Reeling Backward: "The League of Gentlemen" (1960)

There was a time when Jack Hawkins was Britain's top movie star. This might not seem likely, since he didn't get serious about acting until he was about 40 and, while certainly handsome, his bulldog-like visage did not naturally lend itself to romantic or leading roles.

Nevertheless, his skills as a thespian kept him quite busy in movie-making even after his star fell, usually in supporting roles as authoritarian figures -- sometimes deluded ones -- in "The Bridge on the River Kwai," "Lawrence of Arabia" and many others. A heavy smoker, Hawkins even continued to act after having his larynx removed in 1965 due to throat cancer; other actors dubbed his lines until his death at age 62.

"The League of Gentlemen" represents one of his few post-1950s leading roles. It's a bank heist movie directed by Basil Dearden with a distinctive, clever twist: the robbers are not professional criminals but former British military officers who have fallen on hard times. Not only is it a chance for the eight men to collect £100,000 each -- about $2 million in today's dollars -- but they get to use their wartime skills in a peacetime setting.

As Lt. Col. Norman Hyde, Hawkins is the unctuous brains of the operation. The only one lacking a criminal record or black mark on his military dossier, he's incensed at being cashiered after 25 years of loyal service, dismissed "redundant." He certainly doesn't appear to want for money -- Hyde lives in a large, secluded mansion and drives a Rolls-Royce. In the film's tipsy opening sequence, he emerges from a sewer grate at night wearing a natty black tuxedo.

There appears to be more backstory there, but screenwriter John Boland, adapting the novel by Bryan Forbes, purposefully keeps it close to the vest. Hyde lives alone, out of choice rather than economic necessity, and lets the dishes pile up in the kitchen. There is a large portrait of a handsome woman in the foyer -- actually Deborah Kerr -- and when asked if she is his wife and is she alive, he announces, "Regrettably, the bitch is still going strong."

Testy language for 1960! I was also surprised by a brief shot of a chestful of nudie magazines, with bare breasts clearly visible.

Hyde researches the military records to find the perfect other seven men for the job:

• Lt. Edward Lexy (Richard Attenborough ... I know, I'm fixated) -- Radio man and somewhat weaselly ladies' man.
• Maj. Peter Race (Nigel Patrick) -- An itinerant gambler and black marketeer of impeccable breeding, he becomes Hyde's second-in-command after an initial antagonism.
• Captain "Padre" Mycroft (Roger Livesey) -- A quartermaster dismissed for gross indecency, he now impersonates a priest.
• Maj. Rupert Rutland-Smith (Terence Alexander) -- A decent, reserved chap kept economic cuckold by his wealthy, younger wife.
• Capt. Frank Weaver (Norman Bird) -- Bomb disposal leader who was drunk when his squad was blown up.
• Capt. Stevens (Kieron Moore) -- Ousted for homosexuality -- "odd man out" is how Hyde describes him, in the only suitable language for the time -- he's reliable muscle.
• Capt. Martin Porthill (Bryan Forbes) -- Booted for killing Greek separatists, he now sponges off older women.

Despite a limited amount of time to personalize each character, the actors do a wonderful job of building a distinctive persona that allows them to stand out from each other. Attenborough and Livesey in particularly are quite charismatic, in very different ways. Livesey steals the show in a sequence where they impersonate active-duty military officers to steal arms from the local army station. He pretends to be a general and uses the opportunity to lord it over Hyde and Race.

There's a lovely fun scene where Hyde first gathers them all at a swanky club, after having invited them to read an American pulp fiction novel, "The Golden Fleece," that describes exactly the sort of bank robbery Hyde is proposing. After declaring them all "crooks of one sort or another," he proceeds to detail each man's shame individually, and then declare the operation as their chance to get their revenge on the system that betrayed them.

The rest of the movie proceeds as a fairly typical crime caper: the planning of the job, brushes with danger, internal conflicts between the men, followed by the actual heist itself. It goes off perfectly, but their little company -- which they cheekily dub "Co-Operative Removals Ltd." -- is betrayed by the one small detail they overlooked.

British movies were not covered by the Hollywood Production Code, in which lawbreakers always had to be shown receiving their comeuppance. But that appears to be the case with "The League of Gentlemen," in which they are all carted off in the same policy lorry at the end.

The robbery scene is almost anticlimactic. It's mostly notable for the scary-looking gas masks the men wear after smoking out the whole block around the bank. Complete with breathing tubes and a metallic voice projection device used by Hyde, they make for a positively frightening bunch.

I enjoyed "League" for what it is, a rapscallion crime caper, though I admit to being a bit disappointed that it was not what I thought it would be. I expected a harder-edged serious crime drama, something like Stanley Kubrick's early work, in which Hyde is consumed by rage at British societal structure and bent on revenge.

But this isn't existential crisis; it's fun 'n' games. That's all well and fine, but I'd like to see the version where Hawkins gets to play a homicidal maniac in a tux.

Reeling Backward: "A Matter of Life and Death" (1946)

I love the idea of "A Matter of Life and Death." It's the movie they actually made I'm not wild about.

David Niven plays a British bomber pilot who was supposed to die, but files an appeal in the court of heaven for more time. Stories of this kind are pretty familiar, from "A Guy Named Joe" to "Heaven Can Wait" to "Always." Even Albert Brooks' "Defending Your Life" -- a criminally underrated film, in my humble opinion -- contains similar notes about an orderly afterlife, complete with a celestial, fallible bureaucracy and innocent souls striving against its capricious strictures.

It's a tantalizing notion, which is probably while filmmakers keep returning to it.

But this well-regarded film from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger -- the writing/directing team better known as The Archers -- is a daffy, dippy rendering that ends up defending True Love as its central theme. The big court trial in heaven, which was what made me interested in seeing the movie in the first place, is a disappointing and bizarre affair in which British and American ideals are weighed against each other.

Niven plays Squadron Leader Peter Carter, a 27-year-old budding poet who knows he's going to die. As he pilots his flaming wreck of a plane back across the Chanel, with all of his crew dead or bailed out, he speaks to an American girl on the radio. In these few minutes of insistent chatter -- in which Peter does almost all of the talking, I might add -- we're to believe they formed a lifelong bond that cannot be broken.

The official story is that Peter's angel, otherwise known as Conductor 71 -- a foppish French Revolution-era aristocrat played by Marius Goring -- lost him in the fog and failed to transport him to heaven. As a result, Peter ends up alive on the beach, where he comes across a girl riding a bicycle and lo! It's June (Kim Hunter), the gal he fell in love with over the phone.

Conductor 71 appears 20 hours after the oversight to collect his charge, but Peter objects on the grounds that he fell in love as a result of a heavenly mistake. The conductor agrees to file his appeal up the chain of command.

The military medical staff thinks Peter's gone bonkers, of course, led by an unctuous doctor named Frank Reeves, played by Roger Livesey. Frank humors Peter's story, determining he needs a brain operation or he'll die. On the way to the hospital, Frank is killed in a motorcycle accident during a violent storm, which conveniently allows him to be appointed Peter's counsel for the trial.

The metaphysics of the story are beyond silly. An angel can't find his soul because of fog? Pretty shoddy work for divine beings. I also found silly the trick of Conductor 71 stopping time whenever he's on earth, allowing him to do things like plucking a tear from June's cheek to use at the trial.

What I really couldn't stand, though, was the mawkish idea that two people can fall irrevocably in love in a matter of hours. And that this would be the entire basis upon which Peter's case stands. He can't leave Earth because he loves a woman? What about the millions of women (and men) who lost their true love during the war? Don't they get an appeal?

The actual trial is a just plain weird affair. The prosecution is taken up by a Boston patriot who died during the American Revolution, Abraham Farlan (Raymond Massey). His arguments are based entirely around his hatred of the English, referring to the many nations around the globe who have suffered in wars of the British empire. His pride veers beyond American exceptionalism into outright bigotry and Anglophobia.

"A Matter of Life and Death" still stands for its excellent cinematography and special effects. The Archers used Technicolor for the earthbound scenes, while the heavenly sequences are in a twinkling black-and-white -- essentially a reverse of the technique used in "The Wizard of Oz." The film was titled "Stairway to Heaven" for its American release, a reference to the stunning image of Peter and his conductor riding a massive escalator up into the sky.

Although it's undeniably a great-looking film, I just found "A Matter of Life and Death" to be too harebrained to take seriously as a piece of important cinema. I was astonished to learn via the film's Wikipedia page that it was named the second most important British film ever in a 2004 magazine survey of critics.

All I can say is they must have also suffered a conk on the head, resulting in overly ambitious delusions.

1.5 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp"

First of all, he never dies in the movie, so I don't know what's up with the title. Second, he's not a colonel -- when we first meet him he's a lieutenant, and then a brigadier general, and then a major general. Presumably he was a colonel at some point in between. Finally, no one ever refers to him as Blimp.

"The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp" may have a head-scratching title, but it's a fine movie nonetheless. It turns out co-screenwriters/directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger -- who made many films together under the name "The Archers" -- picked up the name of a popular comic strip by David Low. It's an original story, though, with little relation to the cartoon character other than a physical resemblance.

The character's name is actually Clive Candy, although it later becomes Clive Wynn-Candy after he marries. The movie plays out in a flashback structure, with a framing device set in the present (that is 1943, when the film was made). Major General Wynn-Candy, commander of the British Home Guard, is captured at a Turkish bath by an unscrupulous young lieutenant, who has begun a training exercise six hours prior to the command of, "War begins at midnight." The young officer's reasoning is that in order to win this war, the British military must leave behind its gentlemanly rules for the underhanded tactics of their German foes.

Wynn-Candy objects -- his creed is that "right is might," and that winning without honor is worse than losing -- and he tussles with the much younger man. The time then shifts to follow Wynn-Candy's career over the last 40 years.

These flashbacks are divided into three sections, set in 1902, 1918 and 1940. Montage sequences separate them to show the passage of time, marked by increasing number of animal head trophies appearing on the walls of the avid hunter.

The first, and longest, sequence is also the best. As a young lieutenant just returned from the Boer War, Candy (Roger Livesey) is shocked to hear that a German mercenary is spreading unsavory propaganda about the British. He travels to Berlin and meets with an English duchess (Deborah Kerr) working in Berlin. He confronts the mercenary and manages to insult the entire German army, which causes more than 80 German soldiers to draw lots for the honor of dueling him.

As it happens, the German chosen to duel him is Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook). Both end up rehabilitating from their wounds in the same hospital, and become great friends. Candy nearly has his upper lip sliced off in the duel, and to conceal the scar he grows a long mustache, which becomes his trademark. Both men find themselves in love with the duchess, but Candy withdraws gallantly so that they can marry.

Only later in life does he learn how much he regrets this decision. Moving into the 1918 section, Candy is now a brigadier general in World War I, and happens across a young nurse (also played by Deborah Kerr) who bears a striking resemblance to his former love. He arranges to meet after the war, and they marry despite a 20-year age difference. Now named Wynn-Candy, he goes to a prisoner of war camp to reunite with Theo, who has been captured. Their meeting is stilted, as Theo believes Germany will now be humiliated and subjugated by the conquering British.

In the final sequence, Theo has fled the Nazis in Germany. With his wife now dead, he considers England the closest thing he has to a home. He meets again with Wynn-Candy, who has a young female driver (Deborah Kerr, again) who looks just like both their dead wives. Wynn-Candy is set to give a speech on the radio about the fall of Dunkirk, but political influence causes it to be cancelled and the general forcibly retires.

Interestingly, this somewhat mirrors the real political tensions caused by the making of the film. Winston Churchill, who may have thought Colonel Blimp was a thinly-veiled caricature of himself, reportedly tried to have the movie canceled during production.

The physical transformation from 30-year-old lieutenant to 70-year-old general is totally convincing, especially for a film made in 1943. Livesey was actually 37 at the time of the film, but gets the manner and movements of an older man down to a T.

I thoroughly enjoyed "Colonel Blimp," although at the end of the film I'm not really sure it has added up to much of anything other than a lively tale. Livesey gives an engaging performance, but we never really get to know Wynn-Candy beneath his officious facade.

3 stars