Mark Robson

The Ghost Ship

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Tom Merriam on the bridge with Captain Stone

The Ghost Ship isn’t a Jacques Tourneur film but it feels like one. Perhaps that’s because Tourneur’s editor, Mark Robson, is directing. And as well as misty gothic looks and a sense of foreboding, Robson has also borrowed from Tourneur his sense of psychological overload. The Ghost Ship isn’t a horror movie, or a supernatural tale, though it looks like one and even the title nudges us that way, much like Tourneur’s Cat People did. Instead it’s the story of a bright and capable third officer on board a ship who becomes increasingly alarmed at the behaviour of his captain, Will Stone, eventually blowing the whistle after becoming convinced that the captain’s cavalier … Read more

The Harder They Fall

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Humphrey Bogart close up

The Harder They Fall is Humphrey Bogart’s farewell movie. He’d been diagnosed with oesophageal cancer not long before shooting started and knew he didn’t have long to live. Though he looks tired and ill, it doesn’t affect his performance. In fact it probably enhances it. Careworn individuals being something of a Bogart speciality. In a version of the character he’d been playing since The Maltese Falcon made him a superstar and Casablanca reinforced it, Bogart is a journalist down on his luck who is hired by a boxing promoter to puff his boy to the heavens and turn him into a champion. This in spite of the fact that the kid cannot fight, … Read more

Champion

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Kirk Douglas in boxing pose

So here I am coincidentally writing about Champion on the day the death of the remarkable George Foreman is announced. A gent and a plugger, who came back after 20 years away to win the world boxing title for the second time, Foreman was everything the focus of Champion is not. The film made a star of Kirk Douglas, and was his eighth film in three years. In many ways the typical boxing drama – scrappy kid, rags to riches, it all goes to his head, a fight to be thrown, the against-the-odds finale etc – it’s also a portrait of a psychopath, or at least a sociopath, who has no use for … Read more

The Seventh Victim

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Kim Hunter as Mary

A prequel of sorts to Cat People, 1943’s The Seventh Victim is also something of a warm up for Rosemary’s Baby – Satanists in New York! – as well as the debut of Kim Hunter, who plays the little girl lost in the big city. It’s a bit of a mad film and doesn’t quite add up but it’s stoked with atmosphere, all kicking off with young Mary (Hunter) being called into the principal’s office at her school because her older sister, Jacqueline, has not been keeping up with the payments on the fees. She’s gone missing, it seems. So Mary heads to New York to find her, and there tangles with one … Read more

Phffft

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Nina and Robert dance

The comedy of remarriage is really a creature of the 1930s but here it is alive and reasonably well in 1954 in Phffft, a screwbally kind of thing starring Jack Lemmon and Judy Holliday as a married couple of eight years who decide wedlock isn’t for them, then try the alternatives only to eventually have a rethink about why they got divorced in the first place. Eight years, not seven. Columbia had actually wanted to make a version of George Axelrod’s hit play The Seven Year Itch but the rights were tied up (it would become a Twentieth Century Fox film directed by Billy Wilder the following year) and so Axelrod sold them … Read more