A scene near the beginning portrays a beating in a concentration camp, and it’s somewhat surprisingly graphic for a 1940 film. I briefly wondered if the film would be innovative enough (at this early stage in the war) to portray the conflict as brutal, but the remainder of the film pretty much portrays spying as exchanging witty remarks with gentlemen enemies. Additionally, the end feels like an escape lifted from a Bond film, or a Hitchcock film. Without ruining the ending very much at all — at least, I sincerely hope not — a character who was clearly sacrificing himself manages to escape, for the sake of a completely happy ending. It’s maybe the only element that’s somewhat standard in the film, and prevents it from being an absolute classic.

But let’s put things in perspective a little, here: screenwriters Sidney Gilliat and Frank Lauder had worked with Hitchcock a few years earlier, on The Lady Vanishes. They even reproduce a couple of charming supporting characters from that film, though it would be a mistake to consider this film a sequel. Finally, it wasn’t known in 1940 just how brutal the war would become, and it would have been completely unacceptable — and bad for morale — to produce a film during wartime with a British hero that’s killed in the line of duty.

There’s a curious use of detailed models throughout — for shots of trains, landscapes, and even buildings — and while these work quite well, I’d be interested to learn more about why these establishing shots were produced this way. I can only assume it was more cost-effective at the time. It produces another slightly jarring contrast in the film, as it stands apart from some opening stock footage of Nazi soldiers marching confidently around. Perhaps these model shots, introduced later, serve to illustrate that we’re heading into storytelling now, not realism. And there are several brief exchanges in the film that suggest the limited, black-and-white thinking of the Nazi party. Night Train to Munich isn’t Hogan’s Heroes, but it’s closer to morale-boosting adventure film than gritty portrayal of war. It’s a spy thriller that takes a few brief stabs at commenting on the war. And seventy years after it was produced, it remains as entertaining as anything in theatres today.

Frequently, the really interesting thing is what the survivors do — or don’t do — in the pockets of society that remain. Do you have enough compassion to keep the weakest person when they can slow you down and cost you your own life? Is there are artist in the bunch, and what happens to the level of discussion if there isn’t? As a new six episode TV series based on a series of graphic novels, The Walking Dead gets some of the various elements right and others very wrong. The special effects are certainly effective and well done, even as various grainy images and poor music make it look low-budget. The acting ranges from quite good to soap-opera poor, and some of the startling, unpredictable moments are balanced by obvious ones, or puzzling moments that don’t feel right — someone commits suicide by shotgun blast, but is also able to write “God forgive us” on the wall in their own blood with paint-brush neatness. Clearly, some things we wouldn’t question in a graphic novel don’t quite translate to television.

Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) is a wounded police deputy who wakes up in a hospital — in a quick transition that suddenly switches his bedside flowers to dead ones, capturing how quickly time passed for him — to find the world in chaos. He wanders through the hospital to find barred doors that are spray-painted with “Don’t Open, Dead Inside” (in a way that could just as easily be read as “Don’t Dead, Open Inside”) and finds his way to various other survivors in the search for his wife and son.

The show is good bad TV, in that it’s riddled with cliches, but manages to be really entertaining (George Orwell talks about good bad books, poorly written but entertaining). As unelected leader, Grimes ends up in charge of a particular microcosm of society that includes a few too many stereotypes: the handsome and noble cop, a tough and ugly racist, and so on. At the same time, I quite liked a character named Dale (played by veteran actor Jeffrey DeMunn), an older man who is more or less the artist of the group. Thankfully, it isn’t spelled out that he’s an artist, but he sits around the campfire describing words as “paltry, failing things,” and getting replies from the children along the lines of “You’re weird.” He stands on top of the RV keeping watch, quite literally seeing further than the others. He isn’t the strongest one in the bunch, but if anyone represents hope, it’s him. In the final episode, his moments are the only truly interesting ones.

It should also be said, The Walking Dead is seriously gross. I watched it with a kind of look-at-the-traffic-accident fascination. I think people are taking about it at least partly because it represents a new high (or new low) in what can be shown on TV, including zombie children getting shot in the head. If The Walking Dead takes the emphasis off slow-motion flying brains and works to perfect the characters, it stands of chance of becoming a show people are talking about for deeper reasons, not just shock-value, and thrill ride fun. Without having read the graphic novels, I don’t know the direction it will go, but the potential is certainly there.

The performances are all excellent, particularly Richard Basehart as the disturbed young man and Paul Douglas as a likeable cop that does fairly well getting through to him and creating a certain amount of trust. The atmosphere and production values are both outstanding, and the film does a particularly striking job of establishing a quiet, almost desolate early morning city in the first few moments, and building towards a climax with hundreds watching the drama unfold while a handful of briefly sketched but well-acted characters making clumsy attempts to help. It’s like an orchestral piece that begins with a few sleepy notes and builds to a riveting finish.

I don’t know what it is that draws me to films that use a simple narrative framework to find a particular focus, but much like Westerns, I think the straightforward structure helps to heighten the impact of the film. The only thing that reminds the viewer it’s a film and removes the viewer from the drama somewhat is the presence of several vaguely creepy psychologists, impeccably dressed and hanging around making pronouncements nobody challenges in the slightest. It feels a bit standard for mainstream American films of the 1950s to have an unquestionable professional, of one kind or another. In science-fiction films, he’s the one smoking a pipe, examining the alien body and explaining how their advanced technology works as though he’s seen all this a few times before. And I choose my pronoun carefully, because it’s never a woman. At the same time, these dated elements don’t ruin the film, which has interesting, but not overly pat statements to make about our broken methods, and our collective tendency to sometimes produce broken people. Not all of them are on a window ledge in the film, but others are there too. Fourteen Hours may be remembered mainly as the first Grace Kelly film, but it also deserves to be remembered as a compelling and nearly flawless drama.

What’s frustrating about the only direct remake so many decades later is that all it needed was some of the restraint of the first film. The effects are certainly impressive, though I’d agree with Roger Ebert that the werewolf could’ve used a little more weight — it looks a little cartoonish. And the atmosphere is there too. I thought it had a promising start when we only caught glimpses of the monster. For the first half-hour or so victims are suddenly carried off, or suddenly wounded, and the level of suspense is higher than expected. It takes about twenty-eight minutes for the film to decide it needs to show a close-up of a policeman with his face half-torn off, and suddenly the film has all the style and taste of Friday the 13th, part 8.

It’s unfortunate, because there was certainly a lot of potential here, and there’s a film in here somewhere that’s making the effort to be a lot more subtle — you can literally pick out those moments in the film — before somebody apparently went through the script and demanded five more decapitations. As Lawrence Talbot, Benicio del Toro is appropriately brooding and dark, and Anthony Hopkins and Emily Blunt are certainly solid supporting cast members. Hugo Weaving is fine as the inspector, but really should’ve been required to do something other than his Agent Smith drawl from the Matrix. There’s nothing wrong with having a lighter character to provide contrast.

As for the script, the setting bounces back and forth between London and the town of Blackmoor far too frequently, even as characters suffer wild mood swings that either have Talbot as an apologetic gentleman, or down at the pub throwing a drink in someone’s face. Weaving has a good line when he sits back and declares that while we hate rules, “They’re all that keep us from a dog eat dog world.” But it’s the only line he gets that tells us anything about his character, and he spends the rest of the film narrowing his eyes and aiming a pistol. I won’t ruin the end, except to say it’s a whole set of scenes that sometimes feel quite well-handled, and sometimes feel like sudden lurches in the plot to satisfy the need for another fight. And having watched the extended cut, it’s hard to forgive the decision to drop an early scene with the great Max von Sydow, just for the sake of getting to the action sooner. After all, anything that enhances your understanding of the characters only adds to the impact later on.

I know I’m being picky here. As a remake, it’s an entertaining enough film. It’s just unfortunate we’ll never see the more subtle, ultimately more effective film trying to get out. It might be pushing it a little to say on one level it’s a film about fathers and sons, and finding your own way despite having been gifted with a particular set of instincts. But that’s certainly a film I’d like to see.

The hero is frequently a reasonably attractive everyman, and in this early noir it’s Victor Mature as a show-business promoter named Frankie Christopher, accused of the murder of one of his discoveries, Vicky Lynn (Carole Landis). Much like Laura (reviewed here) the film introduces a handful of men that were practically obsessed with the murdered woman, though this time Christopher slowly learns to appreciate her sister Jill — also attractive, but in a less conventional way — in a subtle illustration of the difference between lust and love. But the best and most fascinating performance in the film belongs to Laird Cregar as a policeman so keen to arrest Christopher he’s willing to invest his own time and money. To call him a physically imposing presence is an understatement — he’s a wall that moves around the room threatening to close in on Christopher. And without giving away too much about the film, the script gives him one scene that completely humanizes the character. While a viewer watches a film like this expecting that most of the actors will certainly have died by now, I was surprised to discover the sad detail that Cregar only had feature roles in a handful of films before dying of heart failure at 31 years old.

It’s pretty much a dead genre, film noir. Even if it had a great deal of stylistic influence on generations of filmmakers, it somehow couldn’t translate into colour, or a world where men don’t wear hats and people don’t frequently smoke. In the film world, it’s somehow a bit of an evolutionary dead end, and a modern attempt at a noir needs to borrow so many old trappings it can feel like parody as much as tribute. But they fascinate me, because much like Westerns — which have, of course, survived the decades more comfortably if they’re produced less frequently these days — the simplicity of the framework allows for some remarkably strong statements to hide in plain sight. They’re a curious urban brother to Westerns — so overtly stylish they sometimes threaten to be cartoonish, and yet they’re all based on some kind of strange, secret and vaguely shameful truth. If our modern-day mythology starts with the pioneering spirit of Westerns, film noir is the urban, unavoidable next stop. And it’s only if we ever get to a perfect world that it will be completely obsolete.

The first time I saw Laura five years ago, I thought it was a well-produced drama with a good score, cinematography and performances. And then I forgot about it. But I recently returned to it after seeing Where the Sidewalk Ends, with Andrews as another tough detective, this time an extremely violent one trying to overcome his harsher instincts and working desperately to cover up his accidental killing of a prime suspect. Tierney returns as his love interest, in a supporting role where she’s nevertheless memorable as someone that represents the kind of life he can manage to have if he wriggles out of his current situation. It’s also a very well-produced film, though closer to the kind of film noir that visits gritty city streets repeatedly, and doesn’t have the presence of any character along the lines of an intellectual newspaper columnist. Once again, Andrews is excellent. Where the Sidewalk Ends certainly doesn’t manage to feel like any kind of fable, and is closer in tone to something like Panic in the Streets (1950), but is still a solid drama, putting the viewer in the curious position of pulling for a cop that’s trying to cheat the system. While Laura is another murky journey towards truth and redemption, most of the conversations are in living rooms and various fairly affluent homes. Looking back on the careers of Tierney and Andrews, it’s easy to see how they could’ve been tremendous stars (both weren’t, for various reasons), though I  hope they were content with interesting careers, and in Laura, at least one remarkable film.

Connery had already featured in a much more potent meditation on change, ageing, and to some extent redundancy and inflexibility in Robin and Marian. Away on the crusades twenty years, Robin returns to find the Sheriff of Nottingham (Robert Shaw) is still around, and Marion (Audrey Hepburn) has entered a small convent. Critic Roger Ebert is absolutely right that Connery and Hepburn work well together here, and seem to be in complete agreement about the nature of the film. In fact, between them they make the film, though they have great support from Shaw as the Sheriff and Nicol Williamson as Little John. Connery and Hepburn are utterly believable as two people who were once in love, and Connery and Williamson are just as believable as two close friends that would die for each other.

With all due respect to a great critic, I disagree with Ebert when he suggests the humour is misplaced — I think the humour and touches of warmth help the viewer feel these characters are human, which heightens the drama. It also lightens an otherwise bleak film about people ageing and ultimately failing to change the world around them. The film suggests you can defeat the Sheriff, but he’ll be back. And if he isn’t, there are always others that are only too happy to hoard all the wealth and power. “I know your type,” Robin says to one of the more powerful lackeys he faces. Greed also takes various forms and is excused in various ways, as Robin explains in a powerful speech about religious fanaticism and the horror of the crusades.

It’s a film that gets mixed reviews, because some would prefer not to see these characters stripped of all their magic, as Leonard Maltin complains in his movie guide. But that’s about viewer expectations, not about this film. Certainly, those expecting a swashbuckling affair won’t enjoy watching an old warrior refuse to change, refuse to live happily and go quietly, and drag various others with him. And just to make it the polar opposite of earlier films, it’s all to no avail. As King John, Ian Holm gets exactly one scene that makes it clear the return of Robin is really just something of a nuisance, and changes nothing. But for those who approach the film the right way, it’s quite sad, beautiful and touching. And we can always cheer ourselves up by going back and watching Errol Flynn, right?

Vegas reporter Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin) predates the X-Files by a few decades (and undoubtedly helped pave the way for it, and similar shows) as a man struggling with officials, and determined to let the world know a serial killer is actually a vampire. With a screenplay by Richard Matheson (based on an unpublished novel by Jeff Rice), The Night Stalker is B-movie TV that manages to be memorably good fun. In fact, promotional spots must have created a buzz before it was shown, because it became the highest rated TV-movie up to that point, inspiring a second TV-movie and brief TV series.

It certainly does have some memorable, stylish moments — one stuntman is required to leap out of the way as a crashing police motorbike comes unexpectedly sliding straight for him — that I think would’ve been quite bold for TV in 1972, and good performances from a number of American character actors like Claude Akins and Elisha Cook Sr, most of whom seem to recognize that taking any material seriously helps to elevate it. In particular, Darren McGavin as Kolchak rails against his editor for “suppressing” the truth and interrupts news conferences with important questions like he’s in a Shakespeare play, clearly relishing the role. On a certain level the scenes with Kolchak and his editor literally yelling at each other (which is every scene they’re in together, it seems) should be absurd, but somehow it works, maybe as some kind of weird physical manifestation of some of the themes, or the conflict between revealing the truth and editing it, so the public won’t panic. It might also be the first appearance of a particular kind of genre-crossing, considering it’s a vampire story with narration typical of film noir and hard-boiled detective stories (the above quote is from the film).

If the film has a fault, it’s that it doesn’t include women, except to have them around as potential victims. In a scene where one woman is stalked in a parking lot, they don’t even appear to have arranged a professional actor, and her caricature of a terrified person turns the scene into parody. Kolchak has a girlfriend, but by the end of the film city officials have told her to leave him, so she does. Aside from that, they said to leave town, so she does. It certainly dates the film. It ain’t just a world with vampires, it’s a man’s world with vampires. Otherwise, The Night Stalker is an above-average vampire film, because aside from a suspenseful vampire hunt, there’s a lot implied about the importance of checks and balances, and plucky individuals who demand the truth. If it were remade today, it would probably be about the most determined blogger in the world.

I see the film as one about potential, with one unique experience dropped into a limited world and changing things, and it’s remarkable at capturing that childlike frame of reference where even the broken shell of a house has strange imaginative potential. Ana’s father enjoys a glass beehive for the “mysterious, maddened commotion,” inside, the “teeming bridges and stairways of wax.” If anything represents the constantly engaging adult world that leaves little time for imagination, it’s this beehive. And we all know her attempts to avoid an uncreative life are important and possibly doomed. Ana recalls that the Frankenstein monster responded to kindness from the girl by the lake, but also asks why he killed her. The answer is he didn’t mean it, he threw her in the water playfully but didn’t know his own strength, in a moment that was cut from early releases of the film. It was clear later in Frankenstein that the girl was dead, and ironically the cut scene left room for any number of horrific interpretations. It remains to be seen if Ana will grow up making the imaginative leap of putting herself in someone else’s place — the same imaginative leap that allows for compassion — but it would seem there’s a strong possibility.

Made in the declining years of the Franco regime, the subtleness and symbolism was at least partly a requirement, rather than a choice. There’s much more to be found in the film, though I’ll leave out any more plot details in favour of simply saying it’s a film I could easily see again to test my own interpretation and possibly make some new ones. It could just as easily be argued the beehive represents family, and Ana wanders dangerously from it (though of course, that’s a trifle suffocating and I don’t like it as much).  What’s certain here is that it’s a slow moving and almost meditative film, but a timeless one for its beauty, thoughtfulness and symbolism. The music, acting and cinematography are flawless, and even a brief scene where Ana and her sister run home from the film shrieking “Frankenstein!” rings true, and feels convincing, so that anything Ana imagines is embedded in the stark contrast of realism. This film is a classic for some very good reasons.

The special-effects are good, though somewhat dated as they’re all early CGI, and the acting ranges from outstanding to remarkably awkward. But the real star here is the writing. Creator J. Michael Straczynski has a talent for giving characters quirks that make them seem very real, and a talent for dialogue:

A character about to time-travel quips “Can I bring you back anything from the future? Some bagels? Fresh milk?” Another character sighs and comments “Perhaps it was something I said,” and gets the reply, “Perhaps it is everything you say.”

There are a number of reliably good actors in the main cast, but the standout performance is from the late Andreas Katsulas as one of the alien ambassadors, G’kar. He’s in several layers of makeup, but conveys a changing and maturing character, enduring a great deal as gracefully as possible and getting some of the best speeches along the way. In fact, his character literally goes from petulant egomaniac to spiritual leader. Peter Jurasik is also worth special mention. As another alien ambassador, he’s a combination of Bela Lugosi and a peacock.  Stick with Babylon 5 through a somewhat clunky first season (and really, most shows have some establishing groundwork to do in the first season) and the rewards arrive more and more frequently.