Another sad entry in the criminal history of British barbering! For it is a remarkable fact that any time the protagonist of a Brit flick reaches for the straight razor or scoops out a handful of Brylcream, his fate is sealed and the gallows awaits. One need only think of Uno Henning in Anthony Asquith's luminous-black slice of English expressionism, A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929), or Eric Porter in Compton Bennett's Daybreak(1948), a British answer to French poetic realism and one of the saddest films ever made (reviewed for The Forgotten here).
Both those films represent clear (and successful) attempts to transplant essentially foreign modes of film-making onto British soil. On the Night of the Fire (1939) is something different: it gathers together all the key elements of the classic American noir, and plays them out in an unusual working class and regional setting, but it does so before Hollywood had encoded those genre principles.
Both those films represent clear (and successful) attempts to transplant essentially foreign modes of film-making onto British soil. On the Night of the Fire (1939) is something different: it gathers together all the key elements of the classic American noir, and plays them out in an unusual working class and regional setting, but it does so before Hollywood had encoded those genre principles.
- 2/17/2011
- MUBI
Compton Bennett burst upon the British filmmaking scene in 1945 with The Seventh Veil, a weird, sado-masochistically-inflected semi-gothic love story which did much to boost the careers of Ann Todd (neurotic piano prodigy), James Mason (sadistic music teacher) and Herbert Lom (sympathetic psychotherapist). By 1960 he was working mainly in television, having sunk into a kind of middlebrow lethargy along with most British cinema. But in 1948, at the peak of UK cinematic creativity, he directed Daybreak, one of the few British noirs, and a bleaker story than many of the social realist dramas that followed Bennett's career in the sixties. In fact, as with many of the best downbeat stories, the movie somehow leaves the audience exhilarated, glad to be alive.
This is a movie which, as Sam Goldwyn might put it, begins at a hanging and descends deeper into misery from there. Eric Portman (best known perhaps as the sinister squire...
This is a movie which, as Sam Goldwyn might put it, begins at a hanging and descends deeper into misery from there. Eric Portman (best known perhaps as the sinister squire...
- 6/17/2010
- MUBI
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