1935-42, PG, Network
The first volume of this series was disappointing, but this one is both valuable and entertaining. The first disc from pre-Michael Balcon days has the more significant films. The likable 18th-century children's naval yarn Midshipman Easy (1935) stars future TV star Hughie Green as an idealistic, naive teenager turning up trumps at sea and waving a cutlass ashore while serving on a Royal Navy sloop command by Roger Livesey. It's significant as the directorial debut of Carol Reed and welcomed by his future collaborator Graham Greene in his Spectator film column.
The other film, Brief Ecstasy (1937), directed by Edmond T Gréville, a French film-maker at home on both sides of the Channel, is a little gem about a handsome middle-class Englishman (Hugh Williams) and the attractive student (Linden Travers) with whom he has a one-night stand in London and then meets again five years later, when she's...
The first volume of this series was disappointing, but this one is both valuable and entertaining. The first disc from pre-Michael Balcon days has the more significant films. The likable 18th-century children's naval yarn Midshipman Easy (1935) stars future TV star Hughie Green as an idealistic, naive teenager turning up trumps at sea and waving a cutlass ashore while serving on a Royal Navy sloop command by Roger Livesey. It's significant as the directorial debut of Carol Reed and welcomed by his future collaborator Graham Greene in his Spectator film column.
The other film, Brief Ecstasy (1937), directed by Edmond T Gréville, a French film-maker at home on both sides of the Channel, is a little gem about a handsome middle-class Englishman (Hugh Williams) and the attractive student (Linden Travers) with whom he has a one-night stand in London and then meets again five years later, when she's...
- 5/11/2013
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
(Carol Reed, 1951, Studio Canal, PG)
Carol Reed was acclaimed as an important new talent when Graham Greene, as film critic of the Spectator, reviewed his second film as a director, Midshipman Easy, in 1935. After the second world war they found fame, collaborating on The Fallen Idol and The Third Man. Reed thought they might scale new heights with a film of Joseph Conrad's 1896 novel An Outcast of the Islands. But Greene, in thrall since childhood to Conrad, had been trying to escape the Polish writer's influence and rejected Reed's invitation. A pity, because it might have been a revealing masterpiece.
Instead, it's an ambitious, deeply flawed picture, filmed on unromantically observed south- east Asian locations with a powerful performance by Trevor Howard as the self-destructive Willems and Ralph Richardson (a key exponent of Greene) providing a highly stylised portrait of the godlike Captain Lingard. A crucial film in an important,...
Carol Reed was acclaimed as an important new talent when Graham Greene, as film critic of the Spectator, reviewed his second film as a director, Midshipman Easy, in 1935. After the second world war they found fame, collaborating on The Fallen Idol and The Third Man. Reed thought they might scale new heights with a film of Joseph Conrad's 1896 novel An Outcast of the Islands. But Greene, in thrall since childhood to Conrad, had been trying to escape the Polish writer's influence and rejected Reed's invitation. A pity, because it might have been a revealing masterpiece.
Instead, it's an ambitious, deeply flawed picture, filmed on unromantically observed south- east Asian locations with a powerful performance by Trevor Howard as the self-destructive Willems and Ralph Richardson (a key exponent of Greene) providing a highly stylised portrait of the godlike Captain Lingard. A crucial film in an important,...
- 5/19/2012
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
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