Three Films Make A Post: All guns. No control.

23 Paces to Baker Street (1956): This is a rather heavily Hitchock-indebted thriller by – sometimes brilliant – journeyman director Henry Hathaway, taking place in a London that is traditionally dark, foggy and rainy. Blind playwright and champion in self-pity Phillip Hannon (Van Johnson) overhears a curious, potentially sinister, conversation in a pub and becomes rather obsessed with solving what increasingly looks like a case (though not to the police). The film doesn’t quite have the psychological resonance of the best films of its sub-genre, and Johnson tends to overplay his character so desperately I wanted to punch the guy to shut up the melodramatic outbreaks more often than I found myself rooting for him. However, Hathaway knows how to stage a suspense scene as well as any director of his generation, the script – based on a novel by Philip MacDonald - is clever and twisty in the best way, and Milton Krasner’s photography is as pretty to look at as it is atmospheric, the film making excellent use of a London (even when parts of it are actually the Fox studios) that is still marked by World War II.

Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016): Taika Waititi’s wonderful New Zealand movie is about a kid (Julian Dennison in a drily witty performance that never becomes precocious or annoying) kinda-sorta absconding into the bush with his decidedly grumpy foster father (Sam Neill, decidedly grumpy and wonderful) after the death of the foster mother, the ensuing manhunt and the pair’s sometimes funny sometimes sad adventures. It’s a film that comes by the description of being “heart-warming” as fairly as the director’s What We Do in the Shadows, creating a slightly off-kilter world but putting characters into it one can’t help but care about. There’s an astonishing amount of whit, wisdom and imagination in the film, often wickedly funny humour, and New Zealand looks rather spiffy too.


Nightwing (1979): I don’t know why you’d want to hire Arthur Hiller, never a man known for his grip on action, of all possible candidates to direct your nature strikes back project based on a Martin Cruz Smith novel I suspect to be rather more tightly plotted than the film at hand, but the ways of Hollywood are wild and mysterious. One wouldn’t usually cast Nick Mancuso as a native American sheriff either. Not surprising anyone, the film is a bit of a mess, with generally competent bat attack scenes followed by brain dead 70s paranoia bits, and some mock-native American mythology stuff ripped right out of a 30s pulp tale, and therefore rather cringeworthy, though at least not meant in bad faith. David Warner takes on Robert Shaw’s mantel from Jaws to take a big bite out of a lot of scenery, Kathryn Harold is attractively frightened, and Stephen Macht is an evil rich guy, so while nobody would confuse Nightwing with a good movie, it most certainly is never a boring one.