The Divorce of Lady X (Tim Whelan, 1938)

Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier in The Divorce of Lady X

Cast: Merle Oberon, Laurence Olivier, Binnie Barnes, Ralph Richardson, Morton Selten, J.H. Roberts, Gertrude Musgrove, Gus McNaughton, H.B. Hallam, Eileen Peel. Screenplay: Lajos Biró, Ian Dalrymple, Arthur Wimperis, based on a play by Gilbert Wakefield. Cinematography: Harry Stradling Sr. Art direction: Lazare Meerson. Film editing: Walter Stovkis. Music: Miklós Rózsa. 

Screwball comedy movies, in which an otherwise sober and respectable male, usually a lawyer, a professor, or a businessman, is prodded into absurd behavior and outlandish situations by a giddy, beautiful, and usually rich female, seem to be a particularly American genre. They may have their antecedents in the French farces of Feydeau and Labiche, but they need that American sense, particularly common in the Great Depression, that the rich are idle triflers, not to be trusted by everyday hard-working folk. Which may be why the British attempt at screwball seen in The Divorce of Lady X is a bit of a misfire. Merle Oberon plays the madcap lady in the film, who delights in deceiving and annoying the barrister played by Laurence Olivier until he inevitably falls in love with her. One problem with the film lies in the casting: Olivier's vulpine mien is not one that easily expresses naïveté, which the barrister Everard Logan must possess in order to fall for Leslie Steele's wiles, when she allows him to believe that she's really the scandalous Lady Mere. The real Lady Mere is played by Binnie Barnes, and the subplot revolves around the desire of her husband, played by Ralph Richardson, to divorce her, with the aid of Logan in the dual role of both barrister and corespondent -- how he got into that predicament is the rather clumsy setup for the film. Barnes and Richardson are far better suited to this kind of comedy than Oberon and Olivier, and they contribute some of the more amusing moments in the movie. It's filmed in the rather wan hues of early Technicolor, which only contribute to the general sense of underachievement.

The Bed Sitting Room (Richard Lester, 1969)

Dudley Moore and Peter Cook in The Bed Sitting Room

Cast: Rita Tushingham, Michael Hordern, Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, Ralph Richardson, Arthur Lowe, Mona Washbourne, Richard Warwick, Marty Feldman, Harry Secombe, Roy Kinnear, Spike Milligan, Ronald Fraser, Jimmy Edwards, Frank Thornton, Dandy Nichols. Screenplay: John Antrobus, Charles Wood, based on a play by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus. Cinematography: David Watkin. Production design: Assheton Gorton. Film editing: John Victor Smith. Music: Ken Thorne.

Seemingly every comic actor in 1960s Britain turns up somewhere in Richard Lester's The Bed Sitting Room, but they don't generate many laughs. The problem with most absurdist comedies is the absence of a grounding normality, and in the post-apocalyptic setting of the film, in which Britain has been turned into a vast trash dump by a nuclear war, there's not much to serve as a norm against which its silliness can play out. The point is to satirize our pre-apocalyptic complacency, and once you get that point the film mostly asks you to sit around and wait for your particular favorite actor to make his or her appearance. Oh, there's Ralph Richardson. Ah, that's Mona Washbourne. Good, that's Marty Feldman. And so on for 90 minutes. It only seems longer.

Time Bandits (Terry Gilliam, 1981)

Craig Warnock and Sean Connery in Time Bandits

Cast: John Cleese, Sean Connery, Shelley Duvall, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, Michael Palin, Ralph Richardson, Peter Vaughan, David Warner, Craig Warnock, David Rappaport, Kenny Baker, Malcolm Dixon, Mike Edmonds, Jack Purvis, Tiny Ross, Jim Broadbent, David Daker, Sheila Fearn. Screenplay: Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam. Cinematography: Peter Biziou. Production design: Milly Burns. Film editing: Julian Doyle. Music: Mike Moran. 

A film with many admirers, but I find it too much a kids' movie -- noisy and sometimes silly -- with not enough genuine wit to please grownups. What works best for me in it are the star performers -- Sean Connery, Ralph Richardson, Ian Holm -- letting themselves go. 

Our Man in Havana (Carol Reed, 1959)

Noël Coward and Alec Guinness in Our Man in Havana

Cast: Alec Guinness, Burl Ives, Maureen O'Hara, Ernie Kovacs, Noël Coward, Ralph Richardson, Jo Morrow. Screenplay: Graham Greene, based on his novel. Cinematography: Oswald Morris. Art direction: John Box. Film editing: Bert Bates. Music: Frank Deniz, Laurence Deniz.

Given its cast, its director, and its screenwriter, Our Man in Havana has always seemed to me that it should be a little bit better than it is. I think director Carol Reed may be mostly at fault: His best films, like Odd Man Out (1947), The Fallen Idol (1948), and The Third Man (1949), have just the right mixture of gravitas and wit. Here there's a little too much gravitas weighing down what could have a more pronounced satiric edge: a tale of bumbling British espionage. It's possible, too, that a little uncertainty of tone lingers over the movie because it was filmed on location in Cuba just after the fall of Batista -- Fidel Castro himself visited the shoot -- and the subsequent course of the revolution lends a queasiness to the subject matter. Nevertheless, we are in the hands of masters like Alec Guinness, Noël Coward, and Ralph Richardson here, so there's enough to enjoy. 

The Wrong Box (Bryan Forbes, 1966)

John Mills and Michael Caine in The Wrong Box

Masterman Finsbury: John Mills
Joseph Finsbury: Ralph Richardson
Michael Finsbury: Michael Caine
Morris Finsbury: Peter Cook
John Finsbury: Dudley Moore
Julia Finsbury: Nanette Newman
Peacock: Wilfrid Lawson
Dr. Pratt: Peter Sellers
Detective: Tony Hancock
Lawyer Patience: Thorley Walters
Major Martha: Cicely Courtneidge

Director: Bryan Forbes
Screenplay: Larry Gelbart, Burt Shevelove
Based on a novel by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
Cinematography: Gerry Turpin
Set design: Ray Simm
Costume design: Julie Harris
Film editing: Alan Osbiston
Music: John Barry

The Wrong Box could have used a director like Richard Lester or Blake Edwards, one with a defter comic touch than Bryan Forbes, whose direction is a bit stodgy: The opening sequence that sets up the tontine goes on too long, and the montage of the deaths of the subscribers to the scheme is stolen from the similar sequence in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), which Robert Hamer handled with a lighter, wittier staging. There's an ill-advised slow-motion scene in which Michael Caine and Nanette Newman pirouette through the house as they discover they're in love; it's meant to be a parody of slo-mo love scenes, but it falls flat. And the climactic hearse-chase is something of a muddle whose opportunity for gags is mostly wasted. But none of this matters when you have a cast like this one, capable of reducing you to helpless laughter, as those masters of comic timing Peter Cook and Dudley Moore do to me in the scene in which they resort to using the word "thing" as an all-purpose euphemism. Or when John Mills tries and repeatedly fails to kill Ralph Richardson. Or when Richardson reduces all and sundry to bored stupefaction with his fact-filled monologues. Even the prudish Victorian lovers played by Caine and Newman have wonderful moments, such as Julia's hushed admission that she finds eggs ... obscene, and Michael's eager-to-please acknowledgement that she has opened his eyes to that fact. It goes without saying that Peter Sellers's cameo as the zoned-out Dr. Pratt is one of his many classic moments, but the film is loaded with British comic actors doing their thing, among them Wilfrid Lawson's aged, desiccated butler, Tony Hancock's irascible detective, and Cicely Courtneidge's imperious Salvation Army major. The Wrong Box is a case where directorial auteurship goes out of the window in favor of skilled performers and a screenplay by Larry Gelbart and Burt Shevelove that helps them do what they do best.

Anna Karenina (Julien Duvivier, 1948)

Vivien Leigh and Ralph Richardson in Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina: Vivien Leigh
Karenin: Ralph Richardson
Vronsky: Kieron Moore
Kitty: Sally Ann Howes
Levin: Niall MacGinnis
Princess Betsy: Martita Hunt
Countess Vronsky: Helen Haye
Sergei: Patrick Skipwith

Director: Julien Duvivier
Screenplay: Jean Anouilh, Guy Morgan, Julien Duvivier
Based on a novel by Leo Tolstoy
Cinematography: Henri Alekan
Costume design: Cecil Beaton

If Greta Garbo is the best reason for seeing Clarence Brown's 1935 version of Anna Karenina, then Ralph Richardson is the best argument for watching this one. As Karenin, Richardson demonstrates an understanding of the character that Basil Rathbone failed to display in the earlier version. In a performance barely distinguished from his usual haughty villain roles, Rathbone played Karenin as a cuckold with a cold heart. Richardson wants us to see what Tolstoy found in Karenin: the wounded pride, the inability to stoop to tenderness that has been bred in him by long contact with Russian society and political status-seeking. Unfortunately, Richardson's role exists in a rather dull adaptation of the novel, directed by Julien Duvivier from a screenplay he wrote with Jean Anouilh and Guy Morgan. Although Vivien Leigh was certainly a tantalizing choice for the title role, she makes a fragile Anna -- no surprise, as she was recovering from tuberculosis, a miscarriage, and a bout with depression that seems to have begun her descent into bipolar disorder. At times, especially in the 19th-century gowns designed by Cecil Beaton, she evokes a little of the wit and backbone of Scarlett O'Hara, but she has no chemistry with her Vronsky, the otherwise unremembered Irish actor Kieron Moore. It's not surprising that producer Alexander Korda gave Moore third billing, promoting Richardson above him. The production, too, is rather drab, especially when compared to the opulence that MGM could provide in its 1935 heyday. There's a toy train early in the film that the special effects people try to pass off as full-size by hiding it behind an obviously artificial snowstorm. As usual, this Anna Karenina is all about building up to Anna's famous demise, this time by taking us into her foreboding nightmare about a railroad worker she saw at the beginning of her affair with Vronsky. And also as usual, the half of the novel dealing with Levin, Tolstoy's stand-in character, is scuttled. In this version, Levin is a balding middle-aged man whose only function is to be rejected by Kitty, who is then thrown over for Anna by Vronsky. There's a perfunctory scene that gives a happy ending to the Levin-Kitty story, but it adds nothing but length to the film. Some of the scenes featuring the supporting cast, especially those with Martita Hunt as Princess Betsy, bring the film to flickering life, but there aren't enough of them to overcome the general dullness.    

The Fallen Idol (Carol Reed, 1948)

The presidential campaign has put lying at the center of conversation this year, so The Fallen Idol fits right in: It's all about lying and its consequences. The film is usually categorized as a thriller, and it's undeniably suspenseful, but if you try to pigeonhole it as a thriller you have to deal with an ending that doesn't have the punch that we expect from the genre. I prefer to think of it as something less sexy, and probably much less enticing to those who haven't seen it: a moral fable. Revising his story "The Basement Room" into a screenplay, Graham Greene ensnares everyone in the film in their own lies, so that the audience, which knows the truth, is kept in suspense. Philippe (Bobby Henrey) is the young son of an ambassador, living in the embassy in London's Belgrave Square. His mother has been recuperating from a long illness in their home country, and when his father goes to see her, Philippe is left in the care of the butler, Baines (Ralph Richardson), and his wife, the housekeeper (Sonia Dresdel). Philippe idolizes Baines, who entertains him with made-up stories about his adventures in Africa -- in fact, he has never been out of England. Mrs. Baines, on the other hand, is strict and fussy, so he has learned to be sneaky about things like the pet snake he is hiding from her. When Mrs. Baines punishes him one day by sending him to his room, Philippe sneaks down the fire escape and follows Baines to a cafe, where Baines is meeting with Julie (Michèle Morgan), a woman who used to work at the embassy. Baines and Julie are in love, but she has found their relationship hopeless and has decided to break it off. When Philippe surprises them, Baines pretends that Julie is his niece; before the boy, they continue to talk about their relationship as if it were that of some other couple. After Julie leaves, Baines persuades Philippe not to talk about her around Mrs. Baines, telling him that she dislikes Julie. Back at the embassy, Baines tries to persuade his wife that their marriage is at an end, but she is having none of it. Learning that he's seeing another woman, she also lies, telling him that she's going away for a few days, then secretly stays behind to spy on him. All of this deception comes to a head with an accidental death that looks a lot like murder, with Philippe as a key witness. But Philippe has been so confused by the lies he's been told and the ones he's been asked to tell, that when the police question him he is in danger of leading them into a serious error of justice. Director Carol Reed brilliantly manages to hold most of the film to Philippe's point of view, giving the audience the double vision of what is actually happening and what Philippe thinks is happening. Nine-year-old Henrey, who had no significant film career afterward, is splendidly natural in the role, and Richardson brings a necessary ambiguity to the part of Baines. The film is also enlivened by Greene's secondary characters, including a chorus of housemaids who comment on the action, a clock-winder (Hay Petrie) who breaks the tension of an interrogation scene, and a scene at the police station where the cops and a prostitute (Dora Bryan) try to figure out what to do with Philippe, who has run away after the accident, barefoot and in pajamas, and refuses to tell them where he lives.

The Heiress (William Wyler, 1949)

With 12 Oscar nominations and three wins for directing, William Wyler holds a firm place in the history of American movies. But not without some grumbling on the part of auteur critics like Andrew Sarris, who observed, "Wyler's career is a cipher as far as personal direction is concerned." His movies were invariably polished and professionally made, but if what you're looking for is some hint of personality behind the camera, the kind that Hitchcock or Hawks or Ford displayed no matter what the subject matter of the film, then Wyler is an enigma. His most personal film, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), grew out of his wartime experiences, but they are subsumed in the stories he has to tell and not revealed with any assertively personal point of view on them. And anyone who can trace a Wylerian personality latent in movies as varied as Mrs. Miniver (1942), Roman Holiday (1953), Ben-Hur (1959), and Funny Girl (1968) has a subtler analytical mind than mine. What they have in common is that they are well made, the work of a fine craftsman if not an artist. The other thing they have in common is that they won Oscars for their stars: Greer Garson, Audrey Hepburn, Charlton Heston, and Barbra Streisand, respectively. The Heiress, too, won an Oscar for its star, Olivia de Havilland, suggesting that in Wyler we have a director whose virtue lay not in his personal vision but in his skill at packaging, at arranging a showcase not just for performers -- he also directed Oscar-winning performances by Bette Davis in Jezebel (1938) and by Fredric March and Harold Russell in The Best Years of Our Lives -- but also for production designers, costume designers, composers, and cinematographers: Oscars for The Heiress went to John Meehan, Harry Horner, and Emile Kuri for art direction and set decoration, to Edith Head and Gile Steele for costumes, and to Aaron Copland for the score, and Leo Tover was nominated for his cinematography. Wyler lost the directing Oscar to Joseph L. Mankiewicz for A Letter to Three Wives, but is there any doubt that The Heiress would have been a lesser film than it is without Wyler's guidance? All of this is a long-winded way to say that although I honor, and in many ways prefer, the personal vision that shines through in the works of directors like Hitchcock, Hawks, Ford, et al., there is room in my pantheon for the skilled if impersonal professional. As for The Heiress itself, it's a satisfying film with two great performances (de Havilland's Catherine and Ralph Richardson's Dr. Sloper), one hugely entertaining one (Miriam Hopkins's Lavinia Penniman), and one sad miscasting: Montgomery Clift's Morris Townsend. It's a hard role to put across: Morris has to be plausible enough to persuade not only Catherine but also the somewhat more worldly Lavinia that he is genuinely in love with Catherine and not just her money, but he also needs to give the audience a whiff of the cad. Clift's Morris is too callow, too grinningly eager. There is no ambiguity in the performance. If we like Morris too much, we risk seeing Dr. Sloper more as an over-stern paterfamilias and less as the cruelly self-absorbed man he is. Richardson's fine performance goes a long way to righting this imbalance, but he's fighting Clift's sex appeal all the way.  

Things to Come (William Cameron Menzies, 1936)

Works of fiction that pretend to depict things as they will be in a specific place and year tend to look a little foolish when that year actually comes. The years 1984 and 2001 didn't turn out to be precisely as George Orwell and Arthur C. Clarke envisioned them. But neither Orwell nor Clarke expected them to: Both were extrapolating from what they saw about the times in which they were writing. Orwell was viewing with alarm the struggle for power in 1949, and Clarke was elaborating on thoughts he had about the relationship of man, technology, and nature -- for good or ill -- in a series of stories beginning with "The Sentinel" in 1948. It's significant that both of these writers were working from a post-World War II point of view. But Things to Come starts from a very different place: England just before the second World War. H.G. Wells's 1933 The Shape of Things to Come was a meditation on a utopia founded on science, replacing religions, and a world government, replacing nationalism. The adaptation of these ideas in Wells's screenplay involves a world on the brink of war at Christmas, 1936 -- less than three years before the world actually went to war. Wells didn't have to wait long to see the ideas in the film superseded by reality. In the film the conflict lasts 40 years, and is devastating to the old order of things. There arises a kind of technotopia, which then has to battle with (and triumph over) reactionary, anti-science forces. We no longer have the kind of faith in technology to solve all problems that Wells possessed -- in fact, if the atomic outcome of World War II is any indicator, technology presents as many problems as it solves for humankind. Things to Come is muddled but fascinating: It raises the right questions while providing unsatisfactory answers. The best things in the film are the ones closest to home. For example, Ralph Richardson's performance as the dictator known as "The Boss" -- a slangy translation of Il Duce. Richardson was one of the three greatest English actors of the mid-century, but unlike Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud he rarely got a chance to show his stuff in movies. Here, his eccentric manner is the key to the role, and he plays it to the hilt. Unfortunately, Menzies, a gifted designer, wasn't much of a director, and he surrounds Richardson with inferior performers: Margaretta Scott, who had a long career once she grew accustomed to film acting, here recites her lines as if reading them for the first time and assumes poses copied from silent film vamps. For contemporary viewers, the most interesting things about the film are the set designs by Vincent Korda and the fantasias about what people will be wearing in 2036 -- which in Wells's scheme of things is the year of the first voyage around the moon. The costumes are credited to John Armstrong, René Hubert, and the Marchioness of Queensberry. (Her given name was Cathleen Mann; a portrait painter and costumer, she was married to the 11th Marquess of Queensberry from 1926 to 1946.)

H.G. Wells, Pearl Argyle, and Raymond Massey on the set of Things to Come