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Reviews
The Night of the Hunter (1955)
Simply dreadful
From the baffling editing of sequences at the start, to the mystifying, quasi-Dickensian daffy-ness of Ms. Gish at the end, this movie is appallingly bad. Its main problem is its sheer inconsistency. Is Mitchum supposed to be evil (threatening to hurt the children) or comic (as he whoops to the barn after being shot by Ms. Gish)? Are the sets outdoors (apparent heli-cam flying over Mitchum) or indoors and made out of cardboard (house and barn where the escaping children sleep)? Why do animals, in ones and twos, start to appear during the river escape? Why does Mitchum drive the car containing his wife's body into the river right next to the children's uncle's home? How does he get it to stand the right way up on the river bottom with his dead wife sitting upright in the passenger seat, as though she's in an underwater parking garage? Why are there five kids with no bodies floating in the sky at the start of the movie? Why does Mitchum tell Ms. Gish his name and the time of his anticipated return, so that she can have the cops waiting for him? Why do characters make mysterious gestures (particularly the boy) which have no dramatic significance? Who told Shelley Winters she could act? What's evil about hanging around boys in town and eating ice cream? Why does this movie scream 1930's when Laughton directed it in the 1950's -- is it because he was stuck twenty years in the past? And -- question of questions -- why do so many apparently quite normal reviewers think that this awful, awful movie is so great?
Foyle's War (2002)
Outstanding
Michael Kitchen is simply outstanding -- there is no other word for it.
The three series I have seen are a model of understatement. The supporting cast is excellent. In Series 2 and 3 Foyle appears as a more self-confident man, and therefore I prefer by a small margin the first series, where he seems less sure of himself and less ready to brook authority.
There is a tendency in the plots for Foyle to reveal the complicated machinations of each case in the last few minutes with what can sometimes appear to be astonishing insight, but this is a minor quibble. Well worth seeing -- and re-seeing.
Jericho (2005)
Not the greatest
This series invites a direct comparison with Foyle's War, and Jericho definitely comes off second-best. It's clear that from a production point of view the creators of Jericho threw all they had at their disposal. There is an overdone music soundtrack which verges on the annoying. There are all the props to re-create the 1950's feel, including even two period London double-decker buses, and the costumes are first-rate, but somehow it seems to go wrong so much of the time. There is an attempt to relive film noir, but that's hard when you shoot in color. There are even typewritten subs for each location in the episodes -- a cliché long before this series was made.
As DI Michael Jericho, Robert Lindsay seems to be lost, and he's not much helped by the scripts. Is Jericho supposed to be confident media hero, maverick detective, harried cop just doing his job, or neurotic failing to come to terms with the death of his father (which he relives far too often in flashback)? Even his dyed hair looks wrong -- only men of a certain orientation dyed their hair in the 1950's; and he's not enough of an actor to persuade us to forget that he plays a comic dentist in the series "My Family." In short, this is no Foyle's War, and Lindsay is no Michael Kitchen.