The Man Between - 1953 film review

Carol Reed was a first-rate film director and The Third Man (1949) was perhaps his greatest achievement. That is a film I know well, but I wasn't familiar with The Man Between, released in 1953, until recently. This film revisits some of the issues at the heart of his earlier masterpiece, in particular the complexities of life in post-war continental Europe. The setting is Berlin, a divided city.

I first visited Berlin as a student and stayed with a nice family, the Wehmeyers, who had an apartment right next to the Berlin Wall. Occasionally, for instance while having an evening meal, you would hear shots being fired at people trying to escape to the West. It was a surreal and memorable trip, totally fascinating, and the history of Berlin has intrigued me ever since. When I visited many years later and wandered freely around the Brandenburg Gate, something that was impossible on my first visit, it was a truly moving experience.

The Man Between is set at a time before the Berlin Wall was erected, but the tensions between East and West are already apparent, with posters of Stalin everywhere on the East side, and authorities in the East determined to crack down on people trying to get away. Into this tinderbox ventures Susanne Mallison (Claire Bloom), who has come to visit her brother Martin (Geoffrey Toone) and his newish German wife Bettina (Hildegard Knef). It soon becomes clear that Bettina has something to hide and that her secret concerns a German called Ivo (James Mason).

Bloom, Knef and Mason are three particularly charismatic and gifted actors, and their performances make the most of the material. The story begins extremely well, but once Bettina's secret is revealed, and Susanne finds herself mixed up with Ivo, the pace does drag a bit. The presentation of war-ravaged Berlin is excellent, and the finale poignant, and although this isn't in the same league as The Third Man, it's a very well-made movie. 

Forgotten Book - Home to Roost

Not long ago, I acquired a copy of Andrew Garve's Home to Roost (1976) and it was working its way up the to-read pile ever so slowly until Jamie Sturgeon happened to recommend it to me. I was conscious that it was Garve's penultimate novel, written when he was coming to the end of a long career, and this made me wonder if it might be a bit lacklustre. Not a bit of it. The story is interesting and definitely 'different'.

The narrator is Walter Haines, who starts with a straightforward but rather enticing opening sentence: 'This is an account of how Max Ryland got himself murdered, and what happened afterwards.'  As Haines says rather disarmingly, the build-up seems a little slow - and this may be what prompted Collins Crime Club, not for the only time, to tell a good deal of the story (too much, I'd say) on the dustwrapper blurb. But Garve writes readably and moves things along at a decent pace, so the extended build-up wasn't a problem for me.

Haines, like his creator, is a journalist who becomes a crime novelist and enjoys success. His work is filmed, as Garve's was. And when he meets the lovely Laura, who becomes his wife, all seems set fair. The snag is that Haines isn't as likeable as one might wish. Laura understandably becomes frustrated and when the couple are befriended by a famous actor, Max Ryland, one thing leads to another, and she becomes Max's lover. And then, as we've expected from that first line, Max winds up dead. But - Walter has an alibi. So he's in the clear. Or is he?   

The plot is unusual and the ending of the story is subtle. One of the online reviews of this book is by that voracious reader and thoughtful critic Kate Jackson. Her thoughts are here, and all I will say is that there is a coded interpretation of the ending which reflects my understanding of the final pages. I liked this book a lot. The sheer variety of Garve's stories was a great strength of his.

Moon - 2009 film review

I've always enjoyed science fiction, although I read and watch much less of it than crime fiction, partly because I must admit that I find a little can often go quite a long way. As a writer, I've dabbled in the genre, and I might well do so again in the future. So when I get the chance to see a well-regarded sci-fi film, I'm happy to take it. And I was pleased to catch up with Moon, a film that dates back to 2009 but which still strikes me as fresh and interesting, with some sharp social points lurking beneath the surface of a well-crafted script by Nathan Parker. The director, by the way, is Duncan Jones - son of David 'Space Oddity' Bowie.

A company called Lunar Industries has prospered by mining helium-3 and sending it back to Earth in canisters to alleviate an energy crisis. Thanks to the use of automation and AI, only one human being is required to be on the Moon to supervise this activity. He is Sam Bell (played by another Sam, Sam Rockwell) and he's coming to the end of his three-year contract.

Sam is looking forward to going back home. He gets video messages from his wife Tess, who was pregnant with their daughter when he went on his mission, but live communication isn't possible because of technical problems. Sam is, however, supported by GERTY, a robot voiced by Kevin Spacey (prior to his well-documented career implosion). Unfortunately, it seems that the lack of direct human contact for so long is having an effect, and Sam begins to experience hallucinations. Things start to go from bad to worse...

There are some good plot twists, so I don't want to say too much more about the film, other than that I enjoyed it. The story unfolds at a fairly good pace, and Sam Rockwell's performance, in a challenging role, is first-rate. He's not an actor I know much about, but I was impressed. If you like sci-fi, Moon is definitely worth watching.

BlackBerry - 2023 film review

I can remember quite vividly a partners' meeting that I attended, perhaps twenty years ago, when a corporate lawyer in my firm waxed lyrical about the virtues of the BlackBerry device. At that time, BlackBerries were much in vogue, and before long we all had one for work use. It seemed so cutting edge...but of course, with technology, the cutting edge soon gets very blunt indeed.

BlackBerry is a 2023 Canadian film, co-written by Matt Johnson and Matthew Miller, and directed by Johnson, which charts the rise and fall of the company that made the device. It told me quite a bit I didn't know (although of course, the story has no doubt been significantly adjusted to make it more entertaining) and gave me no reason whatsoever to reconsider my instinctive wariness of tech barons.

The story begins twenty years ago. Two boffins who run a company called Research in Motion, Mike Lazarides and Douglas Fregin (played by Jay Baruchel and Matt Johnson himself) pitch a new device which attracts the interest of a hard-nosed businessman, Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton). He puts some money into the company and before long, despite a chaotic approach reflected in the cinematography, they come up with the BlackBerry and starting raking in zillions.

All goes well until the arrival of the iPhone. The success story starts to unravel and things go from bad to worse once the authorities start looking into some dodgy stock options. The weakness of the film is that we don't get much insight into the outside lives of the key players. When you're telling a story about living people who aren't short of money, you have to be very careful. But as light entertainment, BlackBerry works fairly well. And I found it almost nostalgic viewing - it's a very long time since my own BlackBerry went to the scrap heap...

The Woman in Cabin 10 - Netflix 2025 film review

Ruth Ware is a very successful writer whose novels of psychological suspense show a real talent for, and commitment to, ingenious plotting. Over the past fifteen years or so there have been many psychological thrillers that are said to have 'a jaw-dropping twist', but in some cases, I find that the finale is quite a let-down. It's one thing to come up with a brilliant premise, something else to deliver a resolution that doesn't disappoint. Ruth Ware's ability to do both is what has put her in the elite. I've never met her in person, but I did once chair an online panel on which she was a speaker, and very good she and her distinguished colleagues were too.

I read her novel The Woman in Cabin 10 several years ago, and now I've had a chance to watch the Netflix version of the book. It's a story that seems to me to be a modern version of the kind of emotional thriller at which Cornell Woolrich used to excel - in books like Phantom Lady. A protagonist comes across someone, who promptly disappears - and everyone else denies that they ever existed. This is a set-up that I love, as long as the explanation works.

The cast is very good. The consistently excellent Keira Knightley plays Lo Blacklock, a journalist invited to join a party on a superyacht owned by billionaire Anne Bulmer, who is terminally ill, and her husband Richard (Guy Pearce). The guests include a doctor played by Art Malik and a chap called Heatherley (David Morrissey). The production, equally, is top-notch.

Lo finds herself in the wrong cabin (cabin 10, next to her own) while trying to avoid her ex, a photographer who just so happens to be on board. In cabin 10, she sees a woman, to whom she apologises before making a hasty exit. But that night, someone goes overboard and Lo is convinced it's the woman in cabin 10. The snag is everyone tells her that cabin 10 was never occupied, and there's no sign of the woman she saw.

The solution to the puzzle, when it emerges, is not totally original, but that's fine - true originality is vanishingly rare. The way the story is presented works well. Of course, some suspension of disbelief is required. But I enjoyed this one. 

    

Forgotten Book - The Unicorn Murders

 'You are on holiday in Paris...There is nothing on your mind, and you are utterly at peace with all the world...Then you see walking towards you a girl you have previously known in England...[who] walks straight up to your table and veryy gravely begins to repeat a nursery rhyme. She then sits down at the table and proceeds to tell you what sounds like the most bewildering gibberish you have ever heard in your life.'

So begins The Unicorn Murders by Carter Dickson, narrated by Ken Blake (also the narrator of The Plague Court Murders) who humours the girl, Evelyn Cheyne, and thus 'became involved in a series of events which can still retrospectively give me a shiver...' It's a tantalising start to an unusual story, which blends a secret service thriller with a cerebral 'impossible crime' problem and plenty of twists in the finest tradition of whodunits.

Sir Henry Merrivale is a former employer of Ken and before long he comes on to the scene. After a series of unlikely events, Sir Henry, Ken, and Evelyn wind up in a French chateau, along with a superstar French detective and a French master criminal. But who is the detective and who is the super-criminal? And how are two murders, apparently inflicted by the horn of a unicorn, actually committed?

This is a complex mystery, so complex that Sir Henry's explanation at the end of the book is necessarily lengthy. But he does tie together all the many strands of a convoluted plot that tests one's suspension of disbelief to the limit. However, I'd say that Dickson (aka John Dickson Carr, of course) just about manages to make it all work, quite an achievement. A rollicking read.  

The Truman Show - 1998 film review

I watched The Truman Show not too long after its original release in 1998 and loved it. Now that 'reality TV' has become omnipresent on the schedules, I thought it was worth taking another look to see if it still stands up well after more than a quarter of a century. The short answer is that it does, and that it still offers far more in terms of thought-provoking entertainment than any reality TV show I've ever heard of.

The concept is brilliant in its simplicity, as well as in the fact that quite a few people will be tempted to identify with the psychology of Truman Burbank's situation. He is a young man who lives in the delightful island of Seahaven, blissfully unaware that he is the star of a globally popular reality TV show and that all the people who surround him are actors. However, the truth slowly starts to dawn on him, much to the dismay of the show's creators, who devise all kinds of (often very amusing) ways to deter him from trying to escape from the wholly artificial world - full of product placement - in which he lives.

The Truman Show is a great film because it works extremely well on more than one level. There are some genuinely funny scenes, as well as some that are quite poignant. Jim Carrey is at his very best as Truman, while Andrew Niccol;s script is excellent. Apparently the director Peter Weir persuaded Niccol to shift his approach from purely dystopian to something more nuanced and humour-laced, and this works very successfully.

I must say that I am not a fan of reality TV and I avoid it whenever I can. But of course it's hard to escape and so I have seen quite a few examples (even though I've never managed to stomach a complete episode of Big Brother or its variants). It seems to me that it's better described as 'unreality TV'. There's something unpleasant and arguably unhealthy about a lot of it; certainly real life seems to me to be too interesting and valuable to fritter much of it away on that kind of stuff. The Truman Show exposes the shallowness of this particular form of entertainment, but it does so in a way that is appealing rather than preachy. Unlike any reality TV shows that I'm aware of, this film has stood the test of time. 

Salt - 2010 film review

Salt is an action thriller starring Angelina Jolie. The writer, Kurt Wimmer, has a number of film credits, including co-writing the remake of that notable 60s film The Thomas Crown Affair, while the director, Philip Noyce, has directed such films as Dead Calm and The Bone Collector. So a strong team was involved.

The film begins with scenes in North Korea. Evelyn Salt (Jolie) is suspected of spying and after she is given some rough treatment the CIA arranges a prisoner exchange to secure her release. She is reunited with her boyfriend Mike, who has been campaigning on her behalf. He proposes marriage even though she admits to him that she is indeed a CIA operative.

After this preamble, we get into the meat of the story. Salt is interrogating a Russian defector called Orlov together with a couple of her colleagues. Orlov claims to have knowledge of a plan for Russian sleeper agents to attack the US; part of the scheme involves one of those agents assassinating the Russian president. And then he reveals the name of that agent...which is Evelyn Salt.

This is in many ways an update of the 'who can you trust?' Cold War movies of the 60s and 70s, and it has itself in some respects been superseded by more recent political developments. Angelina Jolie's charismatic screen presence makes the film watchable enough, but I felt that some of the action scenes verged on the cartoonish and that it became increasingly difficult to care whose side Evelyn Salt was really on. Not a bad film, but as far as I was concerned, a bit of a disappointment.

The Lair of the White Worm - 1988 film review

Ken Russell had many qualities as a film-maker, but I wouldn't put subtlety at the top of the list, even though I enjoyed several of the movies he directed. I've now caught up with his adaptation of Bram Stoker's story The Lair of the White Worm, and 'over the top' is barely an adequate description. You have to regard it as a comic horror film, I think, with the emphasis on 'comic', though there are a few scenes that are definitely not for the faint-hearted. But for all its absurdity, it has a certain appeal as a guilty pleasure, which is why it's achieved something of a cult reputation.

The cast is terrific. It includes the young Peter Capaldi, the young Hugh Grant, and, in a small part, Gina McKee. Stratford Johns, better known to cop show fans as Charlie Barlow, makes an unexpected appearance. And Amanda Donohoe (who else?) plays the sultry temptress Lady Sylvia Marsh. Sammi Davis is quite good as Mary Trent, although Catherine Oxenburg, playing her sister, acts as though she'd rather be doing something else.

The locations include a sinister cavern which is actually Thor's Cave, in Wetton, Staffordshire. It looks intriguing and watching the film made me want to visit the cave one day. On the assumption, of course, that there are no monsters lurking in the hidden depths of the cavern's interior...

I haven't read the book, but I've no doubt that Russell's adaptation is a very loose one. He also updates the storyline to the 1980s. Briefly, it features an old legend about a monstrous worm and it's pretty barmy throughout. But the ending is surprisingly good and, whatever else one can say about the film, it doesn't lack pace or incident. 

Forgotten Book - The Tremayne Case

Before I move on to today's Forgotten Book, can I thank everyone who has subscribed to The Life of Crime Premium, my new monthly Substack newsletter, the first issue of which came out last weekend. The response, and the comments from subscribers who have signed up, have been very motivating. The first supplementary newsletter will come out in the next few days and I'm already working on next month's main newsletter, which will give exclusive insights into and info about the British Library's Crime Classics. If you're interested, you can check it out here. 

Alan Thomas made a strong impression with his first novel, The Death of Laurence Vining, and he followed it up in 1929 with The Tremayne Case. I have a copy that he inscribed to Lady Gladstone, which has a facsimile dust jacket. I was amused to note that the front cover has the title and the publisher's name, but not the author's name, which is confined to the spine. But as you can see, on the front cover is the phrase 'a murder mystery'. Since the death in question is deemed by an inquest to be a case of suicide, this amounts to a bit of a spoiler, I'd have thought, even if the vast majority of readers will figure out that there's more to the death of the victim than meets the eye.

One extremely interesting facet of the story is that the plot involves a fake telephone call to lure someone out of the way and I'll be discussing this type of story element further in a future supplement to The Life of Crime Premium.

We see events from the point of view of a young chap called Jimmy Thurston. He falls in love with a young woman he sees at the opera and shows characteristic determination in tracking her down. He becomes friendly with her and her father, but has a rival in a man called Darcy, and also in an acquaintance called Tremayne. 

Suffice to say that this is an 'impossible crime' mystery, and the central trick is a good one in my opinion. The dust jacket blurb describes the story as 'quite definitely a masterpiece'. I wouldn't go that far, but I enjoyed reading it, even if the relentless xenophobia displayed by numerous characters including Jimmy was a bit much. Alan Thomas wrote readably and had some good ideas, making it a surprise that he's faded so far out of sight. I've now read three of his novels and I'd be glad to read more.