Trance (UK 2013)

A good example of the kind of images created by Anthony Dod Mantle with reflective glass – entrapment by mise en scène.

Danny Boyle has been all across the UK media for the last few weeks. I came out of a screening of Trance and found myself in the car listening to a long interview with him on the Radio 4 Film Programme. I’m not sure that this exposure is necessarily good for him – the best thing he’s done recently was to quietly refuse a knighthood. He’s a nice guy and a great filmmaker but now that he is a national treasure, expectations of his work have sky-rocketed. I get the impression that Trance is deliberately dark and nasty – he  has called it the ‘evil cousin’ of his Olympics show. Perhaps it was the right film to make to escape from the gushing praise and to reclaim some ‘edge’ in his filmmaking.

Francine Stock’s interview did tease out some of the elements of Trance which I think can be ‘triangulated’ in a number of ways. On one level, as Boyle suggested, it is a return (with John Hodge) to the three-hander about greed that was his first cinema feature Shallow Grave in 1994 – but now the characters are that much older and a good deal nastier. The setting for the narrative is initially the art world and the two men/one woman situation. In fact there are many elements in common with the Jo Nesbo adaptation Headhunters (Norway 2011). That film has more humour and is essentially an action thriller. The other well-known art theft scenario that comes to mind is a two-hander and a ‘romance-thriller’, The Thomas Crown Affair (1968 and 1999). Trance is much darker, drawing heavily on film noir – Boyle repeatedly called it noir/noirish in the interview. He also said, and this is key I feel, that the stolen object is purely symbolic – it represents something valuable that has been lost, but finding it is about power rather than just money. So what we get is a game about being in control and achieving the power when there are two other competitors. Who do you side with and who do you attempt to push out of the ring first? (The painting is a Goya used in several ways in the plot.)

I suspect that many of us are going to be racking our brains as to which noirs the film reminds us of. I can see that there are some resemblances to Out of the Past (Build My Gallows High, 1947), another three-hander, but in tone Trance is more like the later 1950s noirs from the real hard-boiled guys like Robert Aldrich with Kiss Me Deadly or Joseph H. Lewis’ The Big Combo (both 1955). Having said that, I’m not sure that the script is able to maintain the same tone throughout and at times it seemed to become more playful. The noir milieu depends on mise en scène, editing, sound and having good performances. Boyle is very keen on the importance of sound and I did notice it in the film, not just the music score which is interesting, but more so the sound effects and the voices. Boyle picked out sound as being important in an immersive sense – making us feel that we are trapped inside the head of a character experiencing hypnosis. However, effective though this is in the film, it’s the camerawork that really confirms a sense of ‘disturbance’ and claustrophobia. The hypnotist lives in one of those old Georgian terraces with a lift that has cage-like metal grille doors, perfect for shooting through (camera and guns) and other scenes take place in clubs, warehouses and bedrooms with glass walls, mirrors and concealed lighting. I thought that the camerawork was very good, but I did have doubts about the digital image which in a couple of shots didn’t have the deep blacks and clarity in low light levels that I expect from noirs.

The crime gang led by Vincent Cassel.

The film is very much a three-hander. Even though there are important secondary roles, it is James McAvoy, Vincent Cassel and Rosario Dawson who must carry the film. I’m not sure why but I have problems with McAvoy as a lead in this kind of film. The problems are probably with me rather than him as he seems popular as an action hero, but there it is. I can’t explain it and in theory he is well cast – but he just doesn’t do it for me. Cassel on the other hand rarely puts a foot wrong in anything he does and he has the presence for a film like this. Rosario Dawson is terrific. I haven’t seen any of the Hollywood blockbusters she’s been in but I realised later that she was in two Spike Lee joints (He Got Game and 25th Hour). She has the definite strength and screen presence to stand up against Cassel. With these three leads and the rest of the criminal gang, Boyle has a ‘cosmopolitan cast’ for a film which he tells us could be set anywhere. There’s some truth in that but in a couple of scenes I thought “this can only be in London”. I’ve seen some reviews that mention Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises as another ‘alternative view’ of London’s criminal mileux, but apart from Vincent Cassel, I didn’t see any other similarities – the one thing Trance clearly isn’t is a film set in a specific cultural context.

I’m not sure whether the film will be successful. It’s quite a talky film with relatively few action sequences. The narrative inevitably twists upon itself because of the hypnosis sequences and I’m not sure that the multiplex audience or Danny Boyle’s hardcore fans are that taken with this kind of noir. I would need to see it a second time to begin to analyse how well the script stands up – at the moment it seems like the weakest element of the film. But having said that, new ideas keep popping up –  none of the three principal characters have much in the way of backstories and I’m not sure what that means. The film is being seen by several reviewers as ‘style over substance’ but I think there is more to it than that. On the other hand, audiences who go looking for Inception or something similar will be disappointed. Anyone who says that the plot doesn’t make sense ought perhaps to remember that even Raymond Chandler couldn’t explain the plot holes in The Big Sleep – noirs are meant to be like dreams (or nightmares).

Two final points – it was good to see Tuppence Middleton getting a major film credit to follow her BBC appearance in The Lady Vanishes. I’d love to know how much Apple contributed to a film which is probably the most effective ad for a ‘gadget’ I’ve seen so far.

False Trail (Jägarna 2, Sweden 2011)

Everyone has access to a rifle – Annika Nordin as Karin

False Trail saved the Christmas holiday for me in terms of a new film to go and see. I’m glad I saw it and I’m grateful to the National Media Museum for booking it – but disappointed that Arrow, the small distributor that seems to be acquiring most of the Nordic films and TV series reaching the UK, didn’t give it more of a push. As the Swedish title indicates, this is a sequel to a film released in 1996, which I don’t think reached the UK. The market has, of course, changed since 1996 for Swedish crime fiction films. There is a brief flashback in this film to what I presume were the events of the first, but there doesn’t seem to be any problem in making sense of this film as a standalone.

This is another film that begins with a hunt. Following the Thomas Vinterberg film, UK audiences have been reminded that we seem to be amongst the European countries with the lowest rates of gun ownership. In Swedish Lappland, where False Trail is set, virtually everyone in the film owns at least one hunting rifle. A young woman has gone missing and clues have been found during the time that a hunt is taking place. The hunt then turns into a search operation and the local police arrest a likely and seemingly obvious suspect. However, it is such a small close-knit community that individual police officers have too much history of confrontations with the suspect and the local chief decides to ask Stockholm for help. The officer who arrives from the South, actually comes from Lappland, but he has hardly been back since the events of the earlier (i.e. in 1996). He has a family connection to the local police but no knowledge of the suspect so he is deemed potentially objective.

The man from the South is played by Rolf Lassgård, who has already played Martin Beck, Kurt Wallander and Sebastian Bergman. He’s a great actor but it would be nice to see a new actor occasionally. Predictably, he is short-tempered and stubborn but a good investigator. The film is essentially a procedural, but there are strong thriller elements and the finale plays out like a family melodrama in a perfect setting – a fast-flowing river with large boulders creating turbulence. The plot and the setting are reminiscent of Insomnia (Norway 1997) (the film remade by Christopher Nolan) but the long summer evenings so far North aren’t really mentioned by the characters. It’s also the case that the film does seem like a TV film with Lassgård as Wallander. But this is only in terms of his casting and the crime fiction elements. The film looks magnificent in CinemaScope and deserves to be seen in the cinema and not on DVD where Arrow presumably expects to find the biggest audiences. It’s over two hours but I found the time whizzed by and the thriller elements worked pretty well. I won’t spoil the plot but as I’ve indicated already this is more a familiar crime melodrama rather than that critique of social policies and the breakdown of society we are familiar with from Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell.

With over half a million admissions in Sweden, director Kjell Sundvall‘s film was a popular local hit. Arrow have provided a UK Facebook page for the film which lists cinemas where the film is playing later in January in the UK. I’d certainly recommend a visit – but not as some reviewers suggest as a follow-on from The Killing. This has more outdoor action and the climax is more like a classic 1950s Western. In other words it’s the kind of genre film that popular cinema needs more of. I bet it’s more fun than The Hobbit!

Contre toi (In Your Hands, France 2010)

Kristin Scott Thomas as Anna Cooper in her classy apartment

This is an odd little film finally getting a release in the UK, presumably based on the central performance by Kristin Scott Thomas – a major attraction for UK arthouse audiences. However, I’m not sure that word-of-mouth will make this a hit. The English title doesn’t help the film. ‘In Your Hands’, I realise is possibly a play on the phrase describing the responsibilities of a surgeon – ‘Your life in their hands’? Scott-Thomas plays Anna Cooper, a surgeon specialising in obstetrics and gynaecology, who is abducted one evening and kept in a locked room by a rather wild but very pretty young man. My limited French doesn’t run to idioms, but I’m guessing that the French title might translate as something like ‘Against You’. This would be a better title since the main narrative question is “How much ‘against’ her captor will Anna be?” or perhaps how close, literally ‘against’ him, she might become? (I read afterwards that the director did want the English title but its French translation had already been used.)

Writer-director Lola Doillon sets up these questions from the beginning since she first shows a frightened and bewildered Anna escaping from the house where she has been held and a little later sat in a police interview room seemingly telling her story in flashback. So we lose the suspense of whether the captor will murder Anna and instead we wonder about what kind of relationship might develop between the two since we remember the so-called Stockholm syndrome. The narrative does have a twist which I won’t reveal but I suspect many audiences will guess correctly. (The captor’s name, I understand, is the same as the person who first described the Stockholm syndrome.)

The narrative didn’t really work for me. The characters aren’t particularly interesting but it’s possible that some (female?) audiences will identify with Anna. There is an emphasis on her loneliness as a divorcée without children and seemingly few close friends. In terms of the male gaze, this does feel like quite an intimate film with Scott Thomas almost never off the screen. There is something almost erotic about her careful dishevelment. Somehow she still looks elegant and poised even after she has supposedly not washed or changed her clothes for a couple of days. I think the problem is more with her captor played by Pio Marmaï – the narrative would have worked better for me if he had been older and/or less pretty.

I suspect that my main interest in the film was as an example of French cinema’s seeming ease of access to directing for women as writer-directors. I’m not sure that this qualifies as ‘auteur cinema’ but it is a second film by Ms Doillon, whose parents are in the industry – her father is a director and also a teacher at FEMIS. I also read that she is married to the high-profile director Cedric Klapisch (who is thanked in the credits). With those kind of connections perhaps it is not too difficult to put together a budget. There is nothing wrong with the direction of the actors but I don’t think the script offers enough. The film is only 81 minutes long but it felt longer. It did in some ways remind me of a far more interesting film, À la folie… pas du tout (France 2002) with Audrey Tautou, written and directed by Laetitia Colombani – a director of a similar age whose second feature didn’t make it to the UK.

iLL Manors (UK 2012)

Kirby,  just out of prison, discovers that Marcel has attempted to take over his drugs territory and he humiliates the younger man.

iLL Manors is a film that has received a great deal of attention. I’m not sure this has been totally a good thing as the film has been both over-praised and unfairly dismissed, possibly as a result of the hype. Where audiences have been allowed to ‘find’ the film by themselves many seemed to have been impressed. I’m not sure what I think about the film, but I wish I hadn’t listened to various broadcast reviews which I’ve been unable to get out of my head. I was certainly engaged over the long running time (121 mins for a first-time, low-budget production) by aspects of the cinematography/post-production: the performances of a large cast of both professionals and non-actors impressed me as well.

The hype is because this is the first feature by the ‘platinum-selling’ London rapper Plan B (under his given name, Ben Drew). He has been quoted as saying that he was inspired by Tarantino (Pulp Fiction) and Nicholas Refn and possibly by Mathieu Kassovitz’s La haine. iLL Manors has something of the structure of Pulp Fiction and both the structure and aspects of the milieu of La haine (as well as the familiar Taxi Driver mirror scene – “You talking to me?”). However, it is in some ways a grittier and more shocking representation of East London with a collection of sadder and more desperate characters than its inspirations. The ‘realism’ of the film is partly attributable to Drew’s admiration of the work of Shane Meadows and particularly This Is England. (Jo Hartley, young Shaun’s mum in This Is England, has a small role in iLL Manors.)

The story is set in East London around Forest Gate and Manor Park and involves a group of characters whose separate narratives interlock to produce an ‘ensemble drama’ that eventually becomes a crime melodrama. Aaron (Riz Ahmed) and Ed (Ed Skrein) are small-time drug dealers who find themselves embroiled with both Kirby (local big time dealer recently out of prison) and Kirby’s erstwhile protegé Chris. Trying to move in on the same drugs trade are Marcel and a young teen, Jake. Mobile phones with their replaceable SIMs and their databases of contacts are valuable and when one goes missing it drags ‘crack whore’ Michelle and eventually the East European Katya, victim of trafficking, into the web of relationships. This bald outline suggests a familiar drugs-focused crime film and, combined with the relatively young characters and the setting, that recent British film genre, the ‘urban film’. However, in both formal and ideological terms, the film promises more.

Ben Drew first released a single of his rap ‘iLL Manors’ in April and it attracted attention because it seemed to be that relatively rare phenomenon in contemporary popular music – a ‘political’ commentary on young people’s lives making explicit references to ‘rich boys’ (like Cameron and Osborne) and the ‘real’ reasons for the outbreak of riots last summer in the UK. The video for this single includes several characters who appear in the film and presumably some footage that was shot for the film. Here’s the music video:

This is an ambitious film which is why it is surprising to find that it’s part of the Microwave scheme organised by Film London to help first-time young filmmakers who have demonstrated their talent and potential. The scheme was originally set up to produce films with a budget of under £100,ooo to be shot in 18 days. The unique aspect of the scheme was the mentoring of directors and producers by more experienced UK filmmakers. Arguably the most successful of the early films produced under the scheme was Shifty (2008). In many ways, Shifty is the best comparison film for iLL Manors. The same actor, Riz Ahmed (himself also a rapper) appears in both films in a similar role. However, in Shifty, the writer-director Eran Creevy had the support of several more well-known actors, a tight script and a single location with relatively few complex scenes. iLL Manors has a cast with more non-professionals, a much longer script (50% more), many more scenes/set-ups and significantly more post-production work. My first reaction was to query how much more Ben Drew spent on the film and how Microwave now works. The current scheme seems to have upped the budget limit marginally to £120,000 but I’m sure I’ve also read that Drew had to find extra funding for post-production. Even so, the completed film is an impressive achievement and Drew is clearly a talented director of actors as well as a creative writer. Credit for the fresh look of the film also goes to cinematographer Gary Shaw, something of a veteran of London ‘effects’ shooting who lensed Moon for Duncan Jones. There is a useful press pack on the film available here and lots of promotional material on YouTube and other sites.

Critical commentary

iLL Manors got a relatively wide release from the independent distributor Revolver (which had its first big success with Kidulthood – the film which helped to begin the current ‘urban film’ cycle). The initial release was successful with over £250,000 taken during the first weekend from 191 cinemas, but in Week 2 the number of cinemas fell to 83 and the screen average fell by 65% for an overall fall of 85%. This could be read in several ways. Revolver may have concluded that an initial release to capitalise on the strong profile of Plan B would need to go wide first but that most of the audience would get to see it via DVD and online later. But it also looks like word of mouth was not strong.

Some of the more critical reviews charge the film with collapsing into what is referred to as soap opera or melodrama, specifically an ‘EastEnders Christmas special storyline’. This is a reference to a pub fire that brings several narrative strands to a climax. I don’t watch TV soaps any more, but I understand the charge. I felt at this point in the narrative that moving into melodrama mode was not a bad idea and I think the charge is more a problem of lazy critics. Ben Drew should be applauded on several levels. His music, with mini-biographical songs about some of the characters accompanying a montage of their histories is well-handled. There is a strong sense of authenticity about the locations and the casting and we do get a sense of what it must be like to grow up without much hope in a place like this – since this is precisely the area close to the Olympics site which is supposed to be ‘regenerating’ East London the film also carries a political charge. This is Drew’s own neighbourhood and he represents it with vigour. The problems in the film are mainly concerned with over-ambition. With this many characters, each of which with their own story as well as their contribution to the overall narrative running over 2 hours, it’s easy to lose track of who is doing what to whom. I’d like to see a tighter edit with perhaps one or two of the stories slimmed down or disappearing altogether and perhaps a little more concentration on presenting the action for audiences like me who are less familiar with the lifestyles. Having said that, I’m not the target audience. Drew has said that his focus was the 15-25 age group. In that sense he has done the film no favours by presenting a title which the BBFC deemed worthy of an ’18′ certificate – certainly for the ‘bad language’ as well as the drug scenes and extreme violence. I did feel that the violence towards women was excessive – but perhaps it is acceptable in terms of the narrative. Certainly this isn’t an easy watch – but it is worth spending two hours with.

Shinjuku Incident (San suk si gin, Hong Kong 2009)

Jackie Chan as ‘Steelhead’ leading his Chinese gang in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo

Dismissed by David Bordwell because of the “formulaic” direction by Derek Yee, this film from Jackie Chan’s production company is indeed flawed in many ways – but it’s also pretty interesting for several reasons. The narrative begins in North East China in the 1990s. Villagers are discussing the possibility of emigration to Japan, especially as one of the elderly villagers can prove that she is a ‘Japanese orphan’ – one of the children born during the wartime occupation of China. A group of villagers beg her to claim them as her children so that they can legally enter Japan. Xie Xie (Xu Jinglei) has an aunt in Tokyo and she leaves China. When he has heard nothing from her for a considerable time, her ex-boyfriend ‘Steelhead’ (Jackie Chan as a tractor mechanic) decides to follow her. The ship carrying him and other ‘illegals’ founders on the Japanese coast but Steelhead eventually finds his way to Tokyo and refuge with a Chinese community in Shinjuku which includes Jie, his ‘brother’ from the village. For the remainder of the narrative Steelhead moves steadily from an illegal being hunted by the police to a petty crook and then on to a gang-leader taking on the yakuza. He also develops a second relationship with a Japanese-Chinese woman, Lily, since Xie Xie is by now beyond his reach.

The concept behind the film sees Jackie Chan attempting a ‘serious’ dramatic role. Although there are action sequences, Chan does not perform outrageous stunts or display his kung-fu skills. Instead he plays a hard-working man who is pushed first into crime because of his illegal status and then into leadership of his Chinese community in self defence. This Hong Kong production tells a mainland story that is also about a social issue in Japan. It obviously draws on yakuza genre narratives, but offsets this quite heavily with a ‘moral discourse’ that perhaps derives from Chinese social films (at various times Steelhead acts in an almost altruistic fashion – even though it puts him in danger). As well as the Japanese setting, the plot also involves a Taiwanese gang which Steelhead and his group must replace on the streets of Shinjuku. Language is an issue in the film, although of course the English subtitles draw attention away from the mix of Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese and other Chinese dialects.

I found the film to be confusing at times, partly I suspect because it has been re-edited. It is also very violent. Despite a sometimes poor critical response, the film seems to have pleased many of Chan’s large numbers of fans. In passing I learned something I’ve not thought about before – the film was not released in mainland China because there are no age-related certificates there. Chan is reported to have been concerned that this 18 certificate film in the UK would be unsuitable in an unregulated cinema market where children might see it.

I’m not really in a position to judge Jackie Chan’s performance in this role as I haven’t seen enough of the earlier work which made him such a big star. For what it’s worth, I thought he did a good job – but I must confess that I did think about those films where older stars like John Wayne or Clint Eastwood played action roles that seemed unlikely. Chan was only in his early 50s in this film and there was nothing wrong with his action sequences but he seemed a good 10-15 years too old for the specific role of the ex-boyfriend/fiancé.

Stacking up the numbers on Hollywood remakes – a win for subtitles?

Trying – and probably failing – not to feel smug, I offer you this article in today’s Guardian by number cruncher Charles Gant. A week before the release of Headhunters, confidently expected to be a worldwide hit as a Norwegian film, Gant reports that MGM has conceded that David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo will make a loss in cinemas (despite grossing over $230 million). Gant questions why Hollywood makes a seemingly pointless remake – our sentiments entirely. Meanwhile, Mark Wahlberg is reported as being interested in taking the lead role in Summit’s remake of Headhunters.

Having just read Headhunters – and enjoying it very much, I’m very much looking forward to the film and I’ll be introducing it on April 14 at the National Media Museum in Bradford as part of a talk on Nordic Crime Fiction. Please come along.

The Man on the Roof (Mannen på taket, Sweden 1976)

The media on the street during the climax of The Man on the Roof (screengrab by DVD Beaver)

Nordic crime fiction is one of the major trends in contemporary film and television with successful Nordic titles often prompting swift American remakes. If you want to go back to the source of many of the celebrated elements of the Swedish police procedural, the Martin Beck novels by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö offer a good place to start. This couple, good Marxist socialists both, wrote ten immensely popular police procedurals in the 1960s and 1970s featuring a Stockholm detective and his team. The stories all manage to critique what the authors saw as the flaws in Swedish social democracy. It is this political imperative which has survived in the work of Henning Mankell and others. All the books were made into films or TV series in Sweden and overseas. The best of the films is often said to be this 1976 adaptation by the celebrated Swedish director Bo Widerberg. Widerberg was the young turk of the Swedish ‘New Wave’ in the early 1960s and one of the more radical directors who was critical of Ingmar Bergman’s status within Swedish film culture.

The novel’s title is The Abominable Man – a reference to a police lieutenant who is lying in a hospital bed when he is attacked and brutally murdered, almost filleted with a bayonet. Martin Beck and his colleagues begin an investigation but just as they solve the mystery, the murderer takes to the rooftops with a selection of powerful snipers’ rifles and the police authorities have to devise a safe way of disarming him.

Carl-Gustaf Lindstedt as Martin Beck. Eastwood or McQueen he isn't, but not a police inspector to underestimate either.

The key feature of the film is its realism. Widerberg shoots on location and the action sequences in the film have a strong documentary feel which is also evident during the long police procedural sequences. The casting of a leading Swedish comedian of the period Carl-Gustaf Lindstedt as Martin Beck and the sheer ‘ordinariness’ of the rest of the team adds to this ‘realism effect’. (Lindstedt was the son of a Social-Democratic Party politician and started his career in a socialist youth theatre group according to Wikipedia.)  The film is generally very well thought of – bearing comparison with the best Hollywood crime films of the 1970s (comparisons are made with The French Connection). The critique here is not of police corruption in the Hollywood sense (i.e. drugs, extortion etc.), but something more akin to the systematic failure of police teams to do their job properly – and then to cover up the evidence with collective amnesia and a refusal to take complaints seriously. This approach shifts the focus from a single rogue to the system itself.

Overall I was very impressed with this film (presented on a Swedish Region 2 DVD with English subs bought online from Play.com). The quality of the transfer to DVD is very good. I was a Widerberg fan in the late 1960s and early 1970s but I don’t remember this getting a UK release. I did feel that one or two of the decisions during the sniper incident seemed a bit odd, but then I reflected on how Hollywood would have played it and concluded that the bungling of the Swedish approach is much more like real life and the mistakes we all make. It might be interesting to compare this with some of the other Martin Beck adaptations. After watching this, it doesn’t seem so surprising that Walter Matthau should have played Beck in the US adaptation of another Sjöwall/Wahlöö novel The Laughing Policeman (novel 1968, film 1973). The setting is changed to San Francisco and the character names are changed but the cast looks strong Louis Gossett Jr, Bruce Dern and Joanna Cassidy in a small role. Anybody seen it?

Obsession (UK 1949)

Robert Newton (left) and Naunton Wayne have a discussion about 'Royal Scot' locos and their tenders – one of the brilliant dialogue exchanges which mask the cat and mouse game the would be murderer and detective are playing. Behind them is the large model railway set-up that the Newton character uses to help him wind down from his work.

This title turned up in my monthly LoveFilm rental list. I don’t remember ordering it and for a while I was puzzled as to how it got there. On reflection, I think it may be connected to Keith’s evening class on British Film Noir (read the comments on the posting). Anyway, it turned out to be an interesting find – despite a poor DVD transfer on the disc distributed by Fremantle Media.

The script is by Alec Coppel and is adapted from his novel ‘A Man About a Dog’. The Australian Coppel was a prolific screenwriter but is perhaps best known as one of the writers on Hitchcock’s Vertigo. The director for this independent production by Nat Bronstein was Edward Dmytryk, by 1948 famous for a couple of classic Hollywood films noirs – Farewell My Lovely (1944) and Crossfire (1947). However in 1947 Dmytryk was one of the ‘Hollywood Ten’ as fingered by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and was blacklisted by the Hollywood studio chiefs. With no chance of work in the US, Dmytryk followed several other US-based film creatives and re-located to the UK where he worked on two productions before returning to face HUAC again in 1950, this time ‘naming names’. (His other UK film was the now obscure Give Us This Day (1949) a drama based on an Italian novel and set in Brooklyn.)

Another HUAC victim, Phil Brown, plays one of the four central characters in Obsession, an American diplomat who falls into a relationship with the beautiful but flighty young wife of a London psychiatrist played by Robert Newton. The wife is ‘Storm’ (wonderful name for the character!) and she’s played by Sally Grey. The quartet is completed by the surprise casting of Naunton Wayne (one half of the comic duo of ‘Charters and Caldicott’ who enlivened Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes as well as some British wartime films) as a Detective Superintendent at Scotland Yard. Storm’s affair with the young American is the ‘last straw’ for Newton’s psychiatrist and he determines to abduct the young man and hold him captive for several months before killing him and disposing of the body in a foolproof way. They say that you should never act with children or animals. I would add – or plan murders with them. It is the accidental intrusion into the plan of Storm’s dog ‘Monty’ that steers the narrative towards its inevitable conclusion. Thus the title of the original novel. The American release via Eagle-Lion (set up to distribute Rank films in the US) had the title changed to The Hidden Room which typically plays on the intrigue created by a narrative device in the story but which misses the real attraction which is the obsession to detail and the calm shown by Newton’s character.

Overall this is a very good suspense thriller – cerebral rather than action-packed. All four central performances are excellent and Dmytryk keeps the narrative moving as he allows the audience to enjoy the trading of great dialogue between the principals. The dog is very good too. A couple of other interesting names are Kenneth Horne as co-producer and Nino Rota as music composer. Horne later became the host of two famous UK comedy radio programmes in the 1960s. Rota was one of several leading figures from Italian and French Cinema who worked in the UK at this time. In the 1950s and 1960s he went on to work on the films of Fellini, Visconti and then in 1972 on The Godfather. I confess that I hardly noticed the music in Obsession – but that may be a tribute to the appeal of the narrative.

If you are interested in films like Obsession, the key text is Robert Murphy’s Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1939–49, London: Routledge, 1989. Bob is also listed here as having a book on British Film Noir in preparation for Palgrave Macmillan. I owe the little I know about the films to Bob’s evening class on the sensationalist melodramas and crime films of late 1940s British Cinema at the BFI in the 1980s when he used his research to construct a course which showed several obscure examples – the best of which was an earlier Robert Newton film, Temptation Harbour (1947) with Simone Simon (and based on a Georges Simenon story).

I’m still not sure what we mean by British film noir but Obsession has links via its central characters to two films based on the novels of Nigel Balchin, Mine Own Executioner (1947) with its psychologist attempting to help a soldier with what we might now call ‘post traumatic shock’ and The Small Back Room (1949) with its ‘boffin’ at the end of his tether and facing the terrors of withdrawal from alcohol as he defuses a bomb. This trio of cerebral heroes/villains are emblematic of a certain kind of British crime melodrama.