Moscow Nights

Known in America as I Stand Condemned. History is made...

An uncommonly influential or prescient film, with consequences far and wide. Doctor Zhivago, Alexander Nevsky, The Queen Of Spades, Great Catherine, Fahrenheit 451, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington and The Bounty all owe something or other to it (it owes a little to A Farewell to Arms and King Vidor and Les Misérables).

What Asquith brought back from Hollywood was such a vision of Hollywood lighting as Hollywood hardly understood. He uses it for sculpture in relief and in the round, and if he reaches Vermeer at one point, it’s by an understanding of light and space. Within this overall framework and with these objects, his camera moves in constant composition.

Cottage to Let

A brilliant screwball comedy laid on in Scotland at an inventor’s digs. A Spitfire pilot drops in by parachute, he’s a Nazi spy. A Nazi spy coordinates the kidnapping of the inventor, he’s with MI5.

It begins, typically, with a misunderstanding. Is the cottage a military hospital, a home for evacuated children, or indeed to let?

Very choice performances, and a dicky bombsight over 9000 feet, plus a charity bazaar and an old water mill on a loch.

We Dive at Dawn

The Drake motif carries right through, the Sea Tiger’s steady captain has a butler of that name who arranges luncheons and soirées with various “aunts”, the raid on occupied Denmark and the Jolly Roger flown upon the submarine’s return generally express it.

The crew are married unhappily or betrothed reluctantly or vying for a girl, the voyage has been uneventful, they’re given a new assignment.

The captain musters all their forces for the sinking of the Brandenburg.

No result is perceptible, the depth charges burst, the submarine leaks, lies doggo, rolls over and plays dead.

Then the raid for supplies, home and dry.

The Winslow Boy

A five-shilling dismissal from Royal Naval College goes at last to trial on Magna Carta.

Before he got to the main English system he employed in The Browning Version, Asquith still had the complicated variant of Hollywood lighting he uses here. The very intricate screenplay carries the drama in set-ups put together by him and his actors that render a series of precise accounts.

A great price is paid by Winslow père and the family, even the barrister (Robert Donat in one of Asquith’s extraordinary leading roles), but the weight is lifted at the last.

Neither Time nor the New York Times had any patience with the film. There was a bumper crop that year, or BAFTA would certainly have awarded Best British Film and Best Film from any Source.

The Browning Version

His translation of the Agamemnon, “flawed” saith our hero “the Himmler of the lower fifth” whose own youthful and unfinished version in rhymed couplets is preferred by an admiring pupil.

An amazing screenplay, that might veer out of its way at any time and represent Nabokov’s Pnin or Albee’s George, but doesn’t.

After wasting his whole life and everybody else’s, Rattigan’s schoolmaster is made to say “I’m sorry”.

Asquith is so keen on the subject that his direction is said to be invisible, but a quick glance shows his distinctive lighting in full sway.

The Importance of being Earnest

The two characters are Algernon Moncrieff and his older brother Ernest John Worthing, known as Jack.

Algernon’s sport, Bunburying, consists in having a sick friend to call upon whenever social responsibilities are too pressing. Jack, that is Ernest, is always able to depart from the exclusively “high-toned” demeanor expected of him as the guardian of a pretty ward by going into town after one of his wicked younger brother’s escapades.

There is no friend, no brother, Jack and Algy do not know until the last scene that they are related.

That is the simple, evident structure. There is a great deal of superstructure required to sort the mess out, and while this is of signal interest, having two or more themes in counterpoint (the attractiveness of the wicked, the very title of the play, etc.), it is generally distributed along the lines of respectability or seriousness or earnestness in love, and even for Lady Bracknell a young girl’s fortune is an earnest of her marriageability.

The play has had many critics who, like GBS, do not think it is important because they do not see it is earnest. That, and not Asquith’s direction, is the main reason why some reviewers have balked at the film in the very terms used by Shaw on the opening night. “It amused me, of course; but unless comedy touches me as well as amuses me, it leaves me with a sense of having wasted my evening.” And yet it is a very touching play, the two brothers, the handbag, Miss Prism’s three-volume novel, the two girls of town and country, Canon Chasuble, and (in Asquith’s film) Lady Bracknell riding the rails.

Libel

Television is a central motif of this composition, and Asquith modulates toward its neutral application of light to prepare his great effects at the close. He also abates composition after giving a handful of sharp angular inset views early on (and the silhouette of a stopped train filling the screen in a flashback, with escaped POW’s hiding beneath it, and a German soldier peeking between the cars).

Bogarde effectually shows a transition between his dual roles (one of which is an actor standing before his mirror), making possible his dubious identity at the trial when a third avatar is introduced.

Beneath the legal metaphor is a military one, the victor only being decided when his consciousness returns, availing him a memory of the attack and his proper defense.

The game is played with tricks, ruses, feints and guises, such as the baronet’s American wife, the Canadian smelling out a fingerless villain (The 39 Steps), the terrible revelation of the hospital patient known only by his bed number, Fifteen, and the superb jockeying of Bogarde among his characterizations.

This is a great working–out of cinematic problems to achieve a great abstraction, the victor’s guilt resolved, before the ultimate refinement of Asquith’s later films, and in fact something like the yellow Rolls-Royce is visible in the car dealership scenes.

The V.I.P.s

Crœsus times three and the Duchess of Brighton (Margaret Rutherford) plus a gigolo (Louis Jourdan) at London Airport.

Max Buda (Orson Welles) the Yugoslavian film director has an Italian starlet (Elsa Martinelli) in tow, his next film is Lessing’s Mary Stuart but she won’t even play Elizabeth. He kisses his elderly accountant right on the lips for devising a tax dodge that will save him a million pounds sterling by leaving England before midnight.

Les Mangrum (Rod Taylor) the Australian tractor manufacturer has to be in New York this afternoon or lose his company to Amalgamated Motors.

Madame Andros (Elizabeth Taylor) is leaving her enormously wealthy husband Paul (Richard Burton) for the gigolo.

The Duchess has accepted a job at a Miami hotel as Assistant Social Directress, to save her home.

Fog closes the airport.

Andros threatens, bribes, and writes a suicide letter.

Mangrum’s secretary Miss Mead (Maggie Smith) encounters Andros in the writing room of the airport hotel lobby, he gives her a blank check.

The accountant hits upon another dodge, marriage to the starlet for one fiscal year, and gets another kiss.

The fee for six weeks’ shooting at the Duchess’s home means she doesn’t have to fly to Florida.

Madame Andros also stays home.

Beautifully written, acted, and filmed.

The Yellow Rolls-Royce

The film proceeds along a revolving formula, let us say, and doubtless with reference to Renoir’s Le Carrosse d’or. The Englishman sells it after his French wife dallies with a Foreign Office underling in it. The American gangster sells it after his moll dallies with an Italian photographer in it. The rich American widow ships it back to America after a dalliance with a Yugoslav partisan in it, just before America enters the war.

That this structure, in the lapse of time conveyed, could have any significance beyond a plush ride in a finely-appointed automobile does not seem to have occurred to reviewers in the general run of things.