Another old movie

Just a mention of another old movie we watched the other night. It’s called Hunted, but also has an American title, The Stranger in Between, which isn’t as appropriate as the original.
Dirk Bogarde stars in it, along with a wonderful child actor, Jon Whiteley. Bogarde is a bit too suave and romantic to really play the hunted murderer well, but he’s always a great presence on the screen, and he carries it off. Whiteley, who’d never made a film before, and who was only seven when this film was made (as I was), is just wonderful. There are one or two moments when his concentration isn’t quite there, but in general he brings everything to the screen. He went on to star in four more movies (including The Spanish Gardener, again with Bogarde), an episode of the tv series, Robin Hood, and then gave it all up at the age of twelve. He spent his adult life as an art historian at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
The film is in black and white, and makes great use of the visual contrasts available in that medium. Unfortunately, it runs out of steam some way towards the end: there’s no real climax, only a crisis of conscience on the part of Bogarde’s character, and it’s not enough to satisfy a modern audience any more, I feel. Nevertheless, while it runs, it has some great moments, is visually good to look at, and has a number of well-played minor roles.

Rain and Cold

On the radio here in England they keep going on about how cold the water at the beaches is. What do they expect? This is England, after all, and the temperature in the sea most of the time will be similar to the temperature in the seas around New Zealand. Chilly at best, and only occasionally warmer as you head north.
Far more important, and still related to water, is the flooding here in England. Oxford has been hit, something we wouldn’t have believed when we there ourselves, and some other places have only just got back to having drinking water and water to flush in the loos. It’s hard to grasp what it’s been like for these people when you’re not affected by it yourself; having always lived on hills ourselves, we’ve never really had problems with flooding. Of course there’s been similar flooding in New Zealand after the last few years, but again it’s been nowhere near where we live.
And now on the news this morning we hear that certain `yobbos’ as they’re calling them, have been fouling the water in the places where water is desperately needed. It’s hard to understand why the local yahoos would do it to their own water when they must be in need of it as much as anyone. Perhaps they’re just so lacking in sense they don’t understand the implications of their own actions. Candidates for the Darwin Awards, I’d suspect.