Hue and Cry II

I was about to write a blog post saying that in spite of the fact that I'd had the DVD of the movie, Hue and Cry, on my shelves for some time, I'd never watched it. To my surprise, when I checked back, I did watch it in 2007, and wrote about it then. Both my wife and I said last night, I don't remember ever seeing this before. Which is puzzling, because I usually have a reasonable visual memory for movies, and so does she, and at least some aspects of the first viewing will be remembered in the second.

So I don't need to say any more about the film, except to say that it was just as enjoyable on a second viewing as I'd obviously found it on the first. However, what I don't seem to have noted at the time is the detail. Right from the opening credits, which are white-washed onto a real wall, with boys playing, running, fighting in front of them, and with a bit of humour thrown in (Wot? no producer? says one, and Stick no Bills in another, with a tatty Ealing Studios poster fluttering alongside) there's an attitude of 'Let's see if you pick this up, audience.' Added to this is Auric's opening music which fits beautifully to all the zipping around and punching that's going on.

Every time the main group of boys appear - and there are around a dozen of them, and one girl (Joan Dowling, who later married Harry Fowler, the main 'boy' in the film, and who sadly committed suicide at the age of 26) - not only do we get a sense of their individuality, but all manner of other 'business' is going on. In one scene one boy is holding a bag of chips; the arm of another reaches over several times to pinch a chip while the others are talking. One boy is being buried in bricks from the bombed-out building site in another scene, and is left to fight his own way out when the others all rush off. One boy has a pet mouse (which has a couple of important scenes later) and it's casually walking up around his collar when we first see him. There's a scene where the first 'The Trump' - a boy's adventure weekly that plays a vital role in the film - is snatched back and forth between three or four of the boys, including its owner. Nobody ever stands around in this movie: the boys' characters and movements are distinct and well-worked out. Charles Crichton, the director, obviously had a good eye for how boys of that generation behaved, and the movie is full of things to keep the eye attentive.

And there's plenty of comedy: in one notable scene that takes place in a department store at night the boys are waiting for the crims to arrive: the owner of the mouse is hiding under a mannequin's skirt. The mouse escapes, and heads over to a speak-your-weight machine. The boy dives for the mouse and the machine speaks his weight. The shop's caretaker arrives and tries to get the boy and the machine speaks their combined weight, and then other boys come and then the police and the machine, with its pompous voice, can hardly keep up.

Alistair Sim has only a few scenes, and plays a character who can hardly sit still. Crichton has him up and down around his cluttered flat, talking nineteen to the dozen, and performing as only Sim could do, and doing so many bits of business that his brain must have been whirling. He gets star billing in spite of appearing for about ten minutes all up, but as Sim always did, he makes those ten minutes unforgettable.

I mentioned in the previous post that a great deal of the film was shot on location, outside in the bombed-out streets of London. In the background of several shots you can see workers rebuilding, and further away still, the barges and boats on the Thames. The film manages to be a documentary of a particular time in the city's history as well as an entertaining story.

Full Dark House

I’ve just finished reading Christopher Fowler’s Full Dark House, his first murder mystery in what may be a series. (The second, The Water Room, is also out – my wife’s reading it. We found them both in brand new condition at an op shop.)
If this is a series, it begins in a distinctly odd way by having one of the two major characters, Bryant, killed off in the first page. His longstanding sidekick, May (Bryant and May, get it?) spends the rest of the book finding out why he was killed, as well as remembering (in remarkable detail) their first case together, which took place in the middle of London’s blitz.
Bryant is an eccentric 23-year old in the war-time part of the story; in the present he’s in his eighties, and still eccentric. May is the stable character who struggles at first to warm to Bryant, but ultimately becomes his best friend.
The basic story (in the past) has Bryant and May, who are part of an odd and possibly unlikely adjunct to the police force that deals with peculiar crimes, trying to discover who’s killing off members of the cast of a production of Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld that’s about to be presented in war-torn London. The production is being rehearsed in the Palace Theatre, an enormous building that covers an entire block, is at least five storeys high, and has so many rooms and corridors and odd spaces that no one ever really gets to know the whole place.
Fowler does his own peculiar slant on the mystery story. For a start, he keeps on introducing characters at a rate of knots, until by the end of the book I’d given up trying to remember who all the theatrical people were. Not only that, he kills characters off, in two instances, within the same chapter he’s introduced them in. This doesn’t seem quite according to Hoyle, to my way of thinking. At least let the reader get to know the victim before they’re dispatched. Two other characters die (I’m not giving away any great secrets here) without us really getting to know them, and you get the feeling that the victims are just there because they’re there. It almost wouldn’t matter who they were.
There are lots of red herrings, lots of detail (Fowler is an established and stylish writer), lots of switching back and forth between the past and present, and, in the end, a reasonably neat mystery. I can’t say it was overwhelmingly surprising in terms of the whodunit side of things, and I think Mr Fowler cheated just a little. Nevertheless, it’s entertaining, often funny, and not a waste of time. There’s a delightful appendix at the back which purports to be Bryant’s list relating to the theatre crimes. In fact it’s Fowler having a last lot of jokes before he closes the book.