Otley (1968) Tom Courtenay/ Romy Schneider-- Music by Stanley Myers/Don Partridge

"Otley" is a "sleeper" film a lot of people might have never seen. As far as I can tell it is not available in either DVD or even VHS in the United States.

It's a shame. The film deserves a wider audience in my opinion.

Here's a bit of synopsis: Gerald Otley, a petty thief and garbage rummager, wakes up one morning, after a drunken night on the town, and finds that he is wanted by the police for murder. And that is only the beginning. While being pursued for a crime he did not commit, he is kidnapped by a group of criminals who suspect him of being involved with double agents. Otley manages to escape, but cannot avoid getting into one near-fatal crisis after another, as police and foreign agents chase after him. It is a wild week of misadventures which Otley will never forget! Written by alfiehitchie, IMDB site.

Both the talented Tom Courtenay (from "Billy Liar", "Doctor Zhivago" and the more recent BBC-TV production of Charles Dickens "Little Dorrit") and the beautiful French actress Romy Schneider (as a spy who more "femme" than "fatale") make a good mismatched couple in this man-on-run-tale.



It's a Swinging London version of Alfred Hitchcock's "The 39 Steps", complete with a documentary-style opening that is very much in keeping with the British New Wave style.



I got a chance to see it again after a long interval a couple months ago courtesy of the best movie channel on the cable universe, Turner Classic Movies. It's uneven in patches, granted, but just as charming as I remember. In addition to the tongue-in-cheek style it also features some scenes, such as an attempted murder-by-briefcase-bomb in a London Underground tube station that shows Director Dick Clement was at the top of his game.

Even if these kind of nostalgic spy capers of the 60's and 70's aren't your cup of tea, or Starbucks double latte, the opening tune of the film is quite a catchy little piece by Dan Partridge. Anyway, here's all the film I could find on the Internet.

Charade (1963) Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant, Story by Peter Stone, Music by Henry Mancini

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Romantic Comedy

This film is as good as it gets in terms of combining a Hitchcock style suspense story with the comic/romantic elements one might expect from a film about two attractive and mature adults who happen to fall in love. You'd think Sir Alfred Hitchcock himself would've directed this one, but its a knock-off from another director (Stanley Donen), obviously inspired by Cary Grant's earlier Hitchcock roles in films like "To Catch a Thief" (1955) with Grace Kelly or the two-hour thrill ride of mistaken identity and Cold War espionage that made "North By Northwest" (1959) a touchstone for many filmmakers like Donen.
(below, the opening scene from the film. Grant and Hepburn meet and you can already see the chemistry will be superb.)


"Charade" is a jewel box of a film with a few brass knuckles in with the Cartier diamonds.

Audrey Hepburn is Regina (Reggie) Lambert, who works as a United Nations translator. She decides to divorce her remote and rather uncaring American husband, Charles Lambert, after a brief marriage. (She decides while on a vacation from him at a Switzerland ski resort.)

What Regina doesn't know is that divorce is just so unnecessary "Chuck" has already been murdered---thrown from a fast-moving passenger train in France during the pre-title sequence to be exact, already freshly dead and in his pajamas. It's so undignified I feel, but its all over very fast so it doesn't hurt the chic Parisian backdrop of the rest of the film.




Back in Paris to bury her husband, Regina finds herself being pursued by at least three men who want to terrify her into revealing where the hundreds of thousands of dollars Charles stole from them years ago while in the super secret OSS branch of the American Army.

Trouble is, Charles never bothered to tell Regina about such trifling sums and where and how they were hidden. Another trouble is.... the bad guys don't believe her. She goes to the American Embassy in Paris for help. They aren't much help either, but a nice fellow in one of the offices there (Walter Matthau) tells her to play along and they will see if they can help later. Frightened, she turns to a seemingly nice man she just met named Peter Joshua (Grant) for help.

But is Peter Joshua his real name? Turns out he has at least three others aliases, suitable for all occasions. . All the more reason not to trust him too much either.


But the trouble is this guy, though better-looking than the thugs who want the money, is apparently in league with said thugs. Or is it other four men? Do I hear five? Well somebody is busy secretly bumping them all off one by one so don't bother to keep count.

Suffice to say this is a film to see again. And if you haven't seen it yet, what a treat!

Symphony of Suspense--Alfred Hitchcock's "The Man Who Knew Too Much" (1956)--Albert Hall

Of the two versions of this film Alfred Hitchcock made, I rate the earlier one, a British-made movie from 1934, as the over-all best.

Although the color is stunning in this 1956 remake, and the lead actors very engaging, this version lacks a great villain like Peter Lorre in the cast and , also, the convention of having the lead female character as a singer leads to a rather flat finale, at least for those of us who aren't all that crazy about Doris Day's big hit featured in this film, the saccharine 'Que Sara Sara".
(In the earlier version, the mother of the kidnapped child is a champion rifle marks-person.To give more away would be telling too much, but suffice to say the finale in the earlier film is a real grabber! )


Still, this version with James Stewart and Doris Day has its high points, and this amazing nine-minute sequence has to be one of them.

Using "The Cantata for Clouds", Hitchcock creates an suspenseful sequence without using words--a masterful return to the silent film that the great director began with in the 1920's.

The movie follows a certain Doctor McKenna (Stewart) his wife (Doris Day, playing a former professional singer) and their son Hank as they go on holiday in Morocco. They meet a nice French fellow who turns out to be a secret agent trying to ferret out a murderous international spy ring. When the Frenchman is stabbed in a bizarre in Marrakesh, he whispers the details of an assassination plot to the American doctor. To prevent the couple from revealing what the agent told McKenna, they kidnap his son and tell the couple to not alert the police.

The McKennas remain silent, flying to London to try and ferret out the spy ring on their own. They discover that the murder of an important diplomat is to take place in the Albert Hall during a concert.

Which leads us to this point near the end of the film. Jo McKenna has gone to The Albert Hall. Her husband is close behind her, She knows that there is an assassin there, and she also knows her son is in danger. Stewarts character has already had a narrow escape from the desperate antagonists. It's up to them to catch the killer and hope he'll lead them to their son.

I'll let the film-maker take it from there.

PS--The composer on the podium in this scene is the great Bernard Hermann, who also wrote the original score for this and several other Hitchcock classics like "Vertigo", "Psycho" and "The Birds".

The full nine-minute version of "Cantata for Clouds" was composed by Australian composer Arthur Benjamin for the 1934 film. Hermann declined to write a new score for this scene, feeling that Benjamin's original couldn't be topped.

Ghost Writer (2010)--First Rate Thriller Produces A Grim Shadow of Real Life Events

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Drama

(right) Former Prime Minister Andrew Lang (Pierce Brosnan) and his newest
scribe (Ewan McGregor) have a bit of tense communication in a scene from "The Ghost Writer".


This adaptation of the Robert Harris novel "Ghost" marks Roman Polanski's return to the thriller films like "A Knife in the Water" (1962), "Repulsion" (1965) and "Chinatown" (1974) that he excels at. Although I certainly don't endorse Mr. Polanski's past behaviors with under age girls, it's undeniable he is one of the best living directors working in films today.

The film concerns a hired ghost writer of celebrity memoirs who agrees to shape up the biography of ex-British Prime Minister Andrew Lang. (The previous ghost-writer drowned accidentally in the waters off Massachusetts' cold Atlantic shore--or so that's the official story.)

The protagonist encounters a large bunker-like VIP beach house where Lang is holed up with his nervous and weary wife Ruth (Olivia Williams), a pack of security personnel, and his tough and alluring personal secretary Amelia (Kim Catrall) whom Ms. Lang strongly suspects of being Lang's mistress. The whole set-up crackles with personal tension.

The writer has just a few weeks to make a workable product out of Lang's verbal ramblings and boring political anecdotes. He is a one time Cambridge University actor who took a sudden interest in politics and rose quickly to the leadership of the Labour Party in the 80's and 90's. Brosnan and the writers do a good job here creating a PM who is at times charming, easy-going and a little superficial (good qualities for an American leader to project as well) but quick-tempered and a tight-lipped person once the doors close. Lang is a man who has been following a script long after he ceased being an actor. The question at the center of the film is: Who is writing that script? Lang himself, or the CIA?

(I personally have found it hard to get through modern politicians memoirs, and pretty much have given them a pass in the last few years. It seems the more powerful someone was, the less likely it is he or she can be candid about what actually happened while they were in office. And all memoirs written by future candidates are inevitably guarded and coy.)

The tension ratchets up nicely when the writer discovers that Lang has been charged with being a war criminal by human rights groups and by his ex-foreign minister for allowing four British citizens to be seized by the CIA and taken to a "black ops" site where one of them died in custody. There is also the question of Lang stretching the "special relationship" between Her Majesty's government and the Americans to a point where he was all too eager in the past to do what Washington wanted in matters of war and national security . (Does any of this sound familiar?)

The films has enough twists and red herrings to satisfy not only political types but also those who enjoy a good tale of intrigue and underhandedness told with intelligence and wit. The film works well in part because right up to the end you are not sure what to make of Andrew Lang or those closest to him and the writer, like any good writer, is overcome with a searing desire to simply tell the truth--if he can only live long enough to find out what it is.

The whole cast of this film does an excellent job. Both Olivia Williams and Kim Cattrall make the most of their supporting roles. I had my doubts about the fetching former "Sex and the City" star playing such a steely power player, having only seen her in comic roles heretofore, but she obviously can handle more subtle dramatic roles than she has ever found in Hollywood assignments.

The Cast

Ewan McGregor The Ghost
Kim Cattrall Amelia Bly
Olivia Williams Ruth Lang
Pierce Brosnan Adam Lang
Timothy Hutton Sidney Kroll
Tom Wilkinson Paul Emmett
Robert Pugh Richard Rycart
James Belushi John Maddox
Eli Wallach Old Man
Jon Bernthal Rick Ricardelli

Screenplay by Robert Harris and Roman Polanski.

Hitchcock's "Murder, Most Fowl" The Birds - Original Trailer 1963

One of the most unsettling and mysterious of Sir Alfred's films. This trailer leave no doubt who the real star of this film happens to be.