R.I.P.

The Madness of George King

Yes, George King. That guy you never heard of. Him!

And no, me neither. But he had a short, intense career as director that took in Tod Slaughter horrors and Edgar Wallace shockers and modest little thrillers of all kinds. A number of them have been made available on no-frills but quite adequate DVDs from Odeon Entertainment’s Best of British label. What you basically get are nice little films of the kind that should be filling afternoon TV schedules but no longer do. Well worth renting if you feel like something undemanding, perhaps with a few familiar faces.

And once in a while, George lets rip with some actual CINEMA. THE CASE OF THE FRIGHTENED LADY, from Edgar Wallace’s play, is a predictable and hokey mystery with some amusingly colourful retro dialogue (the detective inspector and his idiot sidekick played by King regular Ronald Shiner are very much in the INSPECTOR HORNLEIGH cross-talk comedy vein). It’s kept on its feet by somebody’s smart decision to cut all the scenes into pieces and intercut them like mad, which boosts the pace beyond what you’d expect in a British cheapie of this kind.

And then the flick suddenly gets all atmospheric in a near-giallo way. Now, this is the climax I’m showing you, but in a way I’m doing you a favour because it saves you watching the rest. Trust me, you’d guess whodunnit anyway. (Nevertheless, I sort of recommend the film as mild fun. Rent it if you’re in the UK and you like old British warhorses.)

Spoilers:

The killer has used, as an alibi, the sound of his piano practice from a distant room, but it’s actually a record he’s playing while he’s off doing nefarious things with thuggee scarves (the movie was known stateside as THE SCARF MURDER MYSTERY, which is an even blander title that the one it started life with). So we get a beautiful, contrapuntal score to this sinister scene, plus the elegant shadow-play…

And that’s Marius Goring popping up at the end with a look of madness in his eyes.

“I lost my head.”

La Fin du Babelfish

I found one review online of Julien Divivier’s LA FIN DU JOUR, suggesting that there may be an official DVD release out there somewhere (there are these nice screen grabs) though I can’t find anything on Amazon.fr. Unfortunately, the review is written in French, and in a way calculated to defeat Altavista Babelfish completely. I like some of the sentences that result though:

“And for us refiler this evil which to obviously tapped the brain him, Duvivier was not there with the back of the spoon.” Rather a lovely image: “Not there with the back of the spoon.” Why don’t we have this common phrase or saying in English? It must be incredibly useful, whatever the hell it means.

Then there’s “…l’eternal lining in eternal representation, with this band of scouts, for him, true cure of youth, is not used for nothing considering early late to the mortal is a prelude to with large nothing imposes itself in large pumps…” which is both poetic and horrible.

And then, hang onto your hats: “…the elegant actor who to carburize in the middle – still that one, his wife having left it and even joined the paradise to have believed that Saint-Clearly could give him on ground, does not function any more that on a half-ventricle -, and with honesty – never indeed, it will not disavow Racine, Shakespeare and their tragedies out of time when well even those, considered to be obsolete by the public, are worth to him most strict of lonelinesses -, nails the nozzle in Saint-Clearly of any hair.”

Even the punctuation is a joy. What’s exceptional is that not only can I not figure out if the reviewer likes the film (not the most important issue but often a basic one), I can’t figure out anything he’s saying at all. He has successfully gutted the Babelfish.

Anyhow, copies of LA FIN DU JOUR are still being given away gratis here if you declare yourselves in the Comments section and say you want one. Also, I’m going to review it myself here in a week or so, so watch ’em if you got ’em and you can join the love-in.