Wonderful character development!

Far from Perfect, Far from Terrible

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

.Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

This movie has a great cast, but I found it a very disappointing experience, especially as I'm a great fan of the stars, Mai Zetterling, Richard Attenborough and Herbert Lom. Many of the support players ring bells with me too, especially Joan Hickson, Hermione Baddeley, Eric Pohlmann, Kathleen Byron, Zena Marshall and Ronald Adam. One wonders how on earth, people of this caliber came to be involved with such a dull and thoroughly disappointing movie. First of all, "hell", either sold out or still open for business, has nothing to do with the wishy-washy plot at all. It's a comedy - yes, a comedy - about a supposedly deceased novelist who wrote a book of that title. Yes, it turns out that reports of the demise were greatly exaggerated. Well, even this idea has promise, but that promise is utterly vitiated by the screenwriter's dull, plodding dialogue and Michael Anderson's unimaginative direction. Even Jack Asher's photography is way, way below his usual high standard. The only good thing about the movie is the agreeable music score contributed by Hans May.

In the days when this film was made the premise of taking over someone else's identity was looked on as a source of comedy.Nowdays it is looked on as a major source of crime.It would no doubt have been made rather differently and one hopes rather more entertainingly.The whole basis of this film seems rather rocky.Lom comes back from the war and finds he has "written" a novel.Whereas Zetterling has taken over his identity.Lom tells her to get out but she doesn't.Attenborough,playing a rather redundant character,falls in love with her.In the meantime Lom rather changes his mind and opts for Zetterling becoming his wife.Quite frankly the plot sounds as soppy as it sounds.Definitely not one of Lom or Attenborough's better films.

One of those films that dealt - perhaps neither deliberately nor directly - with sorting out the muddle of war, and so a very distant relation of The Return of Martin Guerre as much as The Captive Heart. It was Lom's attempt at playing a romantic hero, and it didn't come off; he's too saturnine and grumpy. But artistically this has an upside, as it leaves us unsure whether the heroine will go for him or the more puppy-like, and more British, Attenborough. Alas, it all needs the Lubitsch touch, or at least the Michael Powell one; instead, it's wobbly in tone, shuffling between romance, comedy, farce and the odd echo of the war (Attenborough has blackouts caused by shrapnel in his head), along with some lame satire of Americans. It isn't bad - and it looks great, with high-contrast mono photography - but it isn't very good either.

This is a pointless film. Young Richard Attenborough gives a very sensitive performance, and Herbert Lom gives a good performance as well. But the film is a meaningless ramble, based (one presumes loosely) on one of the novels by the then best-selling Maurice Dekobra, whose novels are largely unreadable today because they are so boring and badly written. I suppose one could classify this film in the genre of 'romantic comedy', despite the fact that it is neither really romantic nor funny. Mai Zetterling gives a convincing performance as an impostor who moves into the house of a successful author thought to have been killed in the War, posing as his widow. It also turns out that she has written 'his' last novel herself under his name. She did this because his publisher (broadly over-played by Hermione Baddeley in trailing boas) had herself stolen the girl's diary which had been sent to the author while away at war, and published that as 'his' previous novel. Then the author, played by Lom, returns home after all, to find himself with a 'wife' and two successful novels, neither written by himself. A situation like that could have made a most amusing film if entrusted to the correct hands, but this film by pedestrian director Michael Anderson is tedious and unrewarding. Also, despite her acting talent, one wonders what it was that people saw in Mai Zetterling to make her a star at this time in several British films. She is not at all interesting either to look at or in terms of her screen personality. Perhaps she was the only Swedish girl any of them knew, and this was as exotic as they came at that time (yawn, yawn). Pretty tame stuff, tepid as well. Don't bother.