| GREEN FOR DANGER (1946) : S.Gilliat : 7/10 |
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 "English rescue worker is injured during German bomb raid during WWII. He dies on the operating table at a rural emergency hospital. When other bodies start turning up, it becomes apparent he was murdered. Inspector Cockrill (Alastair Sim) figures out that all the doctors and nurses might have killed anyone who knew their particular secrets. He arranges a fake operation to ferret out the murderer. Famous whodunit is much overrated. The mystery is satisfactory, but the proceedings are surprisingly somber--in fact, the supposedly witty Cockrill (a poorly conceived character) seems to be in the wrong film. They should have lightened it all up, and Cockrill should have been more like Clouseau. Picture's major advantage is that you forget who the murderer is from one viewing to the next." Danny Peary, Guide for the Film Fanatic (1986), p181 With apologies to Pauline Kael, Vern, Manny Farber, Graham Greene and James Agee, my favourite writer on film has pretty much always been Danny Peary - and his Guide for the Film Fanatic has always been, despite that slightly off-putting title, my idea of the ultimate cinema-related desert-island book. But while I agree with his verdicts nine times out of ten, there are times when we starkly diverge - and Green For Danger is one such example. What Peary sees as the picture's biggest weakness - the tonal disparity between the gravity of the murder-plot and the levity of Cockrill's intervention (he narrates from the off, but only actually appears on-screen from midway) - is for me what makes the film so effective. Until Sim pops up, Green For Danger is indeed a decidedly downbeat evocation of stiff-upper-lip wartime - dramatising how day-to-day pressures impact upon the private and romantic lives of civilians, especially those who, like these characters, are confined to a particular environment and tasked with a particularly onerous form of work. The key point is, however, that the film was effectively a "period" piece - made in the immediate aftermath of the war, but set during what was, for the British public, its darkest, Blitz-haunted days. As suggested by the film's title, Green For Danger is all about the subversion of expectation and reversals of the "norm". Cockrill's emergence abruptly turns a drama into a comedy - a dark comedy, but a very funny one - which that signals the fact that society now can move on and look back on the grimness of war with, at the very least, a relieved, sardonic sort of smile. I also disagree with Peary's assertion that Cockrill is a "poorly conceived character." Partly thanks to Sim's superb physical and verbal fluency, Cockrill is, for me, a dazzling delight whenever he's on screen. Indeed, it's a real shame that the character didn't go on to his own series of comedy-leavened crime pictures (Cockrill actually appeared in seven books by the author of Green For Danger's source-novel, Christianna Brand), perhaps in the vein of Margaret Rutherford's 'Miss Marple' series. With his offhand eccentricity, bounding self-confidence and Olympian irony, Sim's Cockrill is also amusingly reminiscent of several Doctor Who incarnations - most notably Tom Baker. His presence here is absolutely crucial, elevating what could otherwise have been an over-twisty and over-heated potboiler into something that's still deft, surprising and hilarious, six decades on. Neil Young 1.Dec.08 -------------------------------------------------------------------- UK 106m (BBFC timing) director : Sidney Gilliat (Endless Night, Millions Like Us, Only Two Can Play, etc) editor : Thelma Myers (Alfie, The Hill, In Which We Serve, Dr Terror's House of Horrors, The Belles of St Trinians, Island of Terror, Endless Night, Geordie, The Mudlark, etc) aka Thelma Connell seen 18.Nov.08 London (BFI South Bank [ex-NFT] : £5.00)  |
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