Charge of the night brigade
After a couple of months away from the review desk due to difficult personal circumstances, Slarek gets to grips with the six British noir titles and the many hours of special features that make up Indicator’s splendid Blu-ray box set, COLUMBIA NOIR #7: MADE IN BRITAIN.
sound and vision
All six films have been treated to high definition remasters, more details of which I do not have at present but I’m assuming that they were supplied to Indicator as is and were not restored in-house. I’m saying this in part because this would usually be announced in the press release if they had been, and because three of the films are framed 1.78:1, which fills the screen on widescreen TVs but I suspect differs very slightly from the original projected ratio, with either 1.66:1 or 1.85:1 being more likely. If I’m wrong on this, I’m sure someone will quickly let me know. Wicked as They Come and Spin a Dark Web are framed 1.66:1, which I presume is the correct projected aspect ratio.
These minor framing alterations aside (if indeed that’s what they are – I’m really covering my arse here), the transfers are all consistently strong, boasting nicely graded contrast on all six films, with robust black levels on the five black-and-white titles that are inky deep on the last two in the set without feeling aggressive or swallowing detail. The very slightly softer blacks on the colour A Prize of Gold still look fine and assist the retention of shadow detail, while the warm, pastel leaning colour palette of that film is characteristic of some films stocks of the day and is rather attractive in a nostalgic way. Detail is generally crisp on all six films, with the odd shot here and there looking a little softer, the exception being is The Last Man to Hang, which has a handful of shots that are genuinely soft, suggesting either that more than one source was used for the restoration or the focus puller was having an off day and the schedule was too tight for reshoots. The prints are generally clean, with some dust spots still visible in places if you’re really looking, and a fine film grain is visible on all transfers, being slightly coarser and more prominent on Spin a Dark Web, probably due to the higher speed film stock required to shoot on the streets of London at night. The back projection on some driving shots in that film is really visible here, being more washed out than the nicely graded foreground characters. The option is available to watch Fortune is a Woman under its smarter American title of She Played with Fire, and as far as I’m aware, title credits aside, the content is the same.
All of the films have mono soundtracks that are presented in Linear PCM 1.0, save for Fortune is a Woman, which has a DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 track. All have their inevitable tonal and dynamic range restrictions, but are otherwise clear, with the dialogue always audible and no distortion on louder sounds, and no trace of background hiss or fluff.
Optional English subtitles for the hearing impaired are available for all six films.
special features
A PRIZE OF GOLD
Audio Commentary with Thirza Wakefield and Melanie Williams
Professor of film and television studies, Melanie Williams, and film writer and independent researcher, Thirza Wakefield, explore A Prize of Gold in a largely positive light, providing details about the Berlin locations and several of the actors, with Zetterling and Widmark coming in for particular coverage and acclaim. They praise the costuming and the production design, discuss the funding models of the time that supported British productions that had international appeal, while the news that the film was released in the UK the same week as Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai [Shichinin no samurai] leads then to suggest some intriguing parallels between the two films, and the different approaches that they take to essentially the same story elements.
The BEHP Interview with Bill Lewthwaite (103:13)
Conducted by Glyn Jones on 23 August 2008, this British Entertainment History Project interview with A Prize of Goldeditor Bill Lewthwaite differs from most such disc inclusions (including the others in this set) in being a video rather than solely audio recording. In other respects it follows the usual BEHP interview format in taking a largely chronological trip through the career of the interviewee, giving Lewthwaite the opportunity to talk about the productions he worked on and some of the key personnel involved. There are some interesting stories and anecdotes here, including his memories of editing the 1962 Norman Wisdom vehicle On the Beat, on which director Robert Asher was apparently laughing at everything that Wisdom did, while Lewthwaite couldn’t understand what was remotely funny about this particularly comedian. I’m with him on that, though we later parted company when he described Ken Russell’s 1971 masterpiece The Devils as “an awful film,” though by this point he and Jones were largely just reminiscing about the good old days.
Geoff Glover: Golden Opportunity (13:30)
Clapper loader on the film’s second unit, Geoff Glover, recalls wanting to get into the film industry at a time when the ACT union’s Catch 22 clause made it almost impossible for non-industry outsiders to do so – to work in the industry, you had to join the union, but you couldn’t join the union unless you worked in the industry. It was still like that back when I was in film school, and just about every visiting lecturer had a story about the creative solutions they had come up with to navigate around that rule. Glover found his own by sheer chance, and A Prize of Gold was his first assignment, on which he admits making many mistakes, which tested the patience of second unit cameraman Arthur Graham. He talks briefly about the 1.66:1 aspect ratio and the role of second units on films, then teases us with the news that working with John Cassavetes was “an eye opener.” I wanted more on this!
Lies Lanckman: Stealing Hearts (14:41)
Academic and film historian Lies Lanckman talks about A Prize of Gold, which she describes as an interesting mix of film noir and heist film, and the word “interesting” gets used a lot here in regards to this film. She notes that noir is notoriously hard to define, suggests that postwar Berlin makes for a good noir setting (agreed), and makes quite a case for the character of Maria as a sort of femme fatale. I’m not sure I buy it, but do appreciate the points she makes on this score. The ending is also discussed, so definitely save this until after the film.
Theatrical Trailer (2:26)
A by-the-book trailer for its time, peppered with spoilers from scenes late in the film and propelled forward by urgent music and a narrator who says things like “Maria, a girl who had gold in her hair, and shame in her heart.” The “also starring” caption feels the need to remind viewers that Mai Zetterling is “the girl you loved in Knock on Wood” in case the name doesn’t ring a bell.
Image Gallery
59 screens of monochrome posed photos and promotional stills (one of which has been hand coloured), nice black-and-white lobby cards and not-so-nice coloured in ones, crisply detailed pages from the press book, and some interesting posters.
THE LAST MAN TO HANG
Audio Commentary with Barry Forshaw and Kim Newman
In a typically lively commentary, novelist and author Kim Newman and author of British Crime Film Barry Forshaw have plenty to say about a film they regard as a cut above the quota quickie that some might categorise it as. As is his way, Newman has tracked down a copy of the novel on which the film was based – The Jury by Gerald Bullett – and is thus able to detail some of the changes made for the film, theorise about the thinking behind these alterations, and even provide some interesting information on the author. There’s a discussion about the abolition of capital punishment, the debate around which is woven into the film, as well as info on several of the actors They also identify a late story twist as the moment when the audience says, “Give us a break,” though do also admit that the film effectively misdirects us into forgetting about an earlier pointer to this development. As ever, a hugely informative and entertaining listen.
Film Fanfare No. 5 (1956) (4:48)
A British Pathé newsreel piece in which a competition winner gets to spend a day on the set of The Last Man to Hang, where she visits the courtroom set and the editing room, has her picture taken with the stars, chats and smokes with Eunice Gayson in her private suite, and gets a demonstration of screen kissing from Tom Conway. The shot choices, editing and even lighting in one sequence all point to this footage being carefully stage-managed for the camera, but it’s still of real interest, and despite some small movement of the image in frame and a few dust spots, it’s in excellent condition.
The Guardian Lecture with Ivor Montagu (70:26)
I’m something of a fan of these Guardian Lecture recordings, which were originally made purely for record purposes but often prove engaging chats with actors and filmmakers. Despite being billed as lectures, many of them are really on-stage interviews with the individuals in question, usually to accompany a season of films related to their profession at London’s National Film Theatre (now BFI Southbank). Here, the use of the word lecture is more appropriate, at least once we get past the lengthy introduction in which the esteemed Michael Balcon almost forgets to give the floor to the Russian Ambassador to the UK, who heaps praise on Vladimir Lenin as the leader of the victorious October revolution and the founder of the Soviet state, the centenary of whose birth a season of Soviet films has been organised to commemorate. A filmmaker, writer, critic and co-founder (with Sidney Bernstein) of the London Film Society, as well as being a former communist activist and top-flight table tennis player (for real), Montague lectures with the passion of a man looking to get Lenin elected as world leader as he explores both what Lenin thought and did about film in his home country, and how he has been portrayed on screen. This man really knows his subject and explores it in some detail, but even as a leftist with a deep admiration for early Soviet cinema, I found this one heavy going after a while. Film extracts are shown to the audience but not included here (copyright issues aside, the soundtracks would be in Russian), and after the first of these the audio quality takes a bit of a dip, with Montague’s voice becoming very hissy, but he remains legible throughout.
Image Gallery
37 screens featuring superb quality monochrome promotional stills, a selection of lobby cards – some monochrome, others with that artificial colouring I dislike so much – press book pages, and several posters, all of which feature and image of Tom Conway, his face wearing a despairing expression and framed through a hangman’s noose.
WICKED AS THEY COME
Selected Scenes Commentary with José Arroyo (9:38)
Actually more like a single selected scene, as all that is covered in a screen-specific manner is the opening eight minutes, with a brief snippet of a second scene at the end not directly commented on by film scholar and critic José Arroyo. He has plenty of interest to say about the sexualisation of Kathy in the sequence in which she arrives home from work, more so than the running time of the scene allows, hence the insertion of shots of the film’s poster beforehand to pad out the running time. His view of Kathy’s character aligns very much with my own, describing her as a feminist take on the femme fatale, something that clearly got right under the skin of some critics of the day if the hostile reviews that he quotes from are anything to go by.
The BEHP Interview with Maxwell Setton (85:24)
An audio only interview with Wicked as They Come producer Maxwell Setton, conducted by John Legard and Dave Robson on 5 April 1991 for the British Entertainment History Project. This follows the usual BEHP interview format in taking a chronological trip through Setton’s film career, starting with his early life (which includes an interesting story about becoming a barrister and ending up as Charles Laughton’s legal adviser) and his entry into the film business. Wicked as They Come gets only a passing mention, while all he reveals about The Long Haul (which he also produced) is that Victor Mature gave him a lot of trouble in his private life. This matters little, as in his role both as a producer and the founder of independent distributor Bryanston Films he was involved in the production of some of the headline titles of the British Free Cinema movement, including Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960), A Taste of Honey (Tony Richardson, 1961) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Tony Richardson, 1962). He recalls losing out on Richardson’s international hit Tom Jones (1963) and how the problems he encountered trying to finalise a deal to fund it led to him resigning from the company that he founded, then in the role of the head of Columbia in Europe he oversaw the likes of Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962), A Man for All Seasons (Fred Zinnemann, 1966), Georgy Girl (Silvio Narizzano, 1966) and many more. Several of these he has interesting anecdotes about, including Murphy’s War (Peter Yates, 1971), which was of particular interest to someone who wrote the lead essay about that film for the booklet that accompanied Indicator’s Blu-ray release. Frustratingly, Setton is midway through a rant about the damage that Margaret Thatcher did to the British film industry when the interview suddenly cuts off. I definitely wanted to hear the rest of that.
Theatrical Trailer (2:15)
A misleading trailer whose judgemental narrator suggests that Kathy gets plenty out of life from men, “for laughs, for kicks, for money, and for real.” For money, sure, but for laughs and kicks? A 4:3 framed trailer that for reasons that escape me has been cropped to 2.35:1 by slapping black bars across the top and bottom of the image, which plays merry hell with the shot composition.
Image Gallery
48 screens containing text-free promotional stills (just two of those here), monochrome and colourised lobby cards, scanned pages from the press book, and posters, including two rather stylish Italian ones.
Soho (1943) (11:55)
An amateur production made by Ken Hughes whist he was serving in the RAF and shot in London’s Soho district. Images of street life give way to material filmed in a couple of the area’s nightclubs, where close-up shots of a man and a woman downing enough drinks to floor an elephant alternate with footage of musicians performing and people dancing. Has a nicely experimental randomness to its structure, and the exterior shots of Soho have real historical value, especially for those of us more familiar with how it looks now, or in my case how it was back in the 1980s. A pre-film caption points to the opening title suggestion that screenings were originally accompanied by Ralph Vaughan Williams’ A London Symphony but there’s no record of which movement was intended for use. Viewers with access to a recording of this symphony are encouraged to experiment with their own syncing of the image, which is facilitated by the option to watch the film with no accompanying soundtrack. How cool. Alternatively, you can play the film with a new music track created by the band Peninsula, and while interesting in its repeating motif way, it does lend the film an air of slightly sinister surrealism, and makes shots of people dancing look like outtakes from Heck Harvey’s 1962 Carnival of Souls. You takes your pick.
SPIN A DARK WEB
Audio Commentary with Eloise Ross
Academic and curator Eloise Ross is not the first person in the special features to note that there is disagreement on exactly what defines and qualifies as film noir, and she quotes film writer Jim Leach, who says of British noir, “The vision of postwar Britain in films noir is bound up with the cultural discourses that stressed the political and moral decline of the nation.” I do like that. She notes that Spin a Dark Web was not a big budget production but is well put together and is a great film to watch, and while she has plenty of positive to things to say about Faith Domergue, she’s less enthusiastic about male lead Lee Patterson, whose restrained performance as Jim Bankley I rather liked. She talks about prominent British noirs and the possible influence of American filmmakers who fled to Britain to escape the blacklist, the very British character of the spiv, the principal actors, and director Vernon Sewell. She also reveals that this was one of the first films to shoot on location in London’s Soho area, and opines that its liveliness comes from its location work, a point on which we are in total agreement.
The BEHP Interview with Vernon Sewell (76:53)
An audio interview with the then 91-year-old Spin a Dark Web director Vernon Sewell, conducted on 7 July 1994 by Roy Fowler for the British Entertainment History project. Sewell has had a remarkable career in a variety of roles, and was apparently behind several technical innovations that he is not remotely shy about championing. He recalls working with Alexander Korda and Michael Powell, that the latter of whose Australian films he describes as “awful” and technically poor, makes a case for crime writer Peter Chaney having invented James Bond before Ian Fleming put pen to paper, describes the Errol Flynn vehicle The Master of Ballantrae (William Keighley, 1953) as “a ghastly film” and “an absolute disaster,” and reveals why the 1955 Where There’s a Will is the only one of his films where audiences applauded midway through. His unabashed honesty is sometimes amusing and his anecdotes are often entertaining.
US Theatrical Trailer (2:03)
“Authentically filmed in the nerve centre of global gangdom!” screams one of several sensationalist captions in a trailer that really pushes the film as a tough, hard-boiled crime drama, and whose narrator sounds a bit like Criswell delivering the opening monologue of Plan 9 From Outer Space.
Image Gallery
48 screens of variable quality monochrome promotional stills (the best of which are really crisp), black-and-white and garishly coloured in lobby cards, press book page scans and posters.
A Test for Love (1937) (28:44)
The first film from Spin a Dark Web director Vernon Sewell is a dramatized public information short about the dangers of venereal disease. It was, of course, made at a time when actually saying the words “venereal disease” or even naming the condition in question was an absolute no-no, but you’d have to have had a seriously sheltered upbringing not to realise what is being clearly inferred here. The story has pretty shop girl Betty convinced that her boyfriend Jim is going to pop the question, but when he says he has to leave town for a couple of weeks and she sees him being friendly with another woman, she instead agrees to go out with George, who’s been pestering her for a date for a while and who Betty’s best friend Sally thinks is a creep. A creep with a sexually transmitted disease, as it turns out. Unsurprisingly – mainly because this plot twist has been recycled so many times since in one form or another – the woman Jim was being so friendly with turns out to be his aunt. Fascinating to see how the issue was handled as early as this, and despite what now feels like sometimes stuttered pacing and an occasional disregard for the 180 degree rule, it’s solidly handled, with some creativity evident in the framing and camera moves. It’s also, despite a fair few remaining dust spots, in surprisingly good condition.
THE LONG HAUL
Audio Commentary with Will Fowler and Vic Pratt
Film historians and programmers Will Fowler and Vic Pratt, who also co-authored the book The Bodies Beneath: The Flipside of British Film and Television, deliver a most informative and engaging commentary on The Long Haul, though once again I found myself in disagreement with the experts on a couple of key points. This includes the film itself, which they describe as a solid work but not director Ken Hughes’ best, which may well be accurate but does feel like damning it a little with faint praise. The question of whether noir should be considered an exclusively American genre is once again raised and discussed, with Paul Shrader’s Notes on Film Noir referenced and quoted from to judge whether The Long Haul meets its stated criteria, and they’re unified on how beautifully shot a film it is. Pratt is open about his obsession with Diana Dors and her “astonishing beauty” and thus has a great deal to say about her and her career, but believes her character here is an exaggeration of the femme fatale and not well written, points on which they and I definitely differ. I love Pratt’s description of Mature’s physique as being like a huge triangle pointing downwards, and there’s info on the actors, score composer Trevor Duncan, and director Ken Hughes.
Alec Burridge and Ted Wallis: In for the Long Haul (9:40)
Brief interviews with third assistant director Ted Wallis and second unit focus puller Alec Burridge that are intercut with short extracts from the film. Wallis sings the praises of Diana Dors, and relates a story about her encouraging fellow actress Gene Anderson to really slap her across the face during a key scene as evidence that she took the role seriously and was more than just a sex symbol. Burridge supplies some details of shooting the climactic scene with the truck on the Scottish hills, during which he was promoted to camera operator. “It rained every day,” he recalls, “but we wanted rain.
Theatrical Trailer (2:29)
A typical British “get ready, here it comes!” trailer whose urgent voiced narrator assures us that “At last, the cameras probe for the whole violent truth about trucking industry mobsters and their women!” and the dramatically angled captions sing of “The most explosive star team-up ever.” There are some spoilers here, so save it for after the film.
The Long Night Haul (1956) (19:40)
A British Transport Films short about the British Road Service’s general haulage truck division, one that looks back at the origins of the BRS and promotes the work it does to keep goods moving, speed the process along, and even make the journeys undertaken by drivers more efficient. Everything from trucks to ships to quick release articulated vehicles to teleprinters and push button relay tape machines gets coverage here, and if you’re looking for a sequence that really dates the film, try the one where we’re shown how lighter cabs are made and we watch as fibreglass is unrolled, cut to size and pressed into moulds by an operator with his bare hands. Yikes.
Image Gallery
36 screens of black-and-white promotional stills – including a half-dressed glamour shot of Diana Dors (you surprise me) – lobby cards, press book pages and international posters, one of which has the waggish tagline “When Mature breaks down Dors…” while another featuring Dors in a sultry pose goes with “Silk, Flesh and Dynamite!” Steady on.
FORTUNE IS A WOMAN
Audio Commentary with Kevin Lyons and Jonathan Rigby
Film historians Kevin Lyons and Jonathan Rigby – another of my favourite commentary pairings – prove a perfect choice to comment on a film noir that is notable for its gothic horror dream sequences and that brilliant centrepiece scene in the darkened house at night. They outline some of the differences between the film and Winston Graham’s source novel, and debate the appropriateness of both the British and American titles, their preference being for Red Sky at Night, the one that Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat came up with too late to have it put on the already processed film prints. They provide info on the actors, cinematographer Gerald Gibbs (whose CV they briefly skip through, in the process hailing the magnificence of Alberto Cavalcanti’s Went the Day Well?, one of my absolute favourites), art director Wilfred Shingleton (who also had a hell of a career), and composer William Alwyn. They also observe that police detectives in British films always seem to travel in pairs, and point out the way that the character of Sergeant Barnes in some ways anticipates later favourite Lieutenant Columbo.
The BEHP Interview with Anthony Mendleson (94:44)
When I reviewed Indicator’s Blu-ray release of Alan Bridges’s The Hireling, I recall approaching the BEHP interview with costume designer Phyllis Dalton with a small degree of apprehension, being convinced that this would be of only minor interest to me, only to be proved completely wrong by what unfolded. Despite that, I experienced a similar twinge of uncertainly when sitting down for this BEHP interview with Fortune is a Woman costume designer Anthony Mendleson, and once again I was enthralled by the conversation that followed. Conducted by Linda Wood and Dave Robson on 28 April 1993, this is littered with interesting anecdotes, in part because of the sheer number of notable films on which Mendleson worked, including key Ealing comedies Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and The Ladykillers(1955), Bond movie Thunderball (1965), and Michael Crichton’s splendid caper movie The Great Train Robbery(1978), or as it was known in the UK to avoid confusion with a real-life case, The First Great Train Robbery. He’s the second person in the special features to groan at the memory of working on a Norman Wisdom film, that he had a dreadful time on Roman Polanski’s Macbeth (1971), and that he regards The Keep (1983) as a disaster from his point of view, primarily because director Michael Mann was so peculiar and he seemingly could do nothing that satisfied him. He does reveal, however, that he had a good working relationship with Peter Sellers after Sellars took a liking to him, and there are several films that he remembers being great fun to do. Listening to Mendleson talk, I couldn’t help thinking that his connection to Fortune is a Woman was somehow strengthened by the similarity of his voice to that of leading man Jack Hawkins.
Image Gallery
36 screens featuring excellent quality promotional photos (including some posed portraits), monochrome lobby cards and international posters.
This Little Ship (1953) (12:00)
Produced by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority “as a tribute to H.M.S. Plym,” this documentary short has a tenuous link to the main feature by virtue of Jack Hawkins’ sober narration. The ship in question is a decommissioned warship that is being prepared for a nuclear test off the west coast of Australia, and as the bomb is primed, the crew retreat to the distant safety of shore and the countdown begins, the film looks back at the history of the vessel with the sort of melancholic reflection you might reserve for someone who had lived a productive life and now sadly been condemned to death. The atomic explosion, accompanied as it is by a discomforting musical chord, just briefly anticipates the astonishing centrepiece blast in episode eight of Twin Peaks: The Return.
Also included with the release edition is a Limited Edition 120-page Book with new essays by Jonathan Bygraves, Andrew Spicer, Pamela Hutchinson, Robert Murphy, Chloe Walker, and Bethan Roberts, extensive archival articles and interviews, new writing on the various short films, and film credits, but due to the above-mentioned personal circumstances I forgot to request a copy for this review. I’m sure it’s terrific – they always are.
final thoughts
A foolish undertaking for my first post-trauma review, perhaps, being a six-film box set with a ton of special features that I had to watch and write about in those spaces between daytime work and post-trauma fallout duties, but I really, really wanted to take on an Indicator release and this set really was the only logical choice. And it’s a hell of a collection, with all six titles proving worthy viewing in their individual ways, and while opinions will differ on which ones are best and just how noir each title is, it matters little when the choice is so rich. Another terrific release whose wealth of content should keep you busy for good couple of weeks. It certainly did me. Highly recommended.
Columbia Noir #7: Made in Britain
distributor: Indicator
release date: 15 December 2025