The Angel with the Trumpet

A dramatic representation of Austrian history from Mayerling to V-E Day, centered around a piano-making firm whose trademark is referred to in the title (“the trumpet says, ‘make music’, the angel says, ‘serve God’”), with prefigurements of Lean’s Doctor Zhivago and Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces. It is filmed in good style, and reunites Basil Sydney and Eileen Herlie from Olivier’s Hamlet, though Oskar Werner is dubbed by an Englishman to achieve a certain uniformity of style, perhaps, which is a loss nearly as inexplicable as that of Peter O’Toole’s voice in Ray’s The Savage Innocents.

The Terror of the Tongs

“Hong Kong—1910”, and that’s the whole story, a tale of long ago, the Red Dragon Tong, “an organisation that thrived on vice, terror and corruption,” the Grand Masters are in Peking.

The fearful director of The Angel with the Trumpet has no truck with this lot of vermin on the docks for all their opiumed thuggery, and that is that, though it takes a great deal of doing amongst the nightspots and waterspots of the great city.

Screenplay by Jimmy Sangster, with Christopher Lee, Geoffrey Toone, Marne Maitland, Yvonne Monlaur, Burt Kwouk and the Hammer genius.