Dreadfully Boring

Absolutely the worst movie.

it is the rare 'crazy' movie that actually has something to say.

Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

As I recently watched a very good making of on the DVD for the fun Hammer Horror title The Mummy's Shroud,I was shocked to discover that actress Elizabeth Sellars holds the honour of starring in the last movie that Hammer filmed at Bray studios, (Shroud) and the first film that Hammer shot at the studio,which appeared to be a completely forgotten Film Noir. Mentioning the movie on IMDb,I was happily caught by surprise,when a very kind IMDb'er gave me the chance to take a look at the title,which led to me looking up at the sky,so that I could at last see the cloud burst.The plot:1946-Haunted by their memories of getting tortured by the Nazis, John and Carol Graham attempt to numb their pain by working as code breakers for the British government,whilst also saving up for a beautiful plot of land,which they can call their own.Attempting to find an enchanting route in their lives,Carol gives John the news that she is pregnant,which leads to John beginning to plan the family life which he has always desired.Visiting their future plot of land as they start to look forward to becoming a family,a car suddenly speeds past and runs over Carol,Gripping onto the car,John is able to catch a glimpse of the man and woman inside the car,before he is knocked out.Woken up by a police officer,John discovers that the car has killed Carol and their unborn child.Feeling his entire world breaking apart,John keeps the description of the man and the woman in the car close to his chest,as the officer attempts to interview him.Patiently waiting until the officer has disappeared from view,John begins to make plans on how he can track down Carol's killer's,so that he can show them the life that they have burst.View on the film:For the first half of the movie,writer's Leo Marks and Francis Searle smartly keep away from jumping 'straight to the action' by instead allowing the relationship between John and Carol to blossom across the screen,with the couple's dream patch of land giving the title a hauntingly melancholy mood.Wrapping the ghosts from the torture delivered by the Nazis with the soul-destroying death of Carol tightly around John,the writer's cast an unflinchingly brutal Film Noir backdrop,with John being unable to escape from his deadly survival instincts of the past,as he begins to step into a decaying gutter,on the search for Carol and their (unborn) child killer's.Perfectly expressing the melancholy and furious grief contained in the screenplay,director Francis Searle gives Carol and John's romance a sleek Gothic hue,with the low-lit lighting used for the couple taking a peak at their plot of land,showing the dream which they imagine,whilst also subtly hinting at the darkness which lays ahead for them.Sending John out into the Film Noir world,Searle brilliantly uses real cramp houses as locations to show how the pain & fury inside of John is consuming him,with Searle also giving the movie a harsh,gritty appearance,as John casts his first strikes of revenge.Despite featuring in only half of the movie, Elizabeth Sellars gives a tremendous shadow which cast a long shadow across the entire film,thanks to Sellars giving Carol a real sincerity in her hopes that she and John will be able to leave their Nazi horror behind.Frantically using all of his past skills as he searches for the driver & the passenger of the car, Robert Preston gives an excellent performance as John,with Preston showing John's soft eyes gradually transform into an unforgiving fire,as John sees the silver lining on his cloud burst.

Cloudburst (1951)A great title, and a curious, odd little film that is commanding at times and well filmed throughout. And it has some real surprises, so good drama.The big surprise is near the beginning and I don't want to give anything away, but there is a deeply romantic core to the entire movie. This is most of all about a man who loves his wife. Both man and wife are involved in the British top secret code breaking operation of WWII, and the movie begins in fact with a tour of the code-breaking room. But then it shifts to our two leads, the man a hale and handsome Robert Preston, the woman a cute and slightly mysterious Elizabeth Sellars. They're going to have a baby, life looks perfect ahead.But things take a sudden turn, and Preston is off on a solitary manhunt. His lonely quest and his isolation from his friends make this a kind of British film noir, a post-war malaise hanging over the film (it's set in 1946). There is a more than slight improbability to some of the revenge he wreaks (the victims seem a hair willing to just stand there and take it) but if you accept this as just part of the drama, the rest of the film in all its small details is really great, really compelling.In a way, the movie is a metaphor for the whole war, both on the grand scale (hating the Germans) and on a personal level (hating particular crimes, specific deaths). And if retribution occurs, a higher order of justice is inserted, too. And honor, or a sense of doing the right thing based on conscience. Preston pulls off all sides of this dilemma well. He's warm and he's cold, he's smart and he's flawed. And in the end he's sentimental, too. The final reading of the code, once it's broken, is a touching triumph.And what about the character Sellars plays? "My hatred would overwhelm me like a cloudburst," she says, explaining not only the title, but the theme of the movie, retribution from the gut. She inhabits the film very much, but from the opposite side of things than Sellars. As you'll see. The film does move slowly at times. The war is over, that kind of high drama is past, but in its smaller goals it never stutters, it never fails to know what it wants and how to get there.

I read the other two "reviews" here - the first written by someone who seems to have seen a different film than the one actually in front of his eyes, and the other by someone who doesn't really get one of the major plot points. But, this is the IMDb so what else is new.I'd never seen or heard of Cloudburst prior to the recent showing on TCM. It's quite a good little film - well directed by Searle, whose work I don't know at all, with a top-notch score by Frank Spencer, a composer I also don't know. Preston is very good, as are the rest of the players, especially the actor who plays the Inspector. The storytelling is compelling, and there's a surprising complexity in Preston's character. Leo Marks, from whose play this was taken, was a fascinating writer and person - as one of the others points out, he really did work as a decoder during the war - and this isn't the only film he wrote where the central character is a decoder - he also wrote Sebastian, in which Dirk Bogarde plays a decoder. And, of course, Marks gave us the brilliant script to Michael Powell's Peeping Tom.Worth catching if you can find it.

This is a tightly-constructed mystery of the pre-Black Mask style, in which the solving of the crime -- here a potential serial killer -- must be tracked down, and the only clear clue is a bit of paper at the scene of the crime with a cypher code.The movie tries to add psychological drama by turning it from a "Whoodunnit" to a "Howcatchem" a style of mystery familiar to all fans of the old "Columbo" TV movie series, with the added punch that it is told from the viewpoint of the killer -- in this case, Robert Preston, who is an American who is somehow running a code-breaking division for the British government. Motivations are established early, but the whole thing is rendered a bit flat by the lack of details that surround the personnel. The result is a well-told story that is not, alas, particularly gripping.