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.

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 Importance of Being Earnest

A work sometimes considered to be a satire, but actually a dithyramb of praise for the social order that produces such impeccably precise logic.

King Lear is a satire of the socially conforming “that was then, this is now” huzzies who are pawns, by comparison.

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.