounds.
The two spies had combined wages of about £30 which was not much above poverty level.
Street and car scenes are very nicely done and show how basic UK cars were and how everything was still dirty and sooty from all the steam trains and inefficient engines.
Old Bernard Lee is poorly cast as a romantic lead.
Mission to Death (1966)
How not to fight Germans.
I'd never seen this film before and hop I never see it again!
All the squad die from stupidly running at machine guns, failing to kill Germans, failing to shoot from behind trees etc.
I forced myself to watch it to the end but the ending was as horrible as rest of film. Point in question: how can a man fire off a magazine from his tommy gun but not hit the two Germans 30 yards away!
Theirs Is the Glory (1946)
Well worth watching.
Very realistic pre-drop and post-drop footage including burning gliders.
Lots of believable action in the street and with guns and flamethrowers.
Lots of footage using captured Tiger tanks.
The Son of Monte Cristo (1940)
Enjoyable viewing!
I really enjoyed this film as a display of long long film making.
Lots of good sets, the attention to details in all the old uniforms and clothing.
Final scene denouement is quite amusing.
Well worth watching.
The Blind Goddess (1948)
Black and white and gloomy!
Another of those grim 1940s films with good actors but awful tedium.
Set in overstuffed victorian London houses though I dodn't notice an aspidistra.
It is films like this that killed the British film industry.
The Leisure Seeker (2017)
Mawkish soap!
Any film director who thinks it cute to open with a scene with actors talking about farting is surely scraping the bottom of thr barrel. Plus casting Mirren as America is ridiculous.
Alzheimer's are not fit to be on the road.
Hook, Line and Sinker (1959)
Super film of life gone by!
New Aberdeen ship for fishing for halibut by longlines up to 10 miles long! Lines has hooks every few feet and sinks down as far as 2000 feet. Halibut are huge flatfish that feed on the sea floor.
Ship had to sail four days up to Iceland, drop the line, haul in the catch, take out the liver for halibut oil medicine, then chilli t for journey home to market.
The crewlooked really old and work hardened. All ate lots of fried food and smoked at every opportunity but all had numerous children!
Ship lifeboat was tied down and coverd at rear and in case of emergency I wondered if any of the crew could get it loose and uncovered.
Well worth watching by anyone interested in work and life in 1959.
Recoil (1953)
Olde Worlde British movie
A low budget effort with silly complicated plot and storyline about postwar London crooks. Interesting shots of long vanished warehouses and vehicles.
Love interest is between curiously faced Elizabeth Sellars and prematurely aged Edward Underdown who looked old enough to be both her father and his own mother!
Silly shoot out in warehouse filmed in daylight but crook runs to car in dark!
Martic Benson looks very nice with a moustache and he dies very convincingly after the crook shoots him.
Worth watching for the historical street scenes and fashions.
The Deadly Affair (1967)
Grim Olde Britishe Film
Set in slummy 1961 Engkand and filmed in 1967 the film has a curious moment when Masonis speaking with the dead man's wife and in background a steam train goes chuffing by. Maybe the director thought that as the film was set in 1960 the loco was appropriate.
Story is about a man who was a cCommie at 1930's uni and may have or was spying for Russia...Reds under every bed!
Film shows how dull, grim and poverty stricken everything was in those days while the Beatles were yelling away in the Cavern.
Spies and civil servants were paid peanuts and expected to give life and blood for queen and country while queen lived in absolute luxury.
Strange Harvest (1953)
Worth watching for history.
This must have been one of those quota quickies we hear about as the plot and action is pretty basic.
But oh my how glorious life was back then in rural West Sussex when corn grew four feet tall and the sun shone endlessly and village copper pedalled along empty lanes.
It's a visual Mrs Dales's Diary!
The Master of Bankdam (1947)
Very nice way to get through Covid lockdown.
Having lived all my life in the area the novel and film is set in I was eager to see this film and found it mostly very good and realistic with good characterisations and most quite acceptable Broad Yorkshire speech. Broad Yorkshire having its glottal stop 't' and its silent 'h' roots in the Hebrew language spoken by the wandering Israelites that became the Anglo-Saxon-Jute-Viking that populated the Yorkshire area before and after the Roman period. One jarring exception was the scene where the mill owner's son confronts father of pregnant girlfriend and the father speak quite posh English and the son Broad Yorkshire!
Few scenes in the mill apart from the long one concerning the 'milling' of new woollen cloth needing longer time in the milling machine. The woollen milling machine being driven by belts off a steam engine and having two wide cogs close together through which the cloth was fed in order to make the fibres mat together to give strength and smoothness. Helmshore Musuem has similar machine.
The scene of the mill collapsing due to the urge to install extra looms is good and seems to have been filmed in a genuine mill being demolished. The following scene of mayor and millowner's son colluding in covering up the reason for the collapse shows how business was and is done in small town business.
The patriarch with his apparent Broad Yorkshire was played by Tom Walls who being born in Northamtonshire spoke a close version of Yorkshire's Anglo-Saxon and was therefore well able to stop his glottal and silence any aitches in his dialogue.
It's well worth a watch to see real acting and a disappeared way of life.
The Magnificent Ambersons (2001)
Dumbed down remake of a pompously overstuffed original - both best avoided
I have tried to watch the original a couple of time before giving up at Welles pompous pretentiousness and this remake seems to try remake that film like a poor grim British soap opera.
It's chief failing is in modern actors being unable to get into character in appearance, speech or action - just like the concetration camp films that use plump slovenly people who haven't a hope of simulating the original starving inmates.
The Street Singer (1936)
Lovely way to spend 86 minutes!
I grew up hearing Arthur's songs on BBC requests so it was nice to see this film.
Many knock Arthur as rubbish actor and the film as cheap and dull but UK in 1937 was a grim dirty poverty stricken place where the peasants starved in cold damp hovels while the upper classes and royalty lived in luxury!
The film was made under the quota laws - a vain dream that movies show in UK weather and gloom with dirty streets and railways as backdrops could hope to compete with those shot under Hollywood's daily glorious sunshine! It compares well with the overhyped pretentious rubbish turned out by Hitchcock.
I watched it while stuck at home under Covid lockdown but it would be better viewing than any of the grim British soap operas.
The Stable Door (1966)
Olde Worlde Britain.
Actually and infomercial sponsored by Insurance Indsutry to highlight the need fo rgood locks and secure premises.
Hackneyed plot about old burglar being released from jail and immediatly plotting warehouse robbery.
Sets show how grim and dirty Britain was in 1966 when filmed but curiously a steam train features but was sadly broken up shortly after filming.
Nightwatchman outwits one of them but rest escape.
Worth watching for the grim settings and locomotive.
A Very British Christmas (2019)
Made for a very nonYorkshire audience.
The plot is as hackneyed as anything off Eastenders or other grim soap opera and was written by someone who once saw Yorkshire through rose-tinted glasses on a day trip.
Weird plot with the bearded idiot farmer and then the Scouse power worker!
Knaresbrough looked lovely in the sun but last time I was there it was freezing and the town a grim hole.
Could have been so much better but pandered to the Archers-Eastenders mentality.
The Dancing Years (1950)
Lovely way to pass a Covid day!
Despite all the nitpicking by critics this film is a lovely thing to watch.
The negative seems to have faded and could do with refreshing but the lovely dresses and decor of this story is fine as is the singing.
Given the choice of this film or one of the interminable 007 efforts this wins hands down.
The Devil's Jest (1954)
Fanatical Hun spy gets the bullet.
Poorly concocted tale of Hun spy masquerading as British officer in castle on cliff. Castle owned by his former lover. Hun kills a few people including British officers billeted close by.
Hun and lover die shoot out on beach but lover gets full marks for running on sand in heels and long dress!
British army shooting accuracy shows why Britain lost the Second World War.
Overseas Press Club - Exclusive!: Two Against the Kremlin (1957)
Good film.
Just watching this after waking early on Sunday morning.
It's a period drama set in Moscow 1957 and quite accurately shows the life in Moscow in the years around the death of Stalin.
Tapped phones and mail, secret police outside the door noting visits.
Ralph Bellamy plays man with Russian wife and chidlren unable t obtain exit visa for them and resorts to black market.
People try shipping themselves out in packing crates.
Watch it to see th eparanoia of the cold war and why USA spent trillions of atom bombs, planes and rockets.
The Case of Charles Peace (1949)
Grim viewing!
This must have been a quota quickie in both subject, casting and filming.
The acting is as bad as any cheap soap opera though the cast all have a uniformly hard, lined and s0mehow wartime look that is never seen these days. One or two affect a Yorkshire accent as unconvincing as any non-Yorkshire can manage.
The court scene shows the courtroom stuffed with bewigged men of unknown duties who must all have been nearly brain dead from the boredom and trivia of their work hours.
I managed to watch to the fiftenn minutes mark before abandoning it.