Major Barbara (Gabriel Pascal, 1941)

Robert Newton, Wendy Hiller, Robert Morley, Rex Harrison, and Emlyn Williams in Major Barbara

Cast: Wendy Hiller, Rex Harrison, Robert Morley, Robert Newton, Sybil Thorndike, Emlyn Williams, Marie Lohr, Penelope Dudley-Ward, Walter Hudd, David Tree, Deborah Kerr, Donald Calthrop, Marie Ault, Cathleen Cordell, Torin Thatcher, Miles Malleson, Felix Aylmer, Stanley Holloway. Screenplay: George Bernard Shaw, based on his play. Cinematography: Ronald Neame. Production design: Vincent Korda. Film editing: Charles Frend, David Lean. Music: William Walton.

George Bernard Shaw's plays often seem to me as if they're about to collapse underneath their own cleverness: so many paradoxes, so much witty dialogue, such tantalizingly heretical ideas. Major Barbara is a prime example of this, a duel between faith and realism, between rich and poor, between capitalism and Fabian socialism, between men and women, all treated with the would-be drawing-room-comedy lightness of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, down to the climactic revelation that the play's ostensible hero is a "foundling" (a euphemism for "bastard"). But the film version slumps down into tedium because Shaw can't resist trying to make his characters, especially Barbara (wonderfully played by Wendy Hiller), into something like real people whenever he wants the audience to feel something instead of just laughing at the bright repartee. The film remains a three-act play, despite attempts to provide some scenes -- the initial meeting of Barbara and Adolphus Cusins (Rex Harrison being archly ardent), the fight between Bill Walker (Robert Newton) and Todger Fairmile (Torin Thatcher), Barbara's tossing her Salvation Army bonnet (and almost herself) into the Thames, and the tour of the hellish munitions factory and its heavenly benevolent-capitalist planned community -- in between the ones we would ordinarily see on stage. We are supposed to continue the dialogue of ideas among ourselves after the movie's over, but the effect of the two-hour-plus barrage of wit is to make me want to be stupid again. The film was rightly celebrated for the skill of its performers and for the tenacity with which it was filmed during the Blitz, but as a whole it's an achievement that hasn't stood the test of time.

Gaslight (Thorold Dickinson, 1940)

Diana Wynyard and Anton Walbrook in Gaslight

Paul Mallen: Anton Walbrook
Bella Mallen: Diana Wynyard
Rough: Frank Pettingell
Nancy: Cathleen Cordell
Ullswater: Robert Newton
Cobb: Jimmy Hanley
Elizabeth: Minnie Rayner

Director: Thorold Dickinson
Screenplay: A.R. Rawlinson, Bridget Boland
Based on a play by Patrick Hamilton
Cinematography: Bernard Knowles
Music: Richard Addinsell

One of the more famous crimes of MGM was its attempt to destroy the negative and all existing prints of Thorold Dickinson's 1940 version of Gaslight in order to avoid any comparisons between it and the 1944 remake directed by George Cukor. It failed somehow, and the two versions can now be seen back to back. The 1944 film is superb entertainment, winning an Oscar for Ingrid Bergman and showcasing Charles Boyer to very good effect. By its side, Dickinson's version can feel a little undernourished -- or is it just that the later version is overfed, fattened up by Hollywood largesse? I feel very kindly toward the earlier film, which doesn't attempt to disguise the fact that it's sheer melodrama with backstories that try to add psychological realism. All we really need to do is accept the film's Victorian subtext and to know is that Paul Mallen is a foreigner and that his wife, Bella, grew up breathing the pure air of the English countryside to see whose side the film is on. Just the way the Viennese-born Anton Walbrook smooths his mustache is enough to let us know he's a rotter. And was anyone more born to play the gaslighted victim than Diana Wynyard who, with her slight strabismus and her habit of staring into the distance, seems to be seeing things that no one else can? The 84-minute run time sets everything up efficiently and moves steadily through some truly suspenseful moments to its tables-turned conclusion. The 1944 remake runs half an hour longer and while its performances may be more elaborate (and in the case of the teenage Angela Lansbury's conniving maid, superior), Thorold's version keeps us nicely tantalized. The casting of Robert Newton as Bella's cousin is amusing, considering that Newton would go on to make his name as an actor with the terrifying Bill Sikes in David Lean's Oliver Twist (1948). Those of us who saw that film first may suspect that he's up to no good in Gaslight, but we'd be wrong.

Turner Classic Movies

Odd Man Out (Carol Reed, 1947)

James Mason and Kathleen Ryan in Odd Man Out

Johnny McQueen: James Mason
Kathleen Sullivan: Kathleen Ryan
Lukey: Robert Newton
Pat: Cyril Cusack
Shell: F.J. McCormick
Fencie: William Hartnell
Rosie: Fay Compton
Inspector: Denis O'Dea
Father Tom: W.G. Fay
Theresa O'Brien: Maureen Delaney
Dennis: Robert Beatty
Nolan: Dan O'Herlihy

Director: Carol Reed
Screenplay: F.L. Green, R.C. Sheriff
Based on a novel by F.L. Green
Cinematography: Robert Krasker
Art direction: Ralph W. Brinton
Film editing: Fergus McDonell
Music: William Alwyn

The collaboration of director Carol Reed and cinematographer Robert Krasker on Odd Man Out is perhaps not as celebrated as the one on The Third Man (1949), but in some ways it's more impressive. The Third Man has a tighter screenplay and a location, postwar Vienna, that lent itself more readily to the kind of expressionistic atmosphere Krasker's images of it supply. Odd Man Out is a looser, more episodic story. As its title almost suggests, it's a kind of reworking of the Odyssey, the archetypal perilous-journey narrative. Reed made a decision at some point to treat the first part of the film, the planning and commission of the heist, in a conventionally realistic fashion and then gradually to shift into something more expressionistic, something that reveals the disintegrating state of the dying Johnny McQueen's mind. He needed an actor like James Mason, who could give Johnny the necessary charisma while still suggesting from the outset the character's damaged state of mind. But he also needed Krasker's ability to present actuality and then to transform it into something stranger than reality, to suggest the menace lurking in the mundane streets of Belfast and then to work with the baroquely sinister sets designed by Ralph W. Brinton that include the ornate Four Winds Saloon (based on an actual Belfast pub but created in the studio) and the decaying Victorian residence of Shell and the mad painter Lukey. We first begin to see the transition when Johnny experiences vertigo while riding through the streets of the city, but from the moment when the wounded Johnny takes cover in an abandoned air-raid shelter, where reality becomes indistinguishable from Johnny's fevered prison memories and other hallucinations, the film increasingly steps away from realism. Even the weather plays a role in subverting realism: The semi-conscious Johnny is left by Shell in an old bathtub in a lot filled with junk, including a statue of an angel whose nose seems to run after the rain starts to fall. Later, when rain has turned to snow, an icicle hangs from the drippy nose. The encounters with Belfast street kids are like meeting the children of Pandemonium. The cast, much of it recruited from Dublin's Abbey Theatre, is superb, including Kathleen Ryan, Cyril Cusack, Dan O'Herlihy, and Denis O'Dea. Robert Newton received pre-title second billing with Mason, which is certainly out of keeping with the size of his role, and there are those who find Newton's Lukey out of key with the less showy performances of the other actors: Pauline Kael calls it "a badly misconceived performance in a badly misconceived role." But for me it brings the ferment of the manhunt and the increasingly bizarre handing-about of Johnny to a kind of necessary climax before Johnny's reunion with Kathleen and the inevitable outcome.

Jamaica Inn (Alfred Hitchcock, 1939)

According to Stephen Whitty's excellent The Alfred Hitchcock Encyclopedia, the director thought Jamaica Inn "completely absurd" and didn't even bother to make his familiar cameo appearance in it. Hitchcock was right: It's a ridiculously plotted and often amateurishly staged film -- although Hitchcock must take some of the blame for the scenes in which characters sneak around talking in stage whispers and pretending they're hidden from their pursuers when they're in plain sight for anyone with average peripheral vision. Much of Hitchcock's attitude toward the film has been ascribed to his clashes with Charles Laughton, who was an uncredited co-producer and resisted any attempts by the director to rein in one of his more ridiculous performances. As Sir Humphrey Pengallan, the county squire and justice of the peace who is secretly raking in a fortune by collaborating with smugglers who loot shipwrecked vessels after murdering their crew, Laughton wears a fake nose and oddly placed eyebrows and hams it up mercilessly. Maureen O'Hara, in her first major film role, struggles with a confusingly written character who sometimes displays fire and initiative and at other times seems alarmingly obtuse. The rest of the cast includes such stalwarts of the British film and stage as Leslie Banks, Emlyn Williams, and Basil Radford, with a surprising performance by Robert Newton as the movie's romantic lead, Jem Traherne, an agent working undercover to expose the smugglers. You look in vain at the young Newton for traces of his terrifying Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist (David Lean, 1948) or his Long John Silver in Treasure Island (Byron Haskin, 1950). The production design is handsome, and the film begins with an exciting storm at sea, but the screenplay, based on a Daphne Du Maurier novel and written by the usually capable Sidney Gilliat and Joan Harrison, quickly falls apart. Hitchcock's last film in England, Jamaica Inn was a critical flop but a commercial success.

Oliver Twist (David Lean, 1948)

After George Cukor's 1935 David Copperfield, I think this is my favorite adaptation of Dickens for film or TV, and god knows there have been plenty of them. What Lean does right is to treat the Dickens book as a fable, not a novel. A novel takes its characters seriously as human beings; a fable sees them as embodiments of good and evil. And there's plenty of evil on display in Oliver Twist, from the brute evil of Bill Sikes (Robert Newton) to the venal evil of Fagin (Alec Guinness) to the stupid evil of Mr. Bumble (Francis L. Sullivan) and Mrs. Corney (Mary Clare). Oliver (John Howard Davies) is innocently good, whereas Mr. Brownlow (Henry Stephenson) is a man of good will. Nancy (Kay Walsh) and, to a lesser extent, the Artful Dodger (Anthony Newley) are potentially good people who have been corrupted by evil. We need fables like this from time to time, just to keep ourselves from despair. The performers are all beautifully cast, especially Davies as Oliver: He's just real-looking enough in the role that he doesn't become saccharine, the way some prettier Olivers do. This is Lean in what I think of as his great period, when he was making beautifully filmed movies with just the right measure of sentiment: Brief Encounter (1945) and Great Expectations (1946) in addition to this one. But he would be bit by the epic bug while working on The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), and its success would betray him into bigger but not necessarily better movies: Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965), and the rest of his later oeuvre would have the same attention to visual detail that make his early movies so rich, but they seem to me chilly in comparison. Here he benefits not only from a perfect cast, but also from Guy Green's photography of John Bryan's set designs. There are probably few more terrifying scenes in movies than Sikes's murder of Nancy, which sends Sikes's dog (one of the most impressive performances by an animal in movies) into a frenzy. Running it a close second is Sikes's death, seen from a vertiginous rooftop angle. We don't actually see the death, but only the swift tautening of the rope as he plunges, punctuated by a sudden snap. The film is not as well known in America as in Great Britain, where it engendered controversy: Guinness's portrayal of Fagin elicited charges of anti-Semitism, especially since the film appeared so soon after the world learned about the Holocaust. The truth is, Guinness doesn't play to Jewish stereotypes, but Fagin's absurdly exaggerated nose (which makeup artist Stuart Freeborn copied from George Cruikshank's illustrations for the novel) does evoke some of the caricatures in the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer. The film was edited to remove some of the shots of Fagin in profile, and was held from release in the United States until 1951.