For a director best known for his wide vistas and endless horizons shooting a film like Hobson’s Choice might seem like a limiting project for David Lean. Adapted from the 1915 play and set in the mercantile Lancashire of the last century we barely stray beyond the town high street and the shops on each side. Yet within these confines the director makes great use of cranes, sweeping cameras and whip pans to push this fun story along at a pace that never lets up. We start in Salford in 1880. The Hobson of the title is a business owner, a widower, an overbearing father to three girls and, not infrequently, a delinquent drunk. He runs a successful boot makers and when we meet him he is scheming to marry off the two younger daughters while keeping his eldest, a woman of thirty who he considers too ‘over ripe’ for marriage, to run his shop and look after him in his house. She has other ideas. Charles Laughton may play the title character and his name might well top the credits but it quickly becomes clear this picture belongs to the female protagonist. As a character Maggie is the principal agent of change in the drama and as an actress Brenda de Banzie steals every scene she’s in. The first time we see her she is the harpy behind the till, contemptuous of her sisters’ frivolities and bullying to their paramours. Later, on the other side of the curtain that divides shop from domicile, she is taunted for being an old maid who should feel grateful for her unpaid roles as shopkeeper and housemaid. While her younger sisters mewl and moan about their father’s plans and his distaste for their chosen partners (“You mean...

If you love visual comedy, you gotta love Edgar Wright, one of the few filmmakers who is consistently finding humour through framing, camera movement, editing, goofy sound effects and music. Compelling appreciation of the moving image and its possibilities by Tony...

The joy of reading classic noir doesn’t usually come from the investigation itself, but rather uncovering the secrets and hypocrisies the PI’s client would rather stay hidden. How sweet it is to see Phillip Marlowe or the Continental Op turn on their employers, to end the adventure perhaps shorn of their fee but with a clean conscience. Clearly Stephen Frears and Neville Smith, respectively director and writer of Gumshoe, are fans of the hard-boiled genre. The detective of the title is Eddie Ginley, a bingo caller in a working man’s club who, in an attempt to break his depression and ennui, posts a classified newspaper ad offering services as a private investigator. Well, waddyaknow? someone takes him at his word and before the day is out (his birthday, since you ask) he’s walking into a hotel suite and picking up an envelope containing a stack of pound notes, a .38 revolver and a B&W snap of a girl. He’s knows he’s probably bitten off more than he can chew but since he’s decided to play the part he runs with it. As it turns out he has been mistaken for someone else – a contract killer no less – and is soon stuck between the real hitman, the dark forces who hired him and his target with only his wits to protect him. Luckily for both him and us Ginley has wit to spare. He’s initially so nonplussed by the gun he attempts to sell it, only to be told by his criminal connection that so alien are firearms in Liverpool (oh, how times have changed) that he would be better throwing it away. He chooses to hang on to it and while he does lark about and occasionally uses it to back up...

It’s always something of a mystery when some vintage British crime pictures attain a hallowed status in the film pantheon where other, equally good movies, languish in obscurity. You’ll hear no argument from this quarter about the classic status of Get Carter or The Long Good Friday but what about the likes of Villain, The Black Windmill, Fear is the Key or A Prize of Arms? In fact I’ll go one further, now I’ve finally caught up with it, and add another great film to that list of overlooked gems: Sitting Target. Made during Ollie Reed’s early 70s period that saw him zig-zagging between high art fare for Ken Russell and more box office friendly swashbuckling roles, this is a fabulously stripped down study of a career criminal whose bloodlust is raised and cannot be sated no matter the obstacles in his way. He plays a career criminal currently on remand who’s facing an inevitable extra fifteen years in stir. His behaviour inside has been far from exemplary and when his visiting wife tells him she wants a divorce and is carrying another man’s child so great is his anger he smashes through the separating window and tries to throttle her. Chances of an early parole? As close to nil as makes no difference. Fear not though for what unfolds over the next twenty minutes is a peerless jailbreak sequence that will have have you on the edge of your seat. Along with fellow inmates Freddie Jones and Ian McShane, Reed in turn charms, bludgens and Tarzan-style swings his way to freedom but rather than make haste to the continent and a new life abroad he heads to London where his wife, the sitting target of the title, awaits his vengeance. There are certainly...

In between making two of the more winsome Ealing Comedies Charles Crighton tried his hand at directing a genuine crime thriller and pulled it off magnificently. Hunted opens with a young lad, not more than six, desperately running from something or someone. His flight is so pell mell he knocks into pedestrians, is almost run down by a drayhorse cart and when he seeks cover in a bombed out warehouse, runs smack bang into Dirk Bogarde…standing over a dead body. Cursing his luck at this fluke murder witness, Bogarde grabs the kid and scarpers but the strange thing is the boy, despite having opportunities, makes no attempt to escape; choosing instead to stay with the killer. A case of extreme Stockholm Syndrome or is there something more to his story? It turns out there is a reason the lad is too terrified to go home. Slowly, through the police investigation taking place on the pair’s tail and the spare comments from the boy himself we learn he is an adopted orphan who has a particularly heavy-handed father. He’s taken violent hidings in the past and expects his latest mishap – accidentally starting a small fire in his house – to result in a beating that might be his last, hence his aversion to a return home and his growing attachment to Bogarde. For his part Bogarde has no time whatsoever for the kid, treating him first as a nuisance then as a tool to facilitate his escape: standing lookout and making furtive attempts to liberate money from Bogarde’s flat, which is under the watchful eye of Scotland Yard. But something strange happens over the course of the escape. As Bogarde’s options narrow and his flight takes the pair further and further from home they...

Though British studio Hammer was best known for its sanguinary vampire films and gothic horrors, in the early ’60s it started to include psychological dramas in its production slate. The guiding force behind the best this output was one man: producer and writer Jimmy Sangster. True, he made his fair share of Dracula and Frankenstein features but his best work were lean and arresting thrillers like Taste of Fear, The Snorkel and Paranoiac. Add to that list 1965’s superbly tense The Nanny, which weaves and twists and leaves the audience guessing all the way to the end credits. We begin in a comfortable London apartment. Mother and father are at breakfast anticipating the return home of their son, who’s been away at school for two years. A cause for celebration you might think, but something is amiss. From their first scene we know this is a loveless marriage. The father’s heartless opening line is to tell his wife to “pull yourself together”. More engrossed in his morning paper than her he scarpers off to his club whenever household events prove too much. The mother is clearly a broken woman, so highly strung she breaks down into tears and hides in her bedroom at the prospect of her beloved son Joey returning home. The one crutch she does have is the nanny of the title. Nanny (for she is afforded no given name) has been with her family through the generations and brought up Virginia from birth, moving with her through courtship, marriage and motherhood, all the while enabling her infantalised state. We glimpse where this familial anxiety comes from when the father arrives at his son’s school to bring him home. Here Joey is introduced rigging up a noose in his bedroom so as...

We are all used to seeing heist films that focus so intently on preparation that when the final execution of the crime comes along it almost seems like an afterthought. Ringo Lam‘s City on Fire is one example, Michael Mann‘s Heat is another while Noel Black‘s A Man, a Woman and a Bank with its remote-controlled cars and monkeyed-with elevators is perhaps the cine qua non of break-ins. As such it’s a real joy to stumble across a film like A Prize of Arms which wastes no time at all with planning, rather it chooses to burst right into the action. We are quickly introduced to a trio of demobbed soldiers working on some sort of robbery but the film is so pregnant with kinetic energy, and the protagonists so busy looking over their shoulders it’s not until half way through we even find out what they plan on stealing and just how they are going to do it. The proposition, it turns out, is a real doozie: to rob the army barracks pay office on the day before the battalion ships out, when the safe is just bursting with cash. Taking the lead of the three man crew is the ever-dependable Stanley Baker and he has clearly put the hours in: somehow laying his hands on military police uniforms, army lorries, explosives and even a flamethrower. But something must always stand in the way of the perfect plan and in this case it is our old friend the human element. His two compatriots are Helmut Schmid, an explosive expert whose Polish accent is so thick he must feign muteness when interacting with the barracks squaddies and a young Tom Bell who, when not sneaking shots of brandy behind Baker’s back, is losing his...

‘Planned?’ the incredulous victim asks our protagonist ‘You planned this?’ ‘Oh yes, weeks ago. It’s all part of my perfect murder.’ Well, introductory lines don’t get much better than that. It’s always a treat to see a well planned crime so a perfect murder is truly something to behold. Obsession tells the story of a comfortably well off London doctor who reaches the limit of his tolerance with his wife’s infidelity so makes plans to do away with his competition. There are shades of last week’s Archive Discovery The Earrings of Madame de… here as the good doctor, mirroring that film’s leading man does not necessarily object to his wife’s flirtations, even if they are returned in kind but when faced with humiliation? Well, in Doctor Riordan’s own words that is enough to reduce a husband “to the most insensible and uncivilised behaviour.” It soon dawns on us, the audience, that this is to be no ordinary revenge. The ingenious plan is to spirit the adulterer away to a basement in a bombed out part of the city, chain him to a wall and wait for the hubbub around his disappearance to die down. Of course the doctor must make regular visits to furnish his prisoner with food, coffee, newspapers and even booze but all the while he is also making ghoulish preparations in an unseen bathroom just out of his prisoner’s sight. For in this mysterious room is a bathtub that Dr Riordan is slowly filling with acid, and will soon have a enough to completely dissolve his rival’s body, leaving no trace of his crime whatsoever. Over the course of what turns out to be months we follow Riordan through his routine of acid preparation and food parcel visits and over time...

The genesis story of Performance seems at first blush to be a planetary alignment for the ages. It’s 1968 and wild child writer / painter Donald Cammell surveys his list of close friends that not only include a brace of Rolling Stones – Brian Jones & Mick Jagger – but also their muse Anita Pallenberg, England’s actor du jour James Fox and cinematographer Nicholas Roeg, now chomping at the bit to try his hand at directing. They all enthusiastically agree to join Cammell on his new project and the deal is put together. The final result however is something the movie world had never seen before and a film that Warner Brothers, who’d been expecting an teen-accessible vehicle along the lines of A Hard Days Night, were so dumbfounded by that they left it on the shelf for two years. The plot, such as it matters, is a straight forward gangster-on-the-run tale. Mid level hoodlum Chas, played by James Fox with a hitherto unseen hard edge, oversteps his remit and goes on the lam from both the cops and his vengeful boss. Moments away from skipping town he overhears of a room for rent in the basement of a quiet house that requires no references or ID and decides to move there instead. The landlord is Turner, a one time rock colossus now a recluse temporarily bereft of inspiration. Initially reluctant to let this new arrival stay it slowly dawns on Turner that this may be just the dark influence he’s been searching for. The meta theme that runs throughout the film is the merging of two forces and the strength that develops from that union. An opening courtroom scene witnesses a corporation attempting to absorb a smaller rival and the action that gets...