Hidden City - 1987 film review

Way back in 1977, I happened to watch a play on TV. It was called Stronger than the Sun and it was written by a young playwright called Stephen Poliakoff, someone who - I discovered - was only a few years older than me. I was impressed with the story and the quality of the writing and it's no surprise to me that Poliakoff proceeded to enjoy a successful career. When I got the chance to see the first film he wrote and directed, I was glad to seize it.

That film is Hidden City and it has a few elements in common with Stronger than the Sun, which was written ten years earlier. It boasts a good cast, led by Charles Dance, with Cassie Stuart, Bill Paterson, Alex Norton, and Richard E. Grant. However, it doesn't seem to have enjoyed much success in the cinema, and soon made its way to Channel Four. Intriguing as it undoubtedly is, the film does have a number of shortcomings which help to explain why it made little impact.

Dance plays a snooty statistician, James Richards, who complains about the incompetence of a film researcher (Stuart, an interesting actress who seems to have faded from the scene). Oddly, and in an almost Highsmithian way, she latches on to him, pestering him to take an interest in a mysterious piece of film footage that she has found. It seems to show people being abducted. When this unlikely pair of sleuths start to investigate, it becomes clear that the authorities are irritated, to say the least.

I can't really describe this as a crime film, despite the element of mystery, and it's also short of suspense. The real problem is that Poliakoff has come up with a number of good ingredients, but hasn't managed to weld them into a compelling whole. A real shame. There are a number of scenes which simply don't fit - they hold up the flow of events for no clear purpose. I'm glad to have watched it, but there is a good reason why it fell into obscurity. 

And Then There Were None - BBC 1 TV review

And Then There Were None is the finest of all Golden Age detective stories in my opinion- never mind that it lacks a great detective in the mould of Poirot or Marple. Agatha Christie wrote plenty of fine crime stories, but this has been my favourite since I first read it at a tender age. So the question I asked myself when anticipating this evening's first episode of the BBC TV three-part adaptation by Sarah Phelps was - would the TV version do the book justice?

There's been a lot of cunningly contrived publicity in the run-up to this showing which has been designed to generate interest. It has been suggested that Phelps was modernising the story in an inappropriate way, by introducing drug-taking, bad language, and other terribly topical features. Phelps, we were told, had never read any Christie before taking on the task of writing the script. I was rather sceptical about whether the script would prove as shocking as was implied. If you've ever read much Agatha Christie, you will know, for instance, that drug-taking crops up in a good many of her stories. And I devoted a good slice of The Golden Age of Murder to explaining why the perception that Christie's work is "cosy" is  feebly inadequate.

The early scenes, which set up the complex mystery, were well done, I thought. This was probably where a less accomplished screenwriter would have found it easiest to mess up. The book supplies plot, dialogue and characters aplenty, but the challenge of creating the right mood at the outset was an important test, and I felt Phelps passed it with flying colours.From then on, the excellent cast, did the work of keeping me glued to the screen. The filming hasn't been done, as far as I can tell, on Christie's beloved Burgh Island, but I kept thinking back to my own trip to Burgh in September, and my brief experience of being cut off from the mainland for a while, due to the heavy seas....

Phelps has quite an interesting approach to pacing the plot developments, and as I'm starting to study the art of scriptwriting myself, it's helpful to see how an expert does it. Charles Dance, Miranda Richardson, Aidan Turner and Maeve Dermody (who was excellent in the key role of Vera) were all particularly good, while Noah Taylor and Anna Maxwell Martin made splendidly creepy servants. Two members of the cast have met untimely ends so far. The body count will continue to mount tomorrow night. And I will definitely be watching.

The Imitation Game - film review

Although I watch plenty of films, I usually only make a single annual pilgrimage to the cinema, at this time of year. This last couple of years I've seen two great movies, Skyfall and Gravity, and this year the choice was The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, who is most famous for his work on cracking the Enigma code.

I find codes and ciphers fascinating, although I don't always have the time and patience (or ability, in many cases) to try to solve them. They often crop up in Golden Age novels, and sometimes the explanations as to how to crack them can be rather tedious. And a story about building an early, complex computer could be very dull indeed if not handled correctly. The challenge for the writer of the screenplay, Graham Moore, was how to make the narrative gripping. He rose to the challenge quite splendidly.

Of course, he was helped by top-notch casting. Cumberbatch is brilliant, as usual, and Keira Knightley compelling, if perhaps slightly miscast as the gifted woman cryptanalyst, Joan Clarke (she played her as a strong woman confronting prejudice, which was fine, but much as I like Keira, I gained no real insight into the brilliance that Clarke must have had). Charles Dance and Mark Strong were very good indeed, as top brass at Bletchley, and Rory Kinnear excelled as a sympathetic policeman.

Moore employed several techniques. He used three timelines: the war years at Bletchley, Turing's schooldays, when he falls in love with another boy, and the post-war period when he was arrested on a charge of gross indecency. The story zipped around between the timelines, but was never confusing, partly because Moore delineated his characters clearly - quite simply, but in most cases with some depth. The film is based on a true story, but Moore was not afraid to deviate from the historical facts on numerous occasions. I didn't mind this, because it made for a pacy story that seemed convincing even if some aspects of it are debatable in terms of accuracy. And it seemed to me that Moore handled his depiction of Turing's sexual orientation sensitively and effectively, despite leaving some questions unanswered in my mind. You have to make choices as a writer, and I felt he made some very good choices. An excellent film, then, and a fine example of the screenplay writer's art.   

Fallen Angel

I’ve indulged in the DVD of Fallen Angel, the ITV adaptation by Peter Ransley of Andrew Taylor’s Roth Trilogy, and found the three episodes just as gripping as the books on which they were based. Which is saying something, because I really loved the novels, especially the first of them, The Four Last Things

It’s a truly ambitious story, an account in three parts of the development of a sociopathic killer. Rosie, aka Angel, is played in the first two episodes by Emilia Fox, who has surely never had to convey such a chilling character – yet she does so with real conviction. The first story involves the abduction of a young girl, and it turns out that the motive is revenge upon a police officer called Michael, father of the girl. When he was a boy, he revealed the truth about Angel, and a crime she committed, which is at the heart of the second episode, based on The Judgment of Strangers. Dance, a vicar who happens to be Angel’s father, blames himself, but a friend of his late wife reveals that she is, in a sense, responsible for the terrible sequence of tragedies, for reasons revealed in the third and final episode, The Office of the Dead.

Dance is a very good actor, who as David Byfield conveys a mixture of dangerous selfishness and good intentions with real conviction. But I was, if anything, even more impressed by Claire Holman, friend of the family, who plays a vital connecting link between the instalments of the story. Holman was previously known to me mainly from her supporting role as the pathologist in ‘Lewis’, but here I thought she excelled herself. Intensely watchable, very sinister stuff. Strongly recommended.