The Third Alibi - 1961 film review

I didn't have especially high hopes of The Third Alibi, a 1961 crime film directed by Montgomery Tully, but I found myself enjoying a tautly directed and neatly written "inverted mystery" that surprised me more than once with the turns taken by the plot. The storyline contains several familiar ingredients, but here they are blended with a good deal of skill to produce a film that is distinctly superior to most British B-movies of its time.

The story was actually based on a play called "Moment of Blindness" by the husband and wife duo Pip and Jane Baker. Whether the play was actually performed before being filmed, I don't know, but as yet I haven't found a trace of it. The Bakers, incidentally, became much better known for their TV work, most notably on Doctor Who.

Laurence Payne, an actor best known for his TV appearances as Sexton Blake, and a man who became a reasonably successful crime novelist, plays a selfish and weak-willed composer called Norman Martell. He is married to Helen (Patricia Dainton) but having an affair with her half-sister Peggy (Jane Griffiths). Life gets more complicated when Peggy announces that she is pregnant. Helen refuses him a divorce and also keeps secret the fact that she is suffering from a serious heart condition. The plot potters around for a while, and the young Cleo Laine sings a ditty supposedly composed by Martell. (There's an uncredited appearance by Dudley Moore,  no less, as a pianist!) It is not a memorable song; suffice to say that Norman is no Burt Bacharach. Nor, when he begins to plan an ingenious murder, does he prove to be one of the more successful killers.

From the moment that his murder plot begins to unravel, the story gathers real momentum, and John Arnatt gives a nice performance as an affable but shrewd superintendent, while Arthur Hewlett makes his presence felt at the end of the film. In researching the film, I found a negative review by David Parkinson on the Radio Times site which struck me as excessively harsh. Much more thoughtful and perceptive is the review on the Classic Movie Ramblings blog, which describes the film as "a lot more special than one would expect". CMR recommends this film, and so do I.

Thriller of the Year - theatre review

Until last Thursday, I'd not gone to the theatre for more years than I care to remember. It's not because of any lack of enthusiasm - as a student, I used to go to see plays constantly -, but I found working life (especially when my commute home often lasted until about 8.15 pm)  and the need to write at weekends incompatible with theatre-going. One has to prioritise. But this is something I'd like to change, and at least I've now made a start on fulfilling this ambition

The play I went to see was a local am dram production - Thriller of the Year, performed by the Bridgewater Players. The venue was Thelwall Parish Hall, down the road from home, which I last visited a couple of years ago to give a talk about crime writing. The Players are a long-established group - this production is their 179th. I've often seen adverts for their productions, but never found the time to watch them. Having prepared for the evening with a nice meal in the cosy low-beamed village pub across the road, I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

The play dates from the late 60s - a landline telephone plays a central part in the story, and there are plenty of other period touches. The storyline rather appealed to me, a few days after receiving the Poirot- it features a crime writer returning home after winning an award! A variety of incidents make it seem as though someone wants her dead, and is using her prize-winning thriller as a template for the crime.

Glyn Jones wrote the play, and one notable feature is that the cast of five is all female. Jones was a South African born actor, playwright, novelist, director, and lyricist who achieved the unusual feat of writing one early episode of Doctor Who and appearing in another. Some bits of the dialogue are rather wooden, and would have been in the 60s, and there were one or two iffy plot elements, but overall I was entertained. And the cast, led by Anita Rushman as the author Gillian Howard, overcame any first night nerves to do a sound job. I must also say that a ticket costing six quid with a cup of coffee and biscuits included has to represent fantastic value for a good evening out. Overdue as it was, I was glad finally to make the acquaintance of the Bridgewater Players.

The Hypnotist - film review

The Hypnotist is a 1957 British film, which in the US was given the title Scotland Yard Dragnet. I don't think The Hypnotist is an ideal title, but the American alternative is terrible. Thankfully, the film itself is pretty good. It doesn't seem excessively stagey, even though it was based on a play by Falkland Cary, who apparently was an obstetrician before he turned to delivering work for the theatre.

Paul Carpenter plays Valentine Neal, who is involved in a flying accident and suffers an inexplicable psychological trauma as a result. His fiancee, Patricia Roc (who was a very celebrated actress in her day) finds the medics stumped by his condition, so she seeks help from a family friend, Dr Pelham (Roland Culver) who is an expert on getting to the root of psychological problems.

The murder mystery that develops from there is straightfoward in some respects,but I felt that the director, Montgomery Tully, made pretty good use of the material. Admittedly, an interlude in which our hero loses his memory and gets involved with a pretty girl he meets in a jazz club seemed more like a commercial for Chris Barber's Jazz Band than something that contributed to the plot, but the story held my attention better than many with a much bigger budget.

In researching the film, I found that Carpenter, sadly, died quite young and in rather tragic circumstances. On this evidence, he wasn't a top-notch actor, but I see that he took a lead role in a film of Julian Symons' The Narrowing Circle - a book that I didn't know had been filmed. Sadly, no DVD appears to be available. I assume it sank without trace, but if anyone knows anything about it, do please let me know.

One actor I did recognise was William Hartnell, who played the Scotland Yard cop in his customary grumpy manner. A few years later, of course, he would achieve a kind of immortality by becoming the very first Doctor Who.

The Intruders - BBC Two - TV review

The Intruders began on BBC Two this evening with a double-header, the first two episodes of an eight part serialised supernatural thriller. The story is based on a book of the same name written by Michael Marshall Smith, who also writes as Michael Marshall. I haven't read his work (though one of his novels has lurked on my TBR pile for quite a while) but he's a best-seller, and more significantly I know some good judges who rate his books very highly. When I looked him up, I was startled to find that, like me, he was born in Knusford, but unlike me, he moved when young to Illinois. Very different from Cheshire,I bet...

I was really drawn to The Intruders by the fact that the cast is headed by John Simm. I first came across Simm a long time ago, in Cracker and The Lakes, and later I also enjoyed his performances in Life on Mars and Doctor Who. He's a very good actor, and in this show, unexpectedly, he plays an American ex-cop, who has become a writer.

He is married to a glamorous but enigmatic corporate lawyer, played by Mira Sorvino, and there are early clues that she is hiding something from him. But what? The first episode sees a rapid sequence of dramatic and confusing events. A mother and her son are shot dead by an intruder who calls at their house, looking for the woman's husband. A girl commits suicide in her bath. Later, a cat meets an unpleasant end, also in a bath. A conspiracy theorist has his head blown off by that intrusive gunman. What on earth is going on?

Probably the reason why the second episode followed immediately after the first was to give one or two more clues about the story's direction of travel. It was less cryptic, and more gripping, and I started to become more interested in the characters. Plentiful references to the number 9, and the repeated incantation of the phrase "what goes around, comes around" didn't,however,  fascinate me quite as much as the scriptwriter presumably intended. Is the story going to be strong enough to sustain eight episodes? The jury is, I think, still out on The Intruders..

Robert Banks Stewart

With surprisingly little fanfare, Robert Banks Stewart recently published a thriller, The Hurricane's Tail. Why do I say 'surprisingly'? Well, the fact is that Mr Stewart might be described as one of the more successful crime writers of the past half-century. Yet I guess that although plenty of readers will recognise his name, they will not be quite sure why it seems so familiar.

The explanation is that the name of Robert Banks Stewart has appeared on our television screens countless times, as he has been a producer and screenplay writer of great distinction. I first became aware of him years ago, and he was involved with many of the great television series. In his early days he wrote scripts for the Edgar Wallace thriller series, as well as Danger Man, starring Patrick McGoohan. These were among the first crime shows I watched on the box when I was very young.

After that, the hits kept on coming. He wrote for Doctor Who and also for The Avengers - an episode featuring a parodic version of Mensa, of which his wife was a member. He created Shoestring (one of my all-time favourite TV detective shows), starring Trevor Eve, and when that came to an end, followed it up with the even more successful, if less quirky, Bergerac, starring John Nettles. What a CV!

I've been lucky enough to come into contact recently with this wonderful writer, and I asked him about the difference between writing for TV and writing a novel. He told me, "The thing you learn as a screenwriter...ist that economy is important. The picture tells the underlying story...to a certain extent." He found that with his novel, the dialogue came easily, but that he had to work much harder to make everything else convincing: "Funny, isn't it, on screen you don't leave a lot to the imagination. In  a book, huge chunks are down to the imagination of the reader." 

The pleasure of becoming acquainted with this legendary writer has prompted me to take another look at his work, and I'll be returning to Robert Banks Stewart's brilliant career in a future post. In the meantime, The Hurricane' s Tail is definitely worth a look.

Sherlock: A Scandal in Belgravia: review

Sherlock returned to the screens this evening for a very welcome second series with A Scandal in Belgravia. The title is, of course, a play on the title of the first Holmes short story, 'A Scandal in Bohemia', but I wonder if the scriptwriter, Steven Moffat, is aware that it is also the title of a very good book by Robert Barnard? In fact, it might just be my favourite of Bob Barnard's many entertaining novels.

Back to Sherlock. Benedict Cumberbatch is splendidly cast as the great detective brought up to date for the 21st century, while Martin Freeman is a likeable Watson. If you buy into the basic concept - and I do - then there's much to enjoy in these shows, given that the scriptwriters have a real feel for detective fiction and an evident respect for Conan Doyle's achievements. Moffat has also done great work on Doctor Who, but there's a danger, as one or two episodes of Doctor Who have shown in the last couple of years, that the demands of filling an extended time slot can lead to some narrative padding. Happily, that wasn't a problem in this episode, even though it lasted for 90 minutes. It was very well crafted.

There were plenty of witty lines (I enjoyed "The Geek Interpreter", for instance), but the story was also strong, with seemingly random jokes at the start of the story turning out to form a part of quite an intricate plot which avoided tedious over-elaboration. It involved Irene Adler as a dominatrix, in possession of compromising material kept on her mobile phone. Sherlock got hold of the phone - but what was the password to unlock it? The solution to this particular puzzle was very neat.

The supporting cast was strong. Mrs Hudson is given a distinctive personality by Una Stubbs, while Mycroft Holmes is played in suitably aloof fashion by Mark Gatiss, co-creator of this series, and a succesful detective novelist himself (I haven't read his books yet, but this is a gap in my reading I must fill). And Lara Pulver was suitably glamorous as Irene Adler. You could see why Sherlock thought she was the woman.

Narrative and The Keys of Marinus

Happy New Year! I thought I’d kick off the blog in 2011 with a few thoughts on narrative inspired by watching a DVD which was a very welcome Christmas present....

The DVD is a very early Doctor Who serial, The Keys of Marinus, which I remember watching when it was first on, and I was eight years old. It stayed in my mind because of the Voord, the strange amphibious creatures who menaced the Doctor (William Hartnell) and his companions. But on watching the show again, it was interesting to see how Terry Nation, the writer who invented the Daleks, tackled narrative.

Each of the 30 minute episodes took the form of an individual quest as the time travellers try to find the fabled Keys of Marinus. The titles of the episodes – The Velvet Web, The Screaming Jungle and so on – were pretty atmospheric in a John Dickson Carr sort of way.

I was impressed by the pace of the episodes, and was kept gripped despite the ricketiness of the sets. Usually, when you watch a TV show from the 60s, it moves much more slowly than modern shows. But here Nation packed his narratives with plot twists, and this helped him to get over the countless improbabilities in his story-line. The verve with which he tells the story illustrates how popular fiction that has pace and imagination can work very well, even if the story and characters have built-in limitations. It was an object lesson in how to tell an exciting tale well.

Finally, my current plan for 2011 is to post on Monday, Wednesday and Friday each week and also add in some extra posts when time permits. Occasionally, over the past few months, work commitments have led to my changing the schedule a bit, and they have also reduced the time I have to look at other blogs. But I hope to get a bit more time in the not too distant future - we'll see!

Doctor Who - The End of Time: review

The End of Time was a two-part holiday special episode of Doctor Who which saw the departure of David Tennant, who has been superb in the role of the Doctor, and the arrival of Matt Smith. The story involved the attempt of the Master (played by John Simm, who was so good in Life on Mars) to take over Earth, and the intervention of the Time Lords, led by that one-time James Bond, Timothy Dalton. Aiding and abetting Tennant was the splendid Bernard Cribbins.

Given such a starry cast (Billie Piper and June Whitfield were among other famous faces that popped up) the show was always going to be fun to watch, and so it proved. As usual, I enjoyed Russell T. Davies’ script; he is a very good television writer, although his Doctor Who stories sometimes seem stretched out beyond their natural limits, with the extra time occupied by rather sentimental interludes, and this was for me the only weakness of The End of Time. Overall, though, it was good holiday entertainment.

I first watched Doctor Who in the days of the first Doctor, William Hartnell, and it’s interesting to see how writers have grappled over the year with the departure of their hero. In television, this may be due to an actor afraid of becoming type-cast, or even dying. Taggart survived the death of Mark McManus, and the show is still named after his character, although I don’t think the stories are quite as compelling as in the early days, when McManus was at his best and Glenn Chandler wrote some quite brilliant scripts.

In crime fiction, the author may simply tire of writing about his or her detective. Conan Doyle tried to kill off Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls, although public pressure (and lots of money) persuaded him to revive the great detective. When Nicolas Freeling killed off Van der Valk, he had Arlette, the cop’s widow, take centre stage, although not with the same level of success. I once attended a talk given by P.D. James, when she described killing off your hero as ‘foolish’, and within the crime genre, I’m inclined to agree. But in the anything-goes world of Doctor Who, a Time Lord can transform himself and sometimes, as in the Tennant era, with dazzling results.

The Waters of Mars

As I’ve mentioned in responding to comments on my post on Saturday, I share the view that the links between crime fiction and science fiction are very strong. A long list of the fine writers who have worked in both genres includes Isaac Asimov, John Sladek, Fredric Brown, and John Wyndham (though Wyndham seems to have given up on detective fiction once the Golden Age had passed.)

I was reminded of the crossover between genres by the TV special of Doctor Who which was screened last night. The Waters of Mars, in which the excellent David Tennant was paired with Lindsay Duincan, saw the Doctor land on the red planet and become embroiled in a disastrous confrontation between the first human settlers on the planet and dark, water-based forces from Ancient Mars which were hell-bent on taking over the incomers. In a nice joke, the settlers occupy Bowie Base One – a nod to the composer of that marvellous song ‘Life on Mars.’

In the last series of Doctor Who, my favourite episode featured Agatha Christie, and countless quips based on the titles of Christie’s detective novels. Here, the focus of the story was on psychological suspense, with a classic race against time. The Doctor knows that the settlers are about to die, on the very day he lands on Mars, and he fears that he can do little or nothing to save them. But might the course of history be changed in any event – and what is to happen to the Doctor himself?

The writers of The Waters of March did a good job of ratcheting up the tension – a skill required of both sci-fi and crime writers. Less time than usual was devoted to the internal anguish of the characters, a feature of the modern Doctor Who stories which sometimes slows down the action. At its best, Doctor Who is a terrific show, and The Waters of March was one of the most compelling and sharply written episodes I’ve watched for some time.

Adam Adamant again

I’ve invested in the complete collection of DVDs from the 1996-67 BBC TV series ‘Adam Adamant Lives!’ It’s a series I’ve mentioned before. Like ‘The Avengers’, ‘Doctor Who’ and ‘The Prisoner’, it’s utterly redolent of Sixties culture – right down to the melodramatic Kathy Kirby theme song - and it still bears watching today.

For those who don’t know it, the premise anticipates the Austin Powers movies. Adam is a swashbuckling Victorian adventurer, cryogenically frozen by his enemy, the mysterious and devilish ‘The Face’, and restored to life in Swinging London. He rapidly acquires a gorgeous companion, and even a butler, who assist – and sometimes obstruct – him in his battles on behalf of Good against Evil. The series featured many good actors, and one legendary director – the great Ridley Scott, long before Blade Runner.

The special features include a truly excellent documentary, which reunites Adam (the suave, if occasionally wooden, Gerald Harper) with his dolly bird chum Georgina (Juliet Harmer.) A fascinating fact is that the story-line was originally conceived as the revival in the Sixties of Sexton Blake. But the BBC couldn’t acquire the rights to Blake as a character, and he later turned up in an independent television series, played straight by Laurence Payne (himself an occasional crime novelist.)

There’s a marvellous account of the various names that were considered for the character after it was decided he had to be original, and not Blake. No question about my favourite – Darius Crud. Can you believe it? I swear it is true – I have the DVD to prove it! To my mind, it’s a great sadness that ‘Darius Crud Lives!’ was never brought to our screens. It would have acquired classic status.

When I first watched the show, at the tender age of eleven, I thought that Juliet Harmer was probably the prettiest tv star I’d ever seen, and all these years later, I’m not entirely sure I want to revise that judgement. Yet soon she more or less abandoned acting. Her role as Adam’s enthusiastic companion is still her great claim to fame. But a claim to be proud of, I think. The show was flawed, perhaps because the scripts were rushed out and therefore uneven, but it possessed elements of brilliance.