Three Films Make A Post: His bride was EVERYTHING he thought she was…and an air-raid warden besides!

British Intelligence (1940): This propagandistic little spy thriller is actually rather good fun, if you can cope with the limits of its budget and scope. The script is a bit dry and does include not just one but three big didactic speeches about the coming of Hitler (this taking place during World War I to enable a protagonist who is a German spy), but it works as a decently constructed spy mystery.

The film also features fine performances by Margaret Lindsay as our semi-heroine and Boris Karloff. The latter clearly has a lot of fun changing his body language and accent depending on whomever he’s talking to. Which is also a rather neat embodiment of the shifting identity of the kind of double, triple, multiple agent he’s playing here.

The Tomorrow War (2021): That’s a lot more than you can say about this monumental SF action stinker by Chris McKay, a film with a script so unsure about what it is actually about it goes on for thirty minutes after its core plot and relationship has been resolved. Adding insult to the injury of wasting my time by being about half an hour too long, the world building is preposterous – apparently, this takes place in a world where you can easily organize a worldwide draft, but nobody but our heroes thinks about where the enemy is actually coming from - and makes very little sense (even with some timey-whimey hand-waving). I could forgive all of this, if the film’s production design were less blandly generic (the monsters are a particularly boring example of badly digested Giger) and its big action set pieces were a bit more interesting. The direction and production values aren’t bad of course, there’s too much money pumped into the thing, but they also lack any spark of creativity or joy.

Hi Diddle Diddle (1943): This screwball comedy by Andrew L. Stone is a Tarantino favourite, and it’s easy to see why. The moments of meta fourth wall breaking and the play with generic tropes of the style of comedy this is are obvious points to haul the man in – and they do work for me too – but there are also very funny performances by Adolphe Menjou, Pola Negri (as a terrifying Wagnerian opera singer, and Menjou’s wife, no less) and June Havoc. Stylistically, this is as playful as it gets, with many short sharp little asides that bring the film to mind as a guy who just had a brilliant idea and now must tell you all about it. This distractibility in approach could kill any comedy’s pacing stone dead, if not for the fact that most of the distractions the film finds are funny and charming as all get out, enhancing instead of distracting.