According to this British airflight thriller, the Chinese are “medieval” in their “superstitiousness,” believing that nightmares are premonitions of disaster. The flight in question, in The Night My Number Came Up, is from Bangkok to Tokyo. Its details, including a deadly storm, are shared at a Hong Kong dinner party, and the flight the next […]
Tag Archives: Michael Redgrave
It is outrageous that some would think that Anthony Asquith’s charming, delightful, occasionally hilarious The Importance of Being Earnest, from Oscar Wilde’s 1895 play, is anything less than cinematic. I say this because the front-end and back-end set-up, based on the rising and closing curtain of a stage performance of the play, is deliberately stagy […]
Twelve-year-old Leo Colston is spending summer with Marcus Maudsley, an aristocratic schoolmate, in a luxuriant mansion in the hot, lush Norfolk country. Leo’s family’s solvency isn’t nearly as strong. His mother, a widow, may have to sell the rare books that her husband, a banker, collected as a hobby. The Maudsleys buy Leo new clothes, […]
The film known in Britain as Confidential Report is among Orson Welles’s lamest films. It is intriguing and visually dazzling nevertheless. It is as intricate as a dense spiderweb—in some ways, a Trial run for his end-of-Europe, end-of-the-world masterpiece (1962) from Kafka. The protagonist is Guy van Stratten—it turns out, a false identity in a […]
A selective canvas of the homefront during World War II, A Diary for Timothy, by Humphrey Jennings, stresses the contribution made to the war effort by working-class lives (a farmer, a miner, etc.). These, as well as warriors (represented by a recovering injured fighter pilot), are declared as doing what they do for the sake […]
Dennis Grunes 