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duncanjbrooks
Reviews
Bread or Blood (1981)
Gritty and powerful
I should love to see this again. I don't remember it being broadcast more than once, or certainly not since shortly after its first broadcast. I remember it as very gritty and very powerful - one of the few things I've seen that may have come anywhere near depicting the true grinding desperate awfulness of peasant life back then.
The Third Man (1949)
Black and white
Complete classic: photography, lighting, music. You will wonder why anybody bothered inventing colour film.
Many exquisite moments. Look for Bernard Lee poking his head out of the inky shadow.
The Man Upstairs (1958)
Stagey, with clichéd stereotypes
Attenborough is pretty good, but he can't save this as a film. Some of the other acting is ok - but some is dreadful, especially Donald Houston (does he ever do anything except overact? I never understood why he was in so many films) - and several of the characters are pure clichéd stereotypes. The script is wooden and stilted, presumably because of its stage-play origins, and the action is a sequence of simply implausible events, largely engineered to get all the main characters together in one room and sounding off at each other. Corny, with little credibility.
A Cry in the Night (1956)
Moralistic badly-acted corn
Brian Donlevy and Natalie Wood aren't too bad. But otherwise... Horribly corny acting (especially Edmund O'Brien - dreadful) on the basis of a horribly corny and 50s-moralistic script. Natalie Wood pointlessly but oh-so-conveniently gets her skirt ripped so that she can spend half the film flashing thigh only just short of her underwear. Raymond Burr's overdone infantilized kidnapper/killer, the most tragic and interesting character in the film, gets taken away, clearly to the electric chair, but obviously we're not supposed to be interested in or care about that - because we're made to focus on and take joy in the destructively insensitive and overprotective cop/father finally seeing the light and making up with the hapless boyfriend. Pathetic!
But, despite all that, still quite watchable :-)
Home at Seven (1952)
Ralph Richardson awful
I like and respect Ralph Richardson as much as the next film-viewer, but the plaudits his acting receives in many of the reviews of this film on here are simply astonishing. His acting in this film is just awful - it might well have been passable when he did it on stage like this, but transferred to the far-more-realistic medium of film it appears stilted, clichéd and hammy.
Margaret Leighton is decently good by the standards of the era, and Jack Hawkins is unsurprisingly his ultra-reliable self - a top-notch actor by any standards whatsoever. The direction, etc., makes it look not-too-stagey for what is still, obviously, a stage-play.
Destination Tokyo (1943)
Interesting but bad
It would not have occurred to me to review this film before reading other user-reviews here - all of which surprised my by their laudatory nature. It's taken as read that this is a film of its time, and - that time being wartime - one clearly expects a degree of propagandist tone. But... here it's so heavy-handed that, in more than a few episodes, the film almost rates as 'government information' rather than as entertainment. The anti-Japanese propaganda is really laid on with a trowel, to the extent that it could not unfairly be called indoctrination. However, it is a film of its time.
But... The script is tedious and cliched, the direction is plodding and hesitant and lacks any attempt get pace out of the dialogue, and the acting is weak and/or reliant on stereotypes. Among the worst of them is Grant, who is dreadfully miscast and inappropriate as a commander of anything let alone a submarine - he looks awfully out of place (as indeed he did in so many bad films until he found his natural metier as a comedic romantic charmer).
An interesting film, but a bad one.