Michael Redgrave

The Lady Vanishes

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May Witty as Miss Froy

Hitchcock and trains, Hitchcock and trains – even the words seem to run on rails. The Lady Vanishes is the British director’s take on the 1930s craze for the murder mystery on the move. And though Hitchcock could have lent on Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express – published in 1933 to instant acclaim – he was in fact working from Ethel Lina White’s The Wheel Spins, a 1936 best-seller from a fellow British writer who hasn’t weathered as well. But White has something here – the notion of gaslighting. The Wheel Spins turns on the determination of its central character to resist the dominant narrative while everyone around her, for various … Read more

Secret Beyond the Door

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Mark and Celia in Mexico

Largely bonkers, 1947’s Secret Beyond the Door is a great film if what you need is a laugh, but a joke as what it’s meant to be – a twisted psychological film noir. It’s the last of five collaborations between Joan Bennett and director Fritz Lang, and it’s produced by Bennett’s husband, Walter Wanger, who saw this film as a way of reheating the Rebecca pot, Hitchcock’s Oscar-winning first Hollywood movie of seven years earlier. It is the Rebecca story all over again, in fact – woman marries rich guy as his second wife and finds she can’t live up to the memory of the first – but with an addition of the … Read more

The Importance of Being Earnest

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Dame Edith Evans

Fifty years after the making of this quintessentially British comic classic it was remade starring Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Judi Dench and the then almost incandescently famous Reese Witherspoon, to give it a bit of global appeal. That’s a great cast – three Oscar-winners and a scene-stealer par excellence (see Everett in My Best Friend’s Wedding for evidence of that). So no argument there. But they still couldn’t beat the original. That’s because they really, really don’t make them like this any more. No one speaks like Edith “a handbag” Evans. No one resembles Margaret Rutherford’s preposterously dotty, doting Miss Prism. As to direction, what hotshot these days would settle for the approach of … Read more