THE SMALL BACK ROOM (StudioCanal). A Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger dour 1949 film. World War II crippled scientist (David Farrar) has a drink problem and a troubled relationship with his girlfriend (Kathleen Byron). High spots include an expressionistic alcoholic nightmare with a giant whiskey bottle and the 17-minute tense defusing of a German boobytrap bomb on a beach.
THE WEAK AND THE WICKED (StudioCanal). Joan Henry’s best-selling autobiographical novel, a social critique of women’s prisons in the 1950s, is much softened in J Lee Thompson’s portmanteau film of back stories. A roll call of well-known actors take part in a cross-section of crimes. There’s drama (Glynis Johns, Diana Dors) and pathos (Jane Hylton). There is also outright farce (relished by Olivia Sloane, Sybil Thorndike, Athene Seyler) which feels out of place.
JOHN SINGER SARGENT: FASHION & SWAGGER (Exhibition Screen Seventh Art Production). The celebrated portrait painter (1856-1925) paints in the Grand Manner. He has an obsession with clothes and the vibrant, ravishing fabrics. His aristocratic portraits, bold, elegant and opulent, are compellingly intense, strong on individuality and personality, real and highly theatrical. The brushwork is amazing. The Portrait of Madame X caused enormous controversy in 1884.
CYRANO (BBC iPlayer). Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, one of the great romantic dramas of all time, one of the great tearjerkers, has been turned into a musical. Joe Wright’s film, photographed by Seamus McGarvey, has considerable visual flair. Peter Dinklage’s casting means the famed poet-soldier-duellist no longer has a grotesque nose problem. It’s his height (4 foot 5 inches) which leads him to believe Roxane could never love him. Dinklage is a fine actor. I just wish he was performing the original play, which has a far better script than his wife Erica Schmidt’s adaptation.
NO TREES IN THE STREET (StudioCanal) is hysterical melodrama plus social comment from Ted Willis, who argues the crowded slums in the East End in the 1930s were breeding grounds for young criminals (epitomised here by Murray Melvin). Sylvia Sims, representing goodness, and Herbert Lom, representing evil, take their ambiguous relationship to another level when he orders her to change her dress because he does not like what she is wearing.
THREE MEN IN A BOAT (StudioCanal). This broad, laboured, silly slapstick farce, dating from 1956 and starring Laurence Harvey, Jimmy Edwards and David Tomlinson, has nothing to do with Jerome K Jerome’s 1889 classic novel, except for that sequence which has a large number of people lost in the Hampton Court maze. The endless jokes about falling in the Thames are predictable and not funny. Much truer to Jerome and infinitely subtler is the lyrical, gentle Tom Stoppard BBC 1975 version.
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