Millie (1931) **

Director: John Francis Dillon
Screenplay: Charles Kenyon and Ralph Murphy, from the novel by Donald Henderson Clarke
Cast: Helen Twelvetrees, John Halliday, James Hall, Lilyan Tashman, Joan Blondell, Robert Ames, Anita Louise, Edmund Breese, Frank McHugh, Cyril Ring

Cross-generational road to ruin barnstormer with quintessential pre-Code trappings, and a fine example of the lost art of screenplay condensation: turning a novel that spans decades and generations, and moves at a pretty zippy pace itself, into a 68 minute movie that somehow covers the main plot points and conveys the essence of all the characters.
My wife - surely one of the few people left alive that has both seen the film and read and loved the book - confirms that as well as a great movie in its own right, it's also a fine precis of its source, with felicitous casting and excellent backgrounds adding to its appeal.

Helen Twelvetrees is the eponymous Millie, unlucky in love, playing the field and suffering at the hands of wolves and cads (with John Halliday at the head of the pack). Whole generations pass, and when her daughter ends up getting the Halliday treatment, guns go off and court cases ensue.
The rest is a blur of nightclubs, cocktails, drunken parties, trips to Coney, sassy dialogue and pre-Code sauce from the gals: just wait till you get a load of Joan Blondell and Lilyan Tashman as co-habiting bed-sharers Angie and Helen!
All this plus a smashing song performed through bullhorns by a trio of crooners:

She isn't a blonde, she's not a brunette,
She's Millie the redhead and hard to forget!
Look out for your heart, look out for your nerves,
She's Millie the redhead with dangerous curves!

If you ever find yourself in danger of forgetting just why you love pre-Code, I prescribe this. It's got the lot.

How to Beat the High Cost of Living (1980) *

Director: Robert Scheerer
Screenplay: Robert Kaufman
Cast: Jane Curtin, Susan Saint James, Jessica Lange, Richard Benjamin, Dabney Coleman, Fred Willard, Eddie Albert, Cathryn Damon, Sybil Danning, Garrett Morris.

Three gals, up against it in different ways, hatch an ingenious plot to rob the 'money ball' - an enormous glass sphere stuffed with notes - used as part of a publicity stunt at their local mall.

Simple, cheerful comedy that plays like a long episode of a tv sitcom: it seemed utterly disposable at the time, but has now acquired a genuinely attractive dusting of nostalgia value, and the practiced and likeable cast keep things moving merrily along. (For less objective analysis, see here.)
Notable-ish for reuniting Saint James, Benjamin and screenwriter Kaufman after the success of Love at First Bite, for teaming Saint James and Curtin before Kate and Allie, and for giving Lange, who looks gorgeous here, another chance after King Kong and thus paving the way for The Postman Always Rings Twice.

The Pip From Pittsburg (1931) ****

Director: James Parrott
Cast: Charley Chase, Thelma Todd, Dorothy Granger, Charlie Hall

Thelma Todd, that most vivacious of stars, who died so terribly with so much potential unfulfilled in 1935, made an incredible 18 films in 1931, and all over the place: with the Marxes in Monkey Business, Clara Bow in No Limit, and Joe E. Brown in Broadminded; in dramatic mode in the rarely seen, under-rated 1931 version of The Maltese Falcon and Corsair (in the latter trying out her proposed straight-role pseudonym Alison Lloyd), and in so many amazing shorts! In her own series with Zasu Pitts she clocked up five, including the classics On the Loose and Pajama Party; with Laurel & Hardy she made Chickens Come Home.

And then there's Charley Chase, perhaps the most criminally neglected of the great thirties comedians. Todd appeared many times with this delightful, multi-talented but now more or less forgotten star, including this treat, one of two from 1931 and probably my favourite Chase movie.
The premise is an odd one: Charley is grudgingly going on a double-date with a friend who always gets him uninspiring girls so he decides to deliberately spoil things by making himself as repulsive as possible. But when he gets there he finds he's been fixed up with the adorable Thelma, and spends the rest of the short attempting to wash, shave and change his suit, mostly while actually on the dance floor at a night club.

This is a fine example of the Hal Roach method, of which the Laurel & Hardy films are but one facet, combining as it does inventive sight gags, absurd slapstick, delightful touches of characterisation and sackloads of socio-historic detail. His directors and writers seem effortlessly to capture the mood and meaning of their times; the films (like those of Harold Lloyd the decade before) are genuinely valuable documents of their era. They are also extremely funny. And if you only know Charley from Sons of the Desert, start here.

Pranzo di Ferragosto (Mid-August Lunch) (2008) ****

Director/Screenplay: Gianni Di Gregorio
Cast: Gianni Di Gregorio, Valeria De Franciscis, Marina Cacciotti, Maria Cali, Grazia Cesarini Sforza, Alfonso Santagata, Luigi Marchetti, Biagio Ursitti, Petre Rosu, Marcello Ottolenghi

Probably the most delighted I have ever been watching a new film at the cinema was on my first encounter with this, which I went to see with no expectations and not even any clear sense of what it was going to be.
The only reasons I had for expecting to enjoy it were that it was Italian, it had a U certificate but was not a kids' film, and it was only 75 minutes long. All of these things pointed to pleasure, but the film itself was a revelation and remains an oft-revisited favourite.

As an antidote to contemporary standards, it couldn't be more revolutionary. There are five main characters, one a middle-aged man and the other four women in their nineties. The supporting characters are a few more middle-aged men and the beautiful city of Rome. No CGI was required. Nothing explodes.
It's about a good-natured but somehow directionless man who lives with his aged mother (and the relationship between them is beautifully realistic; no silly extremes, just real, day to day ups and downs) and set mainly during the day Romans traditionally leave for the beach and the entire city closes down. Because of his mother he must stay in the city, and he is also left to care for the aged relatives of his landlord (he hasn't paid his rent) and doctor (he can't afford to pay for his consultations). Over the course of the film, and many glasses of wine, he moves from quiet resentment of his lot to resignation to a kind of bemused acceptance.

Gregorio, equally impressive as writer, director and star, shot the film in the exact apartment he shared with his own mother, and all of the elderly ladies are non-professionals: one is his aunt, one a family friend and the other two came from an old people's home. All four are sensationally good, each with their own carefully distinguished and fully developed characters. Nobody is patronised, or relegated to a thumbnail sketch.
It is moving without being remotely sad, funny without ever playing for laughs. Few films have a tenth of its charm, its sincerity, its warmth, its keenness to please.

A Dangerous Method (2011)

Director: David Cronenberg
Screenplay: Christopher Hampton
Cast: Keira Knightley, Michael Fassbender, Viggo Mortensen, Vincent Cassel, Sarah Gadon

Directed with classical precision by Cronenberg and very effective in parts, this is an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to combine psychoanalytic case study with straight biographical drama.
The all too short occasions when the film focuses exclusively on the latter, in a series of simply staged but engrossing conversation scenes between Fassbender's Jung and Mortensen's Freud, seemed by far the most impressive to me; by contrast, the scenes of romantic strife and hysteria become quickly exhausting.
So in effect it plays as two movies: a splashy, energetic but strangely dull one with Keira screaming and contorting, and getting her bum smacked by Jung, and a measured, sedate but strangely compelling one with the two doctors discussing the absurdities of their ideas in their brown wood studies, in measured tones and with the accompaniment of delicious-looking liqueurs, cigars and pipes.
That the two are nonetheless linked, in that the influence of the Freudian theoretical model had a generally tragic effect on psychological well-being in the twentieth century and beyond, is a relevant point but, sadly, not one the film seems overly willing to make, content as it is to view the dawn of psychoanalysis as of purely historic relevance.

In all technical respects the film is well up to par, save in the modern tragedy that some beautiful compositions and visual subjects must now be farcically sacrificed at the altar of inadequate digital photography and projection. Reason abandoned in pursuit of progress: a neat parallel with the subject.
All things considered, probably Cronenberg's best film since The Brood, not that there's much competition.

Gianni e le Donne (Salt of Life) (2011) ***

Director: Gianni Di Gregorio
Screenplay: Gianni Di Gregorio, Valerio Attanasio
Cast: Gianni Di Gregorio, Valeria De Franciscis, Alfonso Santagata, Elisabetta Piccolomini, Valeria Cavalli, Aylin Prandi, Kristina Cepraga, Michelangelo Ciminale, Teresa Di Gregorio

A semi-sequel to Pranzo di Ferragosto, that plays as a kind of reward for those of us who came out for the the first film, and cherished it, and told our friends, and made it the modest but future-bankable international hit that it was.
There is an element of crowd-pleasing contrivance here – Valeria De Franciscis is back as Gianni’s mother, and at times the film sweats to keep her relevant to the story, her appearances often seeming like guest turns.
Inevitably, it lacks the original's sense of surprise, and we can now take for granted the warmth, wit and good-heartedness that were all such wonderful surprises first time round. But the film is also less tight than Pranzo, more casual and episodic, and non-architectural in its structure, in the favoured arthouse manner.
The observation and performances, however, are as beautiful as ever, and if you were one of our happy band that took Pranzo to your heart, you'll have little to complain about here.

The focus this time is Gianni's panicked realisation that, at sixty, his days of romantic adventure are now behind him. The film's structure thus mirrors his mental state, not least in a wonderful sequence, simultaneously moving and hilarious, in which he wanders Rome all night with his neighbour’s enormous pet dog after accidentally ingesting an hallucinogenic at a party, playing like a child in the city fountains while the dog looks on unimpressed.
Later, when he and the dog are sat in the street, there is a moment where he tries to get the dog’s attention by tapping it on its shoulder, the implication being that he either wants to tell it something or point something out to it, and when the dog ignores him he gives up with a look of bemused resignation. I fear it is impossible to convey why this is so hilarious, but it's one of the funniest, truest bit of comic-improvisational playing I’ve ever seen in a movie.
The climactic, aborted family meal, in which the two halves of his life come together, is superbly set up, and the ending is so perfect I wanted to stand and cheer.
Gianni De Gregorio is, for me, the most cherishable filmmaker at work in the world today.

After Life (2009)

Director: Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo
Screenplay: Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo, Paul Vosloo, Jakub Korolczuk
Cast: Christina Ricci, Liam Neeson, Justin Long

After a near-fatal car crash, a beautiful woman is held against her will by a mad mortician who prepares living subjects for the grave, all the while convincing them that their consciousness is evidence not of life but of a transitional period between the two states...

Both ghoulish and high-falutin' in ways that may come to seem defining of us, this is well-made and mainly compulsive, though its essential purpose remains on a somewhat lower plane than its haughty metaphysics.
Not really a thriller, despite suspenseful sections, it's basically an intense character piece with weirdo horror trimmings, presumably artfully tailored to the Twilight generation in its mix of morbid chic, lofty talk and emo pulchritude. Only at the ending, which attempts to raise and dash the viewer's hopes for a conventional resolution, does the essential cynicism of the enterprise give itself away.

For better or worse, though, it's an essential one for all fans of Ricci, whose fearless performance keeps it all watchable, if scarcely enjoyable in any traditional sense.

The Gathering (2003) *

Director: Brian Gilbert
Screenplay: Anthony Horowitz
Cast: Christina Ricci, Ioan Gruffud, Stephen Dillane, Kerry Fox, Simon Russell Beale, Robert Hardy

Unexceptional but pleasing spook stuff with a sturdy British cast (every second Robert Hardy's on screen is a pleasure) made by the Granada company after the surprise success of The Hole. But lightning didn't strike twice on this occasion, commercially speaking, though the same basic rules are applied: it failed to find distribution and turned up on DVD nearly ten years after it was made.

Ricci, the American import this time out, looks great striding through the unusual and effective Isle of Man locations; the supporting cast are an earnest and well-chosen assortment in the best Hammer tradition, and the screenplay by children's author Anthony Horowitz is efficient and entirely generic, with echoes of everything from American Werewolf and The Wicker Man to The Omen and Quatermass and the Pit.
I suppose it's a near-definitive example of that most despised hybrid: the horror film that horror enthusiasts look down on because it is geared to people who don't usually like 'that sort of thing'. But I enjoyed it. It is emphatically better than any of the new Hammer films, and exactly the kind of film, I'd have thought, that they should be making: linear horror stories with modern contexts but reassuring generic conventions left unviolated, and with classy leads, a good rustic chorus, and a strong British identity.

La Ragazza Con la Valigia (Girl With a Suitcase) (1961) ***

Director: Valerio Zurlini
Screenplay: Leo Benvenuti, Piero De Bernardi, Enrico Medioli, Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, Valerio Zurlini
Cast: Claudia Cardinale, Jacques Perrin, Luciana Angiolillo, Renato Baldini, Riccardo Garrone, Elsa Albani, Corrado Pani, Gian Maria Volonte

Zurlini is today probably the least recalled and regarded of the great Italian directors of the post-war generation, perhaps because he offers less for auteurists to get their teeth into than the rest in terms of style and subject matter. He's "one of the hardest directors to picture in the class photo" is how Gian Piero Brunetta puts it in his fascinating History of Italian Cinema.

But rather than an outsider, he's more like a synthesis, certainly on the evidence of this movie, which seems to combine the social authenticity and detail of Neo-Realism, the character-driven poignancy of early Fellini, a use of location and space almost as a character in its own right that evokes Antonioni, and finally the later De Sica's centralising of a major star presence. Cardinale is wonderful here, perhaps surprisingly to those who know her only or mainly for her international guest star-type roles, and so too is Perrin, in an extremely moving performance as the lonely young man who falls for her.
The story of their relationship, which begins with her abandonment by Perrin's caddish older brother, his surreptitious courtship of her, their briefly flowering love, and finally her realisation that she is unable to respond to the intensity of his regard for her, is told with a wonderfully subtle eye for the minutiae of human behaviour, together with a film sense that finds exactly the right setting and situation for each phase of the narrative development.

The sequence in which Perrin becomes increasingly resentful of Cardinale dancing with another man, after he has bought her the dress that enables her to leave her hotel room in the first place, is especially well staged, photographed and performed, but the whole film is a truly excellent piece of work that satisfies the eye, head and soul in unison, and its moving ending lacks entirely the finger-wagging pessimism of Fellini, or the fatalistic shoulder-shrug of Antonioni.

The Beast Must Die (1974) *

Director: Paul Annett
Screenplay: Michael Winder, from a story by James Blish
Cast: Calvin Lockhart, Peter Cushing, Charles Gray, Anton Diffring, Marlene Clark, Ciaran Madden, Michael Gambon, Tom Chadbon

A big game hunter invites a variety of guests to a weekend house party, before announcing that he believes one of them is a werewolf, and he intends to hunt and kill them.

Mostly lively mix of Gothic mythology, And Then There Were None and The Most Dangerous Game, with a ripe cast of scene stealers and a lively wocca-wocca score to accompany its all-action black protagonist, undone slightly by a couple of unnecessary gimmicks and the basic structural problem that, having once explained the set-up, all that the script can do is try to find enough good distractions and delays until the big denouement.
But the final revelation does have a good surprise up its sleeve, much of the suspense works as intended, and there are some amusing scientific explanations of standard werewolf lore delivered by Cushing in one of the most erratic German accents on record.
Only the beast itself fully disappoints: fully wolverine rather than the traditional wolfish humanoid, and seemingly played by a dog. Overall, though, one of the best of the generally second-rank Amicus horrors, and a commendable attempt to do something a little different. Especially enjoyable when watched in company.

Carnage (2011) *

Director: Roman Polanski
Screenplay: Yasmina Reza, Roman Polanski; from Reza's play
Cast: Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, John C. Reilly, Christoph Waltz

Given its irresistible premise - four strong performers bickering stylishly on one set - I expected to have a lot more fun with this than I did, though it's far from a disaster, providing consistent if not outstanding entertainment, albeit of the cynical sort, for audiences who don't mind taking lessons in how hypocritically thin is the crust of middle class civilisation from a rapist on the run.

Two things very strongly in its favour: it doesn't try to open out a chamber piece that would be irredeemably diluted by changes of location, and it doesn't outstay its welcome: it's the latest example of an admirable trend in modern cinema to bring back the less-than-ninety-minute movie. (That's admirable from the perspective of cinema as an art form, not necessarily from that of the punter looking for value from his overpriced ticket.)
Though returning wisely to the character-led intimacy of his best films, like Cul De Sac and Knife In The Water, it's an odd choice for Polanski, in that it's plainly not a director's piece. The point is the acting and the writing, and the director has to be as unobtrusive as possible, which for the most part Polanski is, bar the occasional dash of clunky, old-fashioned symbolism (the sound of dogs barking whenever the characters argue in the corridor of the apartment building; two heavily signposted unexplained stains on the sheet music on the piano, one like a wine stain, the other like a red blood splash).
As for the writing and acting, however: both seem to be constantly on the verge of achieving a resonance they never quite find; the performances in particular struggling to overcome the feeling of staginess that comes of trying to give a naturalistic account of obviously artificial dialogue and character development (especially in the second half, when it becomes increasingly broad and shrill, the characters' guards lowered and intimacies revealed, via conveniently fast-acting drunkenness, with a haste and spontaneity that is entirely unrealistic). The acting is often showstopping but never really involving, though each of the four seize their opportunities. (Winslet also gets to vomit, quite spectacularly.)
Ultimately, it's a slight thing. I'm not sure what the exact opposite of a crescendo is, but it certainly reaches one at the end.

Polanski appears in a split second cameo as a nervous neighbour peering out from behind his door; the barely audible voice of a secretary on the telephone is provided, for some reason, by Julie Adams.

Bullets or Ballots (1936) **

Director: William Keighley
Screenplay: Seton I. Miller
Cast: Edward G. Robinson, Joan Blondell, Barton MacLane, Humphrey Bogart, Joe King, Frank McHugh, George E. Stone, Louise Beavers

This slick, pacy, complicated Warners programmer begins with perhaps the studio’s most impudent comment ever on the relationship between screen and real violence, as crime baron Barton MacLane and henchman Humphrey Bogart go to see a “crime picture” together, actually a short in a fictional series called ‘Syndicate of Crime’, partially modelled on MGM’s Crime Does Not Pay films (1935-47), with Bogart commenting “Wait till you see the actor that takes you off.”
It’s a terrific opening to a film largely concerned with the uneasy relationship between the media, the police and organised crime.
The narrator of the film, a crusading publisher, is soon killed by Bogart’s character because his utilisation of the film medium is proving too effective at mobilising public opposition to racketeering (one-nil to Warners) and it’s not long before we hear the police complaining that the newly-rendered transparency of their operations, thanks to print media, is hampering their ability to deal with the criminals. (Accordingly, the plot is constantly advanced by newspaper headlines, either referred to by the characters or flying straight at the screen to the accompaniment of wailing sirens and a background montage of cops racing to work.)

Since Cagney had appeared to such memorable and popular effect in the previous year’s G-Men (the obvious model for this film, also directed by Keighley and written by Miller) the latest Warner rouse was to recast their gangster icons as tough, no nonsense good guys - that way they could maintain all the old attitudes, punchiness and cocky dialogue (leaving the actual criminality to the plainly irredeemable Bogart), and the censors couldn’t complain.
This one comes up with the even happier variation of casting Robinson as an undercover cop pretending to be a gangster (a deception the film does not even reveal until the halfway mark) so for whole sections it really is business as usual, perhaps the ultimate example of the studio both having its cake and eating it.

Warners were no doubt hoping for another G-Men-sized hit, but lightning didn’t quite strike twice this time. Still, this is an engrossing and hugely enjoyable yarn that rattles along at the best Warner Brothers tempo – all meat, no fat – with the help of a crackerjack studio supporting cast headed by Bogart in his first role after the same year’s Petrified Forest, the great Joan Blondell, Frank McHugh, Louise Beavers and the wonderfully greasy George E. Stone.

The Ghoul (1975) ****

Director: Freddie Francis
Screenplay: John Elder
Cast: Peter Cushing, Veronica Carlson, Alexandra Bastedo, John Hurt, Gwen Watford, Ian McCulloch, Stewart Bevan, Don Henderson, John D. Collins

Lush compendium of second generation horror cliches; in effect the ultimate Hammer film, made by assorted old boys (and girls) for a rival studio intent on reversing the direction it had taken, to its peril, in the 1970s.

While others bemoaned Hammer's traditionalism and timidity, and counselled radical innovation, Tyburn's take was refreshingly reactionary, urging a return to the generic blueprint of the original Bray Studios films. The result is what a 'pure' Bray film would have looked like in the seventies.
It's basically a revision of Elder's script for The Reptile, with an unusual and irresistibly stylish 1920s setting and a less wacky, more grisly monster.

Cushing, in one his most nuanced and effective performances, plays Dr Lawrence, a tormented ex-clergyman in a permanently fog-shrouded (and marsh-encircled) Cornish mansion, who keeps the diseased cannibal son he cannot bring himself to destroy locked in his attic.
While he and Carlson (along with Elder's script, Francis's direction and Harry Robinson's splendid score) all play as reassuringly traditional, other aspects of the film seem positively anticipatory, not least the cannibalism, and a rotting, green-skinned monster that would be more at home in a later Fulci film than at Hammer.
Coincidentally, Ian McCulloch, later the star of Fulci's Zombie Flesh Eaters is the male lead here; nice also to see Bevan, a familiar face to Pete Walker fans. Odd, too, to note the similarities with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which emerged the same year and is usually cited as exactly the kind of horror film that was making the Hammer sort obsolete.
(Both films begin with four young travellers getting lost in the middle of nowhere; some look for assistance in a nearby house and end up slaughtered and eaten by one of the inhabitants. Meanwhile John Hurt, as Cushing's weird gardener, leaps about maniacally in the road in a manner uncannily reminiscent of Edwin Neal's hitch-hiker. And while Cushing's well-appointed house and civilised tastes seem leagues away from the home life of the deranged chainsaw family, Hurt's shed, with its caged animals, general chaos and relics of earlier victims, in this case the purloined underwear of the Ghoul's shapely victims, is not at all dissimilar to their abattoir-like dwelling.)

Since my first nervous encounter with it as a young boy, The Ghoul, despite a very low critical standing generally, has always seemed to me the quintessential horror film: richly coloured, flesh-creepy, with spooky music, blood, thick fog, quicksand, something unspeakable locked upstairs, and pretty girls running and screaming.Especially well-judged is the decision to delay a full sighting of the Ghoul until the end, forcing us in the meantime to build our own picture based solely upon repeated shots of his feet, green skin, weeping sores and sandals.
Francis, a director not always comfortable with the subjects he was handed, was never so confident and in control, his prowling camera seeking out every dark corner of the imposing house and fog-blanketed moors.

The Ghoul (1933) *

Director: T. Hayes Hunter
Screenplay: Rupert Downing, from the novel by Frank King
Cast: Boris Karloff, Cedric Hardwicke, Ernest Thesiger, Dorothy Hyson, Anthony Bushell, Kathleen Harrison, Ralph Richardson

Long thought lost, this genuinely unusual British horror film boasts a casually assembled all-star cast and a peculiar atmosphere entirely its own.
The idea was to provide Karloff with a British role worthy of his new found Hollywood stardom, but the result, clearly influenced by The Mummy, moves with an entirely different rhythm to Hollywood horror, while a few surprisingly gruesome moments show up the differences in British and US censorship.
Not a complete success on its own terms, it is nonetheless unendingly interesting.
The novel by Frank King on which it is based later inspired the delightful spoof What A Carve-Up! (1962).

Ieri, Oggi, Domani (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow) (1963) ***

Director: Vittorio De Sica
Screenplay: Silvia Monelli, Eduardo De Filippo, Isabella Quarantotti, Cesare Zavattini, Bella Billa, Lorenza Zanuso
Cast: Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni, Aldo Giuffre, Agostino Salvietti, Lino Mattera, Armando Trovajoli, Tina Pica, Giovanni Ridolfi, Gennaro Di Gregorio

Robert Benchley wrote that you can divide the world into two groups of people: those who divide the world into two groups of people and those who do not. Nonetheless, I think it is useful to divide cineastes into those who think the coolest movies of the 1960s were made in Italy, and those who prefer those made in France.
The latter have Godard and Karina and Truffaut and Belmondo and the New Wave. The former have Loren and Mastroianni, Fellini and Antonioni and Monica Vitti.

I suppose it will come as no surprise to anyone who has been here before that I am in the Italian camp, and this is one of our sacred texts.
It's not weighty like L'Avventura, or magical like La Strada. It's purely cool; fluff, but perfect fluff.

To those who never forgave De Sica for abandoning the purity and seriousness of Neo-realism it was merely confirmation that he had fully embraced commercialist froth. But for everyone else it's a wonderful concoction, three short stories, each starring Marcello and Sophia, that riff on various aspects of sexual duplicity and gamesplaying, and in which everything is stunning and uncomplicated: the cast, the locations, the photography, the music, the atmosphere.
Wrong to imply that it is entirely without substance - far from it - each vignette will give you plenty to think about and discuss with whoever watches it with you. They are like psychological pencil sketches, that allow the viewer to fill in the detail and the colour. But the overall effect is leagues away from the bleakness and introspection of Antonioni: it's light; effervescent, effortlessly Italian.
If you're on it's wavelength it's like going home.
That's why De Sica, for me, is second only to Fellini, and only my iron disciplined objectivity withholds the fourth star.

Our Daily Bread (1934) ****

Director: King Vidor
Screenplay: Joseph L. Mankiewicz, King Vidor, Elizabeth Hill
Cast: Karen Morley, Tom Keene, Barbara Pepper, Addison Richards, John Qualen, Lloyd Ingraham, Sidney Bracey, Henry Hall

Vidor's best films reflect his preoccupation with depicting the experiences of ordinary people in extraordinary situations, such as The Big Parade (1925), his incredibly eloquent recreation of one man's experience of the First World War, and The Crowd (1928), the equally powerful dramatisation of a few days in the life of a downtrodden city office worker and his wife.
As social documents, part of what makes them so effective is that Vidor has no interest in the fetishising of despair; an easy option for many who affect to prize 'realism' as an alternative to catharsis. He employs a documentary-like matter-of-factness but never abuses the audience's emotional investment in the characters and their plight; so films that sound relentlessly bleak in synopsis play as movingly affirmative, without ever lapsing into contrived sentimentality. The ending of The Crowd in particular, chosen from several that were considered (the camera pulls away from the couple whose fortunes it has been following and slowly loses them in the all-consuming crowd), is ambiguous without denying the possibility of hope.

No question that Vidor was one of the greats: his career was as long and successful as DeMille’s, he was as pioneering as Griffith, as innovative as Mamoulian, and like all three he had a sure sense of what went over big at the box office.
But time and again he was advised that the public wanted escapism, not reminders of reality. MGM wanted no part of Our Daily Bread, yet so committed was Vidor to the project that he pressed on anyway with private backing, most of it his own: he pawned everything he owned to see the project through. (When I think of him pitching it, I see Joel McCrea trying to pitch Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? in Sullivan's Travels.)
He conceived it as a follow-up to The Crowd - although the two main characters, Depression-hit husband and wife city dwellers who stake everything they have to manage an abandoned farm, are played by different actors they do have the same names - Mary and John Sims - as their counterparts in the earlier film.
Still, no specific plot points are cross-referenced, so it's just as easy to think of the two films as unrelated, and it is, I think, better to. The extraordinary ending of The Crowd would be weakened by the existence of a chapter two, and the everyman status of the couple in Our Daily Bread would seem compromised by so specific a back story. So think of them as two facets of the same type, and the films as linked only by their concerns.

The Sims' get the farm working by running it as a workers' co-operative, inviting any out of work artisans to help out and share the profits. Despite this, the film advances no clear political position, and takes care to include a lively scene in which the merits of various political systems are argued over by the characters, all of them ending up soundly savaged, including democracy: "That's what got us here in the first place!" says one.
The commune see themselves rather as founding fathers of a whole new ethos, and the film is one of the very few to reflect the temper of a brief moment between the crash and the New Deal when popular disenchantment with and mistrust in central government was leading to open calls for anarchism and self-rule. The workers in the film embody the spirit of this moment, and the film could only have been made as an independent production - Hollywood had officially rallied around FDR by the time it was released.
Though surely not for this reason, it is a film that never did find its place.
At the time, it was thought depressing, too close to the bone to audiences looking to the movies as a way to forget their troubles. In the years thereafter it became a relic, and when Vidor was reassessed in the sixties it was dismissed as dated, and compromised by its honey-coated ending.

None of these criticisms seem to me to hold water: the film is Vidor's crowning achievement.
As a technical exercise it is breathtaking, beginning with studio interiors for the city sequences it moves to beautifully photographed rural landscapes, and we really get the feeling that these characters actually live in their makeshift shacks and work hard all day. In On Film Making, written in the 1970s, Vidor writes: "when I run my film Our Daily Bread for new audiences I am always asked if the performers were real down-and-out people, or if they were cast through an actor's agency in Hollywood."
The performances of the leads, however, are usually criticised, I think unfairly. I've always warmed to Tom Keene as the husband (even before I realised he was Colonel Tom Edwards in Plan 9 From Outer Space), who plays with utter sincerity and conviction. And for Karen Morley as his wife the film marks the end of a long apprenticeship as ingénues (Dinner at Eight), molls (Scarface) and damsels in distress (The Mask of Fu Manchu); her performance is the emotional centre of the film, and one of the best things in it.
All of the players are fine, but one in particular stands out, in the community itself as much as in the cast. Bringing with her all of the vanished superficiality and high-spirits of pre-Depression days, city girl Sally, played by Barbara Pepper doing a first class imitation of Jean Harlow, pulls up in her dead sugar-daddy's car halfway through and comes within an inch of destroying the entire community with her twin weapons of sexual availability and gramophone records. (As thoroughly entertaining as it is unexpected, Pepper's appearance was, delightfully, a condition of one of the backers.) Her function is to provide the temptation for John to abandon the farm when all looks lost, and he is actually in the act of running away with her when he realises how the farm can be saved.
He returns to instigate the film's magnificent final act, which, unlike The Crowd, is unambiguous and powerfully uplifting.
In this amazing sequence of choreographed toil the workers divert a stream through a hastily constructed ditch to irrigate the crops. Through superb editing, scoring and composition Vidor turns the stuff of documentary realism into compulsive, magnificent, poetic cinema. As he writes in On Film Making:

"One of my favourite sequences of all time is the ditch-digging sequence from Our Daily Bread. Although this sequence has been thrilling audiences since 1934, if I had based it on the advice of a professional ditch digger, its impact would be as dull as its name suggests. Its basis is music. There is nothing factual about it besides the fact that the men use picks and shovels. They move many times faster than men would if they were actually digging a ditch to contain the stream of water shown in the film. But it is the crescendo of rhythm and music carrying the viewer along with it that invariably brings forth applause at its conclusion."

Yes, it owes much to Eisenstein. But so what? It is magnificent, and it brings to a crescendo one of the most compulsively authentic documents of an era that historical circumstances have permitted, and one no less powerful and serious for being so essentially warm-hearted.

Three On a Match (1932) ***

Director: Mervyn LeRoy
Screenplay: Lucien Hubbard
Cast: Ann Dvorak, Joan Blondell, Bette Davis, Warren William, Lyle Talbot, Humphrey Bogart, Allen Jenkins, Edward Arnold, Virginia Davis, Anne Shirley, Betty Carse, Jack La Rue, Glenda Farrell

I don't know if you're familiar with Apocalypse Now, but it's basically about some prat going up a river, and meeting up with an even bigger prat, and it takes him about three hours to get there and then there's another half hour of yap when he does.

If there's one big negative distinction to be drawn between Hollywood films made under the studio system and those made afterwards, it's that the later ones tend to be more self-indulgent, because there is no objective overall control, and they often make a fetish of overlength. They are not all as megalomaniacally tedious as Apocalypse Now, of course, but the ability to keep a film whip-tight, with not an ounce of superfluous fat, was probably the hardest to achieve of all the skills that golden age cinema made look so easy.

Case in point: Three On a Match.

In roughly the time Martin Sheen spends moping about in his hotel room before we even find out what he's going to spend the rest of the film ostensibly doing, Three On a Match takes us through some twenty odd years of American social history, interspersed with the stories of three women whose lives we follow from school-age to adulthood.
In scenes that play as vivid thumbnail sketches we learn everything we need to know about the three girls, so that when the contemporary drama itself begins (ie: about ten minutes in) we already feel we know them and are interested in how their lives unfold.
One of them (Blondell) is sent to reform school and ends up a Broadway chorine, the most popular (Dvorak) marries money and enjoys every imaginable luxury, while the most grounded (Davis) is a hard-working stenographer.
Catching up on old times after the three re-encounter each other accidentally, Dvorak reveals that she is deeply unsatisfied by her seemingly perfect existence, and leaps at the opportunity Blondell's Broadway friends provide to run away with her young child in tow.

The left turn the film then takes remains shocking today.
Dvorak wallows in dissipation and eventually becomes a drug addict, allowing her child to live in neglect and squalor; Blondell helps her husband regain the child, then marries him after he is divorced from Dvorak; Dvorak's feckless boyfriend becomes heavily indebted to a gang boss and hits on the scheme of kidnapping the child and holding it to ransom, but the scheme, overseen by an especially sleazy Bogart, goes awry and it is decided the child has to be killed.
Whereupon Dvorak, physically wasted and with nothing left to live for but her son, writes the location where he is being held on her body with lipstick, and leaps to her death from the window.

That's still enough to silence almost any audience: an incredible example of what Hollywood movies were like before the Hays Code.
For years it was forgotten that they ever made movies like this; now that the pre-Code era is again popular among critics and film enthusiasts, Three On a Match is again being recognised as one of the quintessential products of this uniquely free, imaginative but above all creative era of American film-making.
In particular, it has helped in the re-evaluation of Dvorak, an actress who seemed lost in the Code era, as if made to articulate the narratives that only pre-Code allowed. In this film she gives one of the most intense and vivid performances to be found anywhere in a Hollywood movie.

Of course, it's fairly obvious that what we really have here is a rather longer film, pared down to its absolute essentials in post-production.
Blondell seems to be the main character in the prologue, but the seemingly lesser character played by Dvorak takes over in the narrative proper, while in both sections Davis's character is sketched only vaguely. And while it would be interesting to take a little longer over certain scenes and see a little more of some of the characters - because it's all so very, very good - ultimately I wouldn't change a thing. It's as an example of the extraordinary narrative concision of which Hollywood film-makers were once capable that the film is perhaps most striking.
It's almost impossible to believe just how much it crams into a running time that is, though you may find it hard to believe, 64 minutes.

Los Abrazos Rotos (Broken Embraces) (2009) *

Director/Screenplay: Pedro Almodóvar
Cast: Penélope Cruz, Lluís Homar, Blanca Portillo, José Luis Gómez, Ángela Molina

I must say at the outset that I am not an Almodóvar devotee.
I've never felt the need to see any of his films more than once, but at the same time, I do usually venture out whenever there's a new one. So my view of his work is by no means jaundiced but it is certainly dispassionate.
And personally, I prefer his work now that he has settled comfortably into the role of auteurist elder statesman, the last - temporarily at least - in the line of flamboyant international showmen that stretches back through Fellini, Buñuel and similar stylists. It's as if he doesn't feel he has anything much to prove, and so has less need to grab us by the lapels; the work is more relaxed and considered. Whereas the films with which he made his name and reputation in the 1980s and 1990s look already to me like ossified period pieces.
But I am aware that many of his keener followers - more entitled than I to authority on the matter - feel the opposite.

So, with no real axe to grind either way, I found this typical: never less than enjoyable, never likely to find its way on to my video shelves. Pretty interesting, pretty engrossing, pretty pretty. Parts of it are striking, a lot of it is colourful, it's long, it moves at a uniform pace and it just sort of wanders by - like the circus leaving town.

The Big Sleep (1978) **

Director/Screenplay: Michael Winner, from the novel by Raymond Chandler
Cast: Robert Mitchum, Sarah Miles, Richard Boone, Candy Clark, Joan Collins, Edward Fox, John Mills, James Stewart, Oliver Reed, Harry Andrews, Colin Blakely, Richard Todd, Diana Quick, James Donald

Updating the story to seventies London, this audacious production was asking for trouble, though as director Winner pointed out, the fact that Henry Irving did a pretty good Hamlet was not seen as grounds for denying anyone else a crack at it.
Of course it isn't really a remake at all, just another adaptation of the novel, and one that actually plays somewhat fairer by its source, notwithstanding the changes to location and era. Nonetheless, because it 'dares' to retell the story rendered so perfectly in 1946 it is critically impermissible to do anything but dismiss it as an abject failure. In truth, however, it is nothing of the sort.

It's a totally different take on the material from the 1946 version, and Mitchum, who had debuted his older, wearier Marlowe in 1975's Farewell, My Lovely, is a totally different Marlowe to Bogart. He's outstandingly good, and the supporting cast, likewise, is uniformly excellent. The result is a rather splendid film: at least as clever a rejigging of source material as Altman's Long Goodbye (and my money's on cleverer) and a first class crime thriller in its own right.
Its only sin is that it is not the 1946 version of The Big Sleep. But then, not many films are.

The Big Sleep (1946) ****

Director: Howard Hawks
Screenplay: William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, Jules Furthman, from the novel by Raymond Chandler
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Martha Vickers, John Ridgley, Dorothy Malone, Elisha Cook Jr, Charles Waldron, Peggy Knudsen, Regis Toomey, Louis Jean Heydst, Sonia Darrin, Theodore von Eltz, Joy Barlow.

A treasure trove of great lines, iconic performances, gloriously moody photography and some of the most labyrinthine plot developments ever foisted upon a Hollywood movie, The Big Sleep has as strong a claim as any to the title of greatest crime film ever made.

Just the title instantly conjures a hundred images and memories.
You think first, obviously, of Bogart as Philip Marlowe, sardonic, disillusioned, resourceful, cynical yet possessed of a kind of battered nobility. You think of Lauren Bacall, in the second and most effective of their big-screen teamings, and of their dialogue, impeccably delivered and bristling with sexual innuendo.
Then you recall that whole Warner noir universe, of shadows and rain and fog, high collars and felt hats, small-time crooks and girls on the make, where nobody can be trusted and everybody lies all the time.
But this is one of those films where virtually every line is quotable, just as every scene is a separate delight, and every character gets their own chance to shine. Think of Dorothy Malone’s cameo as the book store salesgirl who passes a boozy afternoon with Marlowe, of Elisha Cook Jr as Jonesy, the patsy whose efforts to get in on the action leave him dead, or of Martha Vickers as Carmen, Bacall’s thumb-sucking, nymphomaniac younger sister.
Then reflect on how Charles Waldron’s General Sternwood, forced to live in an orchid house after a lifetime’s dissipation and debauchery, is able to leave such an indelible impression despite appearing in only one scene, or that Sonia Darrin’s touching Agnes, the girl on the make who never gets the breaks, is not even listed in the credits.
(In fact, two of the other players I've listed above don't rate a name-check, but they both leave a memory: von Eltz is the sleazy Arthur Gwynn Geiger; Joy Barlow the bubbly, forthcoming taxi driver.)

Though the story of Chandler confessing that even he didn’t know who killed the chauffeur is surely apocryphal (it’s not that hard to work out!) this is a dense and intricate plot for sure, made more so by the dictates of censorship. (You have to guess for yourself, for instance, that Carmen is both a drug addict and is embroiled in a pornography racket, a vitally relevant fact that the film merely implies opaquely.)
Still, even if you don’t follow every twist it is unlikely you’ll be feeling short-changed come the breathtakingly tense final scene, notable for one of the most shockingly effective moments of implied violence in Hollywood history.
The whole film is a lesson in how to achieve and sustain mood, style and excitement without once violating the dictates of the Production Code or setting foot outside a studio sound stage.

Incidentally, though Bacall is superb as the duplicitous older sister, it's Martha Vickers for me.

Red Dragon (2002)

Director: Bret Ratner
Screenplay: Ted Tally, from the novel by Thomas Harris
Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Edward Norton, Ralph Fiennes, Harvey Keitel, Emily Watson, Mary-Louise Parker, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Anthony Heald

A vast improvement on its predecessor, but still a plainly superfluous third serving of cannibal stew, which turns the clock back to Harris's first Hannibal novel and re-recruits Lambs screenwriter Tally, so at least there's a plot and a bit of narrative drive again.
Though set before the events of Silence of the Lambs, Hopkins is visibly ten years older and tireder - like the whole moth-eaten concept, really. Worst performance is a close three man race, but perhaps surprisingly it's Norton who takes the trophy, as a supposedly battle-scarred veteran cop who looks like he's just graduated from high school: never has an actor seemed so uncomfortable in a leather jacket and Bruce Willis he-man vest.

This was actually the second time Harris's novel had been filmed: way back in 1986, before the original novel of Lambs had even been published, Michael Mann directed it as Manhunter. Smart alecks hailing it as superior to the legitimate series abound, but, though very different, it's still just awful, with an all-swamping synthesiser score and the look of an overslick tv cop show. Brian Cox played Lecter.

Hannibal (2001)

Director: Ridley Scott
Screenplay: David Mamet, Steven Zailian, from the novel by Thomas Harris
Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Julianne Moore, Gary Oldman, Ray Liotta, Giancarlo Giannini

All that The Silence of the Lambs had going for it, besides novelty, was well-directed suspense and nail-biting narrative momentum. This sequel makes the brave decision to do without both, offering not a single twist or thrill in its entire, numbingly overlong 131 minutes.

Julianne Moore takes over from Jodie Foster, and is poured into a black cocktail dress for the grand finale, but chances are you'll miss it, having long since given up on this almost literally plotless and unendurably boring film.
If you do rouse yourself towards the end, you'll be further rewarded by the sight of Ray Liotta eating his own brain and Moore losing one of her hands - but not, the film would have us accept, her intellectual and emotional regard for the ever more preposterous title character.
If this is high concept grand guignol for the twenty-first century, Herschell Gordon Lewis has never looked so good.

Some beautifully photographed Florentine locations.

The Silence of the Lambs (1992) *

Director: Jonathan Demme
Screenplay: Ted Tally, from the novel by Thomas Harris
Cast: Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn, Ted Levine, Brooke Smith, Anthony Heald, Kasi Lemmons

Unquestionably, this is an important film, perhaps more important even than its continued high standing would suggest.
I'd place it as one of those watershed films that totally changed the direction of the thriller and horror genres, every bit as decisively and permanently as the Lugosi Dracula, Psycho, Night of the Living Dead or Halloween. Indeed, of all the above, I'd say only Psycho rivals it for lasting influence and impact.
By influence, I don't mean those awful rip-offs that appeared in its wake and still occasionally show up today; I mean the way it has influenced the whole shape and substance of what a horror-thriller should be and could do.
Psycho had made it okay to be fun-scared by savage murder in a modern setting, and this took the terrible reality of sadistic 'serial' murder and made it de rigeur to a) centre a film on the clinical detailing of the killer's methods and activities, b) make those killers enigmatic, charming, fascinating, witty, and gamesplayers who set challenges for the cops to solve. The only way to catch such killers was to hope for a sympathetic, maverick cop capable of treating them with the dignity they deserve and, most of all, able to 'get inside their heads'.

At the time, the film was shocking and stunning, and breathtakingly new. There was much concern that it was going too far and too non-judgementally into the world-view of the sadistic and depraved. But it had - don't they always, first time round? - both a patent sincerity and obvious merit as a thriller, that enabled it to deflect such criticism. It romped home with the Oscars and Hopkins's wisecracking cannibal fiend became a cultural hero.
And now, we have Saw, and Hostel, and even worse films, existing solely to show killers torturing and mutilating victims in vivid detail, the victims whimpering and pleading in terror, and all with no excuse needed, just for fun - and Silence of the Lambs is unquestionably the reason why.

It is still a well-made film that may still provide an exciting evening of thrills for those who don't like to think too much about what they're watching. There's a very clever bit towards the end, now copied so much as to have lost its original power, where cross-cut editing is used to thoroughly mislead the audience and provide a very effective narrative surprise. The climax is still fairly nail-biting.
But nearly twenty years on, it is able to look at it more clearly and see how thoroughly duped we were by its pretence of seriousness and sobriety. The dialogue and performances are more or less roundly ludicrous, the psychologising is many rungs below even Hitchcock's Spellbound. The central character of Hannibal Lecter, the supposed sophisticate and genius who also enjoys grabbing people and ripping off pieces of them with his teeth, is one of the stupidest ever to be absorbed into the cultural fabric.

But the real giveaway, to me, is the title.
Just stop and think about it. Think first about the phrase itself, the formulation of it; how silly it is. Now consider the supposed relevance of it to the film in question; that embarrassing scene in which Hopkins psychoanalyses Foster and scores bullseye after idiotic, risibly quasi-Freudian bullseye, and reduces her to tears, and we are supposed to nod our heads and conclude we understand her so much better now, and have stumbled upon the perfect defining motif for the entire film...
What laughable nonsense! It's terrible, terrible writing, built on terrible, terrible Hollywood psychoanalytic cliche, and then to twist it into such a pretentiously ungrammatical phrase, and make that the title, as if it in any way summed up (or disguised, more to the point) the ghoulish swamp of pure sensationalism hiding behind its self-regard...
Well, I fell for it same as you back in 1992, so don't get angry with me just for pointing it out now.

Roger Corman and George A. Romero appear in cameos.

Blame It On The Bellboy (1992) **

Director/Screenplay: Mark Herman
Cast: Dudley Moore, Richard Griffiths, Patsy Kensit, Bryan Brown, Penelope Wilton, Alison Steadman, Bronson Pinchot, Andreas Katsulas, Jim Carter, John Grillo, Ronnie Stevens

Good, fun, totally unpretentious and old-fashioned farce, involving the standard tropes of mistaken identity, mounting confusion, and people hiding and running away from each other.
An assured cast, beautiful Venetian locations and, best of all, a 78 minute running time (that leaves no room for the kind of padding and energy slippage that so often do for enterprises of this sort) ensure it never flags. Though neither the plot nor the jokes are outstanding in themselves, Moore in particular is in excellent form, reminding us of what a fine comic actor he really was, and the whole ensemble join in with mutually commendable enthusiasm.

I remember my mother and I going to see this at the cinema when it came out to generally terrible reviews, and enjoying it thoroughly, and a recent, cautious rewatch has happily confirmed my original opinion. How anyone could prefer A Fish Called Wanda to this is beyond me. Or, indeed, Brassed Off, writer-director Herman's nasty and infinitely less nimble follow-up, which nonetheless briefly got him the attention of which this film could only dream, mainly because it had nice brass band music.
Bar an uncredited walk-on and a bit of voice work, this was Moore's last screen appearance.

The Most Dangerous Game (1932) ***

Directors: Irving Pichel, Ernest B. Schoedsack
Screenplay: James Ashmore Creelson, from the story by Richard Connell
Cast: Leslie Banks, Joel McCrea, Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, Noble Johnson

Tired of hunting tigers and rhinos, Count Zaroff (Leslie Banks) lives only to stalk and kill "the most dangerous game". On a deserted island on which he has built a sumptuous home, he waits in immaculate evening dress for the survivors of the shipwrecks he deliberately engineers to struggle ashore, restores them to full health with fine wine and gourmet food, then sends them out into the jungle for him to hunt and kill.
Today, his quarry are international big game hunter Joel McCrea - a worthy adversary indeed - and Fay Wray, of whom (and which) more later.

Made on what would soon become immortalised as the sets for King Kong, partly to test their effectiveness and partly to get more value for money out of them, this breathless adaptation of Richard Connell's short story is as fine, and important, a piece of work in its own right.
It's probably the defining pre-Code horror movie, the clearest example of what a horror film could be like, but for a variety of interesting reasons rarely was, during those four extraordinary years of sound film production before the Code was enforced.
The assumption that the differences between this and a golden age (Code era) horror film would be more or less the same as between the latter and a modern horror film - ie: more violence and onscreen blood - is soon disabused, though there is a surprisingly gory shark attack, and the 'trophy room' scene, where our heroes stumble upon Zaroff's display of mounted and pickled human heads, is certainly a shock to audiences who are not expecting to see such things in a 1930s movie. (This scene was originally much longer, with even more shocking footage of heads and fully mounted corpses.)
It is a tense and genuinely frightening film; the final scenes of pursuit through the jungle fully the equal of Kong in dramatic effect. But it is the aura of decadence and dark eroticism that truly marks it as pre-Code horror; the fact - of which Wray's tattered and clinging dress would have kept original audiences more than fully reminded - that the cost of their failing to outwit Zaroff is death for McCrea but the proverbial fate worse than death for Wray.
As he states outright, with frankness enough to give Hays nightmares of his own, Zaroff has sex only after the kill, and he intends to make a very different trophy of Fay than a head on the wall.

And it is, I am certain, this darkly sexualised quality to Wray's horror heroines that make her still such an icon of the genre, considering how small a proportion of her output her horror films represent.
It would be interesting to know when her reputation as the genre's most celebrated screamer was first cemented, as I have a feeling it was from the first a kind of metaphorical tribute: the point is not the frequency or volume of her screaming (neither, surely, remarkable in themselves) but the seeming cause and, dare I say, effect of it: even in Kong, the true frisson is that her peril is maidenly peril.
Clara had it, and Fay screams. She is the quintessential embodiment of the genre's pre-Code desires, so carefully sublimated after the Code came in as to be frequently invisible.
Note how often her characters are put in some kind of restraint, or end up with their clothes in disarray; they are not merely put in physical danger from the films' protagonists but a source of obvious lust for them too. Had she played horror roles in the Code era she may well not have stood out from the crowd; it is her complicity in their sado-erotic elements that distinguishes her appearances in this, Kong, Doctor X and Mystery of the Wax Museum (which ends with her strapped naked to a pasting table on the verge of receiving immortalisation via a deluge of hot pink wax).
And it wouldn't have worked so well if her everyday persona was an overtly sexual one: a Jean Harlow, say, would be an interesting but far less effective choice. I think it is in the actual contrast between, on the one hand, her elegance, prettiness, cut-glass accent and mannered style, and on the other, the uninhibited abandon with which she gives herself up to the demands of pre-Code sexuality in her earliest talkies, that her continued and palpable appeal can be located. (Watch these films with an audience and you'll see that whatever she had, it has not become quaint or diluted over time: she's still got it.)
If all she did was scream when the fiend strikes that would be one thing. But as I have written elsewhere, she pants loudly, whimpers, her chest heaves, and she throws herself back in complete submission, her arms flailing. Such sudden moments of eroticised abandon hint at strange depths to her personality. When threatened by lusting maniacs it is not her famous screams themselves that make the deep impression so much as the instant capitulation, tinged with what really does seem like unconscious arousal, that comes swiftly in their wake.

The vividness with which she conveys sexual threat, at its most potent here, is the motor powering these horror films; the secret ingredient that made them seem so very terrifying at the time and still puts them among the most unusual and compelling thirties movies you'll ever see.
I said at the start that the pre-Code era did not produce the quantity of horror films we might have liked or expected, and that's due mainly to the relative newness of the genre itself, but in terms of quality, what was produced was frequently striking. And Most Dangerous Game is one of the very best.
It is perfectly structured, with the first half's slow-mounting suspense, as we discover hint by hint exactly what Zaroff is up to, giving way with the suddenness of Zaroff sounding his hunting horn to a brilliantly directed, relentlessly paced pursuit through the jungle. Set design, music and camerawork all impress, and visiting Britisher Banks is wonderfully loathsome as the mad Russian Zaroff, constantly fingering his scars and waxing rhapsodic on the joys of killing.
Noble Johnson, appearing in whiteface as Zaroff's Cossack servant, makes quite an impression too, as does the pack of terrifying hunting dogs, in reality lovable pooches borrowed for the film from Harold Lloyd.