Post-Blitz London starts as a playground and ends as a shadowy nightmare for 12-year-old Frankie (Andrew Ray). The Yellow Balloon is both a fine film about children and Britain’s second X certificate release, not really a contradiction as it shrugs off its early disguise as a kids’ adventure yarn to explore how vulnerable a child’s life can be.
One, two, three o’clock, four o’clock rock… For those who orchestrated the swing from blues to rock ‘n’ roll, it’s getting late. Like the Chelsea pensioners, their numbers are beginning to dwindle and, as time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future, their testimony must be recorded for posterity, lest it be lost for ever in the music mists (currently somewhere off the coast of Kintyre). Except – and it’s a fairly big "except" – this stuff’s already fairly well documented, no?
When The Man with the Golden Arm was released in British cinemas in January 1956, it was given an “X” certificate by the then British Board of Film Censors (BBFC), which excluded those under 16 from seeing it. Cuts were made to scenes showing the details of drug preparation to obtain that category, and it hit screens at 114 minutes. Some violence was excised, too. A 119-minute version was first seen on home video in 1992 with a “15” certificate. Its last home video release in 2007 shared both the certification and the longer length.
The Dancing Years and The Rat are seemingly very different films. The Dancing Years (***, 1950) is a British musical which defines frou-frou. With a springing-off point in the dizzy world of the waltz-obsessed Vienna of 1910, its lingering shots of spectacular scenery, meringue-light music, pastel-shaded costumes and unrequited love, it’s the sort of film a fan of Barbara Cartland romances would love. The Rat (***, 1937) is black and white and also set in a continental European capital city, this time Paris.
In Hope and Glory, John Boorman revisited the Blitz-battered London of his childhood, and managed to find infectious humour and optimism among the wreckage. Now, 28 years later, he travels back to the early Fifties for this belated sequel, depicting a Britain still exhausted from the European war while the conflict in Korea hinted at a different and scary new world.
This latest Friday night vehicle for archive footage and pop performances was the tour bus, as BBC4 invited us to hop into the back of the van for a quick spin through the "golden age" of touring rock bands (which the producers clearly felt ended with the Eighties).
Model for Murder sits at the polite end of Fifties British exploitation B-pictures, a stiff, washed-out world of bloodless Mayfair murder, and sexless fashion world intrigue. Strip Tease Murder, a still more salaciously titled, Soho-set near-contemporary of this 1959 curio is also released this month, getting its hands grubbier with some actual, heavily censor-snipped stripping. But in this imaginary Mayfair, the looming Sixties of kitchen-sink cinema, blazingly colourful pop music and clothes, Psycho and Peeping Tom are still unimaginable.
"There is no murder in paradise" is the official line of the authorities in 1950s Russia, but nevertheless Child 44 is the blood-drenched tale of a hunt for a mass-murdering paedophile in Stalin's deathly shadow. The source novel was the first in Tom Rob Smith's trilogy about Russia during and after the Great Dictator, and Smith based it on the real-life killer Andrei Chikatilo, the "Rostov Ripper".
Vaudeville is alive and well in the silvered Lilliputian cave which might have been made for it (not that Victorian Savoyards could have had any inkling). If you find yourself, like last night’s showbiz audience, beguiled to cheering point by the shreds-and-patches routines put together by the ultimate theatrical whirlwind, Mamma Rose, that’s because everything in this London transfer from the Chichester Festival Theatre, parody included, is solid gold. Heck, I’d even have paid to hear the first trumpet in the fabulous wind-and-brass orchestra tune up.
Retrospectively, two things help The Blob stand apart from the glut of late-Fifties aliens-invade-small-town-America science fiction films. It gave Steve McQueen his first starring role and its theme tune was an early Burt Bacharach co-write. Either of these – or even both together – are probably not enough to make the 1958 regional independent production into a classic piece of American cinema. But it is pretty good.