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Our Man in Havana/1959

The Carol Reed/Graham Greene partnership is one of the most successful in cinema and here they combined on the latter’s novel. I had read the novel some time ago but never seen the film until I downloaded it last week. Carol Reed is one of the quartet of great English film directors alongside [...]

August 2, 2020 // 0 Comments

Book review: Utopia Avenue (Part 2)

This is the second part (of two) of my review of Utopia Avenue, the latest novel by David Mitchell just released in the UK. To build upon the themes I touched upon in Part One, I must register that normally I avoid fiction like the plague and hitherto had neither been aware of Mitchell’s [...]

July 29, 2020 // 0 Comments

Will the real Poirot stand up?

I have now seen all the re-runs of Series one of Poirot. Hugh Fraser plays the dim, bespoke Captain Hastings, Philip Jackman Inspector Japp with trademark flapping raincoat as brilliantly caricatured by Stephen Fry in Gosforth Park and Pauline Moran the bossy secretary Miss Lemon. The second [...]

July 14, 2020 // 0 Comments

The Directors/Sky Arts

I was so pleased that a further series of The Directors was being run by SKY. I happened to see listed under SKY Documentaries a documentary on Don Siegel, most famous for the Dirty Harry films with Clint Eastwood. In pushing the “Record all” button I saw there were further programmes on John [...]

July 4, 2020 // 0 Comments

Kind Hearts and Coronets

This classic – which I watched on the Talking Pictures channel yesterday – passed with flying colours the Rosen test of excellence, namely initially deciding to watch the first few minutes of a film I have seen many times and staying with it right to its end. It’s known for the [...]

June 26, 2020 // 0 Comments

Das Boot : a historian’s view

Bernadette Angell (TV critic of the Rust) asked me to appraise the historical  accuracy of Das Boot.      I have seen the much-acclaimed 1981 film which Neil Rosen rates as one of the best war films ever. Aside from the accusation levelled by a New York Nazi, which may have been propaganda, [...]

June 25, 2020 // 0 Comments

Peter Finch and Peter Lorre

I set the Discovering (great film actors on SKY ARTS) on series mode for recording. Most recorded I have already seen but last week I caught up with four on Julie Christie, Peter Lorre, Peter Finch and Anthony Hopkins. Of this notable quartet my two favourites are the Peters. Film goers have [...]

June 7, 2020 // 0 Comments

Two jolts whilst I was busy doing nothing

Time catches up with us all, of course, albeit that most of the time – despite our jokes at the dinner table about bits falling off, hair (either receding in anticipated parts of the body and/or growing in others you didn’t know you had), expanding waistlines and going somewhere in [...]

June 7, 2020 // 0 Comments

Headhunters (2011)

I participated in a list of non-English speaking movies and my Scandinavian contribution was Force Majeure, a Swedish drama that begins in a ski resort which  a rich young family visit. An avalanche descends and the wife decides that her husband’s main concern is to save his skin. This gnaws [...]

June 3, 2020 // 0 Comments

Dunkirk (1958)

I watched this film yesterday.  Although a traditional war movie in terms of cast, you can see it was made 18 years after the event as, especially at the beginning, there was much and merited criticism of the hapless British military initiative resulting in the rescue of  some  338,000 of the [...]

June 1, 2020 // 0 Comments

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