The camera glides across the Chicago skyline, glistening lights twinkling in the darkness, before the camera glides down to a roof-top party and comes to rest at the lonely table of Jerry (Fredric Marsh), a drunken reporter and aspiring playwright who is hiding behind a wall of empty whiskey bottles. After spying the delightful Joan (Sylvia Sidney) the two hit it off and fall in love. Jerry thinks Joan is “swell”, even if he can’t quite recognise her face after several drinks, and Joan finds Jerry sweet and charming, even if he can’t quite recognise her face after several drinks.

…

I was rather excited to be back in a cinema last night after almost a year. I was less excited about the fact the first movie I’ve be watching after such an absence would be ‘Nomadland’ (2020), a movie where I had so little empathy for any of the characters on screen (i.e. none whatsoever) that, by the end, I was starting to worry if I was maybe an out and out sociopath. Or maybe I just can’t relate to anyone who views poo-ing into a bucket as a desirable lifestyle choice. Either way, I was profoundly bored.

So ‘Nomadland’…

I’d had the blu ray of Sidney Lumet’s ‘The Offence’ (1973) sitting on my shelf unwatched for several years because I was worried it was going to be an emotionally and psychologically brutal, exhausting, harrowing and uncomfortable experience, but as I had promised a couple of friends last week that I’d finally watch it I thought I had better do so. After all, it might not be that brutal a mov… oh Christ, it most certainly is! Help!

The sensation of palpable unease is evident from the very opening — an ugly, harsh light blinds us as, superimposed over this…

All I knew going into Roy Ward Baker’s ‘The One That Got Away’ (1957) was that it was about “the only German prisoner of war captured in Britain who managed to escape and successfully return to his homeland”, which is exactly what this movie is. Yet that sentence is carefully worded so even though it is totally accurate, and fully reveals the ending, there is so much more excitement, incident and surprises here than I imagined. Boy, this film is fantastic!

Oberleutnant Franz von Werra (Hardy Kruger), a Luftwaffe pilot, is shot down and crash lands in Britain. Werra is…

Catastrophe! Disaster! A huge fire is out of control at an oil refinery and every fire brigade in the area is racing to the scene. Every fire brigade except one that is and that’s the fire brigade of Bishop’s Wallop (what a great name), an incompetent 3 man outfit under the “command” of Captain Viking (Will Hay). They didn’t hear the fire alarm as an old sock has been stuffed in the clanger because Captain Viking suffers from insomnia and didn’t want his sleep disturbed that week.

After a call from headquarters they dash off — Viking, Albert and Harbottle…

Alfred L. Werker and Anthony Mann’s (uncredited) ‘He Walked by Night’ (1948) starts with location footage of L.A. (“a bunch of suburbs in search of a city”) whilst a voice over describes this new type of city, the large police force needed to patrol it and the technology (radio hubs, information gathering systems, facial reconstruction techniques) now at their disposal. This is the face of modern America. This is the face of modern policing.

And the police will need all the technological help they can get because one of their officers, Officer Rawlins, has just been gunned down at point…

What initially struck me watching ‘Ride the High Country’ (1962) for the first time last night was just how many of director Sam Peckinpah’s concerns are already fully present: old timers out for one last ride; the intrusion of technology into the “West”; the passing of an age; loyalty and violence. “This is quite like ‘The Wild Bunch’ in many ways”, I thought to myself as aging lawman, Steve Judd (Joel McCrea), convinces his one-time partner, Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott), to join him for one last job. Except this job, to transport some gold from the mountain top mine down…

‘The H-Man’ (1958), or to give it its more impressive alternative title ‘Beauty and the Liquid Men’, initially covers ground similar to director Ishirō Honda and special effects master Eiji Tsuburaya’s ‘Godzilla’ (1954) in taking the true story of the fishing boat Lucky Dragon 5’s exposure to radiation from a U.S. hydrogen bomb test as its starting point, but rather than turning it into a giant monster movie they turn it into a film noir with melting humans. Awesome!

During a drug bust a gangster, Misaki, is run over by a police car leaving no body but, instead, only his…